Kodėl žmonėms gėlės atrodo gražios?

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Plaukiojo lygiagrečiai fone mintis į "Apie blogį kaip gėrio trūkumą" temą papostinti, bet rezultate pasirinkau šią.

Vėl užšokau ant "left vs right brain" dichotomijos akcentavimo. Klausiau Alex O'Connor pokalbio su vienu veikėju:
Alex O'Connor: Why Evolution Gave You Two Brains - Iain McGilchrist
Šiaip nemažai klaidinančios mitologijos yra prigaminta dėl "left" ir "right" smegenų pusrutulių tariamai reikšmingos įtakos žmonių gyvenimams dėl jų specializacijos pagal skirtingas funkcijas.

Nors šitame pokalbyje labiau užkliuvau ant kito man ne mažiau įdomaus neva "materialistų redukcionistų" tropo, kurį užkabino kažkuris komentatorius prie minėto video ir po jo komentaru užsimezgusi diskusija:

@vargonian 2 months ago
I'm always reminded of the quote by Richard Feynman which appears to be in stark opposition of Iain's position, if I understand it correctly:

"I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say 'look how beautiful it is,' and I’ll agree. Then he says 'I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,' and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts."

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@divineinyang5384
Nothing at all about this quote contradicts McGilchrist's view.
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@vargonian
@divineinyang5384 He repeatedly drove home the idea that a materialist reductionist view is antithetical to a romanticized sense of wonder, etc., which is simply untrue. Further, you can simultaneously believe that what we call "love" is just an emergent property of chemical interactions and still thoroughly revel in the experience of it.

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@tulpas93
​ @divineinyang5384 Good to know! Too bad none of that came through in what he said in this interview - in fact, quite the opposite!

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@RollCorruption
I agree with you that studying the multiple aspects of an object can create a great sense of awe. But you are talking about a material object which can be measured. Try the same with "love" instead of a flower. How much has science led to society having a deeper appreciation towards love?

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@tulpas93
@RollCorruption You're kidding, right? You didn't seriously buy that drivel about love being undetectable, immeasurable, and otherwise impenetrable to science, did you? Sorry.

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@vargonian
@medhurstt I’ve heard people kick the can down the road with that argument, saying things like: “Well maybe the drug is just unlocking the magical immaterial thing in the brain”

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@TheYahmez
E.B. White; "Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process."

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@Eilfylijokul
I think you'd find Iain would agree with that quote entirely. The master and his emissary presents a rigorously researched scientific theory. He cites a large body of neuroscience literature and is by no means anti science.

What Feynman shows in this quote is the optimal pattern of right-left-right hemisphere thinking which Iain lays out in his books and in other interviews (it should be noted I've watched many of his interviews and this one is quite poor relatively). Feynman sees the flower as a plant with an aesthetic form. He then dissects the flower and sees that it is a system of xylem and phloem etc. that carry nutrients wherever they're needed for growth. He then takes this knowledge back to the whole integrated plant and considers its place in the wider ecosystem, whether the insects that depend on it can appreciate its beauty, how he can even identify it as beautiful in the first place.

Iain talks about this way of viewing things, first as an integrated whole (right), then as a system of parts that can be systematically understood (left). The problem is when people terminate at this step and it's that that leaves the world as a system of disembodied parts where there can be no appreciation of beauty. Iain doesn't advocate for disregarding the left-hemisphere's contributions but rather handing them back for the appreciation of the right hemisphere which has a much better and more realistic picture of the process of life and the greater universe.

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@divineinyang5384
Firstly, I do not think Feynman's view is that the experience of wonder can be reduced to the purely material. I have read enough Feynman to know that is not true. By that quote you supplied, he was rather positing that there are several routes to the understanding of beauty, and that an understanding of the interior mechanisms of things, can and often does inspire more awe with each step of unveiling. It's important to note that each layer of inspection unfurls more questions than answers and it is in the gap between the two that wonder exists. While Feynman's view emphasizes scientific curiosity as a route to wonder, it does not follow that he was making a case for a purely materialist reductionist account of wonder.

