Throughout history, creativity has been regarded as one of humanity’s most defining traits. We build economies around it, award Nobel Prizes for it, and tell our children it is what separates us from machines. The “creative genius” — da Vinci sketching flying machines, Einstein reimagining spacetime, Jobs unveiling the iPhone — sits at the apex of our cultural mythology.
But it is worth pausing to ask a question that rarely gets asked: what exactly is creativity? Not what it produces, but what it is — as a mechanism, as a process. When we look closely, the answer may be simpler, and less romantic, than we tend to assume.
The proposition explored here is this: what we call “creativity” is the recombination of historical experience — individual and evolutionary — perturbed by noise and filtered by selection. Not a magical spark. Not a special faculty. Just experience in, recombination in the middle, and output at the end. The word “creativity” may be a label we apply to the result when we find it impressive — and little else.
A distinction worth making: creativity vs. imagination
Before going further, it is worth drawing a line that most people blur.
Imagination is the ability to construct mental representations that are not directly present in perception — to picture a purple elephant, to simulate a conversation that hasn’t happened, to mentally rotate a 3D object. This is a real, measurable cognitive capacity. It operates on internal models and is grounded in specific neural mechanisms. The existence of imagination is not in dispute.
Creativity is a different and much stronger claim. It implies that humans can generate genuinely novel outputs — things that are not reducible to transformations of prior inputs. It suggests there is something happening beyond recombination, some spark or faculty that produces true novelty from within.
One way to think about the difference: imagination is the machinery, and “creativity” is the story we tell about what the machinery produces.
The question, then, is whether the machinery alone is sufficient to explain what we observe — or whether something extra is needed. The argument here is that the machinery is enough. What imagination produces can be accounted for as recombination of experience under noise. If that’s the case, then “creativity” as a separate explanatory entity becomes redundant.
With that distinction in place, consider the following.
Most “creations” have a parts list
An interesting exercise: take any celebrated creative achievement and try to trace where its components came from. What tends to happen is that each piece predates the achievement itself. This pattern shows up across art, science, and technology.
Picasso’s Cubism drew on African masks he encountered at a museum, Cézanne’s geometric treatment of form, and Iberian sculpture. Darwin assembled natural selection from Malthus’s population theory, geological gradualism, and his own field notes from the Galápagos. The iPhone brought together touchscreens, mobile chips, and graphical interfaces that had existed independently for years or decades.
This pattern holds across domains with striking consistency. The “creative act,” on closer inspection, tends to be an assembly of pre-existing parts in a new configuration. Which raises a natural question: if the parts list can so reliably be found, what is “creativity” adding on top of the recombination? It may simply be a word for a recombination that happens to impress us.
Then why are some people more “creative” than others?
This is the most natural objection: if creativity is just recombination, why don’t most people produce masterpieces from the same shared pool of human knowledge?
The answer may lie not in a special faculty, but in the chaotic nature of the system. Three factors go a long way toward explaining the divergence:
Different inputs. No two people absorb the same information in the same order, at the same time, in the same emotional state. Two readers can pick up the same book and internalize quite different things depending on when and how they encounter it.
Noise. Neural activity is inherently noisy. Synapses are probabilistic. The exact chain of associations the brain fires when working on a problem is unlikely to be precisely the same twice. This is a well-documented property of biological systems — physics, not inspiration.
Feedback loops. One encouraging teacher, one lucky break, one audience that responds at the right moment — these small events can redirect entire trajectories. Remove any one of them, and the “genius” may not have gone down that particular path.
There is a useful analogy here: no two snowflakes look the same, yet we don’t attribute creativity to snowflakes. Complexity and uniqueness are natural properties of chaotic systems. They don’t require a special generative faculty to explain them.
What about the brain’s processing power?
A more thoughtful version of the objection goes like this: “Fine, the raw materials come from experience. But the brain’s ability to draw analogies, form abstractions, and make unexpected connections — surely that’s where creativity lives.”
This is a reasonable intuition, but it shifts the question rather than answering it. Where did those abilities come from?
They were shaped by natural selection over millions of years. They represent the species’ accumulated survival strategies, encoded in neural architecture.
