Would a mind that fully understands everything about itself, with no uncertainty or mystery about its own functioning, still be capable of creativity and generating novel ideas?

I can think, therefore the reach of my understanding is incomplete. >< The reach of my understanding is incomplete, therefore I can think.

Our very ability to think and create is constituted by the gaps in our understanding. This paradox is an urgent one to understand as AI systems evolve increasingly fast. My point is the following: If we understand the limits of our self-understanding in particular, and that of complex systems in general, to be constitutive of creativity rather than a mystery to be solved, we can leverage these inherent limits to better harness the potential of both.

I’ve been thinking about the ideal conditions for ideas to emerge for years. My company Sane focuses on building tools that facilitate creative thinking and the emergence of ideas. I founded the company with Ida, believing technology had immense potential in unlocking creativity — not by automating it, but by enhancing the already present creative capacities of the human mind. Since we started, AI systems have made massive leaps. The early adoption of these systems, mainly aimed at automating existing tasks for productivity, has made it clear that we need to shift focus from productivity in the conventional sense towards creativity. We should focus on building the muscle that let's us use technology to do things differently, not just faster.

Beyond my work in this area, I’m an ‘enthusiastic amateur’ of psychoanalytic theory. In short, Lacanian analysis aims to uncover the unconscious structures underlying our conscious experience, often unwillingly expressed in patterns of language and behavior. Lacanian theory, albeit dogmatic and admittedly with its faults, has been the single most impactful framework in shaping my thinking around subjectivity, creativity, and the human experience in general.

What is the unconscious and how does it interact with the conscious mind?

The unconscious is structured like a language — Lacan

Lacan, building on Freud’s work, saw the unconscious as a dynamic system that operates through mechanisms like condensation and displacement, mimicking metaphor and metonymy in language. This language-like system constantly influences our conscious experience. Slavoj Zizek, building in his turn on Lacan, talks about the unconscious as a site of the ‘real’ — that which resists symbolization. It’s all the (language-like) knowledge that affects us but escapes articulation or being fully understood by our conscious mind.

In cognitive neuroscience, the same system is defined as implicit and explicit processes. Our conscious mind interprets and narrativises behaviors and thoughts that originate in unconscious processes.

Depending on the school of thought, the unconscious consists of repressed desires, sensory and affective information from before the threshold of awareness, internalized cultural archetypes, forgotten memories, and implicit habits we cannot explicitly articulate.

If our behavior is shaped by the unconscious, what role does the unconscious play in our creativity?

If the unconscious is structured like a language, how does creativity emerge from the unconscious?

Freud saw the interplay between the unconscious and conscious mind as sublimation. The creative act is fueled by repressed desires in our unconscious that get channeled into socially acceptable forms of expression. Lacan, focused on the linguistic aspects of the process, saw creativity as a dialogue between the symbolic (language and culture) and the ‘real’, or that which cannot be articulated. The unconscious generates associations and combinations of symbols that break into consciousness as creative insight through metonymy and metaphor.

In ‘In Search of Lost Time’ Proust describes the experience of such a moment in perhaps the most famous account of a creative eruption in literary history:

The narrator, feeling gloomy, is offered a cup of tea and a madeleine by his mother. As he takes a sip with a crumb of the cake, he experiences intense joy, that he realizes is connected to the tea and cake, but that it’s much more significant than just the combination of flavors. Eventually the taste triggers an involuntary, forgotten memory of his childhood when his aunt would offer him madeleines in a flower-filled garden. The sensory experience unlocks a flood of imagery, carrying unexpected emotional charge, allowing access to an inner world that transcends time and space.

Proust’s madeleine describes how creative insight emerges through an association of sensory experience with unconscious memories, but any association containing ‘overlapping’ or otherwise connected symbols in our psyche can trigger a similar process.

If some creativity emerges from the unconscious mind, how can we leverage it to augment creativity?

How can we consciously create the conditions for creative outbursts if we cannot articulate the unconscious associations before they surface?

Some common strategies could be engaging in activities that occupy the conscious mind, while leaving space for unconscious processing. Walking is a popular tool for thinking. Ideas often emerge during mundane tasks: in the shower, while washing the dishes or peeling potatoes (my personal favorite). Mindfulness and meditation, or the exposure to different sensory experiences create space for the unconscious to do its thing. For years, I’ve written down my dreams in my Apple notes, often still half asleep, to discover them later and gain deeper access to some of the imagery bordering my conscious mind during sleep. Play allows unconscious processes to flourish by engaging our mind in free associations that we often bypass when occupied with more goal-oriented activities.

