By the time he published Vues des Cordillères, et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique, Alexander von Humboldt (September 14, 1769–May 6, 1859), barely in his forties, was the world’s most eminent and polymathic naturalist (the word scientist was yet to be coined). Napoleon hated him for his impassioned anticolonial and abolitionist views. Goethe cherished him as his greatest thinking partner, whose briefest company and conversation felt like “having lived several years.” Thoreau thought his very eyes “natural telescopes & microscopes.” Whitman declared himself a “kosmos” after the title of Humboldt’s epoch-making book. Darwin, looking back on his life, readily acknowledged that without Humboldt’s inspiring memoir-travelogue, entire passages of which he could recite by heart, he never would have boarded the Beagle, never would have written On the Origin of Species, never would have had his most transcendent experience while ascending the Andes in Humboldt’s footsteps.
Alexander von Humboldt by Friedrich Georg Weitsch, 1806
Unlike his contemporaries, Humboldt saw nature not as an obstacle for “Man” to conquer but as the magnificent superorganism of which human nature is a fractal.
Unlike other naturalists, who collected isolated specimens and sought to classify the living world into neat taxonomies, he was collecting and connecting ideas to “establish the unity and harmony of this stupendous mass of force and matter,” in which “no single fact can be considered in isolation” — a view of nature as a system that paved the way for everything from the Gaia hypothesis of biology to the unified field theory of physics to the concept of ecology.
Unlike other explorers, he disdained the view of non-European peoples as savages who needed to be civilized and saw them rather as sages with much older cultural and folkloric traditions, complex, fascinating, and full of lore about the natural world.
Published in French in 1810, Vues des Cordillères — a record of his time in the Cordilleras, the extensive mountain ranges of Latin America where he had invented the modern concept of nature as a web of relations — was Humboldt’s most lavish book. Amid the scrumptious engravings of mountains, volcanos, and archeological artifacts is a series of strange, scintillating fragments from ancient Incan and Aztec pictorial hieroglyphics, full of faces and bodies, affect and action.
The alphabets of most writing systems begin as pictograms. Europeans had certainly seen other ancient hieroglyphics — particularly the Egyptian, though the Rosetta Stone was yet to be decoded — but they were languages of symbolic logic composed of unfeeling graphic elements. Here was an entirely different visual alphabet of emotion and interaction — the OG emoji.
Detail from Aztec hieroglyphic manuscript
Humboldt, who believed that we must “trace the mysterious course of ideas” across history in order to apprehend the world we live in, must have recognized the significance of this visual language for he devoted nearly half of the book’s expensive engravings to it, effectively introducing the ancient invention of emoji into the modern world.
Vues des Cordillères was so popular that its English translation was published by London’s trendiest publisher, who had brought Lord Byron to the world.
Darwin was fifteen when he acquired his copy.
No one can trace perfectly the golden threads of influence that link minds across generations and disciplines, or measure the unconscious quickenings of inspiration in the mind of another, or know the germination period of an idea. We only know that, as a young man, Darwin paged with a passionate curiosity through his scientific hero’s record of ancient emoji and, as an old man, he created a pioneering visual dictionary of human emotion.
Although he had intended it as a chapter in The Descent of Man, he recognized the singular importance of the subject and published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals as a stand-alone book a year later — one of the first scientific books illustrated with photography, a practice Anna Atkins had pioneered a generation earlier with her self-published study of sea algae.
Depicting basic emotions like fear, anger, joy, sorrow, and disgust as “movements of the features and gestures,” Darwin’s dictionary of affect shares one crucial aspect with the Incan pictograms — both portray emotion as a phenomenon of the total human being, head to toe.
