why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

The simple acts of reading or hearing poetry causes the frostitrons in the shellybral chaucertex to flood the brain with emmersonophins, which in turn stimulates the spencerelle centres, causing a general feeling of happiness.

Glad I could help.

Boru

The extra dose of lithium I took is disabling my ability to understand you.

That's odd - most people tell me it helps.

Boru

[Belacqua]

You're just changing the subject because you like being a contrarian twat.

Sorry, my mistake.

[Belacqua]

For a clear explanation of why neuroscience is not an appropriate method to analyze the arts, you could start with Alva Noe's book Strange Tools, Art and Human Nature.

The author is a philosopher and cognitive scientist and a member of Berkeley University's Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences.

[Angrboda]

Is his argument as bad as yours? Birds of a feather fly together, as they say.

[zainab]

I think we have to say they have realistic existence. 

Consider the alternative: suppose you say "I had an idea." And somebody who thinks that ideas don't have existence would say, "No, you didn't." But if you can describe the idea and convey it to others, then the objection that it was just an illusion and didn't exist is silly. 

This is a big problem for materialists, I think. Because the idea itself (or the perceived sensation, or the mind-only speech act, or whatever) does have real existence, but it is not identical with the electrochemical brain event. So what kind of existence it has is difficult to define. 


OMT !!!!!

Is there a Third kind of Existence?

Is there a Third kind of Existence?

At this point I don't think anybody can say. 

Currently there are no scientific theories as to how brain cell activity can present to a self as a phenomenal experience. Some people (e.g. Noam Chomsky) think that there are just limits to what people can understand, and this may be one of those limits. As you point out elsewhere, we evolved for survival, not understanding, and there is no reason to think that everything in the world will be understandable to us. 

It's also possible that science will undergo another paradigm shift, of the type that Descartes and Isaac Newton brought about before, and new ways of thinking will allow a unification of currently unexplainable unreconcilable phenomena. Ideas like panpsychism attempt to unify matter with thought, but this is speculative.


So far it's a mystery, and there are not even suggestions as to how to start solving it in a testable scientific way.

I wish i have a long life just to see if there is ahope.. that we could solve this

[The Grand Nudger]

Sad thought...but there's a good chance that none of us will live to see that - particularly if there's no standard schematic for brain processes at a specific scale.  The curious part of me would definitely love to know..but the cautious part realizes that it would be one of the most terrifying bits of knowledge to possess...and then weaponize. Thoughts are already lethal as is...lol.

[Belacqua]

I wish i have a long life just to see if there is ahope.. that we could solve this

In a way it's frustrating, because we are getting a clearer view of how much we can't understand. 

If you're hoping for a paradigm shift, I guess it's cheering to see that our current paradigms of science are starting to unravel. There are more and more issues that seem nonsensical or insoluble by any current theories. 

This is what happened with the old paradigm. After all, the geocentric model worked very well in practice for more than a thousand years. Every time someone used it to predict an eclipse or navigate by the stars safely to harbor, it gave added confidence to the Ptolemaic model. It took a long time for observations to cast doubt on that model. And understandably, after a thousand plus years of solid empirical evidence, a lot of people were unwilling to give it up based on Galileo's early, not-yet-confirmed studies. We all see the old paradigm-breakers as heroes, because we live safely distant from the controversy. But we can be confident that whoever throws the first brick will be ridiculed and reviled by the establishment of today. 

For a clear introduction to the limits of our current paradigm, here is a speech by Chomsky. Note particularly what he says about the brain/mind problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0

He is not optimistic that we will ever be able to solve the big problems that are starting to present themselves.

[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.

[Alan V]

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.

[Belacqua]

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.