Secondly, if you're making the case that neurochemical activity in the brain produces pleasant sensations that often accompany the feeling of love, then I totally agree with you. Love being an "emergent property" of chemical interaction in the brain however is exceedingly reductive and makes little sense to anyone who's ever loved. Because we still love when we're angry, when it's inconvenient, when we're depressed and despondent. Love is greater than the sum of its material expressions, and, I think, exists in a plane that transcends the physical.

Lastly, I still think McGilchrist's view is compatible with that Feynman quote because McGilchrist has always emphasized the complementary nature of the left and right hemispheres, particularly the right, in the experience of complex emotions of which love is its hallmark. Feynman's appreciation of the flower is not in conflict with McGilchrist's views.

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@williams.5952
@divineinyang5384 Exactly. I guess these people missed the part toward the end of the episode when McGilchrist mentions the discoveries of biology as one of the things he finds the most wonderful about the world. As for Feynman, the described scientific knowledge may have been obtained/learned purely rationally, but there is nothing rational (or "left-brain") about his aesthetic appreciation for that scientific knowledge.

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@TrevorWright88
It only subtracts if your scientific knowledge leads you to a reductionist position, which is to say you think the flowers beauty isn’t a reality in itself but its “just” this or “merely” that. The question isn’t whether beauty or love is an emergent property but whether that emergent property has its own realness apart from what it may emerge from. A reductionist would say of love that it’s “just” brain chemicals. It’s like asking your review of a movie and saying it’s just light projected on a screen.

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@PeterBarnes2
I think McGilchrist would concede (or agree) that analytic knowledge does not, by presence, subtract. He stated multiply that left- and right-brain modalities are not better or worse than eachother, simply different. His point was that we have biased ourselves into one way over another. Perhaps he tacks rather far into the right-brain, but surely we would say that coming from the relatively materialistic/analytical culture of today. I think his seeming bias was not exclusionary but relative.

Feynman's description of the flower is certainly an observation of beauty. Actually it seems strongly in the right-brain (if I understand McGilchrist correctly), seeing the vastness in depth of it's form, the stories implied by its nature, and stories in what we understand about evolution (consider if we could empirically verify that the circumstances of the appearance of a particular pigment in the ancestors of a given flower happened in an environment sensitive specifically to pollination, and not some other factor).

Consider how Feynman describes his experience considering the flower: it is interesting. Not compelling to some particular scientific question for the purpose of answering another scientific question later, but a value unto itself. That he doesn't say the science knowledge resolves the matter of beauty, but that it "adds to its excitement."

As Feynman said there, the science knowledge adds, it does not subtract. It is possible, though, to choose to subtract from your experience, or rather its possible to neglect: neglecting the wholeness of your experiences, neglecting how it all fits together and with you a component of things; to fail to smell the roses.

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@mitchell10394
@vargonian no - you’re missing the point and the real issue. It is in the term “just.”

You’ve already demonstrated a huge part of the problem - which is that you’ve reduced what something is and said it’s just an emergent thing from particles interacting.

Science merely describes what is going on. It does not EXPLAIN things on a deep level. What I mean is that you can say the world is made up of atoms.. and what are atoms? You can perform this regression to infinity.

Eventually maybe you just say energy.

The fact is - you haven’t explained what it is. You’ve housed it in a new abstraction that makes you feel like you’ve caught it.

You haven’t, and it’s a fallacy.

So - the phrase “love is just particles interacting.” Is just saying “love is just something that happens when things that I don’t really understand interact with each other.”

The boxes we put reality in help us make maps and speculate (left brain - as discussed here.)

These boxes are NOT reality. The map is not the territory.

You’re still falling into the trap he is pointing out.

