So it's not there are zero new ideas, but so few compared to the whole of the intellectual domain, that we can say 'there are no new ideas under the sun' and be basically correct to within a small rounding error. And AI is sufficiently ingenious to serve the needs of the vast majority of humanity, even though we'll still need to find/cultivate/inspire some new genius humans if we want to have more truly new ideas in the future.
Its fairly plausible that the original ideas could be sensory gradient-triggered impulses in simpler creatures' proto-minds that (physical and cultural) evolution has gradually built up through more complex neural machinery supporting more complex representational language.
> where did art come from
Similarly, its not a stretch to see art as built from earlier attempts at representation in physical space - starting with mundane attempts at information exchange by colony insects or pack creatures. The breadth and depth of expression has evolved alongside more complex neural machinery and greater variety in media through technology. There's a hidden lineage in creatures' expressive capabilities that may not be evident when we look at a Caravaggio today, sure.
There's nothing terribly chicken-and-egg about these issues (though the resolution is the same - "chicken" and "egg" co-evolved through iterative selection pressures, one didn't precede the other).
All that said, I concur that its a fantastic and mysterious topic to unpack, but it doesn't follow for me that humans are anointed as uniquely "creative" or that there's necessarily something metaphysical at play.
Oh no, I don't think you understand how big the problem space actually is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal%27s_tree_theorem
A very simple set of 3 possible combinations blows up into a possibility that is 2 to the 2 teterations 1000. This number cannot be explained to the human mind realistically.
> What pre-existing ideas were combined to bring it into existence from non-existence?
This depends what you believe about existence. For example if you believe in mathematical existences then 'simple' exploration of the problem space can lead you to find anything that could possibly exist in the conditions our physical universe allows algorithmically. And the number of those things are for a practical matter, infinite.
>we are a creative species. We can create new things. Somehow.
You are viewing this from a very human perspective scale though. Your individual cells are massively creative containing solutions to a staggeringly huge number of problems, including ones they've not seen before (take the immune system for example), yet how 'intelligent or creative' would you consider your cells to be.
Simply put you're ignoring algorithmic creativity and problem space exploration as it is, until you at least look at how simple systems create infinite complexity already.
Again: what's the number of combinations of elements of ∅?
(∅ is the empty set, a.k.a. {})
Ultimately any claim that there exist only combinations of old ideas must tackle this chicken-and-egg problem convincingly. For example- explain art. There was no art until it appeared fully formed and out of nowhere in early anatomically modern humans' dwellings (Neanderthals also had art but it was simpler and it is subject to the same chicken-and-eggness). So where did art come from? What pre-existing idea was combined to bring it into existence from non-existence?
Btw, since I've had this conversation before- if the answer is that we looked around us in the world and saw things; yes, but we didn't see art. Where did art come from? Where did the idea come from of abstracting shapes and colours so that they resemble the shapes and colours of existing things, without actually being those things, or being composed of pieces of those things? How about numbers? How about writing? How about all our technology and science? Where did those things come from? What did we combine to create them?
Obviously I think that the argument that there are only new combinations is wrong: we are a creative species. We can create new things. Somehow. It would be very interesting to understand how. We have not yet created machines that can match us in that and we can't understand the "how" by studying the machines we have now.