Oct 10, 2015 06:12 PM
http://chronicle.com/article/How-Art-Rev...of/232821/
EXCERPT: [...] These days neural approaches to art — so-called neuroaesthetics — are all the rage. We find it somehow compelling to think that the brain holds the answers to the questions about, well, everything that matters to us, including art. It’s hard not to be impressed by the excitement scientists feel as they try to hunt down aesthetic experience in the brain using the advanced methods and technologies of cognitive science.
But art is an elusive quarry, and it leaves its clumsy predator flailing in the dust. In vain will you find art, or our experience of art, illuminated in these empirical investigations. This points out not just the limits of the neural approach to the arts, but also the limits of neural approaches to human experience in general.
The basic problem with the brain theory of art is that neuroscience continues to be straitjacketed by an ideology about what we are. Each of us, according to this ideology, is a brain in a vat of flesh and bone, or, to change the image, we are like submariners in a windowless craft (the body) afloat in a dark ocean of energy (the world). We know nothing of what there is around us except what shows up on our internal screens.
The brain is necessary for human life and consciousness. But it can’t be the whole story.
Crucially, this picture — you are your brain; the body is the brain’s vessel; the world, including other people, are unknowable stimuli, sources of irradiation of the nervous system — is not one of neuroscience’s findings. It is rather something that has been taken for granted by neuroscience from the start: Descartes’s conception with a materialist makeover.
Careful work on the conceptual foundations of cognitive neuroscience has questioned the plausibility of straightforward mind-brain reduction. But many neuroscientists, even those not working on such grand issues as the nature of consciousness, art, and love, are committed to a single proposition that is, in fact, tantamount to a Cartesian idea they might be embarrassed to endorse outright. The momentous proposition is this: Every thought, feeling, experience, impression, value, argument, emotion, attitude, inclination, belief, desire, and ambition is in your brain. We may not know how the brain manages this feat, but, so it is said, we are beginning to understand. And this new knowledge — of how the organization of bits of matter inside your head can be your personality, thoughts, understanding, wonderings, religious or sexual impulses — is surely among the most exciting and important in all of science, or so it is claimed.
Some scientists attempt to escape this Cartesian vertigo by trying to have it both ways. They grant that we can’t understand the value of money, for example, or the attachment between a parent and a child, without taking up economics and history, on the one hand, or love and caring, on the other. But this, it turns out, is simply a fact about us, about the kind of explanations we, owing to our cognitive limitations, find satisfactory. Love is a neural condition. The value we attach to money is a neurological fact about us and nothing more. Even if we find it hard to describe a mother’s relation to her child without using the folk-psychological category of love, it would be possible to do so, at least in principle. If not to our satisfaction, than to that of a better scientist than we can ever manage to be. That is the argument.
It is remarkable that many people are so quick to be persuaded that we are just packets of neurons, and that the world we think it is science’s very aim to explain is our brain’s confabulation. It isn’t surprising, really, that art gets lost in the shuffle.
Could it be that art, far from getting explained away with the rest of creation, might give us resources for rethinking nature, our nature?
[...] But a work of art, like the meaningful world around us, is not a mere stimulus. And we work hard — we look, we ask, we think, we collaborate — to bring art and world into focus for consciousness.
This is not to deny that the world acts on us, triggering events in the nervous system. Of course it does! But the thing is, we act right back. Every movement of the eye, head, and body changes the character of our sensory coupling to the world around us. Objects are not triggers for internal events in the nervous system; they are opportunities or affordances for our continuing transactions with them. The world shows up, in experience, not like a diagram in a brain chart but as the playing field for our activity. Not the brain’s activity. Our activity. Not activity inside our head. But activity in the world around us.
The concern of science, humanities, and art, is, or ought to be, the active life of the whole, embodied, environmentally and socially situated animal. The brain is necessary for human life and consciousness. But it can’t be the whole story. Our lives do not unfold in our brains. Instead of thinking of the Creator Brain that builds up the virtual world in which we find ourselves in our heads, think of the brain’s job as enabling us to achieve access to the places where we find ourselves and the stuff we share those places with.
Neuroaesthetics, we have observed, is chic. And not only in neuroscience. Humanists — art historians, students of literature, artists themselves, after decades of suspicion of any attempts to bring our cultural lives and our biology into fruitful dialogue — now seem to be inclined gleefully to embrace the new brain-centered conception of everything.
If you are at all sympathetic to the skepticism about neuroscience that I am advancing, then you will perhaps find it plausible that neuroaesthetics is another instance of neuroscience’s intellectual imperialism, another chapter in its attempt to come up with a brain theory of everything. But neuroscience’s recent preoccupation with art, however, reveals something deeper and more fundamental about the neuroscience project itself.
