New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Minds on Monday: The Sense of Beauty Rests On Art

Last week, I argued that art couldn’t be a spandrel, at any rate not a spandrel on norms of beauty. In this, my concluding post on art and beauty, I want to advance two theses. The first is that our sense of beauty comes from art, not the other way around. And the second is that the art capacity is adaptive.

 

Let’s start with the sense of beauty, or more generally, the sense that things have aesthetic value. Throughout this series of posts, I have been sympathetic to Kant’s notion of disinterested pleasure. I judge a thing to be beautiful because it gives me pleasure (or displeasure) in a way that is disinterested, i.e., which is independent of my desiring it, or feeling an aversion to it.

Minds on Monday: Why Art Can't Be a Spandrel

In an earlier post, I argued that all humans have a sense of beauty. That is, they have a capacity to derive disinterested pleasure from things, and, in this Kantian sense, to find them beautiful. But, I continued, there is no universal explanation for norms of beauty—such explanations as are offered for why we find certain things beautiful fail to capture all of the things we find beautiful, and admit many things that we do not find beautiful in the Kantian sense mentioned above. Finally, I argued that all human cultures practice art.

In this post, I want to begin to consider evolutionary explanations of the universality of art. Here, I make a simple point: evolutionary explanations should (but typically don’t) account for the essential role of form in art. Accounting for form has a surprising result.

Minds on Monday: Art is Universal. (Why?)

Last week, I talked about the sense of beauty. I argued first that it would be very strange if there were human beings, or even human-like beings, who are incapable of making Kantian judgements of taste. Then, in a second post, I reviewed some attempts to account for universal norms of beauty in evolutionary terms, i.e. the standards by which we determine what things are beautiful. These attempts get the domain of beauty wrong. From their perspective, chocolates and sex should also be objects of beauty. But this is not the right category for sex. In sum, I think that the sense of beauty is universal–but that norms of beauty are parochial and hard to account for in evolutionary terms, at least if it’s important to account for them as beauty.

Today I want to reflect on the universality of art, which has been illuminatingly discussed by Ellen Dissanayeke, Stephen Davies, Noël Carroll, and Denis Dutton. The phenomena are striking.

• Art has extremely ancient, perhaps even pre-Homo sapiens, origins. Hand axes made by H. ergaster one and a half million years ago display a symmetry unrelated to function, and these was highly time-consuming to produce. Forty thousand years ago, at Enkapune Ya Muto in Kenya, people made delicate strings of beads out of ostrich eggshell, an extremely delicate process. While these artifacts lack the individual style of their makers, and are hence better classified as craftworks, they nevertheless display a “disinterested”–this term will be explained later–regard for appearance and form that is the hallmark of art.

Minds on Monday: Is the Sense of Beauty Evolved?

Today’s not Monday, but I want to round out the discussion of the universality of beauty I started last Monday.

There I suggested that any (normal) human-like creature is capable of Kantian judgements of taste. Today, I want to consider the appreciation of beauty without restriction to the rigorous Kantian ideal. My concern here is the simple sense of beauty–the gobsmacked reaction that people have to gorgeous sunsets, magnificent mountain ranges, the starry sky, and also (my ultimate quarry) to great artistic creations. Obviously, SOB–I apologize for the rebarbative acronym, but perhaps some demystification is healthy–is universal among humans, and apparently not so among other animals. It must, therefore, be an evolved characteristic, something that sprung up in some hominin species and inherited by us. (Million year old handaxes are meticulously symmetric, and dubiously functional; so it seems likely that SOB is pre Homo sapiens.) The question is: why did it evolve?

Minds on Monday: Is Beauty Universal?

I have been writing an entry on “Art and Evolution” for the Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (3^rd edition), and I am going to try out some ideas in a series of posts. On the main points that you might expect to hear about, my positions are (in ascending order of logical strength):

1. Art is culturally universal.
2. Art is evolved.
3. Art is selected for.

I won’t get to 3, the most contested of these theses, for a while.

I want to start by considering the question: “Is the appreciation of beauty culturally universal?” I also want to touch on whether it is evolved and/or selected for. (To be clear: this is just a preliminary to the above questions about art.)

