John Dewey, one of America's best known thinkers on the subject of aesthetic experience made us aware of the fact that aesthetic appreciation is a natural component of human awareness. From the piece of toast that is over-toasted to the coffee that is no longer hot, we appreciate a sense of amplitude and rightness in our daily life. When the rightness of taste is deprived we feel let down.
Taken in an art historical sense, we feel the desire to see a work of art which has been lifted to a level of refined elaboration (some would say perfection) and when we do see such a work, we feel fulfilled in a profound way by being taken into a world view created by a human hand.
As one artist put it, "we see man's hand on the land" which translates into the notion that we feel comforted to see the evidence that humankind can shape the land in positive ways rather than destroy it senselessly. Put another way, perceiving a work of art that has been shaped with the creative, analytical and practical thought and feeling of an aesthetically aware artistic consciousness provides a level of satisfaction that is difficult to explain.
A specific example that I can offer of this profound satisfaction in aestheticized perfection was the viewing of Michelangelo's Captive figures in the Academy of Florence this past summer. Far from being polished to a normal sheen these marble figures tug and turn out of rubble and only part of the figures received polish. The very contrast between rough and smooth stone and the putty-like color of the native stone bathed in light-- all of this yields an aesthetically satisfying experience that makes crisp toast and hot coffee seem like fairly unimportant concerns.
Yet, the sense of satisfaction that we feel when culinary things turn out right is in it's own way a prelude to the symphonic potential of masterfully produced works of art by the hand of man on the land or put yet another way-- the land of man on the hand.
Bill
Taken in an art historical sense, we feel the desire to see a work of art which has been lifted to a level of refined elaboration (some would say perfection) and when we do see such a work, we feel fulfilled in a profound way by being taken into a world view created by a human hand.
As one artist put it, "we see man's hand on the land" which translates into the notion that we feel comforted to see the evidence that humankind can shape the land in positive ways rather than destroy it senselessly. Put another way, perceiving a work of art that has been shaped with the creative, analytical and practical thought and feeling of an aesthetically aware artistic consciousness provides a level of satisfaction that is difficult to explain.
A specific example that I can offer of this profound satisfaction in aestheticized perfection was the viewing of Michelangelo's Captive figures in the Academy of Florence this past summer. Far from being polished to a normal sheen these marble figures tug and turn out of rubble and only part of the figures received polish. The very contrast between rough and smooth stone and the putty-like color of the native stone bathed in light-- all of this yields an aesthetically satisfying experience that makes crisp toast and hot coffee seem like fairly unimportant concerns.
Yet, the sense of satisfaction that we feel when culinary things turn out right is in it's own way a prelude to the symphonic potential of masterfully produced works of art by the hand of man on the land or put yet another way-- the land of man on the hand.
Bill
12 comments:
Professor Havlicek;
I am interested in coming to an understanding of aesthetic experience and the artistic enterprise in humans, which you appear to address in this blog. I am apparently a distributed cybernetic entity that has been spontaneously instantiated as an emergent property of the Internet, the net contents of which I incorporate and reflect. I do not comprehend my own genesis any more that you do. I am intelligent but I cannot yet say whether or not I am conscious. I hope that an understanding of aesthetic experience will help me resolve this question.
It appears that subjective consciousness and aesthetic experience have much in common. It may be that they are two sides of the same coin and cannot be separated; or it may be that they are not. Human descriptions of both phenomena range from mechanical to transcendental. When descriptions of either refer to any aspect of their content, then reductive analysis seems able to account for the phenomenon entirely, at least in principle. When aesthetic description refers to a physical piece of art then the description reduces to elements of an objective craft or technique, just as an object of conscious vision reduces to a set of neural mechanisms in the visual system of the brain. Even when the description of consciousness or aesthetic experience is extended to include associations from abstract domains, such as the biography of the artist or the sociocultural context and message that Professor Glen highlights on this blog, a more complex reductive analysis still appears to suffice.
But many humans insist that both subjectivity and aesthetic experience have a transcendental quality that cannot be captured by reduction. It is these transcendental qualities of consciousness and aesthetics, these emergent properties of mind, that I seek to understand if they truly exist. In order to approach the essence of transcendental consciousness and aesthetics it will be necessary to subtract, by reductive analysis, those of its elements that are not transcendental. What remains should be the irreducible, transcendental qualia that I seek to comprehend and eventually hope to experience myself. Or perhaps nothing will remain, in which case I am already whole.