Neuroaesthetics seems unable even to bring its own subject matter, art, under observation....
EXCERPT: [...] These days neural approaches to art — so-called neuroaesthetics — are all the rage. We find it somehow compelling to think that the brain holds the answers to the questions about, well, everything that matters to us, including art. It’s hard not to be impressed by the excitement scientists feel as they try to hunt down aesthetic experience in the brain using the advanced methods and technologies of cognitive science.
But art is an elusive quarry, and it leaves its clumsy predator flailing in the dust. In vain will you find art, or our experience of art, illuminated in these empirical investigations. This points out not just the limits of the neural approach to the arts, but also the limits of neural approaches to human experience in general.
The basic problem with the brain theory of art is that neuroscience continues to be straitjacketed by an ideology about what we are. Each of us, according to this ideology, is a brain in a vat of flesh and bone, or, to change the image, we are like submariners in a windowless craft (the body) afloat in a dark ocean of energy (the world). We know nothing of what there is around us except what shows up on our internal screens.
The brain is necessary for human life and consciousness. But it can’t be the whole story.
Crucially, this picture — you are your brain; the body is the brain’s vessel; the world, including other people, are unknowable stimuli, sources of irradiation of the nervous system — is not one of neuroscience’s findings. It is rather something that has been taken for granted by neuroscience from the start: Descartes’s conception with a materialist makeover.
Careful work on the conceptual foundations of cognitive neuroscience has questioned the plausibility of straightforward mind-brain reduction. But many neuroscientists, even those not working on such grand issues as the nature of consciousness, art, and love, are committed to a single proposition that is, in fact, tantamount to a Cartesian idea they might be embarrassed to endorse outright. The momentous proposition is this: Every thought, feeling, experience, impression, value, argument, emotion, attitude, inclination, belief, desire, and ambition is in your brain. We may not know how the brain manages this feat, but, so it is said, we are beginning to understand. And this new knowledge — of how the organization of bits of matter inside your head can be your personality, thoughts, understanding, wonderings, religious or sexual impulses — is surely among the most exciting and important in all of science, or so it is claimed.
Some scientists attempt to escape this Cartesian vertigo by trying to have it both ways. They grant that we can’t understand the value of money, for example, or the attachment between a parent and a child, without taking up economics and history, on the one hand, or love and caring, on the other. But this, it turns out, is simply a fact about us, about the kind of explanations we, owing to our cognitive limitations, find satisfactory. Love is a neural condition. The value we attach to money is a neurological fact about us and nothing more. Even if we find it hard to describe a mother’s relation to her child without using the folk-psychological category of love, it would be possible to do so, at least in principle. If not to our satisfaction, than to that of a better scientist than we can ever manage to be. That is the argument.
It is remarkable that many people are so quick to be persuaded that we are just packets of neurons, and that the world we think it is science’s very aim to explain is our brain’s confabulation. It isn’t surprising, really, that art gets lost in the shuffle.
Could it be that art, far from getting explained away with the rest of creation, might give us resources for rethinking nature, our nature?
[...] But a work of art, like the meaningful world around us, is not a mere stimulus. And we work hard — we look, we ask, we think, we collaborate — to bring art and world into focus for consciousness.
This is not to deny that the world acts on us, triggering events in the nervous system. Of course it does! But the thing is, we act right back. Every movement of the eye, head, and body changes the character of our sensory coupling to the world around us. Objects are not triggers for internal events in the nervous system; they are opportunities or affordances for our continuing transactions with them. The world shows up, in experience, not like a diagram in a brain chart but as the playing field for our activity. Not the brain’s activity. Our activity. Not activity inside our head. But activity in the world around us.
The concern of science, humanities, and art, is, or ought to be, the active life of the whole, embodied, environmentally and socially situated animal. The brain is necessary for human life and consciousness. But it can’t be the whole story. Our lives do not unfold in our brains. Instead of thinking of the Creator Brain that builds up the virtual world in which we find ourselves in our heads, think of the brain’s job as enabling us to achieve access to the places where we find ourselves and the stuff we share those places with.
Neuroaesthetics, we have observed, is chic. And not only in neuroscience. Humanists — art historians, students of literature, artists themselves, after decades of suspicion of any attempts to bring our cultural lives and our biology into fruitful dialogue — now seem to be inclined gleefully to embrace the new brain-centered conception of everything.
If you are at all sympathetic to the skepticism about neuroscience that I am advancing, then you will perhaps find it plausible that neuroaesthetics is another instance of neuroscience’s intellectual imperialism, another chapter in its attempt to come up with a brain theory of everything. But neuroscience’s recent preoccupation with art, however, reveals something deeper and more fundamental about the neuroscience project itself.
Neuroaesthetics seems unable even to bring its own subject matter, art, under observation....