|
|||
As you know this is the next to the last meeting of our seminar on Feeling and Imagination in Art, Science, and Technology. Since the first two that were filmed, we’ve dealt with different chapters of my book, Feeling and Imagination. We’ve dealt with the entirety of narvinvinsky’s book, The Emotion Machine. We’ve dealt in discussions, all of which were run by you, and as well as me, on various subjects on the nature of creativity and the way in which nature and feeling interact with rationality. Today we’re going to have a presentation of the final paper, the major paper, Aesthea, on my left, is going to submit next week as the final evidence of the work that she has done in the course. Before she starts there are a couple of things that have been developing in me that I haven’t really dealt with adequately, but perhaps because of the course and perhaps because it is related to my own work in progress, I suddenly get glimmers of what needs to be done. So I’ll talk briefly about those glimmers now and next week when we have discussion about your papers and everything in general we can come back if you think what I’m offering today is worth consideration.
One of the problems that we keep confronting is the relation ship between the brain and what we sometimes call the mind or, the brain as a bodily instrument and experience as something that isn’t obviously reduceable to the work of the brain. We’ve talked about different theories about this some of which say that experience is simply the brain in operation and that all the problems of cumulative experience can be solved by further, more advanced analysis of understanding of the work of the brain. Iocles had not been comfortable with that. We’ve talked about that from various points of view and in relation to the writings of various people. In the case of Minsky, I’m still not clear how he thinks brain and experience are related. But that’s obviously one of the major topics that his book deals with. The idea that I want to throw out now, that I haven’t seen written up much, but it’s such a simple, perhaps obvious idea that may be novel to me but not to anybody else is that possibly the mistake that’s been made in popular studies has been to think that everything in experience depends on the brain and therefore understanding the nature of the brain better will inevitably tell us what we need to know about the nature of human experience. The idea that I want us to throw out is that, yes it’s true that without the brain we wouldn’t be able to have experience and yes its true that changes in the brain alter our experience. One obvious example is what’s called seeing stars. If you hit someone on the head, you effect a mechanism in the brain that cause flashes of light that are metaphorically called stars and that’s seeing stars. Over and above this however, the big crucial question is should we think of the brain as a established, so to speak, fixed, constant, almost an “economist” entity. The changes in which will change experience. An entity of a sort that the legs are operating well they enable people to engage in locomotion and to experience walking, but it’s possible that we’re sort of mistaken by our model and that while changes in the brain affect experience and create changes in experience, possibly changes in experience affect and literally change the brain so that the two are in some kind of interaction and when they work simultaneously all is will with the creature of the human being who has it but perhaps it’s a mistake to think that the brain is of a uniform structure rather than an adaptive one so that the chemical and synaptic and other operations of the brain that are actually changed, that they evolve in accordance with human experience. Now I’m not prepared to say that they evolve in accordance with the history of the race, so to speak. So that if you studied Western history, you should be able to predict changes that are going to take place at the end of that history as compared to what they were at the beginning of that history. That gets to the large scale question about the nature of evolution, but within an individual at least, the individual comes into the world with equipment for sensory experience and then eventually more mental more higher level experiences and it also has the brain that is a “succu?” for that, what we find however is that different individuals have different kinds of experiences. No two babies are identical in terms of the dates or the way in which they respond to the sensory input that they receive as babies. In that process, and that I am hypothesizing, and that I think that some research by some of you could be very helpful, possibly the brain has been changing not only the way in which the brain’s change uniformly for individual development so that obviously the brain of an adult changes greatly from the brain of an infant and there may be a definite similarity of some sort between different individuals who are adults in relation to what they were like as children, you might find that isomorphism regardless of who the individual is, or who they “reason, probabilistic reason?” But also that the actual change in any one individual, the detailed change in one individuals experience will itself create changes in the brain of that individual. That would be a way that experience would affect the brain as well as being affected by the