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How art invented humanity

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Re: How art invented humanity

#51

Post by godzillainaneck »

stillpointlab wrote: post #34

One of my craziest ideas is that language created minds and not the other way around. One view of history is that humans evolved brains sufficient to host language, invented language, and then our brains grew around language. My crazy idea is basically the thesis of this article except swap out "art" and swap in "language". In my view, art is just one form of expression. That is, language predates life. Although, lan…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Instance_of_the_Letter_in_...

people have been talking about that same thing for a very long time

Re: How art invented humanity

#52

Post by stillpointlab »

godzillainaneck wrote: post #51
stillpointlab wrote: post #34

One of my craziest ideas is that language created minds and not the other way around. One view of history is that humans evolved brains sufficient to host language, invented language, and then our brains grew around language. My crazy idea is basically the thesis of this article except swap out "art" and swap in "language". In my view, art is just one form of expression. That is, language predates life. Although, lan…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Instance_of_the_Letter_in_... people have been talking about that same thing for a very long time

Sure, I'm not claiming originality. Although I come at it more from a process philosophy/pragmatism angle (Whitehead/Peirce), but that is probably due to my own background and not because any other treatment of similar ideas is better/worse or more or less correct.

Re: How art invented humanity

#53

Post by stillpointlab »

dieselgate wrote: post #48
stillpointlab wrote: post #34

One of my craziest ideas is that language created minds and not the other way around. One view of history is that humans evolved brains sufficient to host language, invented language, and then our brains grew around language. My crazy idea is basically the thesis of this article except swap out "art" and swap in "language". In my view, art is just one form of expression. That is, language predates life. Although, lan…

Language and "minds" are not unique among humans.

Right, but the question is what came first, minds or language? That is, is language a product of mind or is mind a product of language? Of course another position is that they co-arise and the question of order is ill-formed.

But these ideas have to be placed with respect to the modern and typical materialist/physicalist view of reality. If we trace back time, there was a time before our solar system existed, before our Earth existed, before any kind of physical lifeform existing on the Earth's surface that we could associate with a mind. And we might be tempted in this view to draw a line or identify a point in time where we say "before" and "after". We might say "before this point no minds of any kind existed" and "before this point no language of any kind existed". And if we are to do so then we can talk about how those two points relate to each other.

Re: How art invented humanity

#54

Post by dieselgate »

stillpointlab wrote: post #53
dieselgate wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language and "minds" are not unique among humans.

Right, but the question is what came first, minds or language? That is, is language a product of mind or is mind a product of language? Of course another position is that they co-arise and the question of order is ill-formed. But these ideas have to be placed with respect to the modern and typical materialist/physicalist view of reality. If we trace back time, there was a time before our solar system existed, before…

How does one consistently define "language" and "mind"? I present the following in genuine good faith:

A good case study may be the octopus. They are highly intelligent organisms and a strong argument could be made they have "mind". A quick search [0] shows some evidence they communicate via "posturing and changing color"--is this language? How does one prove an individual has mind?

Regarding the definition of "mind" the mirror test seems very relevant but does "mind exist without the sense of self"? What about emergent phenomena amongst highly social animal groupings...?

Edit: I must be in the "mind" came first camp but in this case mind === consciousness but mind != consciousness

[0] https://www.livescience.com/53514-octopuses-lead-social-live...

Re: How art invented humanity

#55

Post by stillpointlab »

dieselgate wrote: post #54
stillpointlab wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but the question is what came first, minds or language? That is, is language a product of mind or is mind a product of language? Of course another position is that they co-arise and the question of order is ill-formed. But these ideas have to be placed with respect to the modern and typical materialist/physicalist view of reality. If we trace back time, there was a time before our solar system existed, before…

How does one consistently define "language" and "mind"? I present the following in genuine good faith: A good case study may be the octopus. They are highly intelligent organisms and a strong argument could be made they have "mind". A quick search [0] shows some evidence they communicate via "posturing and changing color"--is this language? How does one prove an individual has mind? Regarding the definition of "mind"…

As I mentioned in my earlier post, what I mean is closer to semiotics [1], precisely because "language" is too fuzzy a concept and leads to the wrong conclusion. In that view, communication using posturing and changing color is obviously signalling.

As for minds vs. consciousness, etc. we'll just end up in a language game there which isn't productive. Personally, I am more interested in a more abstract conception of "attention" which I see as preceding "awareness" (which may or may not precede self-awareness). But again, how people use these words in different circumstances makes any discussion of the topics nearly impossible unless they are rigorously defined so as to avoid confusion.

