There is a difference.  If a few genes are "incorrect," the entire organism will die, or simply not live in the first place.  If a book is stylistically immature, it is subject to interpretation, and might be popular anyway.  In essence, you're comparing genes and memes.  Where this analogy fails is that the inherent truth of a meme is not relevant to its reproductive success.  For genes, their ability to produce a living being (their "truth&quot is crucial.

I see what you're saying, and I agree in general with the philosophical accuracy of your statement.  People could probably produce "better" art if they spent more time improving their skill in baby steps.  However, this is a generalization, and is not true in every instance, and your analogy is not exactly valid.

Here's where you're going to run into issues with your analogy.  There are lots of people in music, for instance, who are widely regarded as geniuses, but are not popular.  There are also people who couldn't compose their way out of kindergarten and end up with millions of people loving their songs.  What is the purpose of music?  Is it to make compositional advances, or to entertain people?  I can let you listen to some music with cutting edge compositional techniques that sound like shit.  I can let you hear some of the best musicians in the world playing incredibly difficult music that you'll hate.

In short, the purpose of art, while not completely arbitrary, is somewhat subjective.  Therefore, any statement about a particular piece of art being better or worse is going to be necessarily subjective, where natural selection has concrete results.  So, not only are you dealing with memes, which are not truth-dependent, you're also dealing with art, which, if you haven't noticed, is damn hard to even define, much less objectively evaluate.

Right.  There are analogous equivalents to cranes and skyhooks in the development of artistic ability.  Beyond that, it's just poetic.

Going back to the original skyhook/crane distinction in regards to creative inspiration: There is something to the skyhook idea, though it may not be what you think. It is not that ideas magically pop into your head, it is that there are certain minds that generate a lot more ideas than others, such that it *appears* that the ideas come out of nowhere. What is the difference between creative genius minds and normal minds? That's the real question, and that's where I think there is some validity to the idea of genius. I actually don't think it's that hard to reproduce genius. There are various techniques that can put you in a creative mindset where ideas just seem to flow out of you. It is not simple, like: follow this recipe and watch the ideas flow. It's not as easy to explain as that. But it *is* possible to explain, it just takes more work and one-on-one discussion.

The core comes back to what I call the intuitive mindset. In many ways, this is similar to the infuriating mindset of the theist or the postmodernist who believes in paradoxes and whatnot, but it doesn't have to be that way. There is an underlying intuition that ALL humans have. I define intuition as the brain's natural ability to make pretty good guesses. The intuitive mindset is when you lean heavily on intuition and not so heavily on skepticism. Just let ideas float up into your conscious awareness. It takes practice and I don't expect this one post to be able to adequately explain it.

Think back to when you were a kid and daydreaming just seemed to spontaneously happen. It's very similar to that. Where did those daydreams come from? You didn't think them, they just arose from your intuitive subconscious. Later on, you may have learned how to control your daydreaming, you may have even learned how to direct it for a specific purpose. You gain this control by introducing some skepticism to it. Over time, you begin to rely on this control and the daydreams become less spontaneous. But they also become less creative. Going back to the intuitive mindset means to let go of some of that control to allow your intuition to become more spontaneous and creative. It's actually not that easy, but it becomes easier with practice.

One way to bring it back is to start listening to your gut a bit more, or that inner voice, that first instinct. That's your intuition. As rationalists, we tend to reject our initial intuitions as biased and untrustworthy. And they are. You can't intuit a logic puzzle without applying some rules to your logic. Rules equal control/skepticism. But when we're talking about art, the skepticism can get in the way of some real creative insights. You can't logic a painting or a poem. If you do, it will be pretty boring.

Another way to strengthen your intuition is to play with it. Play games that require association and metaphor, like charades or something like that.

Yet another way is to practice using an intuitive system, which is what most religions are, but you don't have to actually become religious to do this. One example intuitive system that I like to play with is the yin yang duality system. Look for things that are opposing dualities, like light dark, many one, active passive, male female, etc. Then match them up according to your own intuitive associations. E.g. active matches male and passive matches female, so active passive matches male female. Then, look out into the real world and try to see the patterns of duality. If you allow yourself to, you will intuitively see them everywhere. The intuition naturally works that way, with dualities. Watch a good movie and you'll start to see these dualities in action as part of the drama (directors and writers tend to think intuitively too, so they put dualities in their art). Then you'll see the dynamics of the system. Opposites oppose, but then fuse to create something greater, a resolution of sorts. This is the idea of dialectics, which is a related intuitive system: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

Yet another way to experience the intuitive mindset is to try marijuana or mushrooms (if it's legal where you are ;  ). You don't need a lot and they are quite safe if you do them in a safe environment. Certain drugs have effects that allow you to experience a more intuitive mindset than your daily routine. Don't rely on drugs to get the mindset, but they can at least give you a glimpse of what it is all about and how it works. Then you'll know it when you see it, so to speak, and the other intuitive practices will make more sense if they don't already.

