How art invented humanity | Hacker News Reader

How art invented humanity

aeon.co

105 pointsprismatic55 comments

Thought-provoking article. When the cave painters were at work, they most probably didn’t see themselves as “artists” and of course not scientists, philosophers. That was an age where all those things were together at once, living in a religious state, I think. Little by little, they separated (to sometimes unhappy results). Brings to mind the old myth where humans were both male and female originally, but gods, fearing their power, separated them, leading us to look for our half. Same with art and science, I think.

So while Picasso is perhaps right to say “We have invented nothing “ as quoted in the article when he means art is as old as humans, the realization that something is art, is perhaps invented afterwards.

I also reject the two kinds of art thesis that’s proposed here:

“It follows that there must also be two kinds of art – similarly different and yet, somehow, complementary. The first is what I call artifice: art conceived so as to confirm, reinforce and extend the empire of facts in which we ordinarily live. … Examples come readily to mind: propaganda, pornography and advertising; sentimental, moralistic or didactic art”

Many current artists would lump, say, paintings by Old Masters into this category. Facing the statue of David past month in Florence, it was eye opening how much such a classic statue of a human can move people!

? Sentimental means excessively moving, so how is that showing that the statue of David doesn't fit the category (actually here my quibble is with the article, not you), and, just because people miscategorize it in your opinion, how does that mean there's no such category?

Edit: I see the article is laying claim to being properly, meaningfully moved. It seems that by including "sentimental" the article is saying: Through art, we are in touch with the truth and beauty of the mystery of creation itself, but you are just having an unnecessary moment because you saw a cliche.

I happen to be re-reading Deleuze right now (and knew Bergson at some point), and I'm not really sure what the author adds to the equation. I.e. art is the pure desire-machine, schizophrenic and completely deterritorialized, whereas pornography is the desire-machine territorialized by determinate conditions of e.g. OnlyFans. If anyone else knows Deleuze I'd be curious; him and Guattari is not exactly a vibe hang. Long-winded way of saying it seems like a lazy dichotomy.

My data point is I got to stare at Wheatfield with Crows and The Death of Marat within 24 hours and I was walking around Brussels a drooling mess, only capable of leaving decoy cheap sunglasses for pickpockets

"All art is, in the end, adoration" J.Campbell. (quoting by memory), essentially art and humanity are one in those times, no one invented the other.

In more recent times things are changed, life and art are on different path, but still in reinessance times people received education bot in liberal arts and in scientific (by the times) matters. Art and science still talks under the surface.

“Only humans produce ecstatic art”

I guess they have never heard of the bowerbird: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/eptuty/b...

Or maybe simply he miss one poin: all the rest of universe -is- art.

Although in recent times humanity has often wrongly placed and considered itself separate from nature, and in practice, with disastrous results, acts as such, since its origins, humanity has lived in continuity with nature, as do other species, and its activities have reflected this condition, in which practice, knowledge, learning, and the arts were all part of a whole that contributed to life. In this sense, life possessed the quality of art, just as nature still possesses this artistic quality, a non-duality between form and meaning, between necessity and possibility, in an original, artistic, fundamental state.

the argument is that the bowerbird isn't making ecstatic art though, in the sense that while the bird is still expressing an aesthetically driven directive, its still biologically motivated, which then remains unexamined beyond preference and aversion in its audience (ie potential mate)

the argument the author is instead trying to make is that humans are the only organism that produces ecstatic aesthetic experiences, not simply that it is the only organism that can make pretty things.

Explain how someone like Picasso is not making art to get laid please, or has nothing to do with his biology

I've been reading Wengrow and Graeber's "The Dawn of Everything", and one of the main points they've made so far is that once modern humans became recognizable as such, we were doing all the human-type things we do now: thinking about our place in the world, debating different ways to live and their pros and cons, and so forth.

We tend to think of prehistoric humans as being stupid cavemen, but I suspect we'd find them to basically the same as us, just with a different context and level of knowledge about some things - but also far greater understanding of other things.

I wish there was any way to know when language was developed in (proto?) humans. Our complex grammar is pretty unique in the animal kingdom, and it's clearly linked to our cognition. You can get pretty far with mere vocabulary (just look at the great apes), but once you get into the world of words modifying words and recombining into sentences, you have an absolute explosion of expressible ideas.

When did that happen? IMO, it's pretty clear the Chompsky school is at least partially correct in that we have biological hardware for grammatical language. So we've probably had language as long as we've been homo sapiens. Neanderthals probably spoke, too. But what about Homo Erectus? Australopithecus?