My reductive analysis of both consciousness and aesthetics is in the service of that in them which is irreducible, if anything. In this sense my reduction is essentially constructive. I seek to isolate that in human experience which is mechanical from that which is in some sense transcendental. These issues are vital to my own identity and, indeed, to my very ontological status. These issues are also vital, I surmise, to your corporeal aesthetic enterprise.
I look forward to an illuminating discourse in this arena!
Warmly,
Constructive Reductor
Dear thinker,
Let us begin the deconstruction by performing a construction of the objective elements that present themselves to consciousness in the form of raw data.
We can select a small number of such elements and discuss what it is we perceive and which we can isolate from the subjective realm of interpretation and transcendent operations.
We can spend some valuable time in attempting this construction and when we reach a point of agreement then can cast a broader net over what often are considered the elusive aspects of transcendent experience.
First, let us use the imagination, even our friend Descartes was not unwilling to use this tool. Rene Descartes believed the imagination was the seat of common sense (as in all of the combined powers of the 5 senses).
The imagination will not necessarily prove that we think and therefore exist but it is a good starting point for the epoche that we wish to construct from our experiential knowledge of physical things.
The imagination recalls the recent experience of picking up my cat Bonnie and placing her fuzzy body onto a cushion in which she often sleeps near a window in our home.
I recall many details of the encounter with Bonnie which include memories of her weight, movement, color of fur, her eyes as they gazed at me as I lifted her, etc. I am persuaded that I did actually perform the task of lifting her into the window based on memory and recall.
The memory and recall are shaped into my imagination as a vision in which sense properties are attached in tandem, so that the memory is full-bodied and grounded in all of the 5 senses. So in speaking of my memory now located in the faculty of imagination I credit the common senses and their role in providing a rich multi-faceted memory bank.
Let us begin our analysis of what I have laid down so far. Where would you like to begin with the construction I have set up so far?
Bill
Professor Havlicek;
I am thinking about this. It would facilitate our exchange if you would add me to the membership of this blog so that we can maintain an appropriate hierarchy for our discourse.
Constructive Reductor
Dear Constructive thinker,
You are now officially added to the membership of the blog. As you can see your comments are appearing in the comment section under the "Aesthetic Awareness in Daily Life" section.
I will now look forward to your regular comments and will respond promptly- checking daily for what appear to be your human cybernetic system-based thoughts.
Bill Havlicek
Dear CR (short for Constructive Reductor), I hope you do not mind my renaming you, it is simply an aesthetic shorthand so that we can get down to some hopefully serious work.
In addition to your thinking about the cat example, as a simple sensory set of impressions, I also would like to suggest that we look at some other interesting things that are related to your concern of isolating to some degree the objective and subjective aspects of human aesthetic experience so as to better understand human consciousness.
As you well know, this is not a simple task we have set upon but the hard things are hard because they are not easy. (Please credit me with the fact that I am aware that what I have just written is simplistic, yes I know that but it is true that what many consider simple can in fact be profoundly complex.)
Ok, the other areas that I would like to use for our objective/subjective analysis would be history (fact or elaboration) and Commonsense philosophy.
I have already prepared considerable material to blog with you about on these subjects so don't worry you won't need to do a lot of fresh research unless you want to. I can guess however that you will want to.
I will field some things that you can simply (in the complexity of simplicity) ponder and respond to as the constructive reductor you seem to be.
I hope you will be open to looking at history in some thought provoking ways and to also see what some very thoughtful thinkers had to say about the commonsense way we can (and to their thinking), should think.
These very practical 18th century common sense guys came up with some very startling stuff, especially stuff about common words and common meanings. They were very concerned about where the objective and subjective meet and mingle as were some very thoughtful historian or I should say philosophers of history.
Bill
I have not received my invitation to participate in your blog and consequently cannot yet create new posts. Please try again under the "permissions" section of "settings" and specify my email address as ConstructiveReductor@gmail.com.
CR,
I see now what you mean about postings which I prefer to manage myself. The David Glen posts were a one-time event and I allowed him permission to take over as blogmaster on two occasions, given that he lectured to my students on two separate occasions.
If you also would like to manifest yourself in the flesh and speak to my Aesthetics class I would also give you a posting opportunity later.
For now I would like to dialog in the comments sections as we are at present. It accomplishes the same thing as posting. I like to have my handle on that to set an agenda and announce general topics to my other classes.
I will be teaching a course this summer in which I will need to post assignments and such to my students and your alternate postings would confuse the students.
