William writes:
"I'll say that neuroscience is the most promising route of inquiry for new
perspectives on aesthetic judgment. Tell me again why this is such a dangerous
and censored idea. Is it the Bible? Some religious dogma?"
William, none of us is saying the idea of neurology's contributing something
of utility or enlightenment about the creation or appreciation of "art" is a
"dangerous" idea, or that it ought to be "censored". We've said we've seen no
hint of any such contribution having occurred, or, indeed, any "evidence" that
it's about to occur.
You've been asked several times to tell us something of aesthetic use you
have garnered from neurologists, but you have not done so. Instead you refer us
to the likes of Semir Zeki, as though the evidence is there if only we would
look.
Zeki does indeed describe his specialty as "art
and the brain" and "the neural basis of creativity and the aesthetic
appreciation of art". But here below is Zeki's own list of his major
contributions in
his specialty. (I hope you agree with Michael Brady that mapping where neural
activity occurs may be interesting but it illuminates nothing about aesthetic
matters -- and nothing about how consciousness "arises from" such activity.)
For me, the most potentially interesting of Zeki's entries is the last one,
"Studying the neural correlates of subjective mental states, such as love and
beauty, and more recently, hate." One can only await the results of such
studying, along with a description of what sort of "correlates" he has in mind.
Again, William, people like me don't think Zeki's studies are "dangerous". I
am happy to see him and other neurologists do such work if they like. I'll be
even happier if I see something valuable for us coming out of it. You champion
the search for "evidence" of our beliefs, and I agree with you. You project a
fervent belief that neurology will tell us valuable things about the
connection between neural tissue and art. I don't believe anyone reasonable
would call
me religiously dogmatic for asking you what your evidence for that belief is.
Zeki's own list:
* Discovery of the many visual areas of the brain and their functional
specialisation for different visual attributes such as colour and motion.
* finding neurons in a part of the monkey visual system that would
respond only when a particular colour, rather than a particular wavelength, was
in
their receptive fields. For example, he showed that a red-sensitive neuron
would continue to respond to a red stimulus, even when it was illuminated
mainly
by green light. This was the first study relating colour perception to single
cell physiology in the brain.
* Showing that processing sites in the visual brain are also perceptual
sites.
* Showing that we see different attributes of visual input at different
times.
* Charting the activity of the brain in time and showing that different
visual areas have different activity time courses.
* Studying the neural correlates of subjective mental states, such as
love and beauty, and more recently, hate.
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