 - Last login: 5 hours agoLaodan
- laodan is a 56 year old guy from Wisconsin, USA.
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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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Reality Sandwich | Could Science and Art Become One and the Same?
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Apr 15, 6:05pm
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•http://www.realitysandwich.com/could_...
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Could Science and Art Become One and the Same?
in Reality Sandwich by Greg Wendt
Reality encompasses that which is beyond science as we know it, or at least beyond that which the current scientific mindset can explain.
Is it possible that art can be used in a scientific way to create a more accurate expression of reality and a greater understanding of human experience?
Capra points out that Da Vinci's genius came from his ability to use art as a way to be scientific, hence throwing the whole distinction between science and art into question.
 Could Science and Art Become One and the Same?
To answer our most fundamental questions, science needs to find a place for the arts. by Jonah Lehrer in Seed
The Science of Leonardo new book of by Fritjof Capra
Artsense by myself
Acrylic n#39 of my "artsense collection".
In summary Jonah Lehrer posits that "If we want to get an answer to our deepest questions - the questions of who we are and what everything is - we will need to draw from both science and art, so that each completes the other".
Unfortunately this is a position that is founded on a confused understanding of what is knowledge and what is art.
1. Knowledge:
Humans, since times immemorial, tried to understand reality in the sense of "the whole in which we are such tiny particles". We distinguish 3 ages in the history of human understanding of reality or of human knowledge and those 3 ages are driven by the sharing of a common "worldview" that is a vulgarization of the understanding attained by the men of knowledge of the day:
- the animist age: all parcels of the whole are inter-related: the shaman is the man of knowledge.
- the religious or philosophic age: god or wisdom: the priest or the wise man are the men of knowledge.
- the modern age: the logic of capital and its ideology of rationality: the capital holder and the scientist are the men of knowledge.
2. Art:
Since time immemorial visual arts served at giving visual signs of the understanding of reality by the men of knowledge of the day. This societal functionality of art was lost upon all sometime around 1900 when thinker-artists experimented in devising something else than the first degree image that projects on the retina. But those experimentations concluded in the absurd when everything the artist was positing as being art was deemed to be art.
The societal functionality of art was lost because rationality and science don't offer a global model of understanding of reality. Rationality and science are following a path of questioning that pushes till later the discovery of the answer. This model does not supply the artist with a knowledge of everything to illustrate and the artist is most often in no position to devise his own knowledge base, for, he never was given the tools for such an exercise.
I agree with Jonah Lehrer that science left on its own will never come to the end of its mission to understand reality. But I disagree that art has to produce knowledge. This should be left to the philosophers and researchers of humanity's early cultures and most importantly animism. As Fritjof Capra mentioned in his "The tao of physics" the most advanced physics, chemistry, and other sciences often rediscover the fundamental truths expressed in animism and the later philosophies built over it. My take is that a new worldview for artists to illustrate will emerge out of the contact between science and animism.
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