“A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” William James would write a decade after Expression in his landmark investigation of the physiology beneath the psychology of feeling. The paradox of our time is that although we now know that consciousness itself is a full-body phenomenon, we have continued our campaign of denying the animal nature of the human animal by negating the significance, the relevance, the very fact of the body. Encountering each other as faces on screens, scaling startups rather than mountains, outsourcing our experience of the world to the disembodied pseudo-minds of AI, we have become disembodied ourselves. Our emoji reflect this willing amputation of the body, this cult of the head. “By its predilection for symbols,” Humboldt had written in Kosmos contemplating ancient cultures, “[the imagination] influences ideas and language.” Our symbols influence our ideas about what it means to be human and shape our imagination in turn. If we are to reclaim our creaturely aliveness, it may be time to reimagine our visual language and invent a new alphabet of embodied emoji.
The vital force of life is charged by the poles of holding on and letting go. We know that the price of love is loss, and yet we love anyway; that our atoms will one day belong to generations of other living creatures who too will die in turn, and yet we press them hard against the body of the world, against each other’s bodies, against the canvas and the keyboard and the cambium of life.
This is the cruel contract of all experience, of aliveness itself — that in order to have it, we must agree to let it go.
Poet Jane Kenyon (May 23, 1947–April 22, 1995) offers a splendid consolation for signing it in her poem “Things,” found in her altogether soul-slaking Collected Poems (public library).
THINGS by Jane Kenyon
The hen flings a single pebble aside
with her yellow, reptilian foot.
Never in eternity the same sound —
a small stone falling on a red leaf.
The juncture of twig and branch,
scarred with lichen, is a gate
we might enter, singing.
The mouse pulls batting
from a hundred-year-old quilt.
She chewed a hole in a blue star
to get it, and now she thrives….
Now is her time to thrive.
Things: simply lasting, then
failing to last: water, a blue heron’s
eye, and the light passing
between them: into light all things
must fall, glad at last to have fallen.
Shortly before leukemia claimed her life at only forty-seven, Kenyon captured the miraculousness of the light having passed through us at all — which contours the luckiness of death — in a haunting poem that puts any complaint, any lament, any argument with life into perspective:
OTHERWISE by Jane Kenyon
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
“The book of love is full of music,” sing The Magnetic Fields. “In fact, that’s where music comes from.”
The book of love is written in the language of wonder — our best means of loving life more deeply. To love anything — a person, a pond, the world — is to see the wonder in it, to hear the music in it. Both love and wonder are in mysterious conversation with the deepest substrate of us, the complete message of which is unintelligible to the analytical mind, inaccessible by any explanatory model. Both require a surrender to the musicality of the experience — a trust that the music is the message.
In the late 1960s, just before philosopher Thomas Nagel challenged our notions of more-than-human consciousness with his catalytic essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” and long before Robert Macfarlane challenged our notions of animacy by asking whether a river is alive, the Finnish sound researcher Antti Jansson began wondering about the inner life of water, of its unheard creatures. As John Cage was discovering the musicality of silence while listening to his own nervous system in a sensory deprivation tank, Jansson — possibly a distant relative of beloved Moomins creator Tove Jansson — discovered the musicality of ponds. He grew particularly interested in the water boatman beetle Cenocorixa, capable of producing an astonishing 85 decibels — the noise level of New York City traffic — by rubbing its genitalia against its own body, much as cicadas play themselves.
Here was a whole new universe of bioacoustics, never before heard by human ears.
Sonogram of water boatmen
Half a century later, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg picked up where Jansson left off, bringing rigor and tenderness to the world of animal sounds. After his fascinating exploration of why birds sing, he turned his compassionate curiosity to the most neglected recesses of nature’s sonic consciousness — the ponds that punctuate forests, savannas, and suburbs alike.
As the human world grew quiet in the early pandemic, Rothenberg decided to drop a hydrophone into his local pond and just listen. To his astonishment, he discovered a portal into a secret universe of what he calls “undersound,” evocative of Rachel Carson’s landmark 1937 essay Undersea, which invited the terrestrial imagination for the first time to consider the hidden lives of the water world.
