Ning Zong

While creativity has long been regarded as a marvel of the human mind, recent research suggests that creativity is also embodied. However, theories of embodied creativity often remain cautious, upholding the traditional primacy of the mind and retaining internal representation as a core component of creative processes. This results in a “fragmented” state where various forms of bodily involvement are acknowledged, yet a cohesive framework to integrate them is absent. This paper aims to present a radical account of embodied creativity, shifting the focus from grounding creativity in psychological mechanisms to “creativizing the body” through the lens of biological enactivism. It develops the concept of minimal creativity—free from conceptual or psychological influences—based on adaptive and autonomous biological mechanisms, which have played a crucial role in certain radical theories of embodied cognition. The paper then argues that human-level, mind-centered creativity is grounded in minimal biological creativity, as both are driven by the organism’s agential self-producing dynamics, with the “source of creativity” arising from regulatory responses to the far-from-equilibrium, unfinished states of the organizational whole.

Although it is widely acknowledged that the Helmholtzian predictive coding paradigm is consistent with the teleofunctionalist theory regarding the puzzle of mental representation, theorists fail to offer a well-defined teleosemantics to ground the mental perceptual content in a physical neural state because of the problem raised from underdeterminedness. This paper is intended to construct an informational teleosemantics in light of an overlooked functional principle followed by a predictive processing system, namely “minimum description length”. A general moral in determining the perceptual representational content follows from this “Occam’s Razor” of information coding: the semantic content ascribed to a representational state embodies the features of simplicity and directness.

Margaret Boden famously theorizes that the highest form of creativity is more than the production of new ideas—it involves the transformation of a conceptual space consisting of all possible ideas that a person can obtain. This article examines whether this notion of transformative creativity can be applied to the field of biology. Biological transformative creativity (BTC) is theoretically conceivable if an extension of Boden’s original framework is allowed to include non-conceptual spaces as the object of transformation. However, identifying specific biological phenomena that warrant the label of transformative creativity in living systems poses a substantial challenge. After scrutinizing two recent theories regarding BTC—one connecting BTC to evolution and the other equaling it to self-organization—this paper turns to a third alternative hypothesis that emphasizes the autonomous, self-productive mechanisms through which novel organizational patterns and morphological features take shape. To unpack this idea, the paper draws on extensive evidence in epigenetic studies and argues that autonomous transformation of overall possibilities of living organisms occurs at the individual level primarily due to flexible modifications of gene expression norms in the organism. Then, the paper analyzes the developmental plasticity of _C. elegans_ and the origin and differentiation of castes in social insects as two examples of the epigenetic form of BTC. The account is expected to contribute to a more appropriate understanding of the origin of human creativity and the creative nature of life.