Here’s a brief excerpt from Chapter 21 of Minding the Brain (Discovery Institute Press, 2023), “Human Creativity Based on Naturalism Does Not Compute,” by programmer Eric Holloway and computer science prof Robert J. Marks II. The question is, if the brain is merely a random product of evolution, shaped by natural selection acting on random mutation, could it generate the amount of human creativity we see around us? Take, for example, writing in prose…

✼ ✼ ✼ ✼ ✼ ✼

Is the human brain capable of originating the enormous volume of creative prose we observe? Probability arguments are often given to support the impossibility of randomly generating a specific string of words. For the unguided random generation of text, a single specified target, like the first few hundred words of Oliver Twist, will have a minuscule probability. This target is much too specific to address the more general problem of creativity. A more interesting and relevant problem is to evaluate the probability that any meaningful phrase can be generated by chance.

This provides a more reasonable measure of the cost of creativity. Using frequency of occurrence data and English dictionary data, we show that generating a meaningful phrase a few hundred letters in duration is not possible even when (a) the definition of “meaningful” is reduced to any sequence of words found in a dictionary, and (b) generous estimates of the probabilistic resources of the universe are conceded.

Since the total space-time information capacity of the universe falls significantly short of the ability to generate meaningful text of only a few hundred letters, the origin of human creativity cannot be explained under naturalistic assumptions about the origin of the human mind. On the basis of conservation of information, we can conclude that the brain, understood as a merely material product of evolutionary chance, would be incapable of creativity, and that it must have been crafted by an external source.

✼ ✼ ✼ ✼ ✼ ✼

You may also wish to read: Can AI write movies you’d want to see? That issue was the heart of the Hollywood writers’ strike. How was it resolved? Or WAS it resolved really? AI can replace screenwriters only if you are content to see the same-old same-old every day forever. That’s true no matter who owns the technology.