why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?

[bennyboy]

By the way, Zainab, if nobody's mentioned it, the essential issue is about "qualia," knowing what things are like-- what it's like to taste chocolate, for example.

We are our bodies.  Stuff which happens to our bodies happens to us.  Thus "qualia" only become a problem when people think of consciousness as somehow independent of the body.  But our bodies are what are conscious.

That's an expression of material monism by fiat, not an observable truth.  Don't believe me?  Given any physical system X, how would you establish that it does / doesn't experience qualia?

The brain's easy, because we can poke it and people say "I smell smoke" or whatever; we can correlate neural systems or responses with subjective reports, and need only make the assumption that if a body says "ouch" it is actually feeling pain rather than simply seeming to.  But what about a general test of consciousness for say a robot, or a complex mechanism found on some planet's moon near Alpha Centauri?

---

We are our bodies.  Stuff which happens to our bodies happens to us.  Thus "qualia" only become a problem when people think of consciousness as somehow independent of the body.  But our bodies are what are conscious.

The trouble with qualia is that nobody knows how we get them.

If you believe in mind/body dualism or res cogitans that's not a problem -- you just say qualia are a different substance. But if you believe, as most brain scientists do, that the mind arises from the body, then the trouble is that how qualia arise is completely unknown.

Yes, it's quite a nasty logical loop, actually.  Our minds (brains?) are capable of experiencing "truths" which aren't represented in reality at all.  For example, I might say something like "Wow, this marble table top is almost perfectly flat," when in fact it consists of a cloud of shapeless quantum wave functions kind of vibrating in space.  In fact, the idea of discrete objects AT ALL is probably a human construction.

So when we say "A brain's a thing and it does X and it has property Y," we're already so far down the rabbit hole that just getting out of bed is evidence that we've already made our philosophical questions-- i.e. that we are begging the question.

[Belacqua]

To get back to the original question, it might be worthwhile to look at a poem, and ponder what brain science could help us do. Here is a Baudelaire poem:


Le Guignon

Pour soulever un poids si lourd,
Sisyphe, il faudrait ton courage!
Bien qu'on ait du coeur à l'ouvrage,
L'Art est long et le Temps est court.

Loin des sépultures célèbres,
Vers un cimetière isolé,
Mon coeur, comme un tambour voilé,
Va battant des marches funèbres.

— Maint joyau dort enseveli
Dans les ténèbres et l'oubli,
Bien loin des pioches et des sondes;

Mainte fleur épanche à regret
Son parfum doux comme un secret
Dans les solitudes profondes.

It's easy enough to imagine which brain areas will be activated and visible to an MRI machine when we read this. The part of the brain that deals with the French you learned in school; the part that analyzes language; the part that recognizes things you've read before; the part that registers pleasure; etc. But does that tell us anything about either the poem or our relationship with it?

A good reader of the poem will be working on all kinds of interesting things. For example, how Baudelaire's description of melancholy resembles, or doesn't, our experience of melancholy. If it's different, is this interesting to us? Is it like Burton's view of melancholy, or Freud's? Poets are often tricky in what they do. Is Baudelaire being ironic? Intentionally false so as to be provocative? Then you notice that the sestet is a translation of a portion of Gray's Elegy. There is recognition, surprise, and pleasure in this unexpected appearance -- the poets are so wildly different -- what is going on here? What new spin has Baudelaire put on Gray by incorporating this translation into something new? What is the relation of the world-views of these two poets?

In the mid-20th century the prevailing theory was that after you've once read Gray's Elegy, there will forever after be a particular cell, or synapse, or site, or something, in your brain which is devoted to that poem. It was the scientific consensus, and has since collapsed. Things are far more complicated.

It's amusing to think that some poet with access to an MRI machine might make this the criteria for a good poem: he wants a single sonnet to activate every single area of the brain. That would be a fun goal, and would still tell us nothing interesting about either the poem or ourselves.

[Belacqua]

OK, here's another one I read at the laundromat just now. This is by Christina Rossetti.



