Been thinking about the jump to creativity.
The idea that there was an instantaneous leap to universality has had me scratching my head since I first encountered it.
At some point, it seems there must have been a child who was born a person despite having non-person parents. The first person. A universal explainer who was the child of two non-explainers.
Creativity is an all-or-nothing capacity. It’s not a matter of degree. Full-blown, or not at all. So what changes were happening in the skulls of our ancestors that led to its evolution? What was the human suite of mental capacities just before that final, pivotal mutation? And what benefits did the earliest people’s creativity confer that give them a differential survival advantage?
I can’t see how David Deutsch’s theory that creativity’s initial advantage lay in improving one’s ability to enact static culture memes more faithfully can possibly apply to the first few creative people.
Was the first-ever person the patient-zero of consciousness? Was this the first person to make choices? Were they even really a person, or did they just have the capacity to be one? Is creativity not enough? That is, would they have had to acquire — or create — some knowledge with their new creative capacity to become a person?
How would they have known how to use their creativity? Would they have found it more difficult to learn what their parents and cousins were able to learn instinctively and unconsciously? Were they just automatically conjecturing and criticising to learn? Or were they using both creativity and the meme-acquisition mechanisms that their parents and cousins and ancestors had evolved to operate?
