• It is still impressive to see a painting that looks like a photographic depiction. But what is impressive? Imagine a machine that converted high-resolution photographs into oil paintings with great accuracy. How would we regard the resulting image — with more or less reverence than if the same image were produced by human hand? Most likely less because, it would be argued, it requires less skill and labour to produce the image by machine than by hand.
• (This argument would overlook the skill and labour embodied in the machine, which is still human skill and labour, albeit extended through mechanical means.)
• Comparing a two images of photographic precision — one generated mechanically and one by human artist — we would revere the one produced by the artist more than the one produced by the mechanical process. Why? because the human-generated one appears to contain more skill and labour. Thus what impresses us is the implicit skill and labour in the hand-crafted image, although both are visually identical.
• The quality that causes us to be impressed — the implicit human skill — is absent in the mechanically-generated, though visually identical, picture. This demonstrates the continuity between mind and world: we experience the world as ideas.
