The Pansophic Principle: Seeking common ground between the Arts, Sciences and Humanities.

The forefront of human endeavour is extraordinarily diverse. At one time we have physicists building the CERN particle accelerator to search for the Higgs Boson, philosophers arguing whether mental properties lie inside the brain our outside it, and artists cutting rotating discs in the sides of buildings. Seemingly incompatible as they are, all these activities must somehow be connected: they are all attempts to probe, investigate, understand, and convey the peculiar nature of reality and human experience; they are all aspects of a single world.

Pansophy was defined in the seventeenth century by Comenius as ‘universal knowledge’. At a time when it was theoretically possible for one person to read all the books in circulation the ambition of synthesizing all human knowledge must have seemed attainable. In our own age, with the exponential growth in disciplinary specialism, it is unlikely that one person could absorb all the information relating to their own named discipline, let alone a fraction of the all information in print.

The advent of moveable type in mid-fifteenth century Europe contributed enormously to the spread of ideas during the Renaissance and the consequent emergence of novel ideas and technologies. Access to printed information generated not just new knowledge but combinations of knowledge that had hitherto existed in disconnected planes. Libraries and compendia allowed scholars to cross-reference and even stumble unexpectedly on remote ideas that they were then able to piece together into new systems of thought.

The internet, arguably the most significant development in knowledge distribution since moveable type, offers our own age much the same opportunity to access diverse ideas and find the underlying connections between them, but on a far grander scale. Searching for a term like ‘indeterminacy’ will yield references in areas as disparate as philosophy, mathematics, quantum physics, spiritualism, medical science, art theory, and music. Inevitably the term has a unique history and meaning in each case, yet there is also a sense in which it refers to the same phenomena across all.

An immense task now faces humankind. Knowledge continues to be generated at an ever-expanding rate. New specialisms and hybrid disciplines emerge with increasing frequency. But if we accept the pansophic principle that all this knowledge is, in the end, about the same thing — the nature of reality and human experience — then who is doing the work of reconciling this enormous diversity in order to find within it the patterns and connections that would allow a broader rather than narrower understanding of our condition? This is possibly one of the most important challenges facing human inquiry at this time, and the internet can facilitate this in a way that has few historical precedents.

The pansophic principle, however, is not aimed at the simple unification of all knowledge into an all-encompassing truth. It is not a means of homogenizing human ideas or beliefs into a unitary system — an ambition with unfortunately sinister historical precedents. The diversity and incompatibility of human ideas is part of what gives intellectual life its richness and capacity for innovation. Rather, the challenge is an essentially contradictory one: to appreciate and respect the differences between strands of thought, with their disparate histories and contexts, yet at the same time actively locate the productive resonances between them

Drawing people

CEP Conference, Oxford, 2010

Mind and reality (Thich Nhat Hanh)

‘Recall a simple and ancient truth: the subject of knowledge cannot exist independently from the object of knowledge. To see is to see something. To hear is to hear something. To be angry is to be angry over something. Hope is hope for something. Thinking is thinking about something. When the object of knowledge (the something) is not present, there can be no subject of knowledge’ (1991:45-46).

‘Consider the example of a table. The table’s existence is possible due to the existence of things which we might call “the non-table world”: the forest where the wood grew and was cut, the carpenter, the iron ore which became the nails and screws, and countless other things which have relation to the table, the parents and ancestors of the carpenter, the sun and rain which made it possible for the trees to grow’ (1991:47).

Hanh, Thich Nhat (1991) The Miracle of Mindfulness. London: Rider.

‘When we have a concept about something, its image appears within that concept. For example, when we have a concept of a table, we see an image of that table, but we must remember that our concept is not the thing itself. It is just our perception, which might in fact be very different from the table. A termite, for example, may perceive a table as a feast, and a physicist may perceive it as a mass of rapidly moving particles’ (1992: 54).

‘The notion that things can exist independently of one another comes from the perception that they have a beginning and an end. But it is impossible to find the beginning or end of anything’ (1992:60).

Hanh, Thich Nhat (1992) The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion. Berkley: Parallax Press.

(with thanks to Melanie Chan for the quotes)

The indeterminate in cinema and art

In this paper I will address two moments in cinematic history: a shot that occurs in Robert Wiene's avant-garde production of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) and the attempt by the main protagonist in Antonioni's Blowup (1966) to discern a phantom figure in a blurry section of a photograph. Both moments are examples of what I term 'visual indeterminacy', where images resist easy or immediate interpretation. Visual indeterminacy is in fact quite a common perceptual phenomenon, and although not very widely studied in science it has been recognized and exploited for centuries by visual artists and writers.

