Daniel Dennett at the Centre for the Mind

Eminent philosopher, cognitive scientist and popular author Professor Daniel Dennett was awarded the Centre for the Mind's Distinguished Fellow Medal in 1998. The full text of his provocative Distinguished Fellow lecture The Creation of Creativity is available on our web site for those of you who were unable to attend the event (although reading it will not be the same without the effect of the smoke and mirrors we introduced to a surprised Academy of Science). A short excerpt of his lecture is reproduced for you below.

Professor Daniel Dennett receiving the Centre for the Mind's Distinguished Fellow Medal from Professor Allan Snyder

The Creation of Creativity

What are these mind tools, these prosthetic devices that are the cranes of culture? Some of them, of course, are actual physical objects: paper and pencil and the telephone, the photocopying machine, the clock, the telescope, but others are abstract systems of thought: arithmetic, geometry, calculus, double-entry book-keeping a very important and explosive innovation, strangely enough systems of musical notation, systems of perspective drawing. All of these are technologies which, once developed, become available for the use of individual human minds and it is the accretion of these technologies, I am suggesting, that is the primary explanation of the amazing human creativity that so impresses us.

That is my message, then. What makes creativity, human creativity possible? Technology. Machines. It is machines, made of machines made of machines. It is machines all the way down. This is, I am sure, a hateful message to many ears. But only to those who have an impoverished sense of the wonderful powers of machines. After all, you are made of machines. You are composed of a trillion or so cells and each one of those cells, each one of those little eukaryotic cells is a tiny robot doing its robotic thing. So, you were made of a team of approximately a trillion robots

Moreover, of course, you are descended from robots; you are a direct descendent of the original eukaryotic cells. One of your great, great, great, great . . . grandmothers was a robot. So, do not look down your nose at machines. even the highest levels of art and science are to be explained fundamentally in terms of the use of machines: first, the machines "God gave you," the machines you were born with, the machines that are the cells of your body and your brain, but then more particularly the way in which individual human beings acquire a tool kit, an armamentarium of tools which then magnify their powers of creativity.