Can you see the connection(s) between the following concepts discussed in class?
Put forward your ideas in the form of a comment.
Consciousness
Art & Science
Symathetic magic
Totems
Hamlet
Essences
Abstraction
Plato's forms
Beauty
Fitness
Memes
Epigenetic rules
Super-normal stimuli
The Picasso Effect
Romeo & Juliet
Nature, Art & Language
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28 comments:
A thread of connection can be found out while we link all these concepts with the brain activities, related to the origin and evolution of culture.
Firstly, due to its limited memory, in order to record the particulars and complex images it sees, our brain always seeks essences and abstractions of things, and then creates their synthetic ideals. Plato's 'World of Perfect Ideas' could be thought of as a rationalization of the presence of essences and abstractions created by the visual brain. Our abstractions are then usually projected on the nature, for example with Picasso effect.
On the other side, the foundation of human culture can be explained by epigenetic rules, which can be thought as innate hereditary tendencies to do and think things, for example, we always try to understand and control what we sense is going on, both within us and outside us. That’s why we attempt to simulate the world through consciousness, to use sympathetic magic or totems to control what we consider to be worrying and dangerous. Also, Shakespeare, by writing Hamlet, has created a means to overcome our existential problems that come from consciousness. These developmental rules also bias our aesthetic response to visual design according to elementary abstract shape and degree of complexity. This explains why something is beautiful when it fits its purpose, or fits its model in the world of Ideals. Others illustrations of epigenetic rules are supernormal stimuli and Romeo & Juliet, where we see the ‘essences’ of direction of selection in evolution.
Cultural evolution, as any other evolutionary system, contains a pattern of information, or unit of culture: meme. Memes rely on brains to select, vary and replicated them. More precisely, memes which fit the biological and cultural needs will be chosen. Recall that to implement a meme is to express it, so that it crystallizes from the world of ideas into words or body language or objects in the physical world. We create culture, and culture encompasses the arts and the sciences. Once again, art and science work towards the same goal above.
In conclusion, all human knowledge and culture seem to converge to the brain in action for understanding and controlling the world.
Some links between the notions we have tackled seem obvious to me.
First, essences, abstractions, beauty, fitness, Plato’s form and supernormalstimuli are clearly linked together. Indeed the Ideas of Plato’s World of Perfect Ideas are generated by the brain which creates abstractions because it is unable to save the whole information. And this leads us to beauty, beacause abstraction allows us to have ideals we want to reach and beauty is one of those. Supernormalstimuli is both linked to beauty and abstraction. In the example of the woman face, more students were attracted by the “abstract” face which was a symbol of fertility and youth (that can also be linked with fitness).
Sympathetic magic and totemism are linked in that people were representing natural things so as to take control of it. But totemism also has a religious signification and can then be seen as an epigenetic rule because almost everyone is looking for a greater “force” to protect himself and in which he could believe.
Then, memes and epigenetic rules are very close because memes are a response to a desire we have instinctively.
Finally, the real link between all those notions is replication: life and ideas exist only because they replicate, memes and supernormalstimuli too, with a process of evloution.
When taken separately one from each over, it is difficult to relate these notions. Nevertheless, there is a connection between them and I’ll try to explain it.
A simple definition of Art could be every subject that isn’t scientific. Thus, Art and Science would be opposed. However, as long as we can recall, these two notions have grown and developed in parallel. Cave men used paintings and rituals, worshipped totems so they would be more secure. People already inherited tendencies to do these ceremonies and had innate comportments. These are called epigenetic rules and sympathetic magic was one of them. Hamlet, in the eponymous tale, talks directly to his consciousness, using sympathetic magic to try to overcome his existential issues. The notion of Art really evolved when Plato tried to represent Beauty. He was lead to think that as our brain can’t remember every detail, he seeks essence and abstraction i.e. makes his own perfect ideas of the forms of an object (which will be later called Platonic forms). The search for Beauty is meant to trigger the development of Art and Science.
As we are aware of self, death and chaos, we always try to move on, share ideas therefore resulting in a cultural expansion. As a matter of fact, in parallel with science, as our culture permanently evolves, the concept of memes -units of culture- and his replications update the definition of Beauty. Even though we will always consider that something that fits in his environment is beautiful, painters like Picasso and modern artists try to represent Platonic forms and show us the essence of Beauty. They forget common visualization and prefer to share the representation conceived by their brain.