brain. Now if that makes any sense to you, how would you go about verifying it, you would have to know something about the inputs which are sensory basically. In otherwords something outside the brain which does affect human experience and if the theory is plausible thereby affects the brain in different ways because the outside inputs vary considerably. How would you go about verifying this concept of interaction as a way of showing a relationship between the brain and the mind. And second, how would that conclusion whatever it is, affect the way in which we think about computers in relationship to human beings. Computers are made of material that doesn’t seem to respond as fluidly or as plasticly that things that may be happening in experience because those things are electrodes and bits of machinery, of hardware. Even the software might be such that it’s not liable to any great alteration from one moment to another. Its been put in the computer in the hope that the computer might successfully use the software in an “useful” way. Whatever is happening, to the person that is using the person. We couldn’t use the computers as they now exist unless they were constant in that way. When I open my computer, it doesn’t matter if I’m ina grumpy mood or a cheerful mood, whether I’ve had a good breakfast or a bad breakfast, whether I’m feeling pain or I’m feeling pleasure. The computer is going to do its job in a uniform way because it’s been programmed to do so through the software and that in turn is determined by the nature of the physical entity that computers are and which we are not. At least, not apparently. In an obvious sense we are not. If the thesis that I’m throwing out to you about interaction between experience and the brain is tenable, would that indicate that machines could never be made to duplicate human experience or would it be a clue to how the new computers have to be constructed, a clue that would be very relevant to the research that I mentioned earlier, several times, that people like Roslyn Picard in the media lab are doing. That is trying to create computers that are more responsive to human experience and possibly approximate some of the non-cognitive that is affective elements of human experience. I just throw that out as a question, maybe the original thesis is untenable and maybe even if it is tenable, it doesn’t help very much in how to make the new computers of the future. Now, I want to stop now because I do want to hear what Aestha is going to say but if you can mull over this we can spend as much time as you want on these questions next time. All right, anybody want to make any quick comments.
Let me hold up the proceedings, by giving Joe, who just came in…You already had one? Oh, I’m not complaining. No, I was just saying you just came in for the sake of the camera. Hand in your paper next week if you are pleased with it, if however, you would like a couple of days extension, you can let me know in advance. However, grades are due two weeks from today, so it can’t be for very long. But if you’re done you can turn it in next week. Next week you can tell us what you have been doing and what you still want to do. _____ would you take over?
{Aestha??} Ok, well, my topic is completely different than what we have been doing over the past couple of weeks. It has nothing to do with any of the cognitive sciences or computers. Well, at least not directly. So what I was focusing on was capitalism or economics and how it relates to creativity. What I’ve been doing so far is just research on the relations between these two. So the way that I’m going to talk about creativity is through art, whether its commercial art, pop art, fine arts, or any other type of literary arts. So the conflict that I’m having now, that you can help me with after I’m done disclosing what I’ve done so far, is tying it back to the initial aspect of creativity. So once you hear the comments that I have to say, just please feel free to stop me even though I’m talking. First of all, basing the initial part of my project on Adam Smith’s theory of economics, which he presented in the Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiment. ?What was pollution in 1759? So Smith was basically the father of this idea of capitalism. So he used the individual as a foundation for political life and he also views the individual as a foundation for economic life. Back when he was living economic and political life were pretty much intertwined; more than now. In order to succeed people were basically focused on their individual achievements and were trying to achieve individual richness or to better themselves. {Singer }This was a draft that you’ve developed; if you prefer, you can read it. Read it with feeling and delivery so that everyone can easily follow you. This is if you have to paraphrase yourself; whatever you prefer. {Aestha} This is mostly just a history of Adam Smith and how he came up with this thing, so I don’t think that this is that important. I’m just trying to make the point of where this came about and how self-interest is the key point. I’m going to talk a little about the theory of …., so before adam smith the political-economic concept of labor was defined by reference to a feudal system in which all grades and classes of labor and all other forms of property were ultimately subject to a monarch who while the sources of labor