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Could you say more about those regions?

I wish! I'll try.

creativity still could occur in total isolation, but I don't think they would generate much knowledge due to the lack of external feedback.

Maybe less overall, maybe just less by our standards. Maybe still a lot of knowledge can be made in isolation, just of a schizophrenic kind, more unstable without the regularities of external reality. But I'm wondering if isolated regions of the mind can provide "external" variation to each other in that one can make changes to the other, but not vice versa (like how the world makes blind changes to DNA but not vice versa). Maybe this is how evolution happens more quickly in the mind than by random copying error and mutations alone, because there are many more sources of blind variation...

Even in isolation, the real world applies [hardware constraints]

Agreed. So by isolation from reality we shouldn't mean isolation from physics. Just that the evolution taking place in the mind has no specific causal dependence on the external reality, I think. If it's "isolated" in this sense, nothing outside the mind, if changed, would impact the mind's evolution, its content. Even though mind and world are both determined by the same physics. Reality is not necessary, in this sense, so marking this as a criticism.

I also picture a primordial soup often. Maybe including these autonomous regions or layers I'm grasping at. Soups and "Turing gases" have been programmed and so far always plateau in complexity, even with no predefined criterion, so there's something else going on.

One neat paper, for example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.19108
It sounded unbounded at first, but Claude explains that in a recent followup interview, plateauing has been confirmed: https://poggio-lab.mit.edu/blogsupdates/interview-blaise-aguera-y-arcas