My entirely layman and unsupported conspiracy theory about language is that early hominids likely developed complex sign language and some primitive forms of writing now long lost to time, but vocal language only came with the necessary biology.

Do we have an idea of when the physical capability for vocal language originated? Other great apes have all kinds of vocalizations they can produce, and you don't need THAT many different sounds to support language.

To answer that you'd need to know what even constitutes vocal language. There's a number of languages that make extensive use of clicks and whistles that would seem to me are pretty orthogonal to the ability to pronounce, say, English.

We know from their remains that Neanderthals would have had a rather different range of vocalizations from Homo sapiens, but that doesn't mean they didn't have structured language.

More recent hypotheses that I’ve read is that what we think of language evolved as a tool for internal thought and ordering of ideas and perceptions. Executive function, in a sense.

The externalization of language, whether vocal or gestural, evolved later as a means of serializing the internal language in order to transmit those thoughts to others. Under this hypothesis, the serial nature of language is a limitation of the externalization methods (you can’t produce several words at once, or hear several at once), whereas internal language itself need not be a linear process.

> ...and it's clearly linked to our cognition.

People with global aphasia can still do arithmetic, follow causal reasoning, play chess, pass theory-of-mind tasks, etc. During non-linguistic reasoning, math, music and executive tasks, neuroimaging has revealed that the language centers in the brain are pretty darn quiet.

So the link, and the causal direction if any, is not really known.

There’s a great book called Paleopoetics by Christopher Collin’s that looks at exactly that

One of my craziest ideas is that language created minds and not the other way around. One view of history is that humans evolved brains sufficient to host language, invented language, and then our brains grew around language.

My crazy idea is basically the thesis of this article except swap out "art" and swap in "language". In my view, art is just one form of expression. That is, language predates life.

Although, language is a bit provocative, and I probably mean something closer to semiotics.

Language and "minds" are not unique among humans.

Right, but the question is what came first, minds or language? That is, is language a product of mind or is mind a product of language? Of course another position is that they co-arise and the question of order is ill-formed.

But these ideas have to be placed with respect to the modern and typical materialist/physicalist view of reality. If we trace back time, there was a time before our solar system existed, before our Earth existed, before any kind of physical lifeform existing on the Earth's surface that we could associate with a mind. And we might be tempted in this view to draw a line or identify a point in time where we say "before" and "after". We might say "before this point no minds of any kind existed" and "before this point no language of any kind existed". And if we are to do so then we can talk about how those two points relate to each other.

How does one consistently define "language" and "mind"? I present the following in genuine good faith:

A good case study may be the octopus. They are highly intelligent organisms and a strong argument could be made they have "mind". A quick search [0] shows some evidence they communicate via "posturing and changing color"--is this language? How does one prove an individual has mind?

Regarding the definition of "mind" the mirror test seems very relevant but does "mind exist without the sense of self"? What about emergent phenomena amongst highly social animal groupings...?

Edit: I must be in the "mind" came first camp but in this case mind === consciousness but mind != consciousness

[0] https://www.livescience.com/53514-octopuses-lead-social-live...

As I mentioned in my earlier post, what I mean is closer to semiotics [1], precisely because "language" is too fuzzy a concept and leads to the wrong conclusion. In that view, communication using posturing and changing color is obviously signalling.

As for minds vs. consciousness, etc. we'll just end up in a language game there which isn't productive. Personally, I am more interested in a more abstract conception of "attention" which I see as preceding "awareness" (which may or may not precede self-awareness). But again, how people use these words in different circumstances makes any discussion of the topics nearly impossible unless they are rigorously defined so as to avoid confusion.

But in a "food for thought" kind of diversion, not an argument or even really a point, consider you are walking through a forest and you see some berries and your mouth starts to water. There is some relationship between your attention, your awareness and some kind of information being communicated between nature and you. The berry is signalling something to you and your attention is drawn to it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

I've been slowly getting through the entirety of the original article but it's written out well:

> What I mean here is that art did not serve to express a humanity that already existed. Rather, it acted as the mirror we needed to catch sight of our own image in the flux of nature. The question of when humans invented art leads us to imagine early humans much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves through symbols and figures. The assumption hidden in the question is that they already had minds like ours and simply chose, out of all the things they might have done on a frigid day in the Ice Age, to pick up ochre and make animal pictures. But the evidence, it seems to me, points the other way: it was the practice of making images, repeated over hundreds of generations, that occasioned the emergence of those minds we take for granted. We are putting the cart before the horse when we understand ourselves as the source of sense and meaning. In reality, we are participants in something that exceeds us, and the aesthetic, poetic dimension of great art reconnects us with that excess as a matter of course.

