ancient civilizations understood creativity better than we do
Creativity is one of those things that everyone has their own definition and explanation for it.
But why?
Ancient Egyptians viewed creativity as a sacred act aligned with cosmic order (Ma’at), emphasizing imitation, translation, and interpretation of ancient models to produce something new, akin to incremental innovation rather than personal expression.
Ancient Persians conceived creativity as imagination and innovation, embracing foreign customs and envisioning how things could be better; artistic expression appeared in carpet weaving and symbolic motifs, and creativity was defined to include imagination.
Ancient Chinese saw creativity as the endless producing and renewing changes of nature, rooted in the Dao, Tai‑ji, or yin‑yang, and associated with innovative ideas, imagination, intelligence, independence, and high levels of activity/energy.
The ancient Greeks had no terms for “to create” or “creator”; art was considered discovery through submission to rules, with poetry as the sole exception where the poet was regarded as a maker, and creativity was linked to divine inspiration via the Muses.
According to Plato and Socrates, creativity is the result of divine inspiration. It comes about when the Muses breathe into the creative person, sending him or her into a temporary state of madness (Phaedrus, Plato).
Ancient Romans adopted the Greek view but later Latin possessed the terms “creatio” and “creator”; in the Christian period, “creatio” came to designate God’s act of creation from nothing, excluding human creativity, though earlier writers like Horace and Philostratus suggested poets and painters shared imagination and inspiration.
The concept of creativity evolved from being largely absent in most ancient cultures (where art was seen as discovery, not creation) to being viewed as the sole province of God in the Judeo‑Christian‑Islamic tradition; so no wonder why so many describe creativity as God hand and divine intervention.
During the Renaissance, creativity was reconceived as arising from human abilities, particularly those of “great men”; the word “creativity” was first applied to human activity (poetry) by the 17th‑century Polish poet Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski; by the 19th century, art alone was regarded as creativity.
At the turn of the 20th century, discussion of creativity in science and nature transferred artistic concepts to those domains; and the modern psychometric study of creativity began with J. P. Guilford’s 1950 address to the American Psychological Association.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the man who coined the term “flow”, defines creativity as a systemic process occurring through the interaction of three elements: a person (individual), a domain (cultural rules), and a field (experts). In his view, creativity requires an individual to bring novelty, a domain (e.g., music, physics) to hold the information, and a field (experts) to validate and accept the innovation.
David Deutsch defines creativity as the capacity to create new knowledge, specifically the ability to generate explanatory conjectures that can be tested, criticized, and refined, thereby producing understanding that did not exist before. We generate new understandings about how things work and why they behave as they do. Creativity, therefore, is about producing new explanations that can survive criticism and open the door to further progress.
As long as environments allow curiosity, freedom, and criticism, knowledge can grow without bound, making creativity the engine of unbounded progress, or what he calls the “Beginning of Infinity”.
David Deutsch’s view of creativity as the capacity to create new knowledge reframes the artist’s act not as mere self‑expression but as a process of conjecturing and testing explanations about the world, especially about human experience, emotions, and social intentions.
When a singer composes a new melody or a poet writes a fresh verse, they are generating novel explanatory guesses: for example, a conjecture that a particular combination of rhythm, timbre, and lyric can convey a specific nuance of longing, or that a certain metaphor can reveal a hidden aspect of cultural identity.
These guesses are then subjected to criticism through the artist’s own reflective judgment, feedback from listeners or readers, and the internal logic of musical or poetic forms, allowing the idea to be refined, rejected, or retained as a piece of knowledge that survived error‑correction.
Thus the discoveries made by the artist are not just aesthetic objects but new understandings: how a certain vocal break can embody vulnerability, how a specific poetic meter can evoke historical memory, or how a harmonic shift can model a social tension. And each adds to the shared pool of explanatory knowledge about what it means to feel, relate, and belong.
The domain knowledge of music theory, poetic conventions, linguistic nuances, and performance practice serves as the grammatical background against which conjectures are formed and tested; it provides the tools (scales, rhyme schemes, breath control) that make novel combinations possible and gives critics a shared language for evaluating whether the new work genuinely extends understanding.
