Consciousness in the Aesthetic Imagination | Hacker News Reader

Consciousness in the Aesthetic Imagination

metapsychosis.com

34 pointsmsekeris10 comments

> If after the death of the last living thing on earth, there remained a radio playing the Adagio over and over again among the ashes of civilization, there would still be sadness in the world.

That is a very strong claim I would love to see substantiated. What is an emotion (like sadness) without an animal capable of experiencing that emotion? Does the author claim that emotions like sadness are metaphysical, or at least, transcend human physiology?

What if we discovered an animal or alien species incapable of experiencing "sadness" as we do? The quoted statement seems to preclude this as a possibility, which is a very strong assumption.

> Aesthetic vision apprehends the universe as an immanent field of living forces. All of reality is ensouled, willful, alive. Small wonder, then, that works of art present the world as innately sentient.

Alive? Innately sentient? Citation needed.

This article is filled with emotionally flamboyant language that yields either extremely strong and testable claims, or useless drivel.

> Does the author claim that emotions like sadness are metaphysical, or at least, transcend human physiology?

It is not a claim on the nature of emotions, but rather a claim about the nature of existence itself. In other words, he's speaking figuratively, not literally.

Don't be so sure about speaking figuratively. This particular author might be, however, there are profound philosophies that do not.

For example, "all of us" are literally the same entity viewing itself using a variety of perceptions.

Indra's Net. Dependent Arising. Monoism. "I am that I am". Beautiful :-)

> It is not a claim on the nature of emotions, but rather a claim about the nature of existence itself. In other words, he's speaking figuratively, not literally.

Figuratively = as humans interpret it. The idea of a desolate planet with Adagio playing is sad to us. Life elsewhere may not care. Rocks and stars certainly don't.

>What if we discovered an animal or alien species incapable of experiencing "sadness" as we do? The quoted statement seems to preclude this as a possibility, which is a very strong assumption.

Transcendence of feelings does not imply universality. The fact that a rock cannot (potentially?) feel sadness does not take away something from sadness. Not that I necessarily agree with the authors point of view, but our feelings could be conduits of pure feelings (as a conditional consumption) and at the same time pure feelings can be reifications of felt experiences (production.)

>Citation needed

So if I wrote the same thing citing OP would you be happy? I think what you are looking is for a citation of proof. On the other hand, do you have any citation/proof to substantiate your disbelief of the statements? I do not think we need a proof for every statement we make. After all, we are more than proof machines, and exploration of the unknown is what leads us to more discoveries. I read this as an opinion/philosophical piece and found it enjoyable in the questions it raises, such as those you focus on.

The claim you cite is essentially a statement of preference regarding a matter of naming/categorization/semantics.

Suppose you were to distinguish some subset of the Universe, labeling it "sadness"; what sets of things would belong in that subset?

Some might consider "sadness" to be a subset of "emotion experienced by a human", which seems pretty reasonable.

The things perceived by the sad person, the things enacted by the sad person--these things are hard to cleanly cut/isolate from the experiencing of emotion of sadness.

The persons experience of sadness is definitely the center of "sadness", but I could imagine expanding "sadness" to include also the inputs and the outputs of that moment, e.g. a sad story. If there were no people left to experience the Adagio, the Adagio would be what was left of the people; I feel comfortable considering it a part of that "sadness"-branch of the human event.

If we find some thing A not really related to "sadness", I can still call thing B as "sadness"

If you consider soul, will, life to be attributes only of humans, you are distinguishing us to be super special. Is my reading a text that changes the way I cycle/move through spacetime so innately different from the collision of two masses? If we allow soul, will, life to apply to the other things that move, we can find the parallels that show humans as an emergent part of nature, whose behavior fits the general scheme of things.

If I am conscious of a flashing light when I register it in my mind, my mind/brain responding to it some regular way, then is not a rock conscious of the earth when it accelerates towards it? Maybe the rock isn't conscious of its own consciousness of the Earth, but it's definitely conscious of the Earth.

Consciousness has connotations of the complexity of human thought, but the crux of it is interaction/cause-effect/perception-action.

I'm pretty sure humans are made of the same stuff as everything else, stuff that we perceive patterns in, but that ultimately transcends our interpretation of it.

I always enjoy following people's journeys through particular artworks, and on that level I greatly enjoyed this article.

On the level of philosophy of art I found that its starting premise (art's non-discursiveness) is undermined by the analyses of the paintings it uses as illustrations, not least by its final deconstruction of a Vemeer.

If you like this kind of discourse, check out what the medieval Indians have to say about aesthetics from the View of non-dual Shaiva Tantra, and the concept of "rasa" (aesthetic sentiment).

A good book to start with this is Tantra Illuminated, by Christopher Wallis. It only spends a short bit explaining rasa from the tantric perspective, but it very much comes from a similar stream of ideas as, "Aesthetic vision apprehends the universe as an immanent field of living forces. All of reality is ensouled, willful, alive. Small wonder, then, that works of art present the world as innately sentient."

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