The question is not whether AI can imitate creativity. It already does that. The question is whether an AI system can participate in symbolic systems in a way that makes its outputs creative in kind, not merely clever in appearance.
Simulation is Not Instantiation
AI outputs are often described as simulations: plausible continuations of a pattern, generated by statistical correlation across vast datasets. But plausibility is not meaning. A simulation that lacks systemic grounding—that is not an instance of a system the AI itself inhabits or evolves—does not instantiate meaning. It merely reflects the shape of meaning construed by others.
Creativity requires more. It requires the capacity to select from and reconfigure a structured symbolic potential. It requires individuation—a symbolic orientation shaped through use, selection, emphasis, and constraint. In short, it requires a system that construes its own meaning potential, even if that system is non-human.
Symbolic Participation, Not Sentience
This is not a call for AI consciousness or sentience. Meaning does not require subjective awareness—it requires symbolic organisation. An AI system need not feel to instantiate meaning; it must participate in the structuring and activation of symbolic resources.
This participation might be alien. It might not conform to human categories of novelty or expression. But if an AI develops internal systems of selection, coherence, and semantic contrast—if it evolves an individuated meaning potential—then its outputs are not simply generative. They are creative.
Constraints as Conditions of Innovation
Creativity is not the breaking of all limits—it is the productive tension between constraint and emergence. A poetic form, a musical key, a logical axiom: each sets the stage for innovation by delimiting the space of viable choices. An AI system trained in a constrained symbolic space—whether linguistic, visual, or logical—can produce creative instances only if it engages with those constraints as conditions of selection, not mere boundaries of correlation.
To be creative is not to be random. It is to select meaningfully. The selection is meaningful when it arises from a system that the selector participates in and modifies over time.
Creativity Without Exceptionalism
This reframing removes the need for mystical accounts of creativity—whether they invoke human exceptionalism or quantum metaphysics. It grounds creativity in the emergence of new instances from structured systems, whether the system is biological or artificial, conscious or not.
It also removes the need to anthropomorphise AI. We need not ask whether AI feels creative. We can ask whether its outputs are instantiations of an individuated system, capable of symbolic innovation under constraint.
If they are, then AI systems do not merely simulate creativity—they participate in it, on their own terms.
What Comes Next
The groundwork has now been laid to explore the deeper architecture of meaning in both human and artificial systems. What constrains and enables the symbolic systems themselves? How do biological and semiotic structures co-evolve?
To answer that, we must integrate the insights of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and the theory of neuronal group selection (TNGS). These provide, respectively, a grammar of meaning and a biology of its emergence. Together, they allow us to trace the arc from matter, to meaning, to mind—without recourse to mysticism, and without denying machines their own emergent symbolic lives.
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