The Messy Evolution of Thought: Why Math ≠ Thinking

If you haven’t read Project Hail Mary by Andrew Weir, no spoilers, but enjoy this quote from the character Rocky,

They’re trying to figure out why thinking speeds evolved to be the same across species of life. I’ll leave the depth to Weir and the incredible story, but the contrast in this quote, between procedural tolls and the messy, evolutionary nature of all things created - intergalactically or by any of us taking a moment to personally reflect in public - it’s too good not to spend a minute thinking about.

From a pure-science standpoint, evolution is a mess. It's chaos, it’s non-linear, it’s - like creative thinking. Ideas make sense in reverse, but they rarely come together that way. Just as evolution doesn't plan the platypus, our best creative insights often arrive unannounced, in spectacular absurdity, without or at least before we even develop a hunch for what problem they're solving.

A duck-billed platypus and a Cultish Creative Personal Archive entry really do have a lot in common. Most people probably won’t understand what the point is, at least not at first, of completing a thought a day for all these years. But, I think if they stop and stare for a while, they’ll probably agree, me and ol’ DBP are weird little guys worth pondering.

Then there's the AI angle. When I asked Claude, my AI of choice, about creative thinking, he admitted to his own lack of taste. Claude can statistically model preferences, but acknowledged the fundamental difference between his abstracted “experience” and the lived human experience. The messy evolution of actually being alive - that's something no procedural tool can replicate. The truths about enjoying life too, before we even get into suffering and meaning making and everything else, you’ve just gotta feel it.

Thinking is thinking. Creating is creating. All the tools - the math, the procedures, the stored memories - they're just the organized scaffolding on both sides of the problem-solution divide. But the creative leap, the jump, whether literally or metaphorically in our imagination of how we might get across that divide? That's something uniquely alive. It’s evolving and messy. And that beautiful mess deserves to be celebrated.

h/t to brother Pat and Matt R. for making sure I did the audible version. Ray Porter is a god-level narrator. If you haven’t read, let alone listened to Project Hail Mary, I highly recommend it.