Why Does David Deutsch Call Creativity Unimpressive?

David Deutsch says creativity by itself is not an impressive thing. He uses the word to mean the ability to create new knowledge. Evolution is a creative process in that sense. It starts with an animal that cannot fly, and a few million years later it has created an animal that can fly, because its genes encode knowledge of how to fly.

Humans have explanatory creativity, which no existing other species has, although some species in the past had it. A person can say why one move is better than another. Deutsch describes the first person who invented a campfire, an idea he was writing about in his forthcoming book. The person picks up a burning branch from a wildfire to carry it, hoping predators that might attack while he carries food from the latest kill will run away. He is imagining something he has never seen and no one has ever seen, namely carrying a branch for protection. Walking home, he notices he can still see as it gets dark, and thinks that if he gets the branch all the way home, everyone can be protected from the wild animals.

The idea is not induction, and it is not any of the pre-Popper ways of thinking of the growth of knowledge. The thinking cannot be characterized as optimizing for a given outcome, like checkmate, or like proving a mathematical theorem.