RE: why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?
January 10, 2019 at 5:29 am
(This post was last modified: January 10, 2019 at 5:34 am by bennyboy.)
(January 10, 2019 at 4:03 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: Begging what question? It was just a comment on the nature and amount of evidence available to us. Smashing a melon with a hammer is actually a pretty good demonstration of material monism. See the hammer..see the melon? Those two things are evident. Do the two evident things account for what's about to happen, or is there some non-evident special sauce that we have to add before we get to the fun bit with melon flying everywhere? That's the trick, for idealism..to make something of nothing in the minds of a bunch of material girls, living in a material world. That, itself, may account for some of the confluence of interest between idealism and religious hegemony in the first place.The problem is that you can have an experience without depending on the ontological nature of the object. It might be in the Matrix or the Mind of God. So long as your experiences are consistent enough to provide utility, then that's fine. What you can't do, however, even hypothetically, is have an experience, even an "objective" one, without the agency of a sentient experiencer. No scientific measurements, no rehashing experiments, no discussions of science over coffee, no amount of listening to the brightest scientific minds at MIT-- none of these experiences upon which your world view depends are anything other than ideas so far as you can ascertain.
"I see a watermelon, I hear the smashing sound. I've done this before, and I think that smashed watermelons will almost always say SPLAT!" works in all contexts without regard to philosophical positions. "I have a mind, it must come from the brain, because all of reality is material and exclusively so" does not-- it requires the acceptance of that objective material reality BEFORE you can say those things meaningfully. To hit this with a virtual hammer-- it requires the IDEA of an objective material reality. And the utility of this idea does not shed any light on whether it represents reality or not.
In fact, I'd argue that QM very much proves that reality, whatever it is, is NOT representable as anything other than a collection of ideas.
+1 for using the song reference, though for maximum points you should have linked the video. Also, in a sense, it brings us back to the OP, which is about the nature of consciousness as it relates to enjoyment of the arts.