Minds on Monday: Games, Art, and Evolution II

We had a vigorous discussion last week about the merits of Bernard Suits’s definition of game. Of course, we did not reach agreement. But Tom Hurka and I argued that there is a difference between defining concepts and defining words. Our position was that Suits’s definition focuses on a valuable concept that fits most games, even if it is not precisely coextensive with the vernacular use of the word ‘game’.

Today, I want to work with a Suits-like game-concept, setting aside worries both about correspondence with the vernacular and about precise details. The idea I want to explore is that games have a reflexive structure shared by art. I also want to suggest that they might share something significant at the base level of the reflexive structure.

Five Questions About the Unity of Consciousness

The Network of Sensory Research is an international research partnership funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It organizes inter-disciplinary research conversations on the senses.

With the Philosophy Department at Brown University, the Network co-sponsored a workshop on the unity of consciousness and sensory integration at Brown University on November 5^th and 6^th. A report of this workshop, authored by Adrienne Prettyman, Craig French, David Gray, and Kevin Connolly is now available.

Discussion of five questions arising from the workshop is now open, co-sponsored by PhilPapers:

Minds on Monday: Games, Art, and Evolution

Wittgenstein famously claimed that game could not be defined, since it is a “family resemblance”. His argument is embarrassingly anorexic. Nevertheless, he announces it with characteristic grandiosity: “Don't say there must be something in common or they would not be called 'games' - but look and see whether there is anything common to all.”

The late University of Waterloo philosopher, Bernard Suits, ignored the bull—I mean this word in the papal as well as the fecal sense—but took the advice. He took a look and found a common element, a philosophically interesting structural feature of games. (See The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, 1978; republished by Broadview in 2005 with an Introduction by Tom Hurka. The title is for Aesop’s grasshopper, who plays all summer—Suits thought he was on to something.)

Minds on Monday: Molyneux's Question and My Question

Imagine that two electrodes are placed on your skin, perhaps on the back of your hand or on your forearm. Now, one is electrified weakly, so it produces a faint tingling sensation. Or maybe it's heated up so you feel a hot spot pressing against your skin. You see two electrodes, but feel only one tingle or hot spot. Can you point at or visually describe (e.g., “the one on the right”, “the red one”) the live electrode? Let me call this My Question. (You, Respected Reader, can call it “Mohan’s Question”.)

My Question is interestingly related to William Molyneux's famous Question.

Suppose a man born blind were able to distinguish between a cube and a sphere by touch. Suppose that these objects were placed on a table and the man made to see. Quaere: Whether by sight, before he touched them, he could tell which was which?

Minds on Monday: Sense and Un-sense in the Animal Kingdom

“The senses, or sensory modalities, constitute the different ways we have of perceiving the world.” So writes Fiona Macpherson in the Introduction to her new anthology, The Senses, a visionary work, which will spark a whole new literature on individuating the senses. At first glance, you might think “perceive” is unhelpful: the connection between “sensing” and “perceiving” seems too close and too porous for one to illuminate the other. Yet, there is a crucially important point here. Our bodies monitor blood oxygen levels and control breathing accordingly; this is a response to the (internal) environment. Yet, we do not perceive blood-oxygen levels. And this, presumably, is at least part of what Macpherson is getting at. But what does it mean? Colour perception is a response to the (external) environment, after all. Why is it right to say we perceive colour, but not blood-oxygen levels? (The internal/external distinction is unimportant, by the way: hunger and thirst are perceptions, aren’t they?)

Minds on Monday: Seeing and Doing

What we see as a species depends on what we do as a species. This was the teaching of the visionary (though often a little too much so) Estonian physiologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944). Uexküll posited that the world sensorily revealed to an organism, its Umwelt as he called it, consists of environmental features constructed (or selected, as I would prefer to say) for their relevance to the organism’s behaviour and survival.

Colours in the World: Colours in the Head

I have been thinking and publishing about the ontology of colour for a long time now, and I have slowly made some progress toward a defensible view. But now I have an idea that might bring it all together.

(Gerhard Richter: 1024 colours )

I am a realist about colour. Twenty-five years ago, my primary "reason" was the incredulous stare. "My car isn't blue? Really? What colour is it then? What?—It isn't any colour? Go away: how do I see it then?" Today, I would say something a little different.