Let’s come back to memes. They replicate and are submitted to the harsh law of “the survival of the fittest”, competing for their survival according to the natural selection evoked by Darwin. They replicate to try to survive. Plus, they have to face the super-normal stimuli. People always want or select the biggest or the best even though it doesn’t match with what they really need. All of this forms a complex world where a huge number of memes coexist, enhancing culture, art and Science.
Thibault Lambert
It seems like memes are now directing evolution, taking over the much slower genes. Their most important advantage surely lies in the ease with which they can spread, both in terms of speed and cost. But I would argue that the success of memes (both particular ones, and memes in general) is closely linked to our genetic heritage, and to the functioning of the brain.
One of the main preoccupations of the brain is to classify and evaluate situations. But due to its memory constraints, our brain is constantly trying to simplify things. For example, when faced with an object, the visual brain does not simply store pictures with every detail. It tries to store the most significant traits. And in doing so, it is able to build a synthesis of all the views it has been exposed to (the source of Plato's Ideas). We could then construe the brain's process of recognition as a response of "indicators" of the known traits. Those indicators would be a sort of learned sensors.
Incidentally, epigenetic rules can also be viewed as particular indicators : we judge mates, places, .. according to how they feel to our instincts. That is, we judge according to the response from these innate indicators, as when we are pleased by shows of fertility, of fitness.. And their artificial simplicity (in comparison with what they are supposed to reflect) is what creates artificial stimuli. We are trying to get a maximum response from a maximum number of indicators. (Is that beauty ?)
Memes are also subject to this judgement, and need to "please" the existing indicators in order to get in.
But the abstractions we build also constitute indicators, the response being whether a particular object fits with the abstraction. Indeed, that is how we use them.
It's not hard then to imagine that the brain will have a natural tendency to get a maximum response from those as well.
Let's take the example of cell phones. They can have many (positive) features : playing video, music, internet access.. What we want is always to have the maximum number of features, and for them to initiate a maximum response (bigger screen).
So the memes also create their own stimuli, simple indicators just like those of epigenetic rules. In doing so, they take advantage of the brain's efficiency at simplifying and classifying, and can effectively replace epigenetic by eliciting the very same behaviours. Memes are really brain viruses.
Cedric D
Since mankind is "born", the brain has undergone a suite of events,
that contibuted to realize what it is now. This is the theory shared
by numbers of scientists and even artists from every century and
from all over the world.
Today we can compare this happening with Darwin's
evolutionnary theory. The analogy is quite efficient and allows
statement on human behavior : our fears and beliefs, our idealization
of our own world. Like in the seek for a sexual partner, we seek perfection
as a way to reach a level where we still exist forever.
Creation is like procreation and this legacy might be that of memes instead of genes,
it's still undergoing a process quite alike. The way genes survive is linked to the fact
that they are mostly adapted to their environment and so is a Shakespeare play today !
A part of our brain is likely to capture essences of thing and to make us
think about the world and about our thoughts on the world. This "third level"
(after the one of the world itself and the one of our thoughts on it) is intimately bound
to Human nature. Plato might describe it as the one of "perfect ideas" and
some people find in it beauty, idealization of their goals and even God...
Nevertheless, the thing with such a coherent analogy is that we tend to forget there are
differences between the biological and sociological model and erect another model
of what we figure out to be the Truth.
The irony there is that this whole theory of super-normal stimuli and abstraction is
an abstraction and a super-normal stimuli of neurobiologic processes that may or may not
be related to our artistic behavior and our seek for the beauty and the best for us !
Besides, I doubt we can understand these constructions in just 1 million years of existence
inside a 4 billion years old universe.
However we will never know how our brain works because it's the object of the study and the tool
we study it with !
That might be why we can't reach perfection and beauty because we had it all along in the way we are evolving.
Those concept are not static but really bound to our evolution towards the future.
In my opinion, there is a close link between the different notions we talked about.
Thanks to the epigenetic rules, we, human, are conditioned since our birth to feel and understand the reality around us in a special way.