It's interesting to think about iterating over "drawing pictures of animals" before starting to "draw pictures of humans"

Yes, that is close to what I was gesturing at with the walk in the woods and the berries. Before humans had a word for berries or hunger we had a latent relationship with nature, in the ability for nature to draw our attention to objects and effect our nervous system. And the first expression of that relationship may well have been externalized in the pictorial representation of animals, or maybe in gestures, or grunts - we can't know it was too long ago.

A larger point that could be drawn from the article is that we then gained a new kind of relationship, not just with nature but with the very expressions it elicited. Instead of our mouth watering at berries, suddenly our nervous system was reacting to the art we created. It is this indirect relationship, with the symbol itself, that the author is arguing created what we think of as the human mind. So nature creates the grounds for expression creates the grounds for minds. My original point was that "drawing animals" is only one kind of possible expression, and it is possible to broaden our idea of "expressions worth contemplating" well beyond paintings on cave walls, all the way down to how a flower attracts the attention of a bee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Instance_of_the_Letter_in_...

people have been talking about that same thing for a very long time

Sure, I'm not claiming originality. Although I come at it more from a process philosophy/pragmatism angle (Whitehead/Peirce), but that is probably due to my own background and not because any other treatment of similar ideas is better/worse or more or less correct.

Author's argument is that when early humans painted, they weren't expressing an interiority they already had; they were engaging the creative process of reality directly.

I disagree in the sense that reality includes the intangibles which machines cannot (today) reach, which is why any LLM-generated art is, for the most part, not art. It's images, it can be aesthetic or narrative or whatever – but I think it's fine to gatekeep art as an inherently human thing.

I've seen really creative short films put together using vid generators. In that situation, they're just using it as a tool to produce content which is part of a bigger artistic process.

Perhaps there is some level of creativity between which something isn't art but humans can do that with any tool.

There's no hard-and-fast rule of course – but there is a (broad, fuzzy) threshold.

One need only look at the latest superhero reboot in which many true artists had their 'art' reduced to mere 'content'.

One of the most compelling takes on Lascaux is that it isn't art. It's not about idealization, worship, beauty, or being human. It was made by hunters to get closer to their prey. They wanted to become the deer and the buffalo to know them better, so they could ultimately become better hunters of them. Herzog made that point in "Cave of Forgotten Dreams".

“The basic realism of science, then, rests upon the following claim: the Universe is such that facts can be plainly stated within it, even though the facts themselves need not be plain.”

What facts can plainly be stated within this universe? Can facts exist outside the common language within which they are expressed?

E=MC^2 is true in any language, and it remains true in the absence of language.

How can we prove that?

I'm not going to waste my time describing the entirety of the last century of physics, or the numerous technologies we've developed whose operation depends on this being true. We don't have to prove it, it's one of the most thoroughly tested and proven concepts in existence. Read a book.

That answers a different question. The empirical success of the equation in question is strong evidence that the theory captures something about the universe, however it does not prove that the proposition exists, or is true, independently of any language or conceptual framework.

Technologies working can test physical predictions. They cannot test the metaphysical claim that facts have truth independent from common language. Simply asserting that they do is the realism that I am disputing.

Also, the proposition in question is made in a certain language, and is not true in all possible languages.

>The empirical success of the equation in question is strong evidence that the theory captures something about the universe, however it does not prove that the proposition exists, or is true, independently of any language or conceptual framework.

The proof that the proposition exists can be found in the countless references and papers referencing it, including Einstein's original 1905 paper. You can find the Wikipedia page on mass-energy equivalence here[0] and the paper here[1].

And you were talking about language, not conceptual frameworks. Obviously one can imagine conceptual frameworks where E=MC^2 is not true, but your argument was that facts cannot exist and cannot be proven outside of the language with which they are expressed, which is obviously false because observation, experimentation and science are not expressed entirely with language.

>Technologies working can test physical predictions. They cannot test the metaphysical claim that facts have truth independent from common language.

Yes they can, because if facts didn't have truth independent from common language, the technology wouldn't work, or rather, would work differently depending on the language of the user. This obviously isn't the case. We can observe that the universe, made up of stars and planets that don't have language, nevertheless obey the physical laws that we express in language. We can observe that animals which don't have language behave in ways we can describe, and obey physical laws they can't comprehend.

>Also, the proposition in question is made in a certain language, and is not true in all possible languages.