were “interested to the tender care” and mercies to the church with a monopoly on revelation. The resulting caste system also embraced a more ancient division of labor between the liberal and mechanical arts. That basically means that those who worked with their heads practiced liberal arts and those who worked with their hands mechanical. It took them until the 15th century of artist, engineer, humanist, and scientist genius Davinchi ____ Michelangelo who attempted to begin bridging this ancient chasm. In addition this span was _________ in the 16th and 17th centuries where high artisans and industry men whos experminents methods inspired Francis Bacon and fueled the scientific revolution. {Singer} Are you getting this so that people can follow it? You are slurring your words, try to…{Aestha} Oh, I’m sorry. The value of goods and services was rooted by smith in the labor theory of “value??” That’s where the theory of capital started, as physical plans and equipment; Where they learned how to measure labor content of a good as well as historically embodied labor and capital. Does anybody have any questions? No? Ok, so the first part was basically a recap on capitalism and its history. The second part is going to be cultural economics of arts funding and I’m going to talk a little bit about culture and art and culture and economy. So right now I’m going to concentrate on art and economy. The first engine of mass production was not the steam engine but rather the printing press innovated in the 15th century. This threat of literary arts by this innovation revolutionized the world and set the stage for religious and political revolution over the next 500 years. And for the technological transfer of knowledge between cultures, countries, and continents. At the very time the arts withdrew from mainstream industrial society in the 19th and 20th centuries. New communications, media emerged including steel engraving plates, photographs, recordings, films, radio, television, and video recording, which permitted the further culmination of art through the exploitation of revenue streams implicit in copyrights. This process has continued until today where the arts have become a significant factor in the economy. From an economic perspective there are three distinct segments of contemporary arts, namely the fine arts, the commercial arts, and the amateur arts. AS well as four distinct disciplines, literary, media, performing, and visual art. Each creative source is the individual artist. The fine arts are a professional activity which serves art for arts sake, just as knowledge for knowledge sake is the rationale for pure research science. The commercial arts are a profit making activity which serves art for profit and generally places profit before excellence. The amateur arts are recreational activity that serve to recreate the ability of a worker to do his or her job or a leisure activity that serves to self-actualize a citizens potential and thereby permits him/her to more fully appreciate art. All three arts are interdependent, they are also interrelated. The amateur artist in actualizing his or her talents and abilities provides an educated audience and initial training for the fine and commercial arts. The fine artist in the pursuit of artistic excellence is an end and of itself provides research and development for the commercial arts. The commercial arts in the pursuit for profit provide the means to market and distribute the best of amateur and the fine arts for audiences large enough in a form suited to earn profit. Collectively these three types of artistic activity make up the arts industry including advertising, broadcasting, motion pictures, performing and visual arts; 24.32 Publishing, sound, and video recording compared to manufacturing industries. The Canadian art industry in 1993 was the largest full-time employer for more than 234,280. The fifth largest with salaries and wages of 3.1 billion dollars and 10th largest with revenue of 9.2 billion dollars or 2.5% of the gross national product. {Singer} “Elsa?” let me help you a minute. I think it would be more productive if instead of going through the paper the way you have been, you could just talk off the top of your head in terms of what you’re doing and what the paper does. Then we could possibly go back to the paper for more of the detailed writing that went into it. Is that possible? {Elsa} That’s what I was trying to do, but the problem is that I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to organize it. {Singer} That’s where we can help you. The idea is not to go through the draft but to help you develop your thinking further. So can I make 2 suggestions? {Elsa} Yeah, sure. {Singer} One that you stand up and act as if you were talking to a large audience and project everything but do it spontaneously without much thought in advance which may be at first a little uncommon to you if you’re not a public speaker, though you are. Present the problem, present the issues and the problems and why it is that you have a doubt or uncertainty at the moment about how it’s all going to come together. That would be, I think, more exciting. Can you do that? Try it first. {Elsa} Umm, ok. I don’t know what to say.. {Singer} Go to the blackboard and use it as if you were teaching. You can’t do anything wrong. How did you get into this…how about my getting you going with