The Mind's Chorus: Creativity Before Consciousness

I present a theoretical, hypothetical model of creative cognition, broadly framed within a massively parallel view of mental computation, and based on statistical simulation of aspects of memory and perception, particularly sequence. The theory is located at a level of abstraction substantively above that of neural substrate; it models function and not detailed mechanism and works over symbolic representations of percepts. I support the proposal with evidence from a range of computational work concerning learning of and generation from statistical models and argue that the perceptual grounding of the mechanisms presented here may be generalised away, to account, ultimately, for original thought itself.