Rhetoric: Kurzweil’s “How to Create a Mind” and Gardner’s “Creating Minds” Essay (Critical Writing)

The inherent tendency towards theoretical and conceptual synthesis is one of the characteristic features of modern scientific knowledge. Along with the proceeding disciplinary organization of science and rising specialization, there is a dynamic formation of interdisciplinary studies, problematic and project approaches to research are increasingly being used, and the paradigm of integrity is being established. Huge shifts in the intellectual climate caused by the dialogue of two cultures – natural and technical, on the one hand, and humanitarian and social, on the other, attracted the attention of researchers and gave rise to a synthesis of scientific knowledge. Kaufman and Sternberg state that a new type of organization of research activity is manifested in interdisciplinarity – “the study of the same object by representatives of various scientific directions” (203). Some of the most significant interdisciplinary research in the field of mind research are Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind and Gardner’s Creating Minds. These studies contribute to the expansion of collective knowledge of human intellectual discoveries, creations, and inventions. In his work, Kurzweil explores the role of creativity in cognition, which can be analyzed and revealed through Gardner’s consideration of Einstein’s example.

The problem of creativity is one of the traditional, so-called eternal problems of philosophy. It has its roots in antiquity, in the axial time of human history. Kaufman and Sternberg note that such ontological issues as “the problems of being, the origin of the world, consciousness, and cognition” underlie the study of creativity (256). The desire to penetrate the secret of creativity is due to the interest in knowing the personality by exposing the secrets of creative activity as one of its fundamental manifestations. This type of activity activates the personality most fully and diversified.

The sixth chapter of Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind explores creativity as an aspect of cognition. It is noteworthy that creativity is understood not only as of the process of creating a work of art. It includes scientific creativity, the result of which is the creation of new knowledge – theories, discoveries, and inventions, as well as political and technical creativity. Moreover, Kurzweil explores Einstein’s activities within the framework of this concept. In turn, Gardner proposes the theory of multiple intelligences, according to which intelligence is not a single construct but consists of different types of intelligence. Among them are “linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist types of intelligence” (Gardner, 31). In Creating Minds, Gardner examines the lives and works of seven prominent figures in the world culture who ideally personified one of the types of intelligence. Thus, Einstein is an outstanding owner of the logical-mathematical type of intelligence. However, despite this, creativity in the concept of Kurzweil is also significantly related to the scientific activity of Einstein. Accordingly, the role of creativity in cognition is presented and embodied in Gardner’s study of Einstein and can be analyzed in the light of this concept.

The role of creativity in cognition is to apply metaphor. According to Kurzweil, the most important aspect of creativity is “the search for good metaphors” (116). Based on this position, mental experiments can be analyzed, including Einstein. For example, the Einstein experiments described by Gardner, with the help of which he tried to understand the true meaning of the Michelson-Morley experiment, are also metaphors in the sense that they symbolize something new and different from the well-known.

The search for metaphors is to recognize images when changing parts and context. Improved by Einstein’s breakthrough in science is explained not only by the fact that he used metaphors in his mental experiments, but also that he had enough courage to believe in these metaphors. Kurzweil affirms that belief in metaphor and conviction is associated with programming in the nonbiological neocortex. Einstein was able to retreat from traditional theories that failed to explain his experiments and to withstand the mockery of contemporaries for those ridiculous explanations that he put forward on the basis of his metaphor.

Imagination is of particular importance in creativity. Similarly, the work of imagination affects the formation of scientists in the thinking of the ideal objects; this ability affects the formation of scientific concepts. According to Gardner, such mutual influence of cognition, creativity, and imagination on the process of the formation of scientific concepts is “brightly traced in the example of the field” (125). Reflections of Einstein are connected with this, when a new concept appeared physics – field, the most important since Newton’s time. It took a great imagination to understand that non-charges and particles, but the field in space between charges and particles essentially describes physical phenomena. Thus, one of the important effects of imagination on the process of scientific creativity is that this cognitive ability of scientists takes part in the formation of ideal objects and abstractions serving to describe the subject area of science. Einstein’s reflections about the field described in Gardner’s Creating Minds confirm the idea of Kurzweil about the connection between imagination, creativity, and cognition.

Works Cited

Gardner, Howard E. Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi. Basic Books, 2011.

Kaufman, James C. and Robert J. Sternberg. The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity. 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Kurzweil, Ray. How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. Viking Penguin, 2012.