Ten years ago it seemed impossible
That she should ever grow as calm as this,
With self-remembrance in her warmest kiss
And dim dried eyes like an exhausted well.
Slow-speaking when she has some fact to tell,
Silent with long unbroken silences,
Centred in self yet not unpleased to please,
Gravely monotonous like a passing bell.
Mindful of drudging daily common things,
Patient at pastime, patient at her work,
Weary perhaps but strenuous certainly.
Sometimes I fancy that we may one day see
Her head shoot forth seven stars from where they lurk
And her eyes lightnings and her shoulders wings.

Everything we learn about this poet and this poem add to its richness: the woman it was written about; the fact that, from our perspective it seems to describe Rossetti as well; the everyday language of most of the poem, that erupts into quotations from Revelation in the couplet; the fact that it is so British and avoids the influence of Ruskin which had so much effect on her brother and his circle; the seriousness of her religion which set her apart from the Bohemians among whom she lived.

I honestly can't imagine how neuroscience could tell us anything at all about all this.

[bennyboy]

Well what science will do is get down to correlates-- read this or that poem, or have a subject read it, or whatever, and see what brain systems light up and how. Eventually, you'll be able to watch people listen to a poem and tell which poem they're listening to. You could correlate THAT action to other things: how people's brains work in love, or in thinking about chocolate, or a million other relationships, and thereby have something to say.

But what neuroscience CAN'T do is explain why there's subjective enjoyment at all, or even a subjective mind-- as opposed to the Universe having no such thing.

[Belacqua]

Well what science will do is get down to correlates-- read this or that poem, or have a subject read it, or whatever, and see what brain systems light up and how.

 

Yeah, this part makes sense to me. And that's not so far from the article that was pointed to earlier in the thread. You read about poem about kittens, and the part of your brain that likes cute and fuzzy is activated. 

Eventually, you'll be able to watch people listen to a poem and tell which poem they're listening to.  

This part seems more questionable, because a good poem alludes to a lot of different things, and affects different people differently. 

In the Baudelaire I quoted earlier, there are a lot of variables. What if the reader's French isn't very good? What if he isn't familiar with melancholy as a traditional concept? What if he doesn't know who Sisyphus is? What if he doesn't get the allusion to Gray? The brain activations would be very different. 

What if you had to learn the poem in high school, and it had happy memories for you? What if it was your ex-girlfriend's favorite poem and whenever you hear it you want to kill somebody? 

But what neuroscience CAN'T do is explain why there's subjective enjoyment at all, or even a subjective mind-- as opposed to the Universe having no such thing.

Yes, this is the main problem. The jump from the electrochemical events to the experiences is unexplainable. 

But if you want to say that on this forum, prepare for personal attack.

[bennyboy]

But if you want to say that on this forum, prepare for personal attack.

Oh, it's coming. I'll be "disingenuous," "moving goalposts," "defining things wrongly," or "you're stupid and ugly and your mother dresses you funny."

---

This part seems more questionable, because a good poem alludes to a lot of different things, and affects different people differently. 

In the Baudelaire I quoted earlier, there are a lot of variables. What if the reader's French isn't very good? What if he isn't familiar with melancholy as a traditional concept? What if he doesn't know who Sisyphus is? What if he doesn't get the allusion to Gray? The brain activations would be very different. 

What if you had to learn the poem in high school, and it had happy memories for you? What if it was your ex-girlfriend's favorite poem and whenever you hear it you want to kill somebody? 

Yeah, it's harder. Let's say that all listeners are approached with the same performance of a poem. Some will enjoy it, and some will be annoyed by the voice which they find too nasal, too whiny or whatever.

Nevertheless, over massive enough samples, like if the entire human species is connected to the Matrix, I believe a strong system could probably not only know what poem it is based on certain metric or audio responses, but even say something about what kind of person is listening to the poem-- in what way they like or dislike it, and why.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20...085237.htm

This is about music, and I think poems would probably be harder but a reasonably similar process.

[Alan V]

We are our bodies.  Stuff which happens to our bodies happens to us.  Thus "qualia" only become a problem when people think of consciousness as somehow independent of the body.  But our bodies are what are conscious.

That's an expression of material monism by fiat, not an observable truth.  Don't believe me?  Given any physical system X, how would you establish that it does / doesn't experience qualia?