Analogical reasoning exists because recognizing “this situation resembles that dangerous situation” helped our ancestors survive. Abstraction exists because compressing complex inputs into simpler categories conserves cognitive resources. Associative thinking exists because tracking co-occurrence patterns enables better prediction of what comes next.
These are genuinely powerful capabilities. But they are functional adaptations — in the same category as opposable thumbs or binocular vision. Relabeling an evolved information-processing pipeline as “creativity” describes the output but doesn’t explain anything the pipeline itself doesn’t already account for.
The question of the “first creation”
A common challenge to this view: if creation is recombination, what about the very first tool? Surely there was little to recombine at that point.
This challenge rests on the assumption that the first tool appeared as a discrete, sudden event. The evidence suggests otherwise.
Chimpanzees already use stones to crack nuts. Capuchin monkeys strike rocks together and produce sharp-edged flakes. The oldest known human stone tools — the Oldowan industry, roughly 2.6 million years old — are so crude they are barely distinguishable from naturally fractured rock. The transition from incidental percussive behavior to intentional tool-making appears to have unfolded over hundreds of thousands of years.
What likely happened is something far less dramatic than a “eureka” moment: an individual struck a rock, happened to produce a sharp edge, used it, gained a foraging advantage, and repeated the behavior. Operant conditioning, observational learning, and selection pressures refined the behavior over deep time. This is the same variation-plus-selection process behind most biological adaptations. We don’t say the eye was “created.” There is a case for applying the same logic to the first tool.
What AI tells us
The rise of generative AI adds an interesting dimension to this discussion.
Large language models write poetry, generate visual art, compose music, and propose scientific hypotheses. Human evaluators regularly judge these outputs as “creative.” And we know, in detail, how these systems work: they recombine patterns learned from training data through stochastic sampling, shaped by optimization objectives.
There is no creativity module inside these models. There is no hidden spark. There is recombination under noise, guided by selection — and the outputs are often indistinguishable from what humans would call “creative.”
This doesn’t settle the question definitively, but it does suggest something worth considering: if a system built on recombination can produce much of what we associate with creativity, perhaps human creativity operates on a similar principle. Not that machines have somehow acquired a mysterious faculty, but that the faculty was perhaps not as mysterious as we assumed. We may have been doing what these systems do — just on biological hardware, with a much richer and more embodied set of inputs.
A simpler model
If the reasoning above holds, then what we call “creativity” can be decomposed into four components:
- Historical experience as input — the vast range of things a person has encountered, plus what evolution has encoded in the brain.
- Evolved neural architecture as the processing engine — the imagination machinery: analogy, abstraction, association.
- Stochastic noise as the source of variation — the randomness that ensures each recombination turns out differently.
- Selection as the filter — the environment, the audience, the community that decides which outputs are valued and remembered.
This model appears to cover the observed instances of what we typically call “creativity.” If adding a fifth element — a standalone faculty called “creativity” — doesn’t increase explanatory power, then by Occam’s razor, it may not be needed.
To put it simply
“Creativity” may not be a cause. It may be a label — the word we reach for when recombination produces something unexpected and valued.
An infant raised in total isolation produces little, not for lack of some innate creative spark, but because there is scarcely any experience to recombine. A person immersed in rich and varied inputs produces extraordinary things, not necessarily because of a special faculty, but because there is more material to work with, more feedback to learn from, and more opportunities for fortunate combinations to emerge from the chaotic dynamics of recombination.
Imagination is real. The processing is real. The outputs are real and often extraordinary. The only question is whether “creativity,” as something distinct from and above the machinery, needs to be invoked. The argument here is that it doesn’t — that the machinery, the noise, and the selection may well be the whole story.
And if so, the extraordinary was not coming from somewhere beyond us. It was emerging from the vast combinatorial space of what we have experienced — which, on reflection, may be remarkable enough on its own.
MEMO
人类不具备超越因果链的”创造力”。一切所谓创造，本质上是主体对历史经验（含个体经验与物种经验）在随机扰动下的重构，经由环境选择后被事后追认为”创造”。
Humans do not possess any form of “creativity” that transcends the causal chain. All so-called creation is, in essence, the subject’s recombination of historical experience — encompassing both individual lived experience and species-level evolutionary experience — perturbed by stochastic noise, filtered through environmental selection, and retroactively labeled as “creativity.”
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