Imagination vs. Creativity

I like to make a distinction between imagination and creativity that you may or may not agree with. Imagination is the ability to see known possibilities as being reachable from a situation. Creativity is the ability to manufacture new possibilities out of a situation. The two form a continuous spectrum of regimes in simple cases, but are disconnected in complex cases.

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Imagination is an aptitude based on analysis, and is a variety of reasoning forwards from a current state marked by freedom from habituated patterns of seeing. Creativity is an aptitude is based on synthesis, and is a variety of reasoning backwards from desired outcomes marked by closing of realizability gaps. To some extent, the two behaviors exist on the same continuous spectrum, and in most situations we alternate between forwards and backwards reasoning modes. But in complex situations, there is also a discontinuity between the two modes, which is the same as the general discontinuity and qualitative difference that separates analysis from synthesis.

Forward and backward are not symmetric. Synthesis, since it works backwards from a desired state, is strictly more expressive, since it can start from desired states that are not realizable or reachable from the current state using known techniques and patterns of behavior. It can also fail in more ways, since it might attempt impossibilities.

A leap — a creative leap — may be required to connect the forward and backward regimes. Sometimes this might just manifest as a textbook technical problem that is easy to solve once you pose it correctly. You could even outsource that to an appropriate sort of technician to actually execute. Craftsmanship and skill are useful for creativity up to the point where you can see the leap that is needed, but once seen, others can often do it. The most creative people in a medium are rarely the master technicians.

I like the definition of genius as “talent hits the target others can’t hit, genius hits the target others can’t see.” Creative genius likes in seeing what others don’t see. But once you’ve actually seen it, you might be able to simply point it out to others to hit. They might even be better at hitting it than you, once you point it out.

At other times creativity might manifest as an “invention gap,” as I’ve taken to calling it, or even a “discovery” gap — uncovering a new principle or phenomenon to harness in nature. A problem that nobody knows how to solve, or a behavior of nature that nobody has noticed, modeled, or figured out how to harness.

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Imagination to some extent is relative to training data. What for you is a leap of imagination may be a straightforward inference for someone who has seen or experienced more cases. A sufficiently trained AI model may produce behaviors indistinguishable from highly imaginative human behaviors.

Creative behaviors require imagination, but also require more something more. Imagination is necessary but not sufficient for creativity.

Creative behaviors, I think, call for the equivalent of mutation or noise-injection into an evolutionary process. There is a non sequitur quality to creative leaps that strikes me as fundamentally non-analytical and serendipitous.

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