some questions. Why did you choose this rather than an infinite number of other possibilities? {Elsa} Well, I went through a lot of different possibilities for writing my paper. I didn’t really feel comfortable with any of them. One day I just figured that I may as well relate it to something that I’m currently doing. Ok, so I’m taking a managerial psychology class for my major, which is business and finance, and so I’m reading some of the articles and case studies and I came up with how managers in business try to influence the creative ability of the employees, especially in an engineering environment. They use different ways in order to stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship. That’s how, back to the creative abilities of people in general is a common theme in this class and I thought it really relates to business. So far I’ve been doing a lot of research on the topic and I’ve kind of put it all together. Most of it is just raw research. Like what I was reading right now is not as polished as it should be by the time I turn it in. But I’ve learned a lot about the history of economics and about art and how even since it’s beginning it has been funded through commissions by the church and through kings. And then later in the renaissance period it was funded by certain patrons, like the “remanichi?” family and how that has been a big factor in the production of art. All kinds of art, literary art, paintings, music, everything. {Singer} You start with Adam Smith, and you mention the two most important books of his, one on wealth and the other on sympathy or sentiments; on moral sentiments. Now the moral sentiments are feelings and he is part of a school of ethics that existed in the 18th century that are very important because of a line of derivation that philosophers of ethics up to the present but also that line of derivation, smith in particular, is the point of view that Emanuel Kant criticizes. So that if you think of the history of philosophy as having been revolutionized by Kant’s work and it’s had a lasting influence for the last 200 years, you also have to consider smith as a source of his rejection of a view that belongs to what is called the Moral Sentiment theory of Ethics. Can you say something about that in itself before getting along further? {Elsa} Umm…like what… {Singer} You do mention Smith though, but not just because he is important in Economic theory, is there anything in his economic theory or his ethical theory that directly impinges upon the creativity of the employee, employees as simulated by the employer—which is what motivated you in the first place. {Elsa} Not so far… {Singer} So it’s just a kind of introduction, but it’s not terribly relevant so if you left it out nobody would no the difference or it wouldn’t make any difference. {Elsa} Right, well the problem of my paper right now is mostly just structure and it’s also that I need to find a more specific focus for the paper. {Singer} Well that’s why we’re working with you right now. First of all, have any of you studied the philosophical writings of Adam Smith or the economic writings? On the economic side he is important as one of the founding fathers of the idea of capitalism; that people are motivated selfishly and the justification for their selfishness is that through competition they actually contribute benefits for everybody. So this is the unseen hand that is setup so that each person through capital accumulation, through enterprise of a capitalist sort selfishly trying to benefit himself as do other people. That effort contributes to a network of relationships that actually benefit everybody. That’s the fundamental idea of western capitalism and it goes back to a large extent to his philosophizing by adam smith in the middle of the 18th century. We can come back to that in a minute. Second, in terms of the ethical theory--there’s no preparation in that either?—the moral sentiment theory says that we have codes of ethics which are rigid, there are laws, there are magistrates, and all of these are governed by some concept of reason. Kant, was a great philosopher, tried to rehabilitate the importance of reason by showing how you can justify the foundation the ethics on purely rational grounds and if there were mandates that couldn’t be justified that way that were irrational that it wouldn’t really be ethical. Now we don’t have to get very far into Kants ethical theory, but what I want to emphasize has relevance to what Elsa’s interested in and what we’ve been working on in the moral sentiment theory represented by Adam Smith. Because the kind of sentiment that he emphasizes is sympathy, and out of sympathetic feelings towards other people we then sort of work out a motus vivendi, a way of living, and out of that comes ethical rules. So that if everybody was a sadist, lets say that everybody was not only filled with selfish desires but also took pleasure in giving pain to other people, your own selfish desires would lead you to hurt other people, that would undermine our conception of ethics because ethics doesn’t operate that way, but rather in terms of how people feel about what happens to other people. So that if someone is suffering, you give her a helping hand and people say, “Oh isn’t that noble; isn’t that right.” People that are bad off ought to be helped. Now there is a variety of ways you could help. One is by