Art and the Mind
Riccardo Manzotti is Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Institute of Human, Language and Environmental Sciences in Milan. He is devoted to the understanding of the nature of the conscious mind by 3 approaches: 1) creating artificial models of consciousness, 2) using art as a tool to probe the structure of the human mind and 3) by understanding the aesthetic experience.
Is the aesthetic experience inborn?
The capability of aesthetic experience is inborn in the neural structure of the brain, particularly in the capability of abstracting concepts and percepts. This has been clearly outlined and stressed by Semir Zeki's work on neuro-aesthetics. But, such innate capability is different from the development that aesthetics achieved thanks to the cultural evolution of our species. We must always keep in mind that our brain underwent two processes of development. The first, and more ancient, is phylogenetic development. However the brain, among all products of natural selection, is unique in its complexity. The order of magnitude of its complexity is well beyond any other system either biological or artificial. Such complexity if fleshed out during the ontogenetic development in which the brain gets entangled with its environment in many ways still not well understood.
One more thing that I should probably have mentioned from the start: aesthetic experience could be very different since there are many different notions of what “aesthetics” is. However I believe there is a common root shared by all possible definition of aesthetics – namely the perception of value. Value could be something completely different in different cultural contexts (beauty, truth, social usefulness, faithfulness, originality, integration, and so on) but in order to refer in any meaningful way to some version of aesthetics, we need both terms: perception and value. And both terms depend, in very intricate ways, on the innate structure that allow us in perceiving our world and fleshing out our environment.
Can we better comprehend the aesthetic experience by understanding the functioning of the brain?
Aesthetic experience does take place neither in a void nor in a pure conceptual space. Aesthetic experience takes place as a result of human brain activities. It is a little bit like the old Aristotelian saying about metaphysics: if you don't know it, you will do bad metaphysics. We can't underestimate the importance of a true understanding of the neural roots of our thoughts, emotions, values, and aesthetics. Of course this is different from advocating a neural reductionism of aesthetics to pure chemical and functional processes. On the contrary, neuro-aesthetics and psychology of art will allow us to probe into the most inner aspects of our aesthetics life. They will allow us to understand why the physical reality is capable of harbouring something like aesthetic experience.
How can artificial consciousness help us in that process?
The relation between the subject and the object had always been at the centre of many (if not all) works of art. The very fact of creating a work of art establishes a subject-object framework of some kind. More often than not, art tried to overcame and shift such boundaries. Bioart is a wonderful example in this sense. At the turn of the twentieth century something completely unprecedented is taking place: human beings are in the process of creating new artificial subjects. They will achieve this ambitious goal in two ways: either modifying existing biological beings or creating a conscious machine. In the former case they could obtain a super ape, a pan sapiens sapiens or they could modify our own code getting something like a homo super sapiens. But this is not my field, and I can only make polite guesses about it. In the latter case, which I know a little better, engineers will design and implement conscious machines (robot) capable of having phenomenal experiences and, perhaps, aesthetical experience. Artificial consciousness will modify our traditional idea of what a subject is and thus it will modify our notion of what aesthetics is – subject themselves could be the matter of work of art.
How can art and science help in the understanding of the nature of the mind?
Art is a powerful probe to peer inside the structure of the mind. It is an extraordinary lens that allows us to access aspects of our mental life that would be otherwise inaccessible. I like to see art in the same way as Mondrian did: an externalization of knowledge. More simply, I consider art as a way to make knowledge perceivable and experience-able in a way unapt to logic reasoning. Many artists in the recent and not so recent past were not ashamed in using a word that is now almost a taboo. I refer to the T word – namely Truth. Well, I am probably very naïve, but I still think that both art and science strive to get to the same target – Truth – albeit across completely different theoretical landscapes. As to the mind, we are in a very exciting moment now. Nobody really knows what the mind is (whether is a neural property, a completely unknown phenomenon, or a functional process) but several disciplines are currently tackling to get a grasp of what the mind is: neuroscience, philosophy of mind, psychology, physics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. I believe that the disreputable word “Truth” will get involved since the mind is probably the junction were knowledge and experience, subject and object, art and world have to finally meet.
