why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?

[Belacqua]

You have accepted quite a complex collection of philosophical assumptions in arriving at your "simplest explanation."

This is good! This is an important thing to recognize!

On another thread recently I was severely scolded for suggesting we have reasons to believe the things we believe. That when we hear a claim, we evaluate it and accept or reject it based on things we hold to be true. It was angrily suggested to me that when we hear about unicorns, we can in fact reject claims of their existence with no reasons whatsoever -- as if somehow we have direct access to some sort of truth. 

The criteria we use to evaluate what we hear or read are often taken so much for granted that we just assume we are right. And of course this is dangerous, and exactly the sort of thing that skeptics like us should be working on.

[bennyboy]

Well, it's always like this-- changing your world view is inefficient, so you'll tend to filter new info through what you already believe you "know," even if that knowledge is an enumeration of repeated statements by the people around you as you develop through childhood and young adulthood.

People can "know" God is real, and base arguments from that "truth." They can "know" the world is obviously flat, or that someone who says "I smell smoke" is really smelling smoke, rather than just seeming to. They can "know" that there's a deterministic material universe with only one possible resolution at a given moment, or that consciousness is a byproduct of the brain's evolved ability to process the environment.

One of the great advantages of science is that our assumptions about what we "know" in daily life are turned upside down. Anyone who "knows" about QM, or "knows" how QM manifests as material objects, and subsequently as mental experiences, is for sure stringing a series of declarations by fiat, and not using as careful a collection of measured inferences and logical conclusions as they allude to.

[The Grand Nudger]

The simplest concept, like the number 1..has an elaborate logical underpinning...lol. 

[Belacqua]

Back to the OP...

So let's assume that everything asserted about poetry and fMRI studies so far is true. We can watch areas of the brain activate to see how it responds to poems. And since we all read poems while in a claustrophobic narrow tube that's clunking loudly while we can't move our heads, this is a realistic representation of normal life.

If it's a happy poem, the happy part of the brain activates. If it's a poem about warm and fuzzy things, the warm and fuzzy part activates.

If someone asks us later if we enjoyed the poem, and we lie, the fMRI results can show that we're lying. Because lying about poetry is something that science needs to work on.

In my opinion, nothing at all that's important about poetry is addressed by anything that neuroscience can do.

But maybe this requires us to define what it is that's good about poetry. Maybe we want to take a normative approach, and declare that only that which can be detected in a machine can be declared good about a poem, because we are committed to purely materialistic studies. Some people might actually hold that whatever is detectable and quantifiable is real and good, and that which isn't should be denounced.

So what should poems do? Is this something which neuroscience can address?

[The Grand Nudger]

Technically, an fmri can show that you're lying about enjoying something.  Dead pleasure centers plus "I loved it!"= liar.

The answer to the opq remains "something like a drug addiction" - and all of the babble in between doesn't change the fact that we know that.

[Belacqua]

Technically, an fmri can show that you're lying about enjoying something.  

Right, that's what I said.

[The Grand Nudger]

In your own schizoid way..sure...I don't need to quote you....right.........?

[Angrboda]

In my opinion, nothing at all that's important about poetry is addressed by anything that neuroscience can do.

That's a subjective value judgement that is by definition arbitrary. You may care about what you value, but if you want other people to do likewise, you need something more.

[Alan V]

What you aren't addressing are the important questions:
1)  If science is about observation, what observations do you make to establish whether a given system does/doesn't have a subjective experience of reality?

I already answered: a living body with an operational brain and nervous system.

2)  Why is there any such thing as subjective experience in a material monist reality, in which all process are mechanistic?

I already answered: because there is nothing external which can assure the survival of complex creatures, so they must be self-motivated -- which also requires subjective states as feedback.

You have said that awareness brings survival benefits.  If by awareness, you mean the ability to process and interact with the environment, so as to maintain viability long enough to reproduce, fine-- but an advanced machine could do that.  If by awareness, you mean the subjective knowledge of what things are like, then that is not really clear at all.

But what you are missing is that evolution could not have created such an advanced machine, because there is nothing in hostile or indifferent environments to do so. Only intelligent humans with their own motivations could, which is also why such a machine would never require consciousness. Programming imposed from without supplants the functions of evolved awareness.

I would like to add that your further question indicates that you are looking for reductionistic answers about consciousness. I think it is an emergent property, and is therefore not reducible to mechanistic physics. It depends, instead, on a very complex arrangement of materials -- without which it couldn't exist. This is why consciousness disappears with death. It doesn't split up into all the pieces of consciousness.

[bennyboy]

What you aren't addressing are the important questions:
1)  If science is about observation, what observations do you make to establish whether a given system does/doesn't have a subjective experience of reality?

I already answered: a living body with an operational brain and nervous system.

And this is based on what? Your godlike understanding of the nature of consciousness? A hunch? What? Since you are such a huge champion of scientific technique. . . what particular scientific techniques have you applied in arriving at this deep understanding of the nature of subjective awareness?

2)  Why is there any such thing as subjective experience in a material monist reality, in which all process are mechanistic?

I already answered: because there is nothing external which can assure the survival of complex creatures, so they must be self-motivated -- which also requires subjective states as feedback.

I believe you're making stuff up, and you do not in fact know the nature of consciousness, or what is required for it to exist. You claim to be big on science, but you've supplied absolutely nothing but statement by fiat, which is the opposite of science.

But what you are missing is that evolution could not have created such an advanced machine, because there is nothing in hostile or indifferent environments to do so.  Only intelligent humans with their own motivations could, which is also why such a machine would never require consciousness.  Programming imposed from without supplants the functions of evolved awareness.

Eh. If you are a material monist, then evolution HAS in fact created such an advanced machine, except that this particular advanced machine IS capable of subjective awareness. What you haven't explained is why you think one advanced machine can experience qualia, while you insist that the other could not. How, exactly, do you claim to know such a distinction?

I would like to add that your further question indicates that you are looking for reductionistic answers about consciousness.  I think it is an emergent property, and is therefore not reducible to mechanistic physics.  It depends, instead, on a very complex arrangement of materials -- without which it couldn't exist.  This is why consciousness disappears with death.  It doesn't split up into all the pieces of consciousness.

So basically, you take the brain and say "See. . . this is what's required!" That's not a particularly compelling explanation. I suppose rain requires wetness, and the creation of the Cosmos requires matter and time? Deepity.