agree,
Actually the aesthetics sources we draw from will come from the same
source,
"the brain" and the difference within all of us. Ya can't kill
creativity, says I.
mando
On Aug 6, 2008, at 3:33 PM, imago Asthetik wrote:
Let me begin with an admission, before I ask a very minor
question:I have no
knowledge of cognitive science, or neurology, or any brain science,
so any
speculation I would like to make would be rather wild. And I do
not wish to
make any silly claims.
But I wonder nonetheless: even if the natural sciences can
successfully
explain why certain perceptual patterns elicit certain kinds of
responses in
human beings, even if such a scientific study can, as it were,
identify the
conditions of possibility for art, and aesthetic responses, doesn't
that
merely provide a framework for worrying about aesthetics, rather than
actually doing aesthetics?
If science gives us the bedrock of "ises," how are we to move "up"
to the
normative concerns that are the forests of aesthetics. Isn't
science a
little too deep for what interests us?
On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 5:12 PM, Michael Brady
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote:
William:
It's not a bad thing that aesthetics has grown up to occupy a
significant
corner of the cognitive sciences (all of them) and cultural
studies. It's a
good thing. Beauty still has a place, too. What we used to call
art is
either homeless or wonderfully free, take your pick. Me and many
others are
still painting anyway simply as another way to examine and symbolize
experience in the world. We painters recognize the constraints of
culture
and cognitive patterns, as far as they go -- so far. But the
pathways
ahead in those areas are so exciting, so filled with adventure
and promise,
so fresh and unsullied by convention, I can scarcely imagine any
really
smart person not plunging ahead, especially artists, and
certainly painters
who love to look at everything as equally fascinating.
Does it matter in which disciplines aesthetics is studied, if it's
studied
thoroughly and well? Planetary orbits, or rather, their celestial
paths
across the heavenly firmament, were originally located in the
domain of
religious teachings, or at least governance. But they were
transferred to
other spheres--nonmusical, as it happened--a few centuries back.
Similarly,
the medical arts.
As for William's earlier remark about studying aesthetics:
They are necessary forms of responsive human endeavor but if we
really
want to know about feelings, emotions, reflectivity, and
preferences for
ordering information, we need to pursue neurology first, and
cultural
patterns second.
I think this is one of those examples of reciprocal relationships
that
provide a definition or context--or at least limit--for the other.
Neurology
cannot exist separately from individual neurological events, and
many of
them are so-called aesthetic events. And similarly, cultural
patterns do not
exist separately from the discrete items in those patterns. I'm
not actually
disputing William's assertion, but just clarifying the fact that
the workers
in the aesthetic vineyards might think they're harvesting fruits
for an
aesthetic wine, without realizing their juice is being trafficked
in the
Cultural Studies store or Bon Wit and Teller.
Aesthetics does not exist anymore. it has been absorbed into
bigger, more
revealing inquiries.
See above. There is still a worthy pursuit of aesthetics, but
despite the
abundance of sympatico souls and interested pursuers of aesthetic
objects,
the ramifications of the study of aesthetics tend to ramify
somewhere else,
namely as William points out, in neurology or psychology, or as Saul
remarked, in artificial intelligence.
The resistance to studying aesthetics under the rubric of the
cognitive
sciences arises, I suspect, from an underlying fear that if
aesthetics is
susceptible to scientific description, and especially to encoding in
software, human autonomy loses. The ineffable quality, the je-ne-
sais-quoi,
the indescribable essence of being human becomes untethered and is
reduced
to data. Or at least, "genuine" aesthetics will be so very closely
emulated
that "cognitive aesthetics" will reach the point of eradicating the
difference. That's one prospect of such a scientific--and thence
technological--study of aesthetics.
We already have face-recognition software that can scan large
crowds and
identify individuals in it (a feat that astonished me when I first
heard
about it several years ago). How much further to developing
algorithms of
facial beauty? and then pictorial beauty? But beyond that, how
much further
is it to the kinds of inventive leaps humans make in finding
relationships
between separate things? That, I believe, is the big worry: loss
of humanity
and our uniqueness.
They're cloning creatures right now, and they're fiddling with
primordial
chemical soup ingredients, looking for a sequence in which
molecules become
amino acids and, ta da, living things.
The heliocentric theory shook up human self-opinion in the 17th
century,
and Lyell did it with terrestrial time in the 19th century, and
Darwin with
evolution, etc. Cognitive studies of human feelings, in this case
aesthetic
feelings, can be put into a frame of artificial intelligence, another
assault on our self-opinion.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