On the Evolution of Saints and Heroes

Helen De Cruz recently floated the idea that if our moral beliefs are produced by evolution, they are unlikely to be objectively true. “The prospects for an evolutionary-informed moral objectivism are grim, for here we stumble on the problem of the familiar Humean is/ought gap. . . It seems then that as we offer a plausible causal story of moral norms, we will be unable to make mind-independent moral truths figure in the explanation.”

Here I offer three arguments to counter what Helen calls “evolutionary debunking arguments” against moral objectivism.

On the Ethics of Assertion

Sometimes, empirical findings about the mind have surprising consequences for ethics and conduct. The empirical results may provoke little resistance, but the implied consequences for conduct run counter to intuition. Two of my posts to this blog ran into this kind of dissonance. An earlier post about an empirical result was mostly approbated. A later post about consequences for conduct were emphatically contested.  (Admittedly, my application of the ethical principle was controversial--some thought it was sleight of hand.)

Let me put the two together in a single post.

First, the empirical bit. How do we arrive at a belief or decide on a course of action? The intuitive model is single-track reasoning. In any given situation, a subject sums up her reasons, and arrives at a considered reason. (It may be poorly considered, but it's a summary that purports, at the moment of choice, to be complete.) Rationally choosing a belief or action is acting on the considered reason. Of course, you might act irrationally: that is, some other kind of motivation—emotion, desire—may win out. Or you may just behave automatically. But let's consider rational action here.

Consider a petty lie, for instance to a Customs agent who asks the value of the goods you purchased while out of the country. . .

How to See a Sound

(1) Imagine striking this object with a felted mallet.

 

How does it sound? You can probably hear it in your head. What if you struck it with an iron hammer? Ditto. Does this imaginative success mean that you see its sound?

Reaching, Grasping, Holding . . . With Eyes Wide Shut

When Deepika first kissed Saif, he trembled with excitement and his face turned away slightly. But Deepika was quick and adjusted her swoop: her lips softly met his square and centre.

A collar-ripper, and no doubt you want to know what happened next. But no, dear reader: this is New APPS, and I am afraid the ‘S’ stands for Science.  My interest is in something no less interesting but (sadly) much less heart-racing. Visually guided movement. For had Deepika (like Saif) ecstatically shut her eyes while closing in for the smooch (instead of peeking, as you can clearly see), she would have managed only a sisterly kiss on Saif’s cheek.

(Warning: [very] slightly salacious material below the fold.)

You Must Remember This . . .

Here is Freud recounting his memory of an incident in his infancy:

I see a rectangular, rather steeply sloping piece of meadow-land, green and thickly grown; in the green there are a great number of yellow flowers – evidently common dandelions. At the top end of the meadow there is a cottage, and in front of the cottage door two women are chatting busily, a peasant woman with a handkerchief on her head and a children's nurse. Three children are playing in the grass. One of them is myself (between the age of two and three); the two others are my boy cousin, who is a year older than me, and his sister, who is almost exactly the same age as I am. (Emphasis added.)

Freud believed this to be an accurate memory. Yet, how could it be? It is obviously impossible for someone to observe himself across a piece of meadow.

And another thing: How did he identify himself? How did he know which of the two little boys in his image was himself?

Suppress or Enable?

You are playing Bridge, and somebody asks you (quite improperly): Do you have the King of Spades? Of course, you say nothing. Here’s a question. Did you stay silent simply because it was the best course? Or did you also have to suppress the urge to respond, realizing it would be bad?

I suspect the latter. I wonder whether contemporary philosophy of action and epistemology take sufficiently systematic notice of the suppressive side of reasoning.

This kind of question—between positive reasons compelling an outcome and negative reasons suppressing alternatives—has a long history in biology and psychology. Darwin started it. . .

Contest: What Are Mental Images?

Cognitive scientists often define "iconic representations" (or mental images) as those in which “parts of the representation correspond to the parts of the entities represented.” (This wording is taken from Susan Carey's book, The Study of Concepts.) Call this the Spatial Decomposition Principle.

Something like the Spatial Decomposition Principle is true of realistic pictures: every part of a (realistic) picture of your mother is a realistic picture of a part of your mother. (OK, OK: something of an idealization: just suck it up.)

But it is not true of mental images . . .

Colour Fundamentals: Escaping the Paralogisms

Two facts about colour strike me as obvious, profound, overlooked, and philosophically puzzling.

