Re: "rational"

Posted by Arlo Barnes on Jan 06, 2014; 12:56am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/11-American-Nations-tp7584250p7584633.html

We think of art as a special thing, separate from our normal activities in the world which could make it an attractive candidate for a place where [weak or strong] rational thinking does not apply...but such a 'true art' might never be recognized as such. With few exceptions, art is meant to be shared with others, to inspire some type of feeling, and sometimes/often to be commercially viable. Art has a technical aspect. For any of these things, the artist will be using rational thought to achieve the goals necessary to better the art, regardless of how acutely they are aware of the rationality. In addition, I think many artists rationally contrive ways to inspire creativity, by using rational methods of processing with incongruous (or congruous in a specific unexpected way to inspire a certain atmosphere) inputs. For example, using phosphenes.

Besides physiological inspiration, there is something to be said for the multifarious nature of life experience, even in a mechanistic world, just from the statistics of any given combination of events happening to a person. This can provide seemingly non-rational inspiration to a work, because we cannot see the input stimuli that is a person's full life, being limited to our own (although common experiences can give insight; taking psychedelics might help one better understand psychedelic art, for instance).

Lastly, the intuition: I tend to think that it is simply a more subtle, more obfuscated, and less often used logic engine; indeed, it may just be the name for the part of our logic engines that have not yet been made transparent to us. Obviously a lot of this speculation could be from intuition, or just making things up out of whole cloth, but we can look at cases where people's intuitions are more or less accurate and try to analyze, using what information was available to the person at the time, why their intuition arrived at that right/wrong conclusion, and there are real-life examples where interesting observations have been made about such (I just cannot think of any).

A favorite anecdote of local Nick Bennett is an experiment where one group of people was given a set of points and told to do the travelling salesman problem on them: find the shortest path that visits each point once and only once before returning to the start. To solve this, they would use their visual, mathematical, and logical sense. Another group was told to find the most appealing path that followed the same rules (a loop through all points only once). Guess which group had the shorter paths on average? [EDIT: I think this was the paper, let us see if my remembering has embellished] Was the second group using intuition? Not having read the paper yet, I am not sure what the control was.

If I missed the argument, excuse me - I have only been loosely following this thread.

-Arlo James Barnes

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