In short, Deutsch’s framework turns the singer or poet into a knowledge‑creator whose art proceeds by proposing explanatory guesses about human life, refining them through criticism, and contributing to the growth of explanatory knowledge that can be built upon by future artists and audiences alike.
But what makes a good explanation?
A good explanation, according to David Deutsch, is one that is hard‑to‑vary: every detail plays an essential role, so changing any part would ruin its explanatory power; it is testable (or at least criticizable), makes specific and risky predictions, and reveals the underlying mechanism that generates the phenomenon rather than merely describing it.
When this criterion is transferred to the arts, a work of music, poetry or painting can be seen as a candidate explanation of some aspect of human experience; e.g., a particular emotion, a social tension, or a perceptual shift.
Take a song as an example. A song that explains “longing” through a precise combination of a descending minor‑third motif, a syncopated rhythm, and a breathy vocal timbre is hard‑to‑vary: if you replace the motif with a major interval, straighten the rhythm, or use a bright tone, the felt longing disappears or changes. The specific details are indispensable to the explanatory claim.
Listeners can judge whether the piece succeeds in conveying the intended affect; feedback from peers, audiences, or the artist’s own reflective listening acts as criticism that can refine or reject the explanatory guess, just as scientific hypotheses are subjected to experiment.
Good artistic explanations do more than label a feeling; they reveal how musical elements (tension‑release cycles, timbral contrasts, structural expectations) generate that feeling, offering a mechanistic account that can be applied to other contexts (e.g., film scoring, therapeutic music).
The same structure applies to poetry and painting: a poem explains “impermanence” through a tightly interwoven metaphor, meter, and image that cannot be altered without losing the insight; a painting explains “isolation” via a specific palette, composition, and brush‑stroke technique whose interdependence makes the explanation hard‑to‑vary. In each case, the artwork functions as an explanatory conjecture about reality, open to criticism and capable of producing new, testable knowledge about human experience.
The Process of Discovery
Objective aesthetic solutions are not inborn but created. Just as Beethoven agonized over changes to meet a standard he knew existed, artists use creative effort to reject “mistakes” and converge on an objective standard. This process is a beginning of infinity for art: because humans are universal explainers, we can continue to solve aesthetic problems to create unlimited increases in beauty and even design new senses to experience qualia that are currently inconceivable.
This is most straightforwardly so in the case of art forms that involve stories – fiction. ... a good story has a good explanation of the fictional events that it portrays. But the same is true in all art forms. In some, it is especially hard to express in words the explanation of the beauty of a particular work of art, even if one knows it, because the relevant knowledge is itself not expressed in words – it is inexplicit. No one yet knows how to translate musical explanations into natural language. Yet when a piece of music has the attribute ‘displace one note and there would be diminishment’ there is an explanation: it was known to the composer, and it is known to the listeners who appreciate it. One day it will be expressible in words.
What does the future hold?
We will never reach a state of “perfection” in art or science; instead, we will continue to move from misconceptions to ever better, more beautiful misconceptions, forever at the beginning of an infinite journey.
If we look at creativity as the capacity to create new knowledge, than AI will 100% become creative. There is no way it’s not.
We may eventually design new senses and new qualia (subjective experiences), allowing us to experience and create forms of beauty that are currently inconceivable.
The artists will thrive no less than they used to, and the technology will only make things better not worse, but about this in the next post.
I hope this post brought you new perspectives about the concept of creativity. My goal is not to change your opinion but to offer you options to consider. At the end of the day, as Bruce Lee said, everyone should create their own philosophy of life.
Or you can anytime just say that it was God’s hand, who cares?
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Special thanks to David Deutsch, the author of the book The beginning of Infinity. Only after reading this book I could connect all the dots. I researched this topic for many years and read many books before I read The beginning of Infinity. Understanding creativity helped me discover the tools that makes accessing creativity more predictable.