why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?

[bennyboy]

I like to think of all truths as relative to specific contexts.

Well, then we can be friends again:

I've coined a term which I often use, Truth-in-Context. Given a context, it's perfectly fine to refer to truths that don't also apply to the system upon which they supervene. For example, I can demonstrate that my desk is flat by running my hand over it or using some kind of leveling device. In the context of every day human existence, it's as true that my desk is flat as anything else might be said to be true.

But when you're talking about supervenient properties, it's hard to choose which type or level of context to use-- and, in fact, many of the disagreements come from the fairly arbitrary task of setting that context. Does mind supervene on the brain as a whole, or is it intrinsic in some kind of unknown way to self-referential information over time, or is it that every interchange of energy in the Universe is also an essential atomic nano-conscious event? QM goofiness kind of makes me believe that there's infinitely more "mind" in this Universe than we can understand, because it's not in a form that we can relate to.

In looking at drugs, then we are definitely looking at the electrochemical level-- inhibition of neurotransmitter uptake, for example, and we can say that a drug has a causal relationship to behavior. Trying to look at drug effects without reference to brain function and the effects on our experience would be silly.

But I'm not sure that psychogony-- the existence of mind at all rather than the lack of it at all, isn't better explained in terms of QM. I might even say that just as QM particles are really only defined in statistical terms, mind might only be defined in idealistic or metaphorical terms-- there may be nothing there except the awareness itself, as paradoxical as that seems when we know something about brain function.

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I'd like to introduce an idea for discussion-- transcendence of supervenient properties, especially information. It seems to me that an .mp3 file, for example, while it is dependent on SOME medium or mechanism, has a life of its own. You could run Windows 10 on silicon based systems, or in a collection of abacuses manipulated by clever monkeys, and so long as your drivers crash for no reason and it insists on updating even though you keep telling it not to, it's still just Windows-- I'd say that Windows is transcendent of whatever mechanism it supervenes on.