“In the great silence of the brackish waters behind our homes,” he heard the voices of myriad unknown creatures joining together in something between the buzzing of the nervous system in an anechoic chamber and the wistful moan of the gyaling, the Buddhist oboe. He heard photosynthesis itself — the regular rhythm of plants exchanging oxygen through the water, a metronome for the wild symphony orchestra of insects. And all of it he rendered in sonograms — maps of sound frequency against time — revealing the layered complexity of undersound, “music between, music no one species could make alone.” He writes:
Go deep looking for one sound and you may find the meaning of all of them. Everything sings, everything sounds; it all swirls around us together.
Hungry to discover more of this bioacoustic cosmos, he traveled to ponds all over the world, recording the bubbling of a passing turtle in Russell Wright’s Lost Pond in upstate New York and the late-night underwater calls of the painted frog in a pond at the Botanical Garden of Paris.
Soon, as cellist Beatrice Harrison had done with the nightingales a century earlier in what became the world’s first recorded interspecies musical collaboration, Rothenberg began accompanying the pond orchestra — sometimes with his beloved contralto clarinet, sometimes with electronic instruments.
It is mysterious, this universal impulse to join in with music, to sing along, to dance together. Conversation doesn’t seem to impel us in the same way. There, the impulse is often to counter and contradict rather than harmonize. Peter Gabriel (who has a magnificent cover of “The Book of Love”) articulates this perfectly when he runs into Rothenberg at an MIT conference:
With music, people dance, fall in love, sing along. With words on a page, you make enemies. People turn their back on you and get ready to argue.
Perhaps this is because music trades in mystery, while conversation trades in opinion — that subterranean species of certainty. Rothenberg’s undersound is a “cavalcade of lilting unknowns” — no sonogram can discern exactly which creature makes which sound and for what reason. A century and a half before him, Thoreau had captured this while pacing Walden Pond:
All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts.
I have long been fascinated by the sounds made by other creatures on this planet, wondering how we can engage with them without explaining them all away. I never wanted to translate the language of birds, whales, or bugs, but always wanted to join in with them in some uncertain way.
Peter Gabriel is right, if you hear the world as music, you can sing along with it, join in with it, celebrate and dance with it even while never knowing precisely what is going on.
[…]
Those sounds right at the edge of our comprehension might in fact become the most interesting… That is why music is more accessible than language… It just is, beaming to us from the thrum of the world, the universal lyre inside of everything, this animate Earth, this booming, living pond.
This, I suppose, could also be said of love — it just is, a bloom of aliveness within us and between us. Rothenberg’s project, for all its originality at the crossing point of art and science, is above all an act of love — a reverent reminder that we are here to play our small, indispensable part in the symphony of life and to listen wonder-smitten to our co-creation.
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,” Ada Lovelace inveighed upon composing the world’s first algorithm for the world’s first computer. Meanwhile, she was reckoning with the nature of creativity, distilling it to a trinity: “an intuitive perception of hidden things,” “immense reasoning faculties,” and the “concentrative faculty” of bringing to any creative endeavor “a vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant and extraneous sources” — that is, intuition, the analytical prowess to evaluate the fruits of intuition, and a rich reservoir of raw material to feed the “combinatory play” Einstein considered the crux of creativity.
The first comes from experience — intuition is what we call the pattern recognition unconsciously honed in the act of living. The third also comes from experience — everything we have ever read and seen, everyone we have ever loved, everything we have suffered becomes a building block for the combinatorial alchemy of creation. The second is the fault line between genius and madness — a creative revelation, be it the heliocentric model of the universe or the Goldberg Variations, is seeing something no one else has seen, which has acute relevance to the world as we know it, touches it, transforms it; a hallucination is seeing something no one else can see without the ability to evaluate its irrelevance to the real world.
A quarter millennium after Lovelace, we face the question of whether AI can achieve all three, and therefore originate truly new ideas, or remain in the straitjacket of binary logic — a disembodied intellect without the lived experience, in all its embodied and ambiguous wildness, on which true creativity draws. Out of this arises the far more disquieting question of whether we, as a species, are being trained by this “mechanical kingdom” of our own creation to mistake the simulacrum of life for life itself, to reduce our aliveness to algorithms. Given that creativity is a hallmark of our species, questions about the nature of creativity in human and non-human minds are ultimately questions about what it means to be — and remain — human.