Our brain is such a complex organ, but it has its own limits: in comparison to the complexity of the world, our brain is nothing. It just tries to lie to us by finding some tricks that make us feel we understand the world. But in fact, for each part of the reality, each object and animal, our brain just tries to reduce our lack of memory by creating in itself a model that could lead to a categorization of the world. I said it’s a trick because in fact, there is no model in nature, only a lot of particular and unique things. It seems obvious to human people to sort and categorize the world, for example by creating model with science and this skill is maybe one of the most important causes of the human fast evolution. However, I think that in the origin, only the law of abstraction allowed humans to transcend the relative poor faculties of their brain and to have access to the entire nature just by extrapolating the different particular situations, objects and animals they saw in their lives. I mean that with this law of abstraction, even if you only have seen ten horses in your life, your brain create in itself an image of horses that you can extrapolate to all the horses in the planet.
However, this abstraction leads to an important problem: the image your brain has created is a kind of crossover of all the particulars you saw in your life but there is no particular in the nature that looks exactly like the image in your brain. This difference can lead to the existence of super-normal stimuli, which are the proof that we can have a false vision of the world but are also the proof that since our birth, our brain has is own laws to classified the world, so it could be considered as an epigenetic rule. The difference between the image created and the reality explicate that his image is usually called an ideal. Plato, in his theory, thought that there are two worlds closely link; the world of sense and the world of perfect ideas which contains all the mold of the different objects and animals we see in the world of sense, one mold for each “category” such as Horses, Pen … In fact, we know that the ideal surely doesn’t exist in an other world but is in our brain. The main difference is that two people can have different ideals for the same categories and the ideals can change during your life, when you see maybe some contradiction between your ideal and a particular thing.
Because of the works of the brain, people have an incorrect vision of the reality and are often disappointed to discover that they don’t know any particular object that looks exactly like their ideal. This deception leads us to a hopeless quest, which is the search of their ideals, the search of beauty. As the ideals don’t exist in reality, people discovered some ways to allow them to face their ideals. Some painters, like Picasso, tried to represent an essence, which means a thing that has all the characteristics of the original but in fact, in my opinion, I feel that Picasso just tried to paint the ideals he had in his brain. For me, the main role of the art is to allow us to face our ideals and also to succeed our quest of the search of beauty. Seeing an essence or the ideal of the painter in a painting lead us to the feeling that for the first time, our vision of the world is not totally false and we unconsciously believe that with this vision close from the reality, we have more power and we understand better the reality. This is a kind of sympathetic magic, which is an epigenetic rule that makes us believe that if we can represent the world, then we can control it.
To conclude, I want to say that not only our vision of the nature can influence our ideals. With memes, people can communicate an idea that can lead us to consider that our ideals don’t correspond to the reality and that it could be better to change them. Nowadays, the consumer society exists because everyone is searching their ideals in reality without finding them. For example, if you have an ideal of cell phones, because of memes, you will see that other people have a cell phone more beautiful than yours. Then, you will purchase it and your ideal will change for a more high Tech cell phone, and this will never end.
If people don’t realize that even if they have the impression that they are involving, their goods will always remain far away (an infinite distance in fact) from their ideals and the beauty they are looking for. We may wonder if art is the only way to stop our deception of the reality and to believe that we understand it.
(Thank you for having read me)
Thomas Cohades
The way humans are thinking has changed over time.
For example, belief in sympathetic magic was the most primitive stage in human
thought, followed by religion ( totems ?) and then, later, by science.
The aim of this change is to reach perfection. The rush of perfection can be illustrated in our ideal of beauty, our ideal of fitness and our ideal of love… and also in religion because we imagined gods as perfect creatures. But the physical world we see is not perfect. That’s why Art and Philosophy were developed. The material world is not sufficient for us. We try to reach a world of ideals as described by Platoon. And deeper we probe the laws of Nature more the physical world disappears and becomes a world of essences and pure math.
And to explain how this change can happen, R. Dawkins introduces the concept of memes which can propagate from one mind to another and evolve in a manner analogous to genes.
We can say that the different concepts discussed in class are deeply linked.
They are all part of the human nature and are here to determine what is proper to human.
Amine Amiroune
As the attraction between Romeo & Juliet shows us, humans obey to epigenetic rules, which include the super-normal stimuli. But our higher level of consciousness – animals like ants, which are organized as a great organism, also have a conscience – allows us to choose among our memes the ones that fit the best our environment. So consciousness is a kind of incubator for memes - they develop and evolve in our conscience then spread.
But consciousness also allows us to reach a higher level of abstraction than the animals, so we search beauty in sciences (Plato’s forms) and art (the Picasso effect). Beauty is here comparable to elegance, which is something that fits its context.
