The spark of creativity

Where does genuinely new stuff come from, and what does the answer obligate us to do?

We are primates, evolved for the African Savana, with meat machines in our heads. These meat machines can do something curious: they can imagine. Even further, they can be “creative”; that is, they can imagine something “novel”.

At first glance, imagination seems like a cute quirk. We can imagine fantasies, tell fun stories, paint pictures, make gadgets. Some of these stories we deem “creative” or “novel”. But what actually counts as “new/creative”?
The commonly used notion for “creative” in various domains of study is the creation of something “novel” and “useful/appropriate”. “Novel” ensures the new idea/invention is not just a basic recombination of old things. “Useful/appropriate” ensures that the idea is meaningful, reveals something interesting, and is not just a random mess.

Both of these terms are broad and contentious (intentionally so). Who defines what is “novel” or useful/appropriate”? Should it be defined by the individual who originated the idea, or by the social judgment of peers, or specifically by experts, or by history/those who come later? The Systems Model recognizes that “creativity” is not a property determined by individuals, but through an interaction between the domain/field of innovation, the social ecosystem (gatekeepers, institutions, etc.), and the innovation itself.

Other views emphasize the cognitive mechanisms of creativity. New ideas do not emerge “de novo”, they emerge from a recombination of past ideas, with a novel “transformation of the problem space”. Hence, an individual needs to make the creative leap with regards to themselves (their past experiences, cultural knowledge, etc.); it is a mental operation. Even if their new idea might already be known to someone else/the public, if they themselves did not know it, it is still a novel creation for them.
Thus the question: Is there a rigorous notion that can tell whether something is “truly novel”, or even quantify how much? And who decides?

Beyond the domain of fiction and art, our meat sack brains can also imagine things like multiple dimensions, 4D space, invisible forces, and other notions that at the time were heavily criticized as fanciful thinking (imaginary numbers, non-euclidian geometry, microscopic germs).

Our minds were shaped by natural selection to solve savanna-scale problems — predators, social hierarchies, thrown objects. There's no selection pressure for imagining or grasping 11-dimensional string theory or quantum field theory. Feynman himself suspected we might not be able to understand wavefunction collapse or superposition. And human working memory is sorely limited.

It is surprising that these ideas turn out to be “real”. They explain the physical world and give us tremendous power over it. Sometimes, increasing our power over the physical world depends on creating ever more “novel” ideas/absurdities (e.g. Infinite dimensional vector spaces. Subatomic particles. Quantum phenomena. etc.) Outlandishness is not sufficient for scientific success, but those ideas that yielded the greatest increase in understanding/power were often the most outlandish. In other words, the degree of “creative novelty” in science is proportional to the degree of increased physical power we gain. Is there a limit to what our brains can conceive?

Science and art are very different domains. But therein lies the puzzle: the process of creativity deployed in science seems no different from the process of creativity deployed in art; so perhaps the same process is generating novelty in both.

This suggests a tantalizing unity of what it means to be “novel”. If the same process generates “novelty” in 2 (seemingly) different branches: art and science, and one branch leaves physical traces, then “novelty” might not be mere arbitrary social judgment.

Discussion Questions:

• What counts as “creative”/”novel”? Who judges this? Is it an individual or social or objective judgment? How do we know whether something is “new” or not? Are we just “doing whatever we do?”
• Operationally, how does creativity work? How does creativity “create new things”? Where does the newness come from?
• Is the process of creativity in art, social science, natural science, engineering, technology, all the same underlying process?
• If it is the same underlying process, how does “novelty”/creativity in science relate to creativity in art?
• What’s the difference between imagination, creativity, and knowledge?
• Is society obligated to create the conditions necessary for people to engage their creativity? If we disable people’s creativity, is that a form of mind control?