Humans are Creative

It is fashionable to deny the creativity of people. Often that denial is disguised. It is fashionable to deny that we are special. But ultimately, at root, regarding humans as "predictable" or in some other sense little more than animals with slightly bigger brains (just more environmentally damaging) is a denial of our humanity - our personhood. Our creativity. Ever since (and perhaps before) Copernicus dared to suggest Earth was not the centre of the universe there have been people who have concluded there is nothing particularly special about us. The denial of the claim that God set us motionless at the centre of a vast cosmos that swirled unthinking about us must have been powerfully jarring to those who, coming from a religious sensibility, that all of this was not, in fact about us. Cosmically we were nothing special. 

And when Charles Darwin showed how complexity and diversity could arise from simplicity and homogeneity it appeared as though we humans were both accidental and, perhaps worse, as quite similar to all other living things. Related even! An incremental step in the long chain of evolution. Just another animal. Biologically we were nothing special.

But the counterclaim stares back at us in stark contrast each and every time we wake inside a comfortable home, turn on a screen powered by electrons and producing photons in just the right way we can see images of the world - vast cities and great works of art, science and technology constructed over centuries and in mere seconds on the same screens learn the news of Planet Earth and beyond. That we can do this, and no other creature ever has (so far as we know) cries out for explanation. Because these capacities seem not merely special but unique. Our civilization. Our science. Our history. Our art. Our capacity to create, take control and construct. 

What is so very different about us? If we are “nothing special” and our creativity is only apparent and not actual - why is it our lives, organised into grand civilisations, represent nothing like what any other system extant or extinct has ever accomplished?

What is it that is special about people? We can say it in a word, but the word fails to do much more than circularly define itself and what possesses it. Creativity. It is creativity that sets people apart from all other systems. But then no system that is uncreative is a person. To be a person is to be creative. Not creative in the “blind” sense that evolution by natural selection creates biological knowledge. Creative in the intelligent sense of having a problem first and then conjecturing solutions. (On the other hand, in biological evolution, a “solution” (mutation) is often  attempted before there is any problem. That conjecture is often deadly. Not so with the explanatory creativity of people. We can “guess ahead” in the privacy of our minds running simulations using imagination before actually constructing the thing out of atoms. 

But in either case we cannot define creativity. To do so would be to be able to formalise whatever this thing is and so anything not captured by the formalisation would not be creative. That’s how definitions work. So if everyone agreed on some definition for this “creativity” that people possess then what if some person wanted to solve a problem outside the bounds formally set by the definition? Well there’d be nothing for it but to violate the formal definition. Creativity is like this. It breaks free of any attempt to confine it. It breaks free of any attempt to predict its outcomes. It can disobey. It is, indeed, disobedience looked at from another angle. Creativity is the capacity to see of things already in existence and to say: no! This can be better. Or: this can be changed. Let’s try that out. Oh, you want to predict what I will do next? Go ahead. But tell me first so I can disobey your prediction. Creativity allows for that. Creativity is that. The inability to be predicted ahead of time because if we could predict ahead of time the content of some genuinely creative act, we would never need to engage in any creative act because we would already have its products at the moment of the prediction. 

No one can predict what the successor to Quantum Theory will be. Or Neodarwinism. Or even what the headlines for next Tuesday’s 6pm news broadcasts will be. If we could, we would have that information now. And creativity would be false. But creativity is real. And people are engines of creativity, which is why they are inherently unpredictable. One can typically not even predict what their own behaviours will be like an hour from now, much less in a week. We just don’t know what we’ll be doing. Not in fine detail. Because we create. And if we could make such a prediction then what could possibly stop us from creating something new that refuted the so-called prediction?

Oh sure, if I toss you down a waterslide I can predict you’ll be soaking wet by the end of it. Or if I offer you $1 million no strings attached I can predict you’ll take it. Except in the first case, your creativity does not come into it and your sliding down the slide is not actually a behaviour. You’re not consciously choosing to slide down the slide. You are, in a very real way, required to reach the end of that slide because of simple laws of physics. In the second case you might very well think: obviously that’s easily predictable. But if “you” are Grigori Perelman and it's 2006 and someone has indeed just offered you $1 million no strings attached you say “no”. Why? You’re super creative and entirely, inherently unpredictable. People are special. We should celebrate this unique quality we posses. A quality no other living creature we are aware of has. 

Because people are creative we are the generators of explanatory knowledge. Karl Popper was the first to explain the unified view of knowledge which underpins what is known as fallibilism. This is the idea that all knowledge is conjectural - not certainty true. Everything we know contains misconception - its incomplete and our “best guess”. In the final analysis even our most cherished ideas will be overturned and improved. But even if they are not in practise this does not mean that in principle they are not the final word. They are always conjectures - all of our ideas. And it is ideas that drive behaviour and we can change our conjectures in ways unpredictable ahead of time making predicting the behaviour of people, strictly impossible. Which is another way of saying: from no explanation of human behaviour can you derive a prediction about what any human will do. Our good explanations in chemistry of acids and bases allow us to make actual scientific predictions. Anyone with the relevant background knowledge will know how to calculate just what volume of hydrogen gas at room temperature will be produced if 1.0 grams of magnesium metal is placed in excess hydrochloric acid. This prediction can be made before any actual experiment is carried out in the real world because a good universal explanation of acids, bases, the "mole" concept and more besides come together in order to allow us to apply all of that formal apparatus to specific cases and logically derive (or calculate) a prediction. No such general theory of human behaviour exists, except a theory that says: human beings are creative people and this makes their behaviour inherently unpredictable. 