1. Colour is Real It is literally true to say that some of the squares above are red and others green. Moreover, red and green are stable properties of these objects. Never mind how ‘X is red’ is to be analysed: whether in terms of dispositions, relations, physical properties, simple properties, whatever. Whatever way you analyse colour, it had better be true that it is a real property of things in the external world.

Imagine! Then Take the Quiz

Imagine this lady and her unicorn. Furnish them with lots of visual detail. How big are they? How would they look from another angle? Put in some non-visual detail. Suppose our lady gave the little thing a good smack. What sound would it make? Suppose it chewed on some clover-like leaves: How would that sound? How would it smell? Does her perfume overwhelm the clover?

You are entertaining a sensory image. Much of our mental life is directed towards sensory images. Yet it is not well understood how and what they signify. I’ll pose three fundamental questions about imaging that bear on central issues in the philosophy of mind. It may seem obvious how they should be answered—but they mask the potential for sharp disagreement.  

1. Can your image of the unicorn be true?
2. Your image is as of a brown unicorn. Is it, similarly, of an existent one?
3. Are you (necessarily) imagining yourself observing the lady and her unicorn?

When Does One-Shot Induction Work?

Pierre-Paul Broca was one of the great neurologists of the 19^th century. A witty and affable man, Broca was both universally liked and highly respected. In 1861, he famously encountered M. Leborgne, a 50-year old syphilitic man who had (more than a decade earlier) lost the ability to utter any syllable other than ‘tan’. Five days after Broca examined him, Tan (as he was known to hospital staff) died. Broca’s autopsy revealed a syphilitic lesion in the mid-frontal lobe, a rather large one, as you can see. By legend—Carl Sagan wrote compellingly about this—Broca concluded that the lesion was the cause of the loss of speech.

The classic view of mental functioning was that it was based on general purpose learning mechanisms. When we seem to see, for instance, a person, we are aware (as Hume said) of “a collection of simple ideas, that are united by imagination”—i.e., by the association of ideas, or what we have come to call “conditioning.” Conditioning is general purpose: any two ideas can be associated. Because it is universal, association cannot be localized within the brain; rather it is a principle of brain function as such.

Broca and Tan toppled associationism by demonstrating anatomical specialization in the brain. Or did they? Could a single instance really cast doubt on a theory as well-entrenched as associationism?

Perceiving Actively: A Reflection on a Sensorimotor Construction

Justin Broackes is THE expert on the history of colour science—alright, John Mollon is up there too!—and something of a bibliophile. Cruising the Internet one day, he was delighted to chance upon this book by a famous 19^th century Swedish physiologist.  (The author, Frithiof Holmgren, advocated testing for colour vision, and campaigned to exclude the colour blind from signalling work on the railways.)

 

Some time after it had arrived from the Netherlands, Justin proudly displayed the book to dinner guests, who naturally enough remarked on the striking cover design. Justin is somewhat colour-blind (an anomalous trichromat) and he is apt to confuse certain reds and greens. He hadn’t noticed the nifty colour alternation above: the letters just looked brown. But in light of his guests’ compliments, he examined it carefully. Then—but only slowly, after a couple of minutes of looking closely at the book from different angles under a desk-lamp—he saw it. The alternating letters finally looked red and green.

But wait! Justin is colour-blind. How did he manage to see the colours?

Homo Sciens. Or: Why Humans By Nature Desire to Know

Last week I alluded to a view about evolution that motivates some to sympathize with sensorimotor theory, and more generally, with the view that perception is for bodily action, and not (except incidentally) for the detection of states of affairs independently of their relevance to bodily action.

One version of the argument goes something like this.

Selection cares only about (what Patricia Churchland has raffishly called) the “4 Fs”—Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, and Reproduction. Since 4F success does not depend on apprehending the truth, selection cannot explain a truth-seeking organism, much less an abstract-truth seeking one.

Arguments like this have considerable currency. Alvin Plantinga takes them to show that God is needed to explain the reliability of human thought. From Stephen Gould’s perspective, they show that non-4F thought is a “spandrel”—a non-adaptive by-product of natural selection. And Tyler Burge writes that false perception “is not a failure of biological function”, since it is response not detection that is biologically functional.