So, my point is that it is possible to reproduce the creative mindset that I believe is associated with creative genius. Not to say that all your ideas will be great, but they will flow more easily, and you will be able to generate copious quantities of imaginative ideas, compared to other people. Thus, the appearance that 'creative genius' is a skyhook is just an appearance. There is a crane-like explanation for where genius gets all its ideas: intuition. The trick is to allow the intuition to flow, and not restrict it so much with self-doubt and self-criticism.

Of course, I remain a hardcore rationalist, I just think there are rational uses for the intuitive mindset.

I'll answer your question, but first consider this: Is it not an obvious fact that some minds on this planet generate a lot more creative ideas than others? Need I only point to the scientists, Einstein, Newton, Feynman, etc. etc. I don't think it's disputable that certain minds do generate more ideas than others. You are correct to ask, 'how'.

I gave a very clear definition of intuition in my earlier post. It is the brain's natural ability to make pretty good guesses. How it does this remains a puzzle for neuroscientists. However, again, it is an indisputable fact that intuition as I've defined it exists. Somehow the brain has a natural ability to make pretty good guesses, without requiring conscious thought. It just works. That's intuition. I could go into more detail about how intuition functions, such as describing similarity/difference detection, association, pattern matching, conceptualization, etc. But raw intuition exists and there's nothing mysterious or vague about it.

Of course it's natural. Didn't you see my username?

Intuition is a function of the neocortex. I'm not a neuroscientist, so I can't tell you the latest and greatest details on how the neocortex functions, but I have a very good book to recommend: On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins (Amazon)

Basically, from what I get from the book, the neocortex is made of six layers of neurons like a sheet of crumpled paper stuffed in the skull. The neurons that make up the six layers form repeated units of vertical piles of a small number of neurons. Each of these piles (imagine the hex-shaped cells in a honeycomb) acts as a predictive unit. It learns the patterns of the other piles its connected to and produces its own predictive pattern in harmony. The neurons just naturally have this architecture and ability to perform this predictive function. My 'intuition' would essentially boil down to this fundamental process of prediction.

Again, it is the brain's natural ability to make pretty good guesses. I say 'pretty good' because there are known systemic flaws in intuition, such as the tendency to see minds where there are none (anthropomorphization), or the tendency to confirm your own existing beliefs (confirmation bias). Still, even with these systemic flaws, intuition works pretty well as far as survival advantage goes. That's how it was selected by evolution after all, it conferred the ability on animals with a neocortex to make better predictions of the world around them, outcompeting other animals with a less advanced brain/neocortex.

Rationality, on the other hand, is a system built on top of the basic intuitive building blocks, specifically with the purpose of correcting those in-built systemic flaws of intuition. That's why we have rules of logic and lists of fallacies to catch ourselves (fallacies are just names for systemic flaws of human intuition).

One of the key functions of rational thinking is to doubt your first intuition. Maybe the monster in the closet is really just shadows. That doubt is a kind of leash or control on your intuition. The more you doubt yourself (initially at least), the more you are able to correct your flawed intuitions. However, taken to an extreme, if you constantly doubt your intuition, like turning a tap from full blast down to just a drip, then you lose a lot of your creative power. You are discarding more ideas than you allow through your mental filters, and what you end up with is very few creative ideas. In your effort to stop being wrong, you inadvertently stop most of your creativity as well.

The basic building block of the crane is basic, raw intuition. The brain's natural ability to make pretty good guesses. Or you could restate it as the brain's natural ability to come up with pretty good ideas. When you build a pretty good idea on top of another pretty good idea, and again on top of another pretty good idea, you start to develop pretty great ideas. The more skill you get at this, you are able to pop out really big ideas that seem to other people to have come out of nowhere. But they didn't come out of nowhere, they came out of a well-oiled intuition pump. That's the crane that appears to be a skyhook (to those who observe the genius, but can't see where he gets his ideas from).

Even the metaphors we are using here: Skyhook, intuition pump (thanks to Dennett), dripping tap, crane, etc. These metaphors all require forms of intuition to work (specifically association and analogy). There is no actual crane in my head, that's just a metaphor. Your brain has a natural ability to 'figure out' what the metaphor is referring to without you having to consciously make the connection. It just works. That's intuition.

Other examples of intuition: Your ability to tell someone's lying without being consciously aware how you know (I just don't trust him). Your ability to read body language (I think she likes me). Your ability to sense the mood of a crowd of people (maybe we should get out of here). Etc. Etc.

Here's a great example of intuition: Ever play Reach for the Top? It's a quiz game in school where a questioner reads questions and you buzz in to give the answer before the other team gets a chance. If you've ever seen talented kids playing the game, you will see that they often buzz in before the questioner has read the full question. Sometimes the questioner only reads a tiny fragment of the question. But still, the kid makes a 'pretty good guess' about what the question probably is, and then makes a snap judgment about his answer (there's a time limit after you buzz in, so you have to answer quickly), and poof, he comes out with the right answer. Both guessing the question and guessing the answer can rely heavily on intuition. Of course you need to know a lot of trivia, but that's not enough because of the tight time factor. Sometimes you just gotta guess, and the team with the most intuitive players usually win.