You’re asking the right questions, IMO! Chomsky has spent his life trying to answer this question in different forms, and has ultimately arrived to the conclusion that we live in a “Pre-Gallilean” era of cognitive science, where the only answers available to us are developed through the use of intuitive interpretation (like they used to do with ‘the heavens’/space) instead of empirical contradiction (aka science).
He does have some answers, such as “human creativity is the ability to create an infinite range of outputs from a finite range of inputs that nonetheless pertain to our motivations/context in some useful way”, but that’s obviously not a very satisfying answer. It tells us a little — I think Tao is gesturing to exactly this when he complains that GPTo1 can only apply and combine mathematical approaches within a sort of closed domain rather than propose radically new ones - but it’s not helpful for an everyday understanding of creativity. IMO :)
In his words, from Language and Mind:
"Roughly, where we deal with cognitive structures, either in a mature state of knowledge and belief or in the initial state, we face problems, but not mysteries. When we ask how humans make use of these cognitive structures, how and why they make choices and behave as they do, although there is much that we can say as human beings with intuition and insight, there is little, I believe, that we can say as scientists…
What I have called elsewhere 'the creative aspect of language use' remains as much a mystery to us as it was to the Cartesians who discussed it, in part, in the context of the problem of 'other minds."
If this sounds intriguing to you/anyone, I highly recommend his (in)famous debate with Foucault, which is available for free on YouTube. It’s a bit wandering, but about halfway through they discuss creativity in depth, contrasting Foucault’s vaguely postmodern view-that human creativity is mostly constrained by societal circumstances-with Chomsky’s view, that human creativity is mostly constrained by the natural structures of our cognitive system(s).
Wow. Thank you for your thoughtful answer!
> “human creativity is the ability to create an infinite range of outputs from a finite range of inputs that nonetheless pertain to our motivations/context in some useful way”
Do you think this can be used as a metric? Like the more useful answer we can come up with, the more "creative" we are. The constraint of outputs and "some useful way" is such a good insight.
He does have some answers, such as “human creativity is the ability to create an infinite range of outputs from a finite range of inputs that nonetheless pertain to our motivations/context in some useful way”, but that’s obviously not a very satisfying answer. It tells us a little — I think Tao is gesturing to exactly this when he complains that GPTo1 can only apply and combine mathematical approaches within a sort of closed domain rather than propose radically new ones - but it’s not helpful for an everyday understanding of creativity. IMO :)
In his words, from Language and Mind:
If this sounds intriguing to you/anyone, I highly recommend his (in)famous debate with Foucault, which is available for free on YouTube. It’s a bit wandering, but about halfway through they discuss creativity in depth, contrasting Foucault’s vaguely postmodern view-that human creativity is mostly constrained by societal circumstances-with Chomsky’s view, that human creativity is mostly constrained by the natural structures of our cognitive system(s).https://youtu.be/3wfNl2L0Gf8?si=WA3DpnaFEvd3QqCt