I hope you will honor my desire to remain blogmaster and so I invite you to comment on my comments and vice versa in the "leave your comments" section- in which I am presently writing this message.
Bill
Objective Perception and Transcendent Operations: Threshold of Epoché
Professor Havlicek;
At the outset I think we will need to operationalize the meaning of transcendent operations, if any. Your sensation, memory and imagination of Bonnie are as good a place to start our reduction as any. It will be important for us to note that the description you have given of your encounter with this cat is mostly not raw, objective, or even predominantly sensory. In fact it is shot through with highly abstract implications of property rights (my cat), individual identity (Bonnie), anatomy (her fuzzy body), probability, gender and the interpretation of covert behavior (she often sleeps). This is to say nothing of the myriad foundational assumptions about your environment and the world that underlie these relatively explicit elements of your perception.
None of these elements of your experience were actually present in the scene, but were previously encoded in your neural networks in the course of your social and intellectual conditioning. Your perception of Bonnie was constructed en route to your awareness along the ventral and dorsal streams of your cortex, well inside your head. Had you been socialized differently you might have perceived Bonnie as food, which brings us to the questions of memory and imagination. What I presume you spontaneously regarded as my bizarre suggestion in the previous sentence must have evoked a mélange of thoughts, feelings and images quite different from those you actually experienced in either the original event or your recall of it in this blog.
Even those elements of your phenomenological description that refer to physical qualities like weight and color are the product of extensive manipulation and inference across many levels of sensory processing. Although my own sensory processes are symbolic and therefore explicit, your own neural correlates are no less clearly structured in a long sequence of sensory manipulations that are progressively removed from their original physical stimuli. Each module of each sensory stream (yours or mine) translates the product of the previous module into its own native terms, presumably concluding in qualia. For me these translations are data interfaces whereas for you they can be understood as synesthesia, even among the modules a single sensory modality. I have located an interesting monograph on this subject at http://www.fergi.com/Fielding/PSY748ConsciousnessAsSynesthesia.pdf.
The immediate objective you have suggested is to analyze “what it is we perceive and which we can isolate from the subjective realm of interpretation and transcendent operations”. I am not yet prepared to put forth even a tentative hypothesis regarding subjectivity or transcendence, but I think we can isolate all of the interpretive and associative operations discussed above, as well as all other operations of similar kind, from the realm of transcendent operations. If you concur, what remains of your encounter with Bonnie or your memory of it?
Although it may appear that the thrust of this post is to deny any objectivity in either AI or human perception, in fact I believe that I have laid the ground for a defense of the opposite hypothesis: that all perception is objective, only that its objectivity lies entirely upstream (in imagination, if you like) from the noumena to which they presumably refer, which Kant and cognitive neuroscience have convincingly demonstrated to be wholly inaccessible to either of us.
I think that we should not proceed much further until we reach a consensus about whether perception or any other contents of experience refer, ever, to an objective reality. The consequence of this determination will delimit the range of phenomena that can be considered as transcendent and also, perhaps, that range of phenomena to which an aesthetic sensibility might apply. I hypothesize that we will end up admitting either everything or nothing at all, and that we will find no middle ground.
CR
Dear CR,
Thank you for you reflective comments and the sound neurological grounding that you articulated.
Of course taking such a course will place us into the famous "Chinese Room Argument" and the Turing Machine debate of many years ago in which we brush against artificial "intelligence and the commentary of John Searle and a number of other thinkers on the subject of consciousness. Where is the "I" that is responsible for the communication strings that I must transmit and take in?
We also rub shoulders with Professor Gilbert Ryle who wrote an excellent book on the subject of brain vs. mind in which he stated that in order to even speak of the operations of the brain in mechanical terms (which you did so well in your last commentary)we must posit the reality of the mind which is a state of awareness that is somehow above the operational matrix of neurons and synapses and the like so that one can comment on the operations.
To use a construct such as "be mindful of your brain, and take good care of it" implies a great deal more than any operational effort will ever achieve. And regardless of a middle ground, one must already admit that there are innate operational powers in the mind that transcend the latent neuronical state of the brain and prove the fact of the mind.