Operators at the MANIAC I (Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer Model I), 1952.
Few have reckoned with these questions more deeply, or more durationally, than British philosopher Margaret Boden (November 26, 1936–July 18, 2025), who composed her revelatory book The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (public library) when the Internet was just a few years old and computational models still in their infancy. At its heart is an investigation of how the human mind can surpass itself, how our intuition works, and how it is possible for us to think new thoughts, anchored in the insight that “a computational approach gives us a way of coming up with scientific hypotheses about the rich subtleties of the human mind,” that AI-concepts are valuable not because they can (which they very well could) originate new ideas but because they can help us do so, because “both their failures and their successes help us think more clearly about our own creative powers.”
All of this requires a clear definition of those powers — not the ancient cop-out of divine inspiration, not the Romantic conceit of the chosen few gifted with special talents, but a model that accounts for both the immense range of creativity and the wide variations across that range, for its fundamentally mysterious nature and for the possibility of comprehending the mystery without reducing it to code.
An epoch after Einstein observed that “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious” because there is always “something deeply hidden… behind things,” after Carl Sagan insisted that “bathing in mystery… will always be our destiny [because] the universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it,” Boden considers the mystery of the universe within:
If a puzzle is an unanswered question, a mystery is a question that can barely be intelligibly asked, never mind satisfactorily answered. Mysteries are beyond the reach of science. Creativity itself is seemingly a mystery, for there is something paradoxical about it, something which makes it difficult to see how it is even possible. How it happens is indeed puzzling, but that it happens at all is deeply mysterious.
[…]
A science of creativity need not be dehumanizing. It does not threaten our self-respect by showing us to be mere machines, for some machines are much less “mere” than others. It can allow that creativity is a marvel, despite denying that it is a mystery.
Margaret Boden, 1990.
Defining creativity as “the ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising and valuable,” Boden argues that it permeates every aspect of human life, is not a special “faculty” of the mind but “grounded in everyday abilities such as conceptual thinking, perception, memory, and reflective self-criticism,” and is not binary — the question that should be asked is not whether an idea is creative but how creative it is, which allows us to assess both the subtleties of the idea itself and the “subtle interpretative processes and complex mental structures” through which it arose in the mind.
Drawing on everything from Euclid’s revolutionary geometry to Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” she distinguishes between two types of creativity — personal creativity, which “involves coming up with a surprising, valuable idea that’s new to the person who comes up with it” no matter how many other people have come up with it, and historical creativity, in which the idea is completely new in the whole of human history. Both are axoned in a substrate of surprise — “the astonishment you feel on encountering an apparently impossible idea. It just couldn’t have entered anyone’s head, you feel — and yet it did.”
Boden identifies three aspects of creativity: First there is tessellating familiar ideas into unfamiliar combinations. Arthur Koestler, who greatly influenced Boden, termed this “bisociation” in his pioneering model of creativity. Gianni Rodari echoed in his notion of “the fantastic binomial” key to great storytelling. For such a combination to be truly novel, Boden observes, it requires “a rich store of knowledge in the person’s mind, and many different ways of moving around within it.”
The other two aspects of creativity both involve the conceptual spaces in people’s minds — those structured styles of thought we absorb unconsciously from our peers, our parents, our culture, the fashions and fictions of our time and place: styles of writing and dress, social mores and manners, existing theories about the nature of reality, ideological movements. One creative approach to conceptual space is exploration. Boden writes:
Within a given conceptual space many thoughts are possible, only some of which may actually have been thought… Exploratory creativity is valuable because it can enable someone to see possibilities they hadn’t glimpsed before.