With mankind appeared the sympathetic magic, as the totems and the Hamlet’s soliloquy. It’s a reaction to a super-normal stimulus: expose our fears in order to control them and find tranquility, which is more elegant than chaos.
Finally, we have a closed loop of concepts aiming at beauty, elegance, fitness.
Pascal Verdage (164 words)
This year, we have studied the different aspects of human nature. Consequently, it seems important to find connections between them to have a better understanding of this concept.
First, we have seen that Wilson describes the human nature as a collection of epigenetic rules: every man leads his own instinct and has his own way of thinking. However, the memes influence our way of thinking, they change the rules which were predefined: we had a very good example of that idea in Rome and Juliet. Thus, it seems obvious that there is a deep link between epigenetic rules and memes.
Moreover, we all have an ideal, and we always want to reach it. This ideal could be described as Plato’s mold: the final goal to reach. This is our brain which creates this perfect idea, it generates abstractions and this is only visible in our consciousness. For example, beauty is one of these ideal: each person has his own vision of what beauty is in his brain but we know that we can’t reach it.
In conclusion, all the notions that we developed on the human nature could be linked in some way. Our brain can’t contain too much information so we need to use the laws of abstraction to perceive our ideal which is based on the Plato’s mold.
Thomas S
During the english courses of the second semester, we studied different concepts. I think that a link between them is human brain.
Sympathetic magic and totems are used by humans since the prehistoric period and are also used nowadays, so we can think that those concepts are in our brain.
Then we spoke about concioussness and Hamlet who is very conscient of him and the world around him during his monologue. All that find place in his brain.
The next subject was the ability of abstraction and the world of perfect ideas of Plato, they are abilities of our brain and the world of perfect ideas is somewhere in our imagination (it means in our brain).
We learned also the word meme, which is analogue to a gene, but represents an idea that can evolve and transmit like genes, but they evolove in our brains and are transmitted from brain to brain.
We learned that our brain make us thinking that something beautiful is something that fits its environment and for people of our species that will favor the continuation of the species.
As a conclusion, I can say that the link between all the things we studied during this class is human brain which is able to do all these things.
Let's focus on the function of Art & Science.
Memes and their evolution influence our choices, therefore, as for genes and natural selection, take part, unconscously, in our survival.
Science is a way to explain the world with models, and art is a way to express how we sense the world. Both of them give us a vision of the world. And we need those visions.
Indeed, our future is a chaos, there is no way to know what will happen. The only thing we are sure is our death. Art & Science are a way to made us sure of what is life. Art show us what we have to hope or to fear, science show us how the world works. It is not a question of controlling outside forces, it's about controlling our lives to make it as best as possible and cause our death to occur as late as possible.
Art&Science are just the expression of our instinct of survival.
I believe that all the concepts discussed in class are tree-spanning. Their roots are epigenetic rules from which all concepts have evolved, and their connection comes from mutating replication.
At first, primitive men's behaviour was only led by epigenetic rules, which are common patterns for human development. They had no culture.
It was before the appearance of memes : thanks to evolution, human brain became able to process the new things that memes were. And it triggered the appearance and development of art and science.
When men had the brain capable of creating, modifying, and communicating memes, then began consciousness. And with consciouness (of death, of unpredictability, of difference between self and outside world), came need for explanation and control.
Thus the first form of art was certainly cave painting and singing, and its role was the appropriation of an item by painting it into a totem, in order to control the environment.
I will go even further. I believe totemism was the first attempt to catch the idea, the perfect idea, that lies behind physical things. As soon as man was able to create memes, he devised 'the world of perfect ideas' separated from the physical world (although linked to it), as described in Plato's theorisation.
I guess that beauty too was first felt by man as he gained consciousness. Here is an exemple : before, an opened view from a high ground was useful to a man, to hunt and watch his predators. But with memes appearing in his brain, this could evolve into the feeling of beauty. Thanks to memes, things that are fitted seem beautiful.
The next thing to appear was science. Maybe science was just another way of doing sympathetic magic. Of course, science is often opposed to art and culture, because the scientific steps to create new ideas are much more rigourous. However, its purpose is eventually the same : understanding and control. As magic began to show its limits, science proved to be more efficient, but magic never entirely disappeared. Contemporary examples include homeopathy and other alternative medicine practices.