Today, I continue my discussion of actionist theories of perception and thought by taking issue with this anti-intellectual view of human evolution. The 4F view is not mandated by evolutionary theory.

Sensorimotor Excesses

Historically, we owe some of the most exciting scientific discoveries to the rigorous interaction between reductionism and its opposite.

In the ancient world, the atomists made great strides by attempting to demonstrate how various ordinary phenomena—colour perception, moral values—could be reduced to the shape and movement of atoms. But atomism fell to an extraordinary theoretical insight of Aristotle’s. For as the great geneticist Max Delbrück once wrote in a sparkling little essay entitled “Aristotle totle totle,” this great philosopher and student of nature pointed out that it is a “fundamental aspect of Nature that human beings beget human beings, and do not beget rabbits or an ear of corn.” The atomists cannot explain this.

Delbrück particularly appreciated that this “wonderful man” had posited form as the cause of reproduction (“and not a mini-man”), and impishly attributed to him the discovery of DNA. He was wrong, of course: because Aristotle had abandoned the atomists’ bottom-up compositional principle, and had thus actually blocked the road to the double helix.

In the last century, the study of the mind underwent a similar sequence.

Empirical Philosophy of Mind: A Productive Interaction of Science and Intuition

Philosophy is almost always interdisciplinary. But there is a strand of philosophy of mind—empirically informed speculation about mind, perception, and cognition—that stands out because it involves genuine partnership with empirical studies. 

A couple of weeks ago, I remarked here on the method of imaginative counter-example in philosophy. Thanks to Helen De Cruz, the discussion morphed into a lively exchange of views about the value of intuition. On this topic, it is instructive to note how intuition has interacted with science in philosophy of mind. On a positive note for philosophers’ use of intuition, David Chalmers’ completely a priori zombie example played a palpable role (thought not all by itself, of course) in the revival of scientific interest in consciousness. On the other side of the ledger, Tom Nagel used certain cognitive dissociations in “brain bisected” patients to challenge long-standing philosophical intuitions concerning the unity of consciousness. Nagel has since been vindicated by the discovery of numerous cognitive dissociations that challenge classic statements of the unity of consciousness. So a productive conversation between cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind has been going on for a long time, and between philosophers and psychologists for an even longer time.

What I want to highlight today is a genuine back and forth between scientific experiment and philosophical intuition on one question, with Ned Block holding up the philosophy end. The question is this: Can a mental state be conscious, and yet be completely inaccessible to the subject? Many philosophers think that the idea is completely absurd, by definition. They think that a state is conscious if there is “something it’s like” to be in that state. They ask: How can there be something it’s like to be in a state if you have no access to that state? Many neuroscientists share this sense of absurdity: they think that it is “metaphysical” (in a bad sense of the term) to suppose that a subject could be incapable of being aware of a state that is (nonetheless) conscious. How then would one know that the subject is conscious?

How Much Should Philosophy Rely on Counter-Examples?

The method of counter-examples was introduced to philosophy by that under-achieving gadfly, Socrates, and it was one of Plato’s great achievements that he transcribed some of the conversations in which Socrates used this method. Justice is not the repayment of what you owe, Socrates argued, because it is not an exercise of justice when you return a weapon that you owe to a homicidal maniac.

That example, in the Republic, showed a plausible theory false, but this was not the only use to which Socrates put counter-examples. He used them positively as well: the very fact that the method of counter-examples works shows that analysis (or the answering of ‘What is X?’ questions) is a search for property-identities. Analysis cannot rest content with illumination by convincing paradigms. You cannot answer the question, “What is justice?” simply by pointing to the Supreme Court, or the Constitution. You must designate justice (the property) another way, a way that is easier to understand than designating it as justice. And when you do this, you are open to counter-examples.

Though Socrates’ discovery marked the beginning of philosophy as we know it, and is the origin of analytic philosophy in particular, the method of counter-examples hasn’t been hugely important in the history of philosophy. Plato himself turned to reductios (for example in the Parmenides) and Aristotle’s methods are largely constructive. When Descartes wanted to prove the dualism of mind and matter, he didn’t do so by counter-exampling identity theory; similarly Hume and the rationalist theory of causation. The last two authors proceeded from first principles, and this was the dominant method of philosophy even in the heyday of analysis. What are Frege’s great counter-examples? Russell’s?