changing the government so that people, for instance, who are starving wouldn’t starve anymore. But how do you do that? By stimulating industry and getting jobs for them, or putting them on the dole, or by having a kind of intermediary which like in the New Deal in this country, in which the government intervened to set up programs that would give jobs to more people and that would protect people who are old—so out of that comes social security—or sick and unable to cope with the costs of medicine, that’s medicare. So that’s a kind of state socialism. Obviously, socialism would be one way of coping and there are extremes of socialism, Communism is not the same as socialism and so on. In general, the ethical desire to be of help would operate in different political conditions but would be based upon feelings that people have for other people. That’s different than the thinking that we all have that there is something that is right and wrong, this is discoverable by reason, and in the case of Kant reason gets reanalyzed in a very special, a very powerful sort of way. To combat the moral sentiment theory represented by Adam Smith, also by David Hume, utilitarianism, and different other ethical theories which are concerned about human feelings in a way that Kant thinks is external to ethics. It isn’t that Kant isn’t interested in feelings or happiness, his point is that that doesn’t tell us much about ethics. To be ethical you have to do what is right and you have to do it because it’s right not because it helps other people and brings about happiness. At the same time, Kant says that it’s very noble to bring about happiness and that there is nothing wrong with searching happiness for yourself, it’s just that ethics is not based on that. The difference between right and wrong of an ethical sort, has to be found by means that are independent of our search for happiness and our concern about the happiness of other people. The reason I thought Adam Smith could be of utility to you is that he’s talking about human affect, rather than cognition. And that’s something we’ve talked about. The question is how is that relevant to creativity in the arts or creativity in business as part of employees and how that might lend itself to stimulation by employers, which is your thesis. So, it possibly, depends on what you want to do. Going back to the content of Adam Smith’s theories, you might find it more relevant to your project than I’ve indicated. Anybody else want to say anything? Now we know where you began, and we’re ready to go from there. What are the problems you’re facing? {Elsa} Most of the problems that I’m having right now is having a place to go. The other stages of the paper is how art has been influenced by business and funding and how that goes back to capitalism. It seemed like a good idea when I was doing the research but now I don’t see how I’m going to tie it together so I don’t know what to do—my paper isn’t working. {Singer} One way would be to study afresh what the theory of capitalism is. It doesn’t exist just as a theory. There isn’t just that you go to business school and you find that you can get a better job than if you didn’t go to school and graduate school in business and what you do is answer the telephone and become qualified as a broker on the stock exchange and then you buy and sell shares and that may be what your idea of a capitalist is. But the point is that kind of person is highly trained but not highly educated because the whole structure of that way of life is based upon ideas about human nature—what people are and how they should be and how individuals can contribute to it. We’re not slaves merely of our irrational desires to have 3 cars instead of 2 or to eat in restaurants instead of home, which doesn’t cost as much. We choose that, we choose to live that way and we choose to be a burden or not and society is set up to justify that kind of choice or not, depending on the society, on the basis of very general ideas of what human beings are and should be doing. Starting with someone like Adam Smith, how does this tell us about what feelings are and what they should be in the capitalist environment of the sort that you are expressing? {Elsa} Well, I thought of a point that could be made. For example, the reason that art prospers in a capitalist society is that art is a luxury. People try to obtain luxury, therefore being able to sustain art. But I don’t want to do that as a topic anymore. {Singer} Well, let’s explore that more. Does everyone feel that art is a luxury? {Elsa} Well, it depends what type of art I guess. {Singer} Tell us, what’s the type that is considered a luxury and by whom. {Elsa} Well, for example theatre, that would be a luxury to attend one of those shows. {Singer} You think it’s a luxury. Do you think everyone considers it a luxury? {Elsa} Yeah, I guess. {Singer} Ok, let me become autobiographical. My college roommate decided that he wanted to go into theathre, and he did. For him, it was not a luxury it was a need, a necessity that he had. It was what he wanted to do. He became successful, but the reason that he became successful was that it was a passionate involvement, he really cared and didn’t worry about the money. Eventually he created his own company; it was here in ---------------- The above text was transcribed by Jeff 1-1-2005 -------------- Last Modified 3/4/05 12:49 PM |