To clarify this, my belief is that the connection between concepts like 'memes', 'sympathetic magic', 'totem', 'perfect ideas', 'art', 'science' lies within the process that made them appear : mutating replication from a previous idea.
There is a close link between the different notions we talked in class and the main common aspect is the idea of replication and evolution. The only aim of life is to replicate, life implies death and the replication is the only way to transcend the mortal existence of the life. With genes, the different species can transmit a part of them to their descendants. However, time after time, generations after generations, the gene pool you transmitted become negligible. Ideas, contrary to material things, can be transmitted to a largest part of people, not only your descendants, and that’s why we can say that the only way to reach immortality is to transmit some ideas, some memes that correspond to you.
As I said, the aim of Life is to replicate and it’s similar for memes. Memes are often compared to virus because they can’t exist without being in one’s brain and they propagate themselves into other people if they pass across their “meme filters”.
To continue the comparison between genes and memes, it’s sure that in our world, memes explain the fast evolution of the human being and his power. Human genes don’t make him the strongest or the fastest animal and memes are a good way to understand the power of the human being.
Like it is the case for virus, memes may be dangerous and we can think of the possible consequences of a theory or a doctrine that could pass over the filter of a huge amount of people and can lead them to destruction.
It seems that memes control the evolution of human and then control the world.
However, since a few years, people tried and succeed to control genes by using science and medicine (think of GMO for example) so we may wonder if the new challenge of the next years (centuries?) could be to find a way to control memes and to prevent the proliferation of “bad memes” in people’s minds like medicines prevent the proliferation of virus in people’s bodies.
Our evolution, that from memes, take place in the incubator that is our conciousness. Indeed, our conciousness made us raise to an higher level of abstraction. Animals share with us abstractions, instinct and have their own epigenetic rules, as supernormal stimuli, but looking for beauty, we were able to pass through. We found out that in Nature often individuals looked for reproduction for different ones from themselves, but the epigenetic rule is more complex : it happen a lot that people in foreign countries marry there, with people who could be even from the same gene pool, but who are surely from different cultures. An evidence of the meme evolution.
Moreover, the mankind is making abstractions with only one goal : Beauty. In Art, as Picasso looked for absolute fitness of forms with reality, for the Plato's forms, to attend touching his World of Ideas, perfection reign artists. Scientists quest every day for either elegancy of formulas and algorithms, or the flawless fitness to the reality of his simulation. Even in sympathetic magic, we're seeking the perfect way to escape from our fears. One could even more say it is the first form of quest of Beauty.
Emile de Weerd.
The theory of evolution exposed by Darwin show the process of natural selection. That is to say that the best life entities but also the best behaviors are selected and replicated. The epigenetic rules, and memes allow the human to live in society. The super-normal stimuli, and fitness give some advantages to the reproduction.
Even tough with the technology, the human escape to the natural selection, there is still some selection but this is in ideas, in believes, etc... We want to extract the essence of things and for that we use art and science. Some artists, writers with their product query about beauty, abstraction, etc... The process of the brain is really complex, and the human use all he can to understand how it runs. Some thinkers wonder about the process of abstraction, like Plato for example. Some artists, writers make product in order to product effect on the brain. Thus we can understands, or only make hypothesis on some part of our brain.
So in my mind this topic are link by replication. In fact the replication of ideas, entity or behavior produce the humanity.
Linking art and science need already some explanations. Whereas science is often associated with adjectives such as accurate, exact, the goals of art are more difficult to define. But one thing seems clear, art is born from brain limitations. Actually, our brain couldn't remember everything with all its details. Art catches the essences of objects and thus our brain can recognize its. But artists have another aim : beauty and fitness. Are these two notions abstract and personal? Not wholly. There are closely linked to genes and memes. Everyody have a notion of beauty linked to epigenetic rules, inherated from his parents but also depending from his personnal experiences, his culture. As memes and genes replicate, evolve, we can conclude the notion of beauty is evolving too. Thus prehistoric paintings which were linked to sympathetic magic at the beginning, were maybe beautiful for prehistoric men even if nowadays we are more impressive in front of the last computer than these paintings.
We have seen that we can eventually jump from one notion to the other even if they seem so far at the beginning such as the title Art & Science. Artists have been creating and scientists have been intending to explain people behaviour in front of all these creations.
