About creativity and the difference between humans and animals

Maybe humans are especially similar to god in a sense that humans are able to consciously think and that we are not bound to only do what instincts advise us to do. Or maybe our brains are just so highly evolved that the same kind of spirit that houses in every other animal‘s brain is merely amplified within humans.

Humans are not special in that they can use their environment to create things. Creativity, or rather thinking creatively, is a trait that can be observed all over the animal kingdom.

From capuchin monkeys beating a snake using a club (you could argue whether that's a way of thinking creatively), over other primates like orangutans using pointy items to extract the heart of palm from treetops, to the herring gull that made a habit of catching rabbits and drowning them at sea. Research has shown that first of all, creativity is a phenomenon that is not unique to humankind. Moreover, scientists found that an animal‘s creativity stands partly in relation to the size of its brain. That‘s most likely why so many species of primates have acquired the capability of using tools to their benefit. What is special and unique to humans, though, is that we have an enormously large brain, we use incredibly complex language to accurately convey information. This is why humans have gained the upper hand over the globe. If gorillas were able to speak eloquently and fluently in a language that has enough words to describe the most complex diversity of things, maybe the earth would look a lot different.

No animals have all the attributes of human minds but almost all attributes of the human mind are found in some animal or other. One trait that humans possess, but no animal has yet been found to is the phenomenon of intentionality. Humans have intentionality, which means that he is capable of referring to real or imaginative things, features or facts. The word ‚intentionality‘ describes the ability to imagine things. Close your eyes and think of an apple, and try to envision it. Although you can (or cannot) see the apple, it is merely a product of you imagination. The apple before your inner eye is confined to the boundaries of your mind. No other being will ever know for sure what it looks like. In that sense, it is unreal because it can‘t be measured in an objective manner. Still, to you the apple exists, not literally but in a way that is different from not existing at all in some sense.

We don‘t know whether or not there is an animal that has intentionality for we can‘t look into their minds. Also, we are unable to say whether or not the color red appears in the same light in my mind as it does in yours. As weird as it is, different wavelengths of light appear to the human mind in different colors. But the exact nature of the specific colors remains inexpressible. Sure, darker colors will appear darker to any observer, but who can say whether what I perceive as blue in another mind is processed into another color, but is still described as blue? This is just one example of individual instances of subjective experience, or, qualia. Others are the sensations of pain and taste. Everything that is experienced can be described, but not in its true nature. The true nature is the experience itself and although you can paint a picture based on the experience of seeing a sunset, the experience itself is unique and every description thereof is bound to be inaccurate.

We as humans should be thankful for our special place in the world and for our unique features and abilities. It is because we are so much more advanced, because we teach everything we know to the next generation, and because we do so successfully, that we are able to not only understand art, literature and music, but to create art, to write literature and music. No dolphin ever composed a sonata and no chimpanzee ever painted an intelligible picture. It is reserved to humans alone to take from an assortment of means of art like notes, colors, brushes or letters and arrange them in a way that is unprecedented. This ability to create, even though only using things that are already in existence, is what makes the human race so similar to the nature of god, as a creator.