Margaret Boden, a British philosopher and cognitive scientist who used the language of computers to explore the nature of thought and creativity, leading her to prescient insights about the possibilities and limitations of artificial intelligence, died on July 18 in Brighton, England. She was 88.

Her death, in a care home, was announced by the University of Sussex, where in the early 1970s she helped establish what is now known as the Center for Cognitive Science, bringing together psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and philosophers to collaborate on studying the mind.

Polymathic, erudite and a trailblazer in a field dominated by men, Professor Boden produced a number of books — most notably “The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms” (1990) and “Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science” (2006) — that helped shape the philosophical conversation about human and artificial intelligence for decades.

“What’s unique about Maggie is that she’s a philosopher who has informed, inspired and shaped science,” Blay Whitby, a philosopher and ethicist, said on the BBC radio show “The Life Scientific” in 2014. “It’s important I emphasize that, because many modern scientists say that philosophers have got nothing to tell them, and they’d be advised to look at the work and life of Maggie Boden.”

Professor Boden was not adept at using computers.

“I can’t cope with the damn things,” she once said. “I have a Mac on my desk, and if anything goes wrong, it’s an absolute nightmare.”

Nevertheless, she viewed computing as a way to help explain the mechanisms of human thought. To her, creativity wasn’t divine or a result of eureka-like magic, but rather a process that could be modeled and even simulated by computers.

“It’s the computational concepts that help us to understand how it’s possible for someone to come up with a new idea,” Professor Boden said on “The Life Scientific.” “Because, at first sight, it just seems completely impossible. God must have done it.”

Computer science, she went on, helps us “to understand what a generative system is, how it’s possible to have a set of rules — which may be a very, very short, briefly statable set of rules — but which has the potential to generate infinitely many different structures.”

She identified three types of creativity — combinational, exploratory and transformational — by analyzing human and artificial intelligence.

In combinational creativity, familiar ideas are combined in unfamiliar ways — in lines of poetry, for example, or satirical cartoons in The New Yorker or the work of artists who blend cubism with surrealism.

“In one sense, this is easy to model on a computer,” Professor Boden wrote in “The Creative Mind.” “For nothing is simpler than picking out two ideas (two data structures) and putting them alongside each other. In short: a computer could merrily produce novel combinations till kingdom come.”

Exploratory creativity involves coming up with new ideas or concepts that fit within an accepted structure: “another Impressionist painting, another benzene derivative,” Professor Boden said in a 2014 interview with American Journal of Play.

Computers seem perfectly capable of such thinking, she pointed out, citing as an example Impro-Visor, a computer program that plays jazz.

Impro-Visor “relies on a database that can be closely modeled on a particular musician’s style (Parker, Armstrong, and so on), and which can be adapted to non-jazz styles as well,” she wrote in “The Creative Mind.” “The explorations are subtle, extended and (expressiveness apart) uncannily convincing. There’s some twisting and tweaking, as the dimensions being explored are pushed.”

But it crucially lacks what is inherently human: the ability to evaluate whether the output is any good.

Then there’s transformational creativity, “the ‘sexiest’ of the three types,” Professor Boden wrote in AI Magazine, “because it can give rise to ideas that are not only new but fundamentally different from any that went before.”

For decades, computer scientists have debated whether machines would one day be capable of such thinking — if they would achieve superintelligence, matching or outperforming human thought. There were many skeptics.

“After all, they say, a computer does what its program tells it to do — and no more,” Professor Boden wrote in AI Magazine. “The rules and instructions specified in the program determine its possible performance (including its responses to input from the outside world), and there’s no going beyond them.”

She was among the skeptics.

“The notion of there ever being a time where we could have a natural language-using program which was able really to converse in a rich and subtle way with an intelligent and educated human being about anything under the sun — from, you know, football to fossils — seems to me to be a fantasy,” she said on “The Life Scientific.”

Today, such abilities actually exist with large language models like ChatGPT. Professor Boden entered a care home before these tools emerged and wasn’t able to use them.

I put the question to ChatGPT: Would Professor Boden have been surprised by its existence?

“Margaret Boden probably wouldn’t have been shocked that something like ChatGPT exists — but she would likely have been both fascinated and deeply critical,” ChatGPT responded. “She stressed that computers don’t ‘think’ or ‘understand’ in the way humans do — they manipulate symbols without consciousness or intentionality.”

Anil Seth, a former student of Professor Boden and a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, agreed.

“This sounds about right to me,” he said when I asked if ChatGPT’s response was accurate. “Though, of course, I wonder what she really would have said.”

Margaret Ann Boden was born on Nov. 26, 1936, in London. Her father, Leonard Boden, was a civil servant. Her mother, Violet (Dawson) Boden, worked for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.

She was a precocious teenager. One of her favorite activities was browsing used bookstores on Charing Cross Road, looking for books by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell.

“I was fascinated, on the one hand, by religion and the philosophy of religion and all those questions,” she said on “The Life Scientific.” “But I was also fascinated by evolution and, in particular, by the mind and how it works and how it’s possible for the brain, which is a material thing, to in some sense be responsible for our psychological being.”

She initially studied medicine at the University of Cambridge, but then took up moral sciences — a catchall for philosophy.

While pursuing her doctorate in social psychology at Harvard University, she stumbled on a book at a used bookstore: “Plans and the Structure of Behavior” (1960), by the psychologists George A. Miller, Eugene Galanter and Karl H. Pribram.

“It was the first book which took the idea of computer programs and applied that idea to the whole of psychology,” she said. “It literally changed my life in five minutes.”

Professor Boden’s marriage to John Spiers ended in divorce. She is survived by her children, Ruskin and Jehane Boden Spiers, and four grandchildren.

As a philosopher of AI, Professor Boden was often asked if she thought that robots would, or could, take over society.

“The truth is that they certainly won’t want to,” she wrote in Aeon magazine in 2018.

Why? Because robots, unlike humans, don’t care.

“A computer’s ‘goals,’” she wrote, “are empty of feeling.”