In order for people to be "predictable" we would need a theory of human behaviour from which we could derive specific instances at will where we predict what Joe will do on a Friday afternoon. Or what some large group of people will do. Anyone can make guesses about the future. But actual predictions are the rate exception for they are logical consequences of good explanations. And in the realm of "conjecture making" - the very thing human minds do, there is as yet no "good explanation" of what a mind is precisely or how it generates conjectures. But we have some clues and the first of those is: those conjectures really are creative acts. Conjectures are unpredictable before they are made.

But the other arm of Popper’s epistemology is “refutation”. Objective knowledge to be objective and form part of a fallibilist world view must have the quality of “could possibly be wrong”. Popper was no relativist. In the case of physics and the physical sciences more broadly we have a job of demarcation to do precisely because some areas of our study are about the real physical world where we can, to some degree, some of the time at least, and for all practical purposes, ignore what impact human creativity might have. So astrophysicists make predictions about the trajectory of asteroids or the life cycle of stars. They can do this assuming people do not make choices (or are unable to make choices) to alter the course of those things. In the physical sciences (and biological, geological etc) we set them apart from other areas of our discourse which are not sciences by the standard of whether or not we can perform some experimental test - the crucial test in the ideal case - which rules out all purported explanations but one. Figuring out how to do such experiments is itself also a creative act.

But in all other areas outside of science, refutations must still be possible for progress to occur. “Conjectures and Refutations” is a universal claim about all knowledge - not just science. It is just that in science there exists a specific kind of refutation available to us: the experimental test where we compare the outcome of an experiment to the predictions made by competing theories. Again, those predictions must not involve the possibility of human creativity having any impact on them because this would make those predictions impossible because human creativity would introduce a necessarily unpredictable element. 

There are many ways to falsify (better yet: refute) economic theories. One way would be to simply assert: coercion is immoral and go from there. That coercion is immoral stands as a refutation of, for example, socialism, is decisive. But we can also point to all the data on economies that tend in the direction of socialism over time. The more they approach the limit of something like North Korea, the more impoverished the people. The more they approach the “ideal” of something like a free trading society like The United States, the more we see prosperity (and, predictably, inequality - a feature, not a bug, allowing for people to freely choose what to work on and how to create wealth, if at all). And as always often the most clear cut way of refuting economic, political or moral theories is simply by recourse to the fact they are bad explanations. No one need test anything. If your economic theory is: just have the government print more money to pay off the national debt, we should not want to test this (admittedly this is any odds with “modern monetary policy as subscribed by many nations right now). It is a bad explanation because it is naive about the causes of inflation. We should not want to test such a theory, although we have and did during covid and now we reap the falsifying rewards thereof. It was a bad explanation all along and everyone who understood this simple fact about our circumstance (printing money = higher inflation, especially when there is no growth) is seeing the logic play out like our person down the waterslide. It was inevitable. Or was it? Of course even here we can imagine that, for example, someone might have invented small modular fusion reactors during the covid lockdown and now we’d all have near-free electricity and inflation would be falling. Or any of countless things might have happened. But absent human creativity the link between printing money and inflation is simply a logical necessity. All else being equal. It’s not so much a “prediction” that printing money leads to inflation. It’s just logic unless you think a claim that cutting an apple in half leads to two pieces is a “prediction” of number of pieces given “cutting in half”. Very well. Then all such necessary truths are predictions too. Like: I predict you cannot draw a 4 sided triangle.

Popper wrote about how economic theories can be tested or compared one with another and thereby refuted as worse explanations of how economic systems should be arranged. Of course all such predictions must be made on the condition they are unaffected by the intrusions of the creativity of people. And in the economy, of course, ultimately this is not possible in the real world because the growth of knowledge is inherently unpredictable. One can imagine a company “predicting” their new widget is going to upset the market entirely when it is released next Wednesday - and they have exceedingly good reasons for thinking so. Because this widget is unlike anything else and is the kind of thing people have long said “If only we had this. But only in science fiction films”. I don’t know - maybe it’s a hoverboard.

But come next Tuesday their competitor releases their widget. Superior in every way to the first company’s. Their well-founded “prediction” of disrupting the market Wednesday turned out to be nothing but pure prophecy because there was no way of knowing that other people - creative competitors of their’s - had been working long, independently and in secret on something so much better. (Think “magic carpet” type thing that can do everything the hoverboard can only it can go a lot higher, faster and is safer to boot (if you fall off, it catches you again before you hit the ground - it’s basically impossible to fall off.)

Whenever a prediction is made about people, it is an attempt to deny they are creative and can do the unexpected. Sure, you might ask your friend where they would like to have coffee and they respond just as they always do. “You’re so predictable” you might say. Of course that’s not a prediction. You share a culture - a history - a set of memes that tend to cause people to behave alike. But absolutely nothing, in reality, is requiring your friend to choose the same place. They are making a creative choice (and likely creating anew each time you ask them a theory in their mind of your mind and your preferences and wanting to make you happy). And having now said “you’re so predictable” they take offence and insist on going elsewhere - they create a new idea. But never mind that - just because you confirm your “prediction” does not make it a true prediction. It was still just a prophecy because you did not actually know the content of their mind. You had no good explanation - only a rough guess because you know your friend well. But not that well. We do not observe their ideas. Only their behaviours. And even if their behaviours align with our expectations much of the time, it’s never all of the time. We do not confirm our theories. We fail to falsify them.

People are unpredictable. And so communities are unpredictable. Nations and civilisations are unpredictable. In large part because individuals inside those groups can be decisive in creating something new, whether it be widgets, wine or wars. We should celebrate our creativity - it is the thing that sets us apart from other creatures. It is what makes us unpredictable. Even in those cases where others say “you’re so predictable”. They are, of course, verificationists. And Popper refuted that entire line of thinking root and branch. 

​People are creative. And that is why we are unpredictable.