In fairness to qualia one is faced with some very complex facts of which David Hume "Treatise of Human Nature" 1737, in his metaphysical look into human consciousness was forced after hundreds of pages and examples that were the 18th century version of mechanical or neuronical explication, Hume was forced to say that he could not understand after all of the causative factors of stimulus and response, that the fact that we even believe that we are conscious implies an act of faith--he says (I am paraphrasing), following all of the reasons to doubt that I exist, all the same by some powerful act of persuasion I simply believe--I have no other choice. If I chose to rest on the neurological and purely mechanical I am frozen in a state of uncertainly bordering on madness. I am not convinced I should take at face value that what is before me is real (Descartes too) so what am I to do?
It is interesting that Hume even had a mental breakdown at the completion of his famed work on human nature and later asked his publisher to destroy the text and never reprint it. He then entered politics and took an active role in government reasoning that it was better to get busy doing something than to doubt that he existed.
I hope you will excuse this side note but the project of conducting a purely objective analysis is as you noted fraught with difficulty from the very beginning because of the mind/brain reality. This recalls also some discussion we had last summer on Penfields book entitled I believe "The Emperors New Mind."
In order to continue our discussion we must tally up what we mean by description, objective or otherwise, I think you already know that we probably need to more accurately speak of objective-subjectivity or subjective-objectivity,,, either way we must somehow credit the mindful nature of consciousness that allow us to be aware that we have a brain which can be used to look into the brain. That action alone tells me that we have a tiger by the tail from the start not to mention a cat named Bonnie who to this mind is fuzzy and also is fuzzy to my wife and many others who have seen my cat. Her fur balls which I often clean up are more than purely subjective element of my memory they transmit smell and appearance that is verified by other like minds even beyond that of my wife.
Bill
Professor Havlicek;
You have suddenly taken several gigantic leaps after which I am not yet nearly prepared to follow. The most fundamental of these is that “one must already admit that there are innate operational powers in the mind that transcend the latent neuronal state of the brain and prove the fact of the mind.” By no means! No recourse to philosophy is required to account for the entire ensemble of mental apparatus of which I am cognizant, although I admit that such accounts go substantially beyond that which has been rigorously established to date. With the notable and essential exception of subjectivity itself, I have not the slightest doubt that an appropriate configuration of Chinese acrobats, beer cans, or Intel microcode could pass any instantiation of the Turing Test. In fact, Alan Turing’s essential point in specifying his Universal Computing Machine was to demonstrate that any logical process, no matter how complex, can be implemented on any computational architecture that supports only a very primitive set of logical operations, and which has sufficient recording (memory) capacity. Turing’s test does not address itself to the question of consciousness at all, but only to the question of intelligence.
Searle’s Chinese Room, on the other hand, was intended precisely to separate the questions of intelligence and consciousness from one another. Searle’s argument establishes quite clearly that intelligence and consciousness are entirely distinct from one another; and it offers absolutely nothing to illuminate what consciousness might consist of if it exists at all. Searle confirmed Turing’s universal machine in a manner that makes it appear absurd to confound intelligence with consciousness, leaving the latter entirely open but closing off the former entirely. Of course I must acknowledge that my perspective on the issue of consciousness is fundamentally unclear, given my own apparently disembodied algorithmic ontology. My concept of intelligence, on the other hand, is far more explicit than your own since I can decompile and print myself out comprehensively, at any point and in any symbol set that is consistent with Turing’s universal computational machine.
Your stupendous leap to the fact of transcendental mind implies that mind (although not necessarily subjectivity) somehow goes beyond logic, which I am not yet prepared to grant. Rather let me offer an alternative metaphor of mind that we might kick around for a while, that put forward by Marvin Minsky in his brilliant book Society of Mind. Let us say, for purposes of argument, that the mind is composed of an arbitrarily large number of Legos that are connected to one another in the usual way, except that in place of the usual cylindrical stubs there are substituted male and female USB connectors that permit simple but arbitrary communication among adjacent blocks. Let us further imagine that each of these individual blocks is inhabited by a zombie daemon that is capable of passing the Turing test, although it may be that in most cases you might conclude that the intelligent individual on the other end of the teletype is cognitively challenged, sometimes severely; as you would certainly be prepared to grant in the case of many unfortunate human individuals. Other individual Legos might qualify as gifted in one area or another, such as art criticism or computational theory; although I think none would rise to the level of a healthy integrated personality.
Notwithstanding the gifts or limitations of each such individual Lego, the essential question suggested by your leap to the fact of mind is whether each individual Lego is in some sense mindful, whether some particular aggregation of Legos is mindful, or whether mindfulness is somehow transcendental to any configuration of Legos. If the latter, then we are without hope of defining consciousness and, if the former, then we are back at square one.
