Can an AI have wild thoughts? Are machines capable of true creativity, true art, of going beyond the training and the prompts we give them in order to explore new worlds?

My guest this week is Simon Colton of Queen Mary, University of London. He’s a professor of computational creativity who has been working towards this goal for decades, and he thinks the answer is yes… but only if we give AIs the freedom to choose what they create and to use their own experiences as inspiration.

It’s an interesting approach that invites us to think about AI from the inside. Whether or not you reckon an AI can be conscious, AIs do have interactions every day – so many of them – and what you could think of as experiences that they could perhaps express in a poem or a painting.

Simon and I discuss how to develop truly creative AIs – including projects of his such as the Painting Fool and the What If machine – as well as what the inner world of an AI might be like. What would it express, if it was able to do that through art?

My feature for this week’s Nature: Can AI be truly creative?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03570-y

Simon Colton’s home page

https://www.seresearch.qmul.ac.uk/cmai/people/scolton/

Simon’s paper: “The Machine Condition”

https://research.aalto.fi/en/publications/on-the-machine-condition-and-its-creative-expression/

Painting Fool

https://www.cs4fn.org/creativity/paintingfool.php

What If Machine

https://projects.research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/en/horizon-magazine/creative-computation-and-what-if-machine

Simon and Louis Bradshaw’s AI piano miniatures

https://computationalcreativity.net/iccc24/papers/ICCC24_paper_178.pdf

Mario Klingemann’s Botto

https://verse.works/botto

Harold Cohen’s Aaron

https://whitney.org/exhibitions/harold-cohen-aaron

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Thinkers don’t come much wilder than Albert Einstein. His out-of-the-box physics transformed how we think about the universe: with his famous equation E=mc2 he showed that energy and matter are one and the same; through his theory of relativity he joined space and time into one malleable fabric that can morph according to your point of view.

But we’re talking about a very different side to Einstein. My guest is Kieran Fox, a physician and neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, all-round spiritual explorer, and author of a fascinating book called I am a Part of Infinity. Kieran argues that Einstein didn’t confine his revolutionary thoughts to the physical world. The physicist was also deeply spiritual: he followed what he called a “cosmic religion”, that he hoped would unify science and religion; mind and matter; us and the cosmos.

Biographers and historians have tended to skate over this aspect of Einstein’s life… maybe they felt it wasn’t a suitably rational topic for such a hero of physics. But Kieran has pieced together Einstein’s religious thinking and traced influences from Pythagoras and Spinoza to the Tao Te Ching. He argues that Einstein’s spirituality wasn’t a minor sideshow, and it didn’t just co-exist with his physics, it was central, his ultimate motivation for wanting to understand the nature of reality in the first place.

What was this sacred path - and is it still relevant today? I asked Kieran to tell me all about it.

Kieran's home page

http://kieranfox.net/about.html

Kieran's book: I am a part of infinity

https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/kieran-fox/i-am-a-part-of-infinity/9781541603578/

Some of Einstein's writings on science and religion

https://www.silene.ong/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/AEinstein-Religion-and-Science_1930.pdf

Quantum Questions, ed. by Ken Wilber

https://archive.org/details/quantumquestions0000unse_n5j0

Some of Kieran's neuroscience papers - on meditation, cognition, creativity and whales

http://kieranfox.net/research.html

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https://www.yada-yada.net/

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Standing waves and resonant frequencies appear everywhere in the world around us, from musical notes and swaying bridges to electron orbits and animal coats. This week's guest, neuroscientist Selen Atasoy, wondered if they could also be found in the brain.

Her work has led to a new way to understand different states of consciousness -- from anaesthesia through our normal waking state to meditation and psychedelics. She explains how changes in our awareness reflect a shifting balance between order and chaos, and why psychedelics may tune the brain closer to a critical point of maximum complexity.

I talk to Selen about what this all means for our understanding of the mind, including how modern life may be blunting our awareness, and whether consciousness might be possible elsewhere in the natural world, beyond the human brain.

This isn’t the end of Selen’s story, though, as she recently trained as a psychotherapist. We discuss what inspired her leap from objective science towards a more personal exploration of the mind, and how we can all find harmony within.

Selen's home page

https://www.selenatasoy.com/

Selen’s first paper on harmonics in the brain (2016)

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10340

Selen’s paper on harmonics and LSD (2017)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0079612318301018

Selen’s paper on meditators (2023)

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.16.567347v1.abstract

Video of Chladni sand patterns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFAcYruShow

Harmonics and animal coat patterns

https://www.math.ttu.edu/~anpeace/files/Math5354Papers/murray_SciAm.pdf

MeTruely

https://www.metruely.com/

*** To support us, please rate & review the show!

*** Subscribe for new episodes every Mon

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*** Edited highlights on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhB4lyBDyjTliuz_h5oHwN6H8HoxS7qWL

Hosted by Jo Marchant:

https://jomarchant.com

Produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada:

https://www.yada-yada.net/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.