Exploratory creativity discovers novel ideas within an existing conceptual space and, in the process, invites others to consider the limits and potential of the space. But one can go even further, beyond exploring and toward transforming the conceptual space:
A given style of thinking, no less than a road system, can render certain thoughts impossible — which is to say, unthinkable… The deepest cases of creativity involve someone’s thinking something which, with respect to the conceptual spaces in their minds, they couldn’t have thought before. The supposedly impossible idea can come about only if the creator changes the preexisting style in some way. It must be tweaked, or even radically transformed, so that thoughts are now possible which previously (within the untransformed space) were literally inconceivable.
This, of course, is the paradox of all transformation, best illustrated by the Vampire Problem thought experiment — because our imagination is the combinatorial product of past experience, we are fundamentally unable to imagine a truly altered future state and deem such states impossible, chronically mistaking the limits of our imagination (which transformative experience expands) for the limits of the possible.
Boden picks up where Koestler left off to explore what it takes for an idea to be truly transformative. “Bisociation” alone, she argues, is not enough to originate such ideas:
Combining ideas creatively is not like shaking marbles in a bag. The marbles have to come together because there is some intelligible, though previously unnoticed, link between them which we value because it is interesting — illuminating, thought-provoking, humorous — in some way… We don’t only form links; we evaluate them.
This question of value is where the central paradox of creativity resides, because our values are largely inherited conceptual spaces, making it difficult to assess or even recognize the value of a transformative idea whose originality overflows and overwhelms the conceptual space. In consonance with Bob Dylan’s observation that “people have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them,” Boden writes:
Our aesthetic values are difficult to recognize, more difficult to put into words, and even more difficult to state really clearly. (For a computer model, of course, they have to be stated really, really clearly.) Moreover, they change… They vary across cultures. And even within a given “culture,” they are often disputed: different subcultures or peer groups value different types of dress, jewellery or music. And where transformational creativity is concerned, the shock of the new may be so great that even fellow artists find it difficult to see value in the novel idea.
She returns to the most crucial element of creativity — surprise so intense it has an edge of shock: Something previously unthinkable has entered your mind. To be surprised is to watch your calculus of probability crumble in the face of the possible, to find the locus of your expectations too small to encompass what you have just encountered. (This is why societies and epochs, such as ours, that prioritize certainty and self-righteousness over exploration and surprise are shackling their own creativity.) Boden writes:
A merely novel idea is one which can be described and/or produced by the same set of generative rules as are other, familiar, ideas. A radically original, or creative, idea is one which cannot.
[…]
To be fundamentally creative, it is not enough for an idea to be unusual — not even if it is valuable, too. Nor is it enough for it to be a mere novelty, something which has never happened before. Fundamentally creative ideas are surprising in a deeper way. Where this type of creativity is concerned, we have to do with expectations not about probabilities, but about possibilities. In such cases, our surprise at the creative idea recognizes that the world has turned out differently not just from the way we thought it would, but even from the way we thought it could.
We are animated by this creative urge to bridge the actual and the possible because it matters to us what world we live in — it matters because we are made of matter, because while a computer’s generative flow is, as Boden puts it, “implemented rather than embodied,” ours streams in through through the sensorium of our bodily aliveness. A quarter century after the publication of Boden’s seminal book, months after the emergence of transformer-based large language models, Cambridge University endowed a lecture series in her honor. In her inaugural address, she reflected:
Homo sapiens is an intensely social species. Our needs for what Maslow called “love and belonging” (which includes collaboration and conversation) and “esteem” (which includes respect and dignity) are not mere trivialities, or optional extras. They matter. They must be satisfied if we are to thrive. Their degree of satisfaction will influence the individual’s subjective experience of happiness (and others’ measurements of it).Computers have no such needs.
In the remainder of The Creative Mind, Boden goes on to explore the complementary role of chaos and constraint in creativity and how, despite their limitations, AI models can help us better understand the mystery of human intuition. Complement it with Oliver Sacks, writing three decades before ChatGPT, on consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning, then revisit his own take on the three essential elements of creativity.
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