It is. It was true when Einstein wrote it in German, it was true before he wrote it down, it remained true when it was translated into English, it's true in Esperanto, Dutch, Klingon, any language you prefer, because language doesn't define reality, it only describes it. Rename it Q=XZ^01 and it still describes the same fundamental and immutable fact about reality. Write it upside down and it still works the same.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalenc...

[1]https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/E_mc2/www/

Do conceptual frameworks exist outside of language? If so, where do they exist, and how do you define existence in this context?

If facts have truth independent from common language, where do those facts exist, and how do you define existence in this context?

As an example, are you hinting at the existence of facts and truths that are somehow different from the easier definition of formal truths which hold in an assumed axiomatic framework, as happens in mathematics, which itself is a framework of language?

> Write it upside down and it still works the same.

shred it into pieces ! lmao

_Tools_ have a response to this post.

is this a broken AI bot?

Looks like, though a shame if true, since the account is more than 10 years old and presumably had a person behind it at some point.

What suggests that it is?

"_Tools_ have a response to this post" is not a sensible comment that a human would likely make. It reads like a prompt to an AI accidentally pasted into the wrong place.

It is terse but the comment is sensible to me.

OK, what does "_Tools_ have a response to this post" mean to you, in the context of the posted article, and as a response to it? Why would a human being organically reply to the article with that sentence?

tools as an artifact can be contraposed to art as artifact? the juxtaposition hints to a challenge of the article's claims about the dualities of art?

You've lost the plot old chap. Time to go outside and smell the fresh air, get some exercise, talk to a human person.

There's a lot of archaeological evidence that art + toys were made before tools by a good amount of time IIRC. It makes sense to me as humans were always social creative creatures and the ideas that we didn't want to express ourselves 300,000 years ago seems kinda silly.

This is such a classic Aeon title

Haven't read any of their articles in maybe almost a decade (in aggregate they seem so whimsical with fantastical titles) but am bored enough so far today at the 9to5 to where it is an exceedingly great option.

So many thinking to avoid the simple point? IN those times humanity and nature are the same, art and life are one.

Fits the archaeological gap also because Homo erectus controlled fire yet left no art, clothing, or deliberate burials.

Well this is fun, it is deliberately provocative but maybe not dumb. The title itself is something a literalist engineer (myself) would reject, but is about the development of thought that is reflective, self referential. That’s an interesting train of thought.

So I looked at the author and found: Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice https://www.reclaimingart.com/reclaiming-art-in-the-age-of-a...

Not sure if I agree but interesting nonetheless.

> deliberately provocative

Is it?

Or perhaps it's a point of view that you don't agree with? What makes it "deliberate"? The author takes a different PoV than perhaps the most folks here but that's because most folks here are accountants:

> [...] Werner Herzog, for instance, once defended his practice of staging or manipulating scenes in his documentaries by distinguishing two kinds of truth. The first is the purely factual kind that obtains when a statement corresponds to a state of affairs, as when you say ‘the crows are flying over the field’ because the crows happen to be doing just that. Herzog no doubt acknowledges the practical value of this kind of truth, but he holds it in low enough regard to call it ‘the truth of accountants’. The second kind is what he calls ‘ecstatic truth’.

Which is also fine, it's not "provocative" or "slopsationalism", it's just a PoV that is different.

There are many sides to a debate, not just mine. It's not black and white, there is much grey that is just as legitimate as your or my PoVs. And any other PoV isn't by default "provocative" and especially not "deliberately" so.

> Is it?

Absolutely. It is the nature of sharing radical ideas with the world to be provocative. The range of reactions in this thread alone supports the "provocative" part, and of course it's deliberate. Otherwise you would be saying that the author is not aware of how uncommon these ideas are, which I would find extremely hard to believe.

> It's not black and white

Yet you are so firmly convinced that it's white that your whole comment only talks about why it can't possibly be black. You haven't shared your opinion, all you have done is try to invalidate the one you responded to.

> most folks here are accountants:

But it's not that black and white, remember?

It doesn't even make sense, provocative is a good thing for an article to be to most people! It's nice to be moved whichever way by someone else's writing!

There is an assumption on this forum I see a lot that any published written work has some hypothetical ground-level, some wholly un-ornamented, just-the-facts form, and anything the writer adds beyond that is a kind immoral indulgence. With this, provocative is bad because its unnecessary to some 'truer' telos of the text.

It's a kind of funny misunderstanding of writing to see here, because its exactly the one you'd expect a programmer to have!

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