Mansouri, Daniel: Creativity as Support Extension: A Structural Account of Genuine Novelty in Hierarchical Adaptive Systems

Existing accounts of creativity describe its products, its psychological correlates, and its neural substrates, but do not specify what structural event constitutes a genuinely creative act as distinct from sophisticated revision of existing knowledge. This paper provides that specification within the Hierarchical Constraint Processing (HCP) framework. Creativity is defined as a support extension event in Fisher information space: a discontinuous expansion of the system's probability distributio