Creativity as Self-Referential Gap: A structural argument opening a research program

This paper presents a structural argument—not an empirical theory—about the nature of creativity. The central thesis: self-reference necessarily generates an unclosable gap between a system (S) and its self-representation (S'). This gap constitutes curiosity, the creative drive. The paper's most radical claim is that the gap is not something the system has but what it is. The system seeks itself and finds itself only in seeking, never in finding. Creativity is therefore not an action but a mode of being. Like Gödel's incompleteness theorem or Shannon's information theory, this work offers a structural framework intended to open a research program, not close one. The paper explicitly acknowledges its limitations: empirical operationalization, complexity thresholds, and causal mechanisms remain future work.