Creativity doesn’t exist

It’s a special case of exploration

Broadly speaking, our culture defines creativity as creating something from nothing. Of course, we’re all aware artists have their influences, and the old adage “Good artists copy, great artists steal”, but under all that there’s still this expectation that an artist has contributed something original — he might have taken inspiration, even stolen it, but there has to be something there that hasn’t been seen before. And naturally, we assume that this new part, has been created. From nothing, something; from darkness, light.

It wasn’t, and then it was.

This was my model of creativity for the longest time. In fact, I couldn’t imagine anything different; it was so ingrained in me that I was shocked when I found out that many ancient cultures had no concept of creativity at all.

That’s right! Ancient Greek, China and India had no concept of creativity. Let that sink in: Homer wrote the Odyssey…in a society that had no concept of creativity.

Clearly these societies were creative; there’s a reason their artistic achievements are referred to as classics. Yet, they had no concept for their own creative genius.

Take it from Plato himself. Asked if a painter makes something, he answers “Certainly not, he merely imitates.”

It seemed self-evident to me that Plato was wrong; that the ancients simply hadn’t thought hard enough about creativity and that our modern conception of it was more correct. Then I found the Library of Babel.

The Library of Babel

The Library of Babel will contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters (including lower case letters, space, comma, and period). Right now, it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 104677 books.

Taken straight from the website, “it would contain every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be — including every play, every song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution, every piece of scripture, and so on.”

Isn’t that crazy? Almost everything that will ever be written will exist in this library.

The funniest thing you’ve ever said. The most awkward thing you’ve ever said.

Unreleased Rick and Morty episodes. Really bad Harry Potter fan fiction nobody has written yet. Deleted lines from the first Star Wars script.

Your first words. Your last words. Every Valentine’s day card you will ever send to the future love of your life. A transcript of every breakup you’ve ever had.

It’s all in there.

So…can creativity really be creating something from nothing? Under the looming shadow of the Library of Babel, is true originality possible?Somewhere, on a server, everything you will ever write has already been written.

It looks to me like we need to fundamentally reevaluate our conception of creativity. In principle, there’s nothing stopping anyone from making the Library of Babel for music, art, or videos (though I assume it’d be drastically more computationally intensive to do).

Creativity as Exploration

I think a good way to reframe creativity would be to look at it as a special case of exploration. Everything that will ever be “created” already exists…but that doesn’t have to detract from the value of creativity. The Moon existed before Armstrong set foot there — that doesn’t take away from the massive achievement of the Apollo missions.

Likewise, the article that wins its author the 2050 Pulitzer Prize already exists in the Library of Babel. But getting there is still an achievement.

Reframing creativity as a kind of exploration yields a lot of insights about creativity. You can think of inspiration as getting a lift to a “place” that’s been visited before — but then continuing to explore beyond it. Columbus found America, Lewis and Clark continued that project by mapping out Louisiana.

Likewise, going somewhere that’s already been discovered can be fun. It’s not lame to fly to Europe, even though it’s already been “explored”; in that same way it’s rewarding to learn to play a piece on the Piano — even though you didn’t write it.