I will discuss the phenomena of visual indeterminacy, its perceptual basis, and its wider implications for our understanding of how we see the world. In particular, I will note the impact of indeterminacy on our notion of the 'real,' and close by looking at the work of the artist Gerhard Richter, whose images veer between the mechanically and expressionistically abstract to the photographic and hyper-real. Richter's declaration that works of art should defy easy interpretation will be considered in relation a wider modernist preoccupation with indeterminate meaning.

Keynote presentation
Realism after the European Avant-Garde Conference
University of Paderborn, Germany, October 2010

Perceptual Technology

http://perceptual-technologies.com/

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Art Connections

In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science
Edited by Bruce Clarke, Manuela Rossini

"We live in a time when dialogue between the arts, sciences, and humanities is widely encouraged. Funding agencies offer incentives for scientists to work with artists; books are being written that seek to span C. P. Snow’s “gulf of mutual incomprehension” between scholarly cultures; interdisciplinary conferences are being convened that support cross-area dialogue and report the findings of collaborative projects. There is a sense that previously disconnected fields of study are actively converging.

All this is welcome given the fractured state of contemporary knowledge. Born just over 400 years ago, the poet John Milton is reputed to be the last person who would have been able to read every book then in print. Certainly the well-educated person of his time would have understood a wide range of subjects. The subsequent tendency towards micro-specialism in academia has brought breadth and depth at the price of fragmentation and isolation; no longer could any individual hope to absorb more than a tiny fraction of published information, and most disciplines work in ignorance of each other. Ulrich’s directory of periodicals, which lists most of the world’s scholarly journals, boasts over 300,000 titles, each representing the tip of an iceberg of accumulated knowledge. And a report in 2002 by the Association of American Colleges and Universities identified the “atomization of the curriculum” caused by artificially dividing knowledge into distinct fields as a significant barrier to the future of education..."

With forty-four newly commissioned articles from an international cast of leading scholars,The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science traces the network of connections among literature, science, technology, mathematics, and medicine. Divided into three main sections, this volume:

Links diverse literatures to scientific disciplines from Artificial Intelligence to Thermodynamics
Surveys current theoretical and disciplinary approaches from Animal Studies to Semiotics
Traces the history and culture of literature and science from Greece and Rome to Postmodernism
Ranging from classical origins and modern revolutions to current developments in cultural science studies and the posthumanities, this indispensible volume offers a comprehensive resource for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers.

With authoritative, accessible, and succinct treatments of the sciences in their literary dimensions and cultural frameworks, here is the essential guide to this vibrant area of study.

Published July 2010

Art and Extensionism

In this chapter I will consider some of the consequences of externalism for art. I will argue that some artists have intuitively understood the mind to be something that extends beyond the brain and the body. The kinds of externalist tendencies evident in artistic practice, however, differ somewhat from those found in the more formally expressed theories of science and philosophy. Then I will take an approach I have termed 'extensionism'. Extensionism stresses the extended dimensions of objects and events rather than that which divides them. When this approach is applied to the analysis of art it becomes apparent how widely distributed the mental aspects of artworks are, and how hard it is to put the genie of the conscious mind back into the bottle of the brain.

Book chapter in Aesthetics Beyond the Skin, edited by Riccardo Manzotti, due 2011

Art, indeterminacy and consciousness

One of the functions of the brain and perceptual system is to categorize data from the world into discrete meaningful chunks and so impose distinctions on the world that are consistent with the biological needs of the perceiver. However, under certain conditions such as deep meditation, when afflicted by particular agnosias, or when faced with visually indeterminate stimuli, these object distinctions break down or disappear altogether. The world can then appear as indeterminate, i.e. devoid of the objective distinctions that characterize our habitual engagement with the world (a mode of perception termed ‘nirvikalpa’ in Indian psychology).



I will show that artists have long understood this contingent nature of objective distinctions and tried to create works that evoke indeterminate perception by dissolving the hard, deterministic boundaries around objects. This has resulted in varying degrees of visual indeterminacy in art movements such as impressionism, fauvism, cubism, and abstract expressionism. I will discuss my own paintings, which attempt to induce a visually indeterminate state in the viewer, and the collaborative work I have done with psychophysicists and neuroscientists to investigate the effect of indeterminate artworks on subjects’ responses and brain functions.

This indeterminacy in visual experience is analogous to the inherent indeterminacy operating at quantum levels of reality, according to the standard Copenhagen interpretation. I will suggest that the viewer who interprets an indeterminate image is attempting to ‘collapse’ many potential states into an actual state in the same way states of quantum superposition are said to collapse during observation of sub-atomic events. This, I will argue, suggests a role for consciousness as the process by which the inherent indeterminacy of nature is resolved into the more determinate world we experience.



I will close with the claim that the experience of trying to resolve visually indeterminate states demonstrates how the conscious mind acts to bring the world into being for us.