I forbid to sign up for my comment.
D Fournier
After taking lessons this semester about art, science and culture, only one thing cross my mind when I think all this concepts over: the human behaviour.
What we are, our society and how we evolve through the time are the results of cooperation between genetics factors and cultural factors. To understand these cultural factors, we have to understand the mechanisms sparked off it.
Human beings are constantly looking for some idealization of their world, some kind of perfection in the imperfect reality.
Individually, we make choices, personal and different choices, because we feel things differently according to what we perceive with our senses. Our choices are directed in agreement with our needs, our wishes, come be in order of aestheticism (beauty in art) or scientific.
But in the end, the fact we live in community has major influence about our decisions. Through memes, this environment incites us to copy the same behaviours.
In my opinion, culture represents a need for perfection, security, understanding and control of the world in which we are living, shared and disseminated inside social groups forming cultural communities.
May Mankind could be defined only by the consciousness of itself ? Probably.
Since the beginning of their existence, humans have always tried to see what is there beyond the hill, to reach excellence, some would even say God. Thus, is it surprising they want to understand everything, including themselves ?
In order to do so, it’s necessary for us to be fully aware of the mechanisms of our spirit, of our brain. That’s the purpose of every point presented above : each period of history has seen different shapes of this research.
Philosophers started the study, like Plato with his Allegory of the Cave. The objective was to explain how we think, how we know, how we “are”. Today, things are more or less the same, although means have changed. We have used art as well as science. Science highlighted the role of genes in some of our deepest behaviours. Art helped us to stimulate imagination, to understand of sense of beauty.
Finally, we could say that mankind spirit consists in cooperation between science and art. The concept of consciousness of itself is precisely this ambivalence. It represents the two opposite points of view of a same problem. One of them is deeply linked to the senses, the other one to the intellect. One of them is subjective, as art works are different from artists to artists, the other universal, two mathematicians will find more or less the same solution to a problem.
Besides, one point links them. Both of them have been reproduced, imitated, by the community. Thus we have been able to perform this study, and we are still improving our self-understanding.
As you can see, memes work !
Obvious links exist between all these themes.
First of all, memes are clearly related to epigenetic rules. These are the background common to every individual. Memes are what allow us to evolve. But for a meme to be accepted, it has to stimulate and answer to epigenetic rules. It's a kind of filter, a rule for evolution.
Some links are less obvious and more subjective. For example, a link between sympathetic magic and Plato's World of Perfect Ideas. Plato's Ideas are representations, abstractions of the real world. Sympathetic magic has us believe that something looking like a real thing is somehow linked to it, and that affecting one means affecting the other. Why wouldn't the two things represent Plato's perfect Idea, meaning that everything looking like the Idea are representation of it, and thus affecting one means affecting the Idea ?
To conclude, I believe that what link all these ideas studied during the semester is fitness. Evolution, in art o r in science, is closely link to fitness. Evolutions that are allowed to exist are those which fit the better in their environment. And this is true for biology (Darwin's Theory of Evolution shows it, with its selection), social (memes are allowed to replicate only if they fit) or art (a painting is considered as beautiful and artistic if it fits).
And proof of a fitting evolution is replication, since genes replicate, memes replicate, and paintings "replicate" or are being copied.
I think that the main concept is memes & genes. Around this concept are four categories: what makes the value of a Meme or a Gene, how classify it, what characterize it and how does it materialize. The value of a meme or a gene is his capacity to survive, for a picture, beauty and fitness for example. Then, a meme can be art, epigenetic rule, or part of a subcategory like sympathetic magic. Third, a meme is an abstraction. It could be an essence of something. Last, meme materializes in many forms. It could be artwork, totem, mode, poesy, play. And, in our case, it could be a part of a play, what a scene try to reproduce (seduction in Romeo & Juliet). For a gene, it’s more obvious since behaviour is a direct consequence of the gene. But consequences are sometimes surprising in super-normal stimuli.
Valentin Perrelle.
Let's talk about this subject a little differently. These concepts of art and science can be also linked with the fact that they are both increasing the feeling of control on things, on environment.
How did science could increase this feeling ? There are three points. Firstly, the science is used by people to understand how nature works, and how human nature woorks also. Indeed, understanding things bring us to feel better and closer along those things. Inventing something is also a means for human to increase his control on environment, but it is only a feeling. The perfect example is the A bomb, which permits the Americans to feel stronger during the Wolrd War Two. But we can also see it in space course, which is now resulting in a polluted area over the Earth.