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@RollCorruption
@tulpas93 Love exists in the relational. AI knows this. Cog sci knows this and good science appreciates this. It doesn't exist within an individual.
What you are measuring is either a biomarker that correlates with the reported experience of love, or simply the report of the experience of love. You aren't measuring love. Any scientist would admit that.

With this train of thought you would also need to state that people believing in God or smoking cesation correlating with religious conversion is evidence of the divine? - Both arguments are flawed.

We cannot measure love in a lab the same way we cannot measure hot or cold. We can only measure Celsius or temperature which in itself isn't the same as hot or cold. It relates, sure. But hot and cold exist in the relational, with temperature being only part of the equation, ourselves being the other part and the hotness or coldness existing between us.

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@DundG
@RollCorruption Problem is love is very loosely defined and people say "I love you" while others completely dismissnit as real love but say it's just lust, or obsession, or a childish, naive love, or brotherhood. So what should we map when those are different things, as when you talk about a lover someobe wouldn't say "I get you, I love my brother too".

plus we still don't understand the whole brain structures that constitute even one type of love.

And I think understanding love better will increase the appreciacion for it once we understand it enough, just like we appreciate the development of a human being more by knowing how it develops. Having a love test, similiar to a pregnwncy test would also be very usefull for us and greatly appreciated.

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@arturhashmi6281
It does not contradict Iains position at all. He said clearly during this conversation, that many scientists particulary physicists tend to have holistic approach to the world, actually I believe that He would say that the "artist" from your story is rather reductionist, by putting himself and his friend in the categories of "astist" vs "scientist", which is basic left-brain thinking. Im sure that he would agree totaly with Feynmans position, because He did that already in one of the first chapters of his book - "Master and his emissary", where he descibe the mountain from the different points of view: the geologist, the painter, the tourist etc and he claims just like Feynman, that all those poitions are true, not like the "artist" from your story who sees his own worldview as "the truest". Do not forget that Iain Mcgilchrist is scientist himself, he spend most of his life as prof. on one of the best univeristies in the world and he shows clear respect for science and methodology, I would say that he is just more sceptical towards scepticism itself, then most of materialist scientists.

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@RollCorruption
@DundG I hear you. Once I learned the various greek words for Love it really opened my eyes and helped me gain clarity on the word. It took me nearly thirty years but being able to explain how I can love my son and love cake, but not with the same love... Dig into CS Lewis and his lecture on it. Very helpful.

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@Eilfylijokul
@DundG I didn't put forward a distinction between logical and emotional. I meant that the left brain view is schematised, abstract and in discreet parts (as in a series of notes written on a sheet) whilst the right hemisphere view is a living, embodied whole (as in the musical performance).

While I certainly can't deny the wealth of beautiful music that has come from classical theory it's worth noting that recent studies have been performed that found people from cultures outside of Europe prefer music that contradicts Aristotle's mathematically derived scales and tempos.

I might also argue that whilst a computer can reproduce a beautiful piece of music one isn't as moved as one would be watching a live orchestral performance of the same piece. In the same way I don't think simulated or formulaic expressions of love could every come close to emulating the real lived experience of it given the mix of bittersweet emotions and complex interpersonal relationships it takes form in.

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@michaelricketson1365
@Eilfylijokul You've explained Iain's view perfectly. Hopefully the OP paid attention.

[Svetimas]

Šiaip for fun dalinuosi abstrakčiais pamąstymais apie "grožį":
Lofi Cinema: You're Being Tricked Into Thinking This Is Beautiful

[Svetimas]

Drew Birnie su Mark Manson viename podcaste (Mark Manson: How to Focus, Solved) užkabino vieną gan įdomią metaforą tarp bičių ir žmonių:
21:55 Chapter 2: The Exploit–Explore Dilemma

Beje, kas bendriau liečia patį podkastą, tai jo pabaiga visai įdomiai ir neblogai kai kuriuos dalykus reziumuoja:
3:05:29 Chapter 8: The 80/20 of Focus
3:07:51 Is Focus a Skill?
3:11:07 Takeaways