I don't think it's easy to dismiss people like Ramachandran, especially by reading Amazon-style reviews on line. He and other cutting-edge neurologists are careful about claiming too much in a field that's still in its infancy with respect to being based on new imaging technology. Ramachandran didn't invent the mirror neuron (not 'neutron' as you say). He notes that it is indicated by brain imaging.
As for that 'splash of yellow' you already give away the fact that you liken it to something else (splash) when in fact the splashiness is a metaphorical interpretation. I don't see how a past culture lacking an equivalent of an English word (like blue) can be said to not 'see' blue and think of it in some terms when the culture in question is packed with 'blue' color images. There can't be meaning situated inherently in anything since meaning is a human construct (maybe all animals and other life forms have ways to construct 'meaning' for themselves). We project meaning because we have the capability to do so in our brains. That capability is provided by mirror neurons. I lament your old-fashioned anti-science approach. I also wonder why you think resemblance must be limited to the relation between a thing and what is occasioned in the interpreting brain. No resemblance is needed to trigger some flood of mental images or word associations. Anything can be the occasion of any thought of any resemblance whatsoever. Cultural habits and mental agility -- to say nothing of taboos and self-preservation and subconscious inhibitions, limit what associations might make it into consciousness. Mirror neurons may be another form of limitation, aiding what we call sane thinking. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, November 4, 2012 8:06:09 AM Subject: Re: "The problem with Hegelbs aesthetics is the assumption that the truth of a work of art emerges completely via its conceptual In a message dated 11/3/12 4:50:33 PM, [email protected] writes: It's resolved by mirror neurons. see Ramchandran and others. WC I think the jury is still very much out on Ramchandran. I confess I've read little of him, but summaries of his work are freckled with phrases like "he theorizes that...", "he Hypothesizes that...", and conclusions are regularly, "such and such MAY...", "It might be that..." This past year the Swiss neuroscientist Peter Brugger said, in 2012 in a review in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, Vol. 17, Issue 4, that Ramachandran's book The Tell-Tale Brain is "a pop-neuroscience book that provides vague answers to big questions." (Not that Brugger is free of his own loony theories.) Ramchandran has spent a great deal of time on optical illusions, and though his "mirror neutron" theory might address why a drawing can "remind us" of a giraffe or Uncle Sid or even our missing left leg that was amputated years ago, it's not easy to see how it can resolve the many questions Kate raises. The heart of what I've had to get clear in my mind is Kate's instinctive distinction between "meaning" and "information". The difference between any written word, and something in a "painting", is that words don't "resemble" anything (onomatopeia, which is spoken, not written, aside). I've found all this to be much more complicated than it initially sounds. Sure, the guns in Goya's "8th of May" firing-squad pic "resemble" in an "informative" way that a written word never does (Asian lingo-scription aside), but does a splash of yellow in a "non-representational" pic "resemble" anything? Do "symbolic" meanings of red, green, blue etc ever resemble? No -- Kate tells me that their symbolic "meaning" varies from one continental society to another. (As for "blue", Kate says the ancient Greeks didn't even have a word for that color.) So you can see why, as Jack Benny said, "I'm thinking! I'm thinking!" ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sat, November 3, 2012 11:48:29 AM Subject: Re: "The problem with Hegelb s aesthetics is the assumption that the truth of a work of art emerges completely via its conceptual If the object is only an object ,a lump pf canvas and paint,then what is the image and why is it reproduced? Is copy more important than the object? Does the reproduced image contain the value the object had? And what was that value if it existed? Further if words like Lincoln release a flood of notions composed of bits and pieces of past experience etc etc-it is quoted below-then what is the difference between this description of a flood of notions and the terser meaning? Or does the word meaning represent a Platonic ideal while the flood of notions is common and everyday. Are information and " meaning" the same thing? Kate Sullivan -----Original Message----- From: lslbsc2 <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, Oct 26, 2012 10:10 am Subject: Re: "The problem with Hegelbs aesthetics is the assumption that the truth of a work of art emerges completely via its conceptual Tom wrote:When you say, " How do you propose to establish THE MEANING if you don't look at the painting? It is clear that the physical existence of a book is not the same as ITS MEANING" it is glumly clear to me that you think an object "has a meaning", that you think there are two distinct entities out there the object and "its meaning". No. All of what you call "meanings" are (varying) mental entities inside heads. Paintings do not have mental entities inside their frames. Paintings also have colors which are not inside anyone's head. They have shapes,also not inside a head. When you have never seen a painting before you have no memories of it to depend on.You will doubtless say that memories of other paintings will come to mind,that notions of artiness will float to the fore,but none of these are seeing the painting. They are assumptions about an object which a cursory glance has classified as a painting. Paintings are intended to carry information. It is difficult to separate the information from the painting. Never mind the meaning, about which I know you can spend countless hours quibbling over and explaining various things you have decided I think. How do you get the information from the painting if you don't look at it. -----Original Message----- From: Tom McCormack <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, Oct 25, 2012 4:20 pm Subject: Re: "The problem with Hegelbs aesthetics is the assumption that the truth of a work of art emerges completely via its conceptual Please delete the posting that came from me a minute ago. My wandering thumb accidentally hit 'enter'. Kate writes: "I think I need you to explain clearly why it is that if the only way you can see a painting is because it has a physical existence the physical existence has nothing to do with the meaning. How do you propose to establish the meaning if you don't look at the painting? It is clear that the physical existence of a book is not the same as its meaning, but the physical existence of a lot of paint on canvas would seem a little different." I'm woefully aware that the hardest thing about my position to explain is that it's an error to assume that a painting, poem, play, dance or ANYTHING "has a meaning". I don't question that, when we contemplate such things, notions arise in our minds. And I realize how often we are all inclined to call those notions "the meaning for me". And we then tend to feel it's obvious we "got the meaning" from the object. "Where else could it have come from?" From which it follows the object "must have that meaning", otherwise it couldn't give us that meaning. But I claim that what comes into our mind is solely bits of memory we've associated with the object during past experience (the object could be something we're seeing, it could be a word-sound, etc). Consider: If I say Lincoln to you where else except your memory could the various flooding notions come from? Granted, we tend to say the likes of, "The word 'milk' means this white stuff." But if I say "milk" to you, why does what comes to your mind differ from the meager flickers that would come to a shepherd in the Andes? Don't say, "It's because the shepherd hasn't learned the meaning of the word." If you think about it, that's simply saying the shepherd has no associated memories with the sound "milk". If someone says, "The word Taliban has come to mean" he is, in philosophical terms, overreaching. What the speaker has in mind is that many people in the West like him will retrieve similar dire memories associated with that word. Those "thoughts" will be quite different from the ones that come to locals in the north of Afghanistan. Picasso may have had fierce thoughts when he was painting "Guernica", but what thoughts the painting occasions in millions of other contemplators will depend on their own receiving apparatuses (some may be color blind) and experience-memories. When you say, " How do you propose to establish THE MEANING if you don't look at the painting? It is clear that the physical existence of a book is not the same as ITS MEANING" it is glumly clear to me that you think an object "has a meaning", that you think there are two distinct entities out there the object and "its meaning". No. All of what you call "meanings" are (varying) mental entities inside heads. Paintings do not have mental entities inside their frames.