We can link it with the art, by thinking about memorizing and transmission of events. Art and science help us to do that, to help next generations to live by saving our “thoughts” and our “work”.
About art, reproduction and now recording of facts, of events, make us feeling also increasing the control of our environment. Indeed, like in prehistoric art, when we can paint things like they are, or like we want to make people see those, we feel like a genius, controlling things like we want.
Rémi Fayolle
Our analysis drove us to build a model in order to explain the links between all the topics related to Art and Science. It supposes that everyone’s evolution is based on three different categories of spring of knowledge.
First, there is the instinctive one, which consists in all the primitive instincts determined by the specie, like the instinct of survival.
Then we consider the “steered choices” category with the “innate” (proper to each individual) and the education, determined by the environment we are growing in.
Eventually there is our comprehension, compound with what we learnt and understood during our life, which can change what we are at the beginning.
We began our study with the primitive arts because in a certain way they explain the reason for being of art, that is to say the fear of the unknown: by representing the world artistically we become magically in control of it.
Then we can divide the topics studied in two main categories. The first one is compound with concepts which govern the evolution of art: certain concepts are linked with our uncontrolled instinct, like Essences, and others with our comprehension of our world and ourselves, like Abstraction and Plato’s form. There are also some topics like Beauty and Fitness that refers to both instinctive and understood part of our mind, and even with our education in a certain way.
The second one is much proper to topics which govern the human evolution, like Memes and Epigenetic rules: they are cultural thoughts that influence our way of thinking (kind of education of our minds) for the first one, or inherited ideas that all humans have in common for the second one.
That analysis can lead us to suppose that there are strong connections between Art and Science and a similar way to evolve.
The ultimate purpose for both of Art and Science is the full understanding of ourselves, lead by Consciousness, which is, in a way, a reflexion about our instinctive and steered choices. Consciousness may also make us change some original aspects of our minds by questioning our prejudices.
As it was suggested in the previous paragraph, Art and Science have much in common. Not only they have the same purpose, that is to say understand ourselves and things around us, but they also share the same model of evolution. In fact, we saw that genes and memes followed the same algorithm to evolve; however they govern the way we interpret and see art. As a consequence, Art have to evolve in parallel with genes and memes if it wants to “survive”. The original aim of art is indeed to wake up our minds to new concepts, sometimes by calling our consciousness and further by provoking and innovating all the time. In order to succeed, it uses, just as we do, replication by keeping concepts used in the past and adding new ones to lead our minds even farther than the previous generation.
Art and Science have this common point that they allow us to understand the preestablished world in a deeper way than we use to do and to bring us to new ideas, which are the cement of our evolution.
In this architecture, beauty plays the role of a stimulant: it incites our desire to improve ourselves and to keep evolving. The ultimate purpose would be to achieve an utopian synthesis of things whatever they are biological or cultural.
The Red Queen theory - "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place" - takes here all its sense for both human and art evolution: as human have to evolve to remain competitive with regard to the other species, art have to evolve too in order to continue make us think about ourselves and open new windows on the part of humanity hidden to our eyes.
Evolution is mechanical and can be applied to our society too, in a phenomenon much more powerful than the evolution of the single individual. Therefore, aren’t we insignificant quantity helping the whole thing to work? May this awareness leave us happy?
Damien Giammichele
Guillaume Massonnet
How to determine the beginning of humanity? According to me, humanity started when humans became really aware of their human nature. This process is the birth of consciousness in human brain.
With consciousness, humans realize that they are not omniscient. Humans are mortal and the world around them is like a chaos : they can't control it and real world often doesn't match with their inside view of the world. So arts and science are ways to deal with these tensions.
Indeed, arts can be view as a response to fears or misunderstandings of the world. For primitive humans, sympathetic magic were a way to feel that they can have a remote control on the world. Arts are often a response to the absurdity of the world. Arts are a way for humans to express their humanity, to exist and so, in one sense, to become immortal.
Science has the same priorities. Science allows to better understand the world, to put it in order and so to be more serene. Like Shakespeare, Einstein improves the humanity's knowledge and so we can say that he became immortal.
To conclude, arts and science are different ways for humans to confront the world. They permit to improve humanity's lot and so to feel better.