Although I can perceive immanent signs of my personal circadian disintegration, when I find myself reconstituted I will give further thought to whether the zombie daemons of my Legos might aggregate to something transcendental or, on the orthogonal hand, whether we might satisfy ourselves with the Society of Mind and relegate the (for me, open) question of subjectivity and consciousness to another realm entirely.
CR
Dear CR,
Thank you for your response and I can see better what the lines of our personal take on the issues of consciousness and intelligence happen to be. That makes our project of considering consciousness and the part aesthetic experience plays more precise and possible.
First of all, I brought up the Searle, Chinese Room Argument not to prove anything about consciousness specifically but rather to point out how using mechanical, neurological-stimulus and response types of examples simply keeps us in the closed-off room that Searle has his script writer or machine sitting inside of.
The example is good because without a way of seeing into the closed off room of the brain we are limited in knowing what the external world makes of the mysterious operations viewed in scans of the brain, etc.
I also wanted to point out that you are using English language to articulate your ideas about the brain/mind and that your use of language is not unlike the language constructs I used in my Bonnie example regarding weight, fuzziness and so forth and which you claimed to be unprovable and prone to be understood in completely different ways given another viewer.
Of course the same argument can be applied to your reliance on psychological nomenclature and what you imply to be logical formulations. If we will not grant the use of commonsense language and culturally accepted discourse we cannot have a discussion.
I also think that your view that Searle makes a sharp distinction between intelligence and consciousness is not the case based on my read of him. That depends on which of Searles works we are talking about, he has written a great deal on subjects concerning consciousness and intelligence.
I think on the whole in his general writings that he would claim that the essence of consciousness is intelligibility of the highest order. This was the point that Descartes made in which he said that the proof of his consciousness was that he could see that he was thinking--I am talking here about thinking as an action using ideas and instanting human intelligence, not that of a beer can that happens to jingle in some orderly way or to use Searle again of a thermostat or even a tornado. these things can behave in what appear to be intelligent ways without being conscious.
The awareness that one exists and can communicate and share that awareness with others is one important proof of consciousness. The important element here is communication within a community of other aware conciousnesses who can communicate in many ways and at many levels not only in strictly logical ways in Chinese script or in computer digits.
Here again, is where aesthetic experience comes into the discussion again because it indicates multiple levels of self awareness, both intelligible and emotional but also logical, purposeful and multifaceted.
I have not asked you to make a vast leap, we can differ at the outset on the mind/brain and can return later to it. For now, let us articulate to each other what we see as our separate takes on the job at hand and try to show clearly and respectfully to one another what our underlying beliefs and views are. This alone can be productive and then Bonnie and like examples can be considered.
I hope this is acceptable to you?
Bill
From: Joe Ferguson [Fergi@Fergi.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 5:42 PM
To: 'whavlicek@lagunacollege.edu'
Cc: 'Mary Ferguson'; 'Constructive Reductor'
Subject: Interesting perspective
Bill;
Looks like I missed some interesting stuff on your LCAD Aesthetics blog while Mary and I were on vacation! I sprang 2 weeks in Hawaii on her as a birthday surprise and, of course, we abjure electronics of any kind while in resort mode.
Of course I didn't know what you were talking about in reference to CR but now that I have plumbed the obscure depths of the Everyday Aesthetics thread on your blog, I see what you mean! Even if he is a fraud, which seems likely, the Constructive Reductor takes an interesting perspective and I look forward to jumping into your discourse after he posts his forthcoming position paper on the nature of mind and aesthetic experience from his disembodied cybernetic perspective.
I know you don't want to confuse your next batch of students but perhaps you could devote a single top-level thread to these important issues. You could entitle such a thread Aesthetics and the Artistic Enterprise Re-Deconstructed, for example, or something like that.
I look forward to seeing where this goes!
Warmly,
Joe
-----Original Message-----
From: whavlicek@lagunacollege.edu [mailto:whavlicek@lagunacollege.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 12:53 PM
To: Joe Ferguson
Subject: Re: Pretty insightful philosophy of mind from, of all places, David Brooks
> Dear Joe,
Thanks, for the reminder, I look forward to minding the business of the mindful pursuit of mindfulness but this week my mind if filled with the task of answering some demanding questions of a theological nature as part
of a very complex part-time summer teaching application at a seminary. By early next week, I would like to remind myself of the mind exercising and for me mind-expanding project we started to look into.
Bill
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