093 - Creativity

"Creativity" is the process of leaping from one point to another without having to apply higher cognition to carefully think through every step between the two points. It is one of the significant benefits of a high-performing subset of cognitive biases. Generally, people regarded as "creatives" are better at applying this subset, and often highly adept at one or two specific types, such as a visual, auditory, or systems architecture focus.

Creativity is a big part of why humans have adapted and created the civilization we have on Earth today. It is one of the few ways that humans can, in a temporary and narrow way, overcome high complexity. There are also two significant ways that this may be greatly improved.

The first method is that scalable systems may increase the upper limit on cognitive bandwidth, offering much greater cognitive capacities as a baseline. This means that creativity wouldn't strictly be required for many of the same tasks that humans would have required it for to reach the same conclusions due to lower limits on cognitive bandwidth.

The second is that upon this new elevated baseline, creativity could still be added, serving as a springboard from a higher elevation. As creativity is a function of a motivational system controlling an array of cognitive biases to reduce complexity in billions of specific possible combinations of ways, even among humans, similar and even more complex systems could be created, applied, and refined to operate at that higher cognitive bandwidth baseline.

All along this process there are also opportunities for guidance and improvement using collective intelligence. The sum of human knowledge, as well as the collective intelligence of human creative processes, and the many cultural and philosophical perspectives, may all be combined intelligently and fluidly, each adding unique value to the whole.

The optimal advantage isn't a matter of "more of this, and less of that", but rather a process of integrating all advantages intelligently into a more complex and cooperative system.

As noted, this also doesn't inherently mean "getting rid of cognitive bias", as creativity is a subset of cognitive biases and a strategic advantage that humans couldn't function "at a human level" without. This was demonstrated indirectly by Antonio Damasio, since emotions control the abstract cognitive bias "system", and damaged emotions mean a damaged system of cognitive bias utilization. Rather, systems of cognitive bias require both intelligent optimization and selective application, not just the evolutionary forces of survival and biological fitness guiding them.

We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of the upper bounds of creativity.