On Innovation

I have a vague idea of my own about how the mind achieves various levels of understanding, comprehension, and creativity.

This idea is pure speculation and may stem from a completely rudimentary understanding of how the mind works, based on my casual dabbling in endocrinology and basic neuroanatomy. However, this is how I understand the subjective experience of comprehension.

I know that when parts of the mind are not in synchrony, the senses can blur together into extreme experiences of synesthesia. Space can be confused with color, taste with sound; the body can blur into the environment, the self into the perceptions of others, and things like time or concepts can lose all meaning.

I know that when the mind lacks the capacity to comprehend reality or is hallucinating or in a schizoid state, it is akin to sleep—where there is experience, but no sense of agency. It is as if the limbic system is using the cortex to justify its own experience while the frontal cortex ceases to modulate.

I know that when the mind is tired, it cannot form insight intellectually, but such insight can stem from the subconscious. I know that depression removes the ability to self-motivate, but subconscious individuation is increased.

I know that insight comes from the subconscious—that the conscious mind organizes ideas, but when it stops actively thinking about them, the answer arises from the noise of the subconscious. In my mind, this noise is related to diffuse thermodynamic organization—the same principle that drives biological functions from chaos—as if the chemistry of the mind is the source of insight, and neurons are there to restructure its output into a structured experience.

I also think that if subconscious information is reduced to chemical operations and processed in a way we cannot comprehend, the mind acts like multiple lenses analyzing that output. The visuospatial capacity renders an idea into a relationship of objects, and the linguistic capacity translates those relationships into hierarchies and symbols.

This complexity is not just due to the sheer number of these processes—the “lenses”—but also because, together, they project all of this into an experience where the mind can look at itself and feel a sensation of satisfaction when it “understands” a concept. This projection creates a symbolic representation of the subconscious—like a virtual hard drive running a virtual program—almost like a computer in Minecraft.

There is also the possibility that subconscious processes are simply the result of neural activity that does not directly contribute to the projection of conscious experience. However, this explanation seems less convincing to me, as I do not see a clear evolutionary path for such a distinct division of operations.

To me, this model is built upon the most rudimentary abilities of neurons. I could even see a tapeworm’s reaction to its environment as a fundamental example of where creative insight originates. Creativity, in my view, is merely an extrapolation of a cell’s ability to self-organize based on its composition and environment.

What makes humans unique is not just our ability to have insights but the breadth of our symbolic representation and our ability to guide it through frontal cortical modulation. I have seen mice innovate in their own way, and ants solve problems—such as navigating past tape on the ground—that evolution could not have specifically prepared them for. From my understanding, any diffuse thermodynamic system has the potential for adaptive organization, which is essentially elementary innovation at a chemical level.