It’s our inability to fully grasp our unconscious that makes it such a potent source of creativity. Making space for the unknown areas of our psyche is a way of consciously stimulating creativity.

Being human is like trying to see your own eye without a mirror — the organ of perception cannot fully perceive itself.

In the fields of science and technology, the prevailing worldview is a logic one; everything can and should be explained empirically. But what if the inability to explain everything is precisely what is driving us to do so?

The concept of a constitutional lack has a rich history in philosophy and mathematics. Thomas Metzinger’s self-model theory of subjectivity argues that the self is an internal model created by the brain, referred to as the Phenomenal Self-Model. Since the model is a functional construct, our ability to introspect is limited to its content, unable to reach the components of its own functioning. We can reflect on our experiences, but cannot access the underlying mechanisms.

Similarly, Douglas Hofstadter sees the self as an emergent property of recursive loops in the brain. In ‘I am a strange loop’, he refers to Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, which state that in any complex system capable of self-reference, there are statements that are true but cannot be proven by the system itself.

Bertrand Russell’s work on set theory illustrates this with a perfect conundrum: Consider a set of all sets. If this set contains itself, it shouldn’t. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t in fact contain all sets. The set must both be and not be a member of the set it contains. Russell’s paradox shows the limits to the existence of fully self-explaining systems.

Returning to psychoanalysis, Slavoj Zizek draws on Lacan to argue that human subjectivity is fundamentally structured around a lack or a void — the subject is inherently empty, “nothing but the failure to become itself”. Attempts to fully realize or understand ourselves are always incomplete. This incompleteness is constitutive of the subject.

If any complex system capable of self-reference has some truths about itself it cannot prove, isn’t such a system defined by its limitations more than the nature of its capabilities? Since we can’t examine ourselves (or anything else for that matter) from outside of ourselves, any attempt to fully understand the self from within is doomed to fail.

If we follow this logic, a system fully capable of explaining itself would no longer be intelligent. If I had full access to my own mind, I would no longer perceive it as such. The lack of distance or directed perspective would result in a kind of short circuit, removing the tension between what thinks and what is thought of. Therefore, could we see the unconscious as not an inconvenience making us do stupid shit, but as a constitutive part of intelligence? The view of the self as a construct around a void seems dramatic, but if we look at the history of mysticism and many religious traditions, it’s a core principle that has followed human thought for thousands of years. If we understand our incompleteness as the prerequisite for creativity — for producing new knowledge — we can tap into it as a source.

Unconscious drives

Unconscious drives, in the Freudian sense, are those forces that operate outside of our conscious awareness but greatly influence our behavior and mental processes. To make my case, I want to isolate the concept of drive from the properly human (sensory, embodied, affective), and define it through the following key characteristics:

• Emergent — drives arise from interactions within a system, not explicitly or consciously intended.
• Persistent — drives influence us over time. They’re resistant to immediate change. You can take the man out of X, but you can’t take the X out of man.
• Unconscious — drives function below the threshold of awareness or explicit representation.
• Directional — drives are oriented towards specific outcomes, even if they are not consciously recognized.

The black box nature of deep neural networks makes them operate in inexplicable ways. AI exhibits behaviors that are emergent, persistent, unconscious, and directional. An unprogrammed bias somewhere results in a model adopting a character uninstructed, or making a semantic leap that its human counterpart wouldn’t have made. In this vein, the differing molecular / binary constitution of each system is less interesting to examine than the symbolic, linguistic order they both operate in, with its mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy.

There has been a lot of conversation recently around whether AI will be able to produce net new scientific research without a provided theoretical framework (ref. Mel Andrews). If we follow our line of thought, could we project the ‘drives’ in AI systems, as defined by their key characteristics, to develop into directions similar to the workings of the human unconscious in enabling creativity? With the risk of drawing an overly ambiguous line, can we separate those elements in our unconscious processes that are not dependent on embodied experience, and see similarities in a potentially creative machine unconscious? Can we see intelligence as neither human nor machine, but isolate those parts of it that are apparent in both? It’s common knowledge that the human body consists mostly of water, but we rarely discuss the degree to which the sea resembles us. In a similar vein, we don’t need to anthropomorphize AI to recognize similar principles underlying its behavior. A lot of the same, much of the different.

If we see this lack, gap, or incompleteness in understanding through this lens in both human and machine creativity, how does that change our perception of their interplay? Instead of attempting to model ‘creativity’ in machines, can we stimulate ‘unconscious’ states in these systems similar to the strategies we as humans have to create conditions for creative outbursts? What are the machine equivalents of madeleines and tea — the Proustian triggers for AI?

Work in progress