Paper at Towards a Science of Consciousness, Tucson, April 2010

Art and Posthumanity in a Boundless Reality

While new forms of bio-art seem to signal a change in direction for contemporary art and ideas, they in fact merely extend a tradition that is already well established. When the process of making and observing art is understood in a way that denies the distinction between object and viewer, and recognises the inherent continuity between biology and technology, then artistic forms like bio-art no longer seem so transgressive. This extended view of material and biological existence, I would argue, is essentially what should be understood by the term 'posthuman'. Here the posthuman being is seen as an agent within a boundless reality, and we are faced with the challenge of how to articulate this new reality with concepts that no longer seem adequate to the task.

Paper at Zoontotechnics Conference, University of Cardiff, May 2010

The Posthuman Condition: Progress and Challenges

There have been enormous shifts in the intellectual landscape since the first edition of The Posthuman Condition was published in 1995. The view that the mind is entirely dependent on the brain has been widely and seriously challenged, with theories of enactive perception and extended cognition now gaining significant currency; mid-twentieth century models of artificial intelligence, with their dependence on top-down processing and symbolic logic, have been replaced with situated models of intelligence based on embodied interaction within the environment; and the notion of posthumanism itself — once a minor strand in science fiction literature — is now a major branch of cultural theory, which some have argued is succeeding postmodernism as the defining intellectual idiom of our age.

While all this is to be welcomed, I want to argue that the posthuman conception of reality continues to present us with profound challenges, the importance of which many contemporary theorists are yet to grasp. Take the startling implications of quantum theory, part of standard scientific knowledge for nearly a century now. Thought for a long time to be confined only to the smallest detectable scales, recent experiments have shown how quantum effects can influence events at the human scale of reality. Yet despite this, many thinkers continue to rely on ontological assumptions that were already out of date by the 1920s. Just as vital is the need to incorporate new knowledge arising from the quest to understand consciousness, which in the last 15 years has moved from the margins of psychology to the forefront of science and philosophy. Many recent discoveries in consciousness studies are deeply perplexing and counter-intuitive, and force us to rethink cherished beliefs about human nature.
I will survey these developments and point to where posthuman thinking might further guide us as we struggle to come to terms with developments in science and technology in the gathering posthuman age.

Keynote at The Emergence of the Posthuman Subject Conference, University of Surrey, July 2010

Art and the conscious mind: The artistic contribution to our understanding of human nature

I will argue one reason the nature of consciousness is so deeply mysterious is because there is much more at stake than the relatively local issue of how subjective experience is supported by the biology of the brain — crucial though that question is. I want to explore the possibility that our conscious experience is synonymous with reality itself. For without awareness of ourselves and of the world there is no reality, at least not in the sense we habitually experience it. Take away our self-knowledge, our sense of presence in the environment, our access to immediate memories, thoughts and beliefs, and the condition of existence in which we are immersed from moment to moment disappears.

If conscious experience and reality are synonymous, as I will argue, then we must consider the consequences for our understanding of human nature. For one thing, we may need to think less about a reality that pre-exists us — one that we are passively conscious of — and more in terms of a reality that emerges simultaneously with the dawning of subjective experience — a reality we are actively conscious with. The implications of this for our view of mind, nature and existence will be considered in this paper.

I contend that art and artists have something useful to contribute to questions about mind, nature and existence — questions that have traditionally been addressed through the disciplines of science and philosophy. Using examples from the history of art I will show how artists have explored many of the same essential problems as metaphysicians and scientists, even if they have done so by different means and with different outcomes. Art, therefore, offers a way of investigating metaphysical questions about the mind and reality that richly complements other disciplines and so extends and deepens our understanding of these vital questions.

Paper at Consciousness and Experiential Philosophy Conference, Oxford, September 2010

Art, Perception and the Mysteries of Experience

The idea that there is a world full of real objects existing whether or not we are there to see them is taken for granted by most of us. It seems obvious that the everyday fabric of reality is made of things that have qualities like tangibility, colourfulness, weightiness, smelliness, and tastiness. Yet scientists have known for nearly 200 years that objects in the world have none of these qualities in themselves. All the sensory qualities we associate with the world are not due to the way things are in themselves but are generated by our perceptual systems. It is ultimately our minds that create things as they appear to us, including all the sounds, textures, aromas, and patterns of the world.

In this talk I will give a brief account of the way our perceptual systems work to generate sensory experience, and indicate some of the puzzling consequences that arise, not least the fact that without the presence of the mind there is no reality at all. I will then look at the parallels between the way we construct a perceptual experience of the world and the way artists construct realities through images. In many ways the artistic process mirrors that of perception in that images have to be constructed and interpreted in the same way we have to construct and interpret reality. Using examples of works by Turner, Picasso, and Tanning I will draw attention to some of the mysterious aspects of our perceptual experience that artists have probed through their work.

Paper at International Symposium on Illustration, Cardiff, November 2010

Suspension

I'm currently working on a new book about art and consciousness, so posts to this blog will be few and far between for a while.