The brain's easy, because we can poke it and people say "I smell smoke" or whatever; we can correlate neural systems or responses with subjective reports, and need only make the assumption that if a body says "ouch" it is actually feeling pain rather than simply seeming to.  But what about a general test of consciousness for say a robot, or a complex mechanism found on some planet's moon near Alpha Centauri?

No, what I was actually doing was describing an observation which solves the qualia problem. The qualia problem is framed wrong by consciousness studies. So I was reframing it.

The criteria for consciousness is an operational biological self -- a nervous system with a brain in a body. Robots will therefore never experience qualia. At most they will be sophisticated puppets because they don't self-organize evolutionarily.

The trouble with qualia is that nobody knows how we get them.

If you believe in mind/body dualism or res cogitans that's not a problem -- you just say qualia are a different substance. But if you believe, as most brain scientists do, that the mind arises from the body, then the trouble is that how qualia arise is completely unknown.

Yes, it's quite a nasty logical loop, actually.  Our minds (brains?) are capable of experiencing "truths" which aren't represented in reality at all.  For example, I might say something like "Wow, this marble table top is almost perfectly flat," when in fact it consists of a cloud of shapeless quantum wave functions kind of vibrating in space.  In fact, the idea of discrete objects AT ALL is probably a human construction.

So when we say "A brain's a thing and it does X and it has property Y," we're already so far down the rabbit hole that just getting out of bed is evidence that we've already made our philosophical questions-- i.e. that we are begging the question.

Qualia arose because that's what worked evolutionarily. Complex biological creatures which didn't care what happened to them couldn't survive in their indifferent or hostile environments.

And of course the marble table top is flat. Such observations are no less real than quantum observations. The world is not reductionistic in my opinion, but emergent.

[Angrboda]

I honestly can't imagine how neuroscience could tell us anything at all about all this.

And yet it does. Given your assertion, I can only conclude that you lack imagination.

---

But if you want to say that on this forum, prepare for personal attack.

Oh you big baby. You've responded to both personal attacks and substantive criticism by labeling both as personal attacks and reasons for your disengagement. That's just you being dishonest and hypersensitive.

[bennyboy]

Thoreauvian, you are enumerating the points of your world view. Saying "X is good, so must be evolution" is not a particularly convincing argument for why the Universe has the capacity, under any material formation or process, of sustaining subjective experience. Why, for example, couldn't things learn, interact, say stuff, make babies, and so on purely mechanically without ever really having qualia?

And more importantly, how am I to establish that isn't the case?

Alternately, how am I to determine that any of the things I take as real aren't just idealistic representations? How do I know space is real, or anything of the objects in it or their properties? By experiencing them as such, maybe? That leads to a nasty circle-- if 100% of everything you base a theory of mind on is dependent on a world view you developed with that mind, you're going to have a problem establishing a foundation. The Matrix might be feeding you mutually coherent data that represents no actual reality, or perhaps the Mind of God makes pure ideas seem like physical reality, or maybe Ulthar the Magnificent is poking your (Xarathrian, not human) brain with a hard-tipped boodledyboo in a jar somewhere because you've been dead for 10 Xarathrian days and the Ritual of Rezooberification is set to commence.

---

I honestly can't imagine how neuroscience could tell us anything at all about all this.

And yet it does.  Given your assertion, I can only conclude that you lack imagination.

I'll bite. What does neuroscience tell us about why neurons (or any other physical structures or processes) are capable of subjective experience, rather than a mechanical simulation with identical outcomes: loving-like behaviors, crying-like behaviors, getting mad in a text forum-like behaviors, but without any actual awareness? How, even, does neuroscience establish whether any given physical system is doing so?

[Angrboda]

And yet it does.  Given your assertion, I can only conclude that you lack imagination.

I'll bite.  What does neuroscience tell us about why neurons (or any physical structure or process) are capable of subjective experience, rather than a mechanical simulation with identical outcomes?

How, even, does science establish whether any given physical system experiences qualia?

That's not what he said, asshole. If you're just going to make straw men and knock them down then you can just eat dirt.