But in a "food for thought" kind of diversion, not an argument or even really a point, consider you are walking through a forest and you see some berries and your mouth starts to water. There is some relationship between your attention, your awareness and some kind of information being communicated between nature and you. The berry is signalling something to you and your attention is drawn to it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

Re: How art invented humanity

#56

Post by dieselgate »

stillpointlab wrote: post #55
dieselgate wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one consistently define "language" and "mind"? I present the following in genuine good faith: A good case study may be the octopus. They are highly intelligent organisms and a strong argument could be made they have "mind". A quick search [0] shows some evidence they communicate via "posturing and changing color"--is this language? How does one prove an individual has mind? Regarding the definition of "mind"…

As I mentioned in my earlier post, what I mean is closer to semiotics [1], precisely because "language" is too fuzzy a concept and leads to the wrong conclusion. In that view, communication using posturing and changing color is obviously signalling. As for minds vs. consciousness, etc. we'll just end up in a language game there which isn't productive. Personally, I am more interested in a more abstract conception of…

I've been slowly getting through the entirety of the original article but it's written out well:

> What I mean here is that art did not serve to express a humanity that already existed. Rather, it acted as the mirror we needed to catch sight of our own image in the flux of nature. The question of when humans invented art leads us to imagine early humans much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves through symbols and figures. The assumption hidden in the question is that they already had minds like ours and simply chose, out of all the things they might have done on a frigid day in the Ice Age, to pick up ochre and make animal pictures. But the evidence, it seems to me, points the other way: it was the practice of making images, repeated over hundreds of generations, that occasioned the emergence of those minds we take for granted. We are putting the cart before the horse when we understand ourselves as the source of sense and meaning. In reality, we are participants in something that exceeds us, and the aesthetic, poetic dimension of great art reconnects us with that excess as a matter of course.

It's interesting to think about iterating over "drawing pictures of animals" before starting to "draw pictures of humans"

Re: How art invented humanity

#57

Post by stillpointlab »

dieselgate wrote: post #56
stillpointlab wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, what I mean is closer to semiotics [1], precisely because "language" is too fuzzy a concept and leads to the wrong conclusion. In that view, communication using posturing and changing color is obviously signalling. As for minds vs. consciousness, etc. we'll just end up in a language game there which isn't productive. Personally, I am more interested in a more abstract conception of…

I've been slowly getting through the entirety of the original article but it's written out well: > What I mean here is that art did not serve to express a humanity that already existed. Rather, it acted as the mirror we needed to catch sight of our own image in the flux of nature. The question of when humans invented art leads us to imagine early humans much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves thro…

Yes, that is close to what I was gesturing at with the walk in the woods and the berries. Before humans had a word for berries or hunger we had a latent relationship with nature, in the ability for nature to draw our attention to objects and effect our nervous system. And the first expression of that relationship may well have been externalized in the pictorial representation of animals, or maybe in gestures, or grunts - we can't know it was too long ago.

A larger point that could be drawn from the article is that we then gained a new kind of relationship, not just with nature but with the very expressions it elicited. Instead of our mouth watering at berries, suddenly our nervous system was reacting to the art we created. It is this indirect relationship, with the symbol itself, that the author is arguing created what we think of as the human mind. So nature creates the grounds for expression creates the grounds for minds. My original point was that "drawing animals" is only one kind of possible expression, and it is possible to broaden our idea of "expressions worth contemplating" well beyond paintings on cave walls, all the way down to how a flower attracts the attention of a bee.

Re: How art invented humanity

#58

Post by hammock »

godzillainaneck wrote: post #50
hammock wrote: post #28

“Only humans produce ecstatic art” I guess they have never heard of the bowerbird: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/eptuty/b...

the argument is that the bowerbird isn't making ecstatic art though, in the sense that while the bird is still expressing an aesthetically driven directive, its still biologically motivated, which then remains unexamined beyond preference and aversion in its audience (ie potential mate) the argument the author is instead trying to make is that humans are the only organism that produces ecstatic aesthetic experiences,…

Explain how someone like Picasso is not making art to get laid please, or has nothing to do with his biology

Re: How art invented humanity

#59

Post by riazrizvi »

krapp wrote: post #31
orangedog wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What suggests that it is?

"_Tools_ have a response to this post" is not a sensible comment that a human would likely make. It reads like a prompt to an AI accidentally pasted into the wrong place.

You've lost the plot old chap. Time to go outside and smell the fresh air, get some exercise, talk to a human person.

Re: How art invented humanity

#60

Post by nkrisc »

krapp wrote: post #14
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish there was any way to know when language was developed in (proto?) humans. Our complex grammar is pretty unique in the animal kingdom, and it's clearly linked to our cognition. You can get pretty far with mere vocabulary (just look at the great apes), but once you get into the world of words modifying words and recombining into sentences, you have an absolute explosion of expressible ideas. When did that happen…

My entirely layman and unsupported conspiracy theory about language is that early hominids likely developed complex sign language and some primitive forms of writing now long lost to time, but vocal language only came with the necessary biology.

More recent hypotheses that I’ve read is that what we think of language evolved as a tool for internal thought and ordering of ideas and perceptions. Executive function, in a sense.

The externalization of language, whether vocal or gestural, evolved later as a means of serializing the internal language in order to transmit those thoughts to others. Under this hypothesis, the serial nature of language is a limitation of the externalization methods (you can’t produce several words at once, or hear several at once), whereas internal language itself need not be a linear process.

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