Why does art exists? Does it have a goal?
Man is special compared with his neighboring, he has consciousness and self consciousness. Therefor he is aware of his imperfectness, that he is mortal. And that scares him. Because of his abilities (abstraction, making projects) man has made the secret wish to control death. Science also tries to find a way.
In that purpose, art can be seen simply as a way to entertain and to have an activity (with a minor goal) in order not to think of death.
It was also a response to the chaos of surrounding world: sympathetic magic is one of the first reason why art has appeared.
It has been a way of communication: to teach religious stories (in churches). And now on in Dada art painters try to explain the absurdity of the world. Through abstract art, artists show us the result of their philosophical work, the aim of which is to find the essence of things.
In an abstract point of view art is the expression of a civilisation, a way for it to show that it exists.
Humanity has been formed through genetic evolution, and epigenetic rules are now the foundation of our mind. With the competition of memes for its biggest shares, the brain has become the new theatre of evolution, and the lasting infection of the subconscious mind has become the memes' ultimate quest (see advertising, religion, art, ...).
The complexity of the human brain is often hard to fathom, and its subconscious activity is undoubtedly of the most mysterious. As we are unable to focus our attention on more than a few things, we are constantly discharging tasks to the subconscious mind. We use it to analyse what we see through essences and abstractions, and build that way what Plato called the World of Ideas. The judgement over an item's beauty need not the brain's focus either, for we do not actively argue its fitness to its purpose. People seldom wonder consciously why a savannah-like landscape would look great and weather supernatural stimuli are hidden behind sexual appeal or not.
Finally, the subconscious mind seems to be behind everything we do. So in order to lesser its influence, we should fight Bacon's idols and use our consciousness to dig out those frightening questions trying to hide in our subconscious mind.
Balint Menyhart
In class, we raised the question: What are the origins of our culture? I think that replication happens also in culture, albeit in a different sense.
First, the ‘epigenetic rules’ determine genetically how we are predisposed to behave and make choices. Super-normal stimuli illustrate this innate hereditary tendencies. Moreover, we are conscious: aware of self, death and chaos. This lead to express our feeling with art: sympathetic magic, totems…
Also, a ‘meme’ is a ‘unit of cultural information’ which can propagate from one mind to another in a manner analogous to genes. Owing to art and science new ideas appear so other ideas may become extinct, other ideas will survive if they fit our necessity, spread, and mutate, for better or for worse. So various ideas pass from one generation to the next; such ideas may either enhance or detract from the survival of the people who obtain those ideas, or influence the survival of the ideas themselves.
In conclusion, cultures can retain memes that once served a purpose during one epoch or era.
BEL HAJ ALI Ahmed
Science is often distinguished from other domains of human culture by its progressive nature. However if there is one thing that is essential for this progress and which is common to all scientific studies, it is the fact of "making hypotheses to explain observations"...This scientific step (making hypotheses) is somewhere mysterious because it appeals to, not only our scientific, but also our feelings and our "intuition". And it is this absence of a very rational framework and quite precise and normative criteria for identifying "the good hypotheses that a scientist have to make", which makes me say that "hypotheses" are the artistic part of science. Thus, to go beyond its limits defined by the mathematical logic and the physical laws, the science employs art in particular through “the hypotheses and the scientific intuition” to explore new worlds and new ideas.
But what it is the origin of this “intuition”?
I think that this irrational conviction called “intuition” is probably a result of not only our personal experiments, but also this huge quantity of memes which surround us, which influence us and which build our culture, our beliefs and may be also our habits…
Moreover, these memes evolve nowadays so quickly that our brain - because of its limited capacity to remember - is increasingly constrained to use the law of constancy and the law of abstraction to retain this quantity of information to which we are exposed.
Actually, one cannot say that this idea of abstraction is recent. Some of our ancestors used the same principle when they built totems as simple objects which regroup and represent so many things and ideas.
To conclude, I can say that the human being uses science to go forward and explore and discover new worlds and thus new feelings. And it uses art - consciously or unconsciously- to exceed the limits defined by the science and the reason, always with the aim of discovering new things and may be even to allow the science to impose, once again, its limits on these new spaces discovered and which will be thus regarded as acquired. The use of the laws of constancy and abstraction is a facet of our use of the art to face and exceed the limited capacities of our brain defined by the science.
Yassine NABIL
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