Long live metaphors
mando
On Nov 24, 2009, at 9:36 PM, William Conger wrote:
Thanks Mando. I want to emphasize that there's much to admire in
steven Pinker's Blank Slate. He writes well and makes excellent
arguments that allow for plasticity in the way the brain functions
but still insists, and rightly I feel (I say feel to avoid claiming
to know) that much of our brain structure is indeed genetically pre-
set or predisposed. Yet he looks for a correspondence between
universal brain preferences or predispositions and cultural habits
which Dutton claims are universal too. If Pinker wants to
discredit the Blank Slate notion that puts nurture above nature, if
not exclusively so, then why does he rely on an analogy that
equalizes the nurtured with the natural as he does when he compares
his science with Dutton's speculation while insisting that nature
trumps nurture? But as I said, I'm ready to accept Pinker and
Dutton without much quibble although their views don't necessarily
define art since we can always say that something
excluded by their views is now, once was, or could be art. And
that art could be lesser, the same, or better than what they
propose is exemplified by Dutton's universal cultural
characteristics and genetically echoed by Pinker's brain science.
I mean some eras produced bad art but they still called it art and
so art it is.
Another snag I find in the neurological and cognitive sciences with
respect to answering how and why humans think as they do is their
almost total emphasis on biological and even psychological
evolution. Given that bower birds create artful nests or that
chimps use sticks to probe for termites or that other animals
sometimes modulate their calls, or devote energy to sexual
attraction (peacock's tails) and the like, it seems obvious to me
that what really sets humans apart is the use of metaphor. When
will the bower bird start casting in plaster, grinding paint, or
delegating the nest decoration job to slave sparrows? Chimps have
had more than enough time to improve their stick probes. But while
we may think these animals are on the path to creating tools and
imagining ways to cheat their limitations, they don't improve much
and only then with rote training soon ignored. But humans just
keep on making up new stuff.
Whereas ordinary evolution may require a 100,000 years to grow a
bigger eye, a longer tail, faster gait -- an improvement of the
biological machine, a human needs only to "make-believe" an
advantage and then create an "as-if" to attain it. Instead of
evolving over lengthy time to get a better eye, man creates a make
believe eye, or make-believe wings, and so on. This sort of
evolution seems to have developed in very brief time while our
biological evolution creeps its petty pace over eons. When and why
did humans begin to make-believe, to create surrogate advantages,
to invent tools as if they were extensions of their bodies and
senses? So far, all the evidence we have for our metaphorical
breakthrough is limited to about 25,000 years, more or less, and
mostly much less, say, 5,000 years.
My pet cat is bristling with sensory antennae and other sensory
capabilities far superior to an ordinary human's But unlike the
human, the cat has evolved without metaphorical ability. If my cat
thinks it seems not to think in make-believe, it does not imagine
making surrogate wings to chase the little birds into the sky. I
won't find him tinkering with glue and feathers. I suppose It only
thinks about how to use its biological abilities to their best
advantage: jump higher, run faster, prowl quietly. What biological
glitch, or what genetic "fire and wire" event enabled or required
the human brain to give up on natural selection, and so-slow-you-
can't-see-it evolution and to focus on make-believe, the as-if, the
metaphorical world?
Another amusing thought: The creationists are wasting their time
trying to beat out the biologists and biological or even
psychological evolution with all their silly bunk about complexity
of anatomy, etc. They should turn to the human capacity for
astonishingly fast evolution as rather puny creatures (compared to
a cat or dog and thousands of other animals) who make-believe. Man
as a metaphor-maker may actually have a history more or less in
line with the Biblical creationist origin of 4004BC (Bishop
Usher). When Adam and Eve ate the apple they acquired the secret
of life -- make believe -- and so God punished them by telling them
that from then on they'd have to rely only on their metaphorical
abilities, to invent surrogate "as-if" improvements of their
biological bodies in order to survive and it wouldn't be easy but,
with a little sweat of the brow, it works. So, my friends, go forth
and make-believe.
wc
----- Original Message ----
From: armando baeza <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Cc: armando baeza <[email protected]>
Sent: Tue, November 24, 2009 7:42:19 PM
Subject: Re: Reading Dutton: Chapter 10 - Four Characteristics of
Great Art
I like that very much, and will save it to quote from, thanks
mando
.asp
