NOTE: this is the first post of a saga I’m doing related with the work of the physicist David Deutsch, this saga isn’t to quote david on these topics, it’s to provide simple and practical understanding of these amazing topics! All that I’m writing is my opinion, but my opinion on these topics is truly shaped by David’s opinion on these topics!
So a good place to start is with the definition of creativity! David’s definition of creativity is “creativity is fundamentally impossible to define”, which is pretty useful lmao! But seriously, this is actually true, I believe, because as soon as you define creativity, you can easily create an algorithm that basically confines creativity, it’s like you get the secret sauce that made everyone more curious about tasting your soup and once it stops being secret, than people can just exactly replicate the soup! Creativity is a form of knowledge and therefore you can always “get” better at being creative, and there is never an creative “utopia” if there was a state where you could say “oh okay, this is the most creative that a human can be” this would automatically means that all creativity has an endpoint so people could just go straightforwardly to it but this isn’t how neither creativity nor society itself works, we must make mistakes and we’ve seen millions of civilisations that collapsed and it is inevitable to that happen otherwise it would be impossible for progress to happen, the only thing that makes progress happen is error correction, we must correct our mistakes so we can get closer to the truth, this is also the case for creativity, you can’t tell by any mechanical means whether an given output is creative. When we first are incentivised by people (which is extremely rare unfortunately) to use our creative thinking and problem solving we are like babies learning to walk, we will fall and we’ll stumble while trying to explain ourselves but with time, we develop that part of our brain and there’s never a time where we stop developing the creative thinking unless we just stop challenging ourselves!
Deutsch is also a big big advocate of raising free thinking children and has also criticised a lot of how our education system works and why it doesn’t cultivate our creative thinking. I think the education system is definitely the field where the progress has been more slow, for instance, in the labor market for quite a long from now we’ve seen that even if little, it rewards human action and creativity! The board of a company will never want a CEO that just “tries to do better”, the job of a company is to maximise profits and you’ll only maximise the profits of your company if you innovate and adapt, this means that you need to deliver something new to society. We’ve seen more this kind of assumption that if things aren’t growing there’s something wrong with the CEO / president / whatever, there’s maybe more than ever an aspiration to progress and this is great! The education system on the other hand seems to not be evolving much specially compared with for example the labor market! I don’t really understand why this is the case but it’s a memetics case, memes are ideas they spread in our heads and it’s very difficult for us to recognise that (what david calls of) anti rational meme, memes arise from the culture we live in and borned in, it’s definitely worth trying to pursue this memes inside of our heads and make a critical judgement on either that meme is actually helping us becoming better and it’s really part of our core identity, or if it’s only conditioning our freedom and only pull us more from really projecting our true selves in the world. It’s important to notice that memes are just ideas, but they are very powerful and useful ideas to control us, most ideas inside our heads aren’t memes, memes are only the ones whose cause their instantiation in other minds.
This a very good image on memes:
basically the point of relating this graphic with anti rational memes is that anti rational memes disables creativity, this happens because a anti rational meme relies on disabling the recipient's critical thinking to get it replicated, which is the total opposite of a rational meme that requires critical thinking to be replicated. An example of a rational meme is a scientific theory with great explanatory power, like the theory of evolution by Darwin, while a belief that all vaccinations are bad would be an example of an anti-rational meme (both are abstract mental representations and both cause behaviours that encourage their replication, evolution as a theory gets replicated because it explicitly explains so much, while the anti-vaccination meme gets replicated because it appeals to emotions such as fear and suspicion that override more rational explanations).
Deutsch says that one of the reasons why the education system is still so stuck in time is that is full of anti rational memes. I’m gonna quote david now because this is a incredible explanation “The actual practices of making children sit in rows and recite things by heart and hit them when they don't, that has changed but the underlying theory of what, for what it's all supposed to do, is exactly the same as it was in prehistoric times, the idea is that we want to make sure that the next generation get the knowledge that we have in our culture, faithfully, because that's what knowledge is, it's information that is poured into you and anything that's not faithful is going to be an error because almost all deviations from the true theory are going to be false, and so that just doesn't take into account that this process of transfer is not a process of copying or pouring. It's a process that happens inside the recipient and is about the recipient trying to pick and choose between the stuff he sees and trying to make sense of it, trying to make sense of what it's for and including moral theories and everytning, not just factual theories”. The simple idea of having an exam and having a standard or a maximum note is nonsensical, the education system is looking for ways to create people that are alike, and we should be looking for ways to create people that are different not that are alike. Just the simple thing that we can hear things like “oh sam is a better student than alex because sam has better grades” is ridiculous, looking for ways to create people that are better is also very wrong! We’ve known for a long time that the only way progress can happen, economically as well is that we need different people, creative people! Humans should do want they do better, this means that we shouldn’t have any kind of people doing mechanical jobs, creativity is probably our most human characteristic and yet the big majority of people still think that you’re either born creative or not, creativity is universal. In this sense, AI is an ally because in a couple of decades maybe, it will replace all mechanical jobs and will create space to humans do what AI will never be able to do, be creative (because AI has to solve a specific problem and therefore isn’t creative, and true creativity as naval says means you can hold any idea in your head, it’s unbounded). Anything that a AI can do, an human shouldn’t be doing that at all, that’s an anti human philosophy to just accept humans doing mechanical jobs. The aspect of education that is designed to meet a standard is the part of education that is not educational at all, any kind of standardisation (standards are objective) is the opposite of diversity and therefore will unable human creativity to flourish.
Deutsch says that disobedience plays a huge role in progress and creativity. As I’ve wrote before AI it’s not creative because it has to solve a specific problem, this is also what separates humans from AI, because disobedience allows creativity! It’s very ironic to look back in time and historically, the most terrible things (war, genocides, slavery etc) have resulted from obedience, not from disobedience!