I tend to think of Art as the expression of mastery of craft - i.e., you master a craft and sometimes its purpose transcends craft purpose to stimulate minds in an artistic way.
Music = structured sounds (i.e., along lines of melody, harmony and rhythm) whose purpose is to entertain and/or stimulate artistically. Not necessary in evolution, per se (as far as we know) but it arose out of biological components we did need. For the purposes of my pondering, it is the “Art byproduct” emerging from the “evolutionary craft” of developing a hearing apparatus.
Our Mind/Sense of Identity – serves the evolutionary purpose of organizing our various “selves” into a “single identity which contains multitudes” in order to keep us motivated towards self-preservation and procreation. Given its transitive, dynamic nature and fluid purpose, it is hard to nail down and leads to more speculation than anything about identity, God, etc. But is the mind another “Art byproduct emerging from evolutionary craft.”??
Is there insight to be gained – past a simple metaphor - when trying to make this connection or think of the mind this way?
I don’t think that the “higher” functions of the mind are by-products or separate from the evolutionary aspects of the most complex capabilities. I think I do get what you are saying about hearing and music, the useful change making the “frivolous” change possible. But it seems to me that the things that became possible due to our enhanced mental capacity have been adaptive as well. Self-awareness, the ability to correlate, long-term memory, anticipation of future events; all of these thing seem as adaptive as the original extra brain capacity that made them possible. It’s hard for me to envision what the advantage of extra brain capacity was without the add-ons”.
Or maybe I just don’t have the brain capacity to understand the premise.
I agree with everything you have here (well, I don’t know that I would agree with the word “frivilous” - but appreciate how you are trying to build on my OP ;). And yeah, clearly our degree of self-awareness HAD to be adaptive - in the OP, my assertion is that it plays a meta-organizing role which would be critical evolutionarily as our adaptive-learning capacity and hence our brain power, grew.
But my point is that it evolved to meet that need - but wouldn’t you agree that much of Human pondering takes advantage of that capacity in a way that stretches FAR beyond the initial needs which were the impetus for its selection?
Jürgen Schmidhuber has some interesting views on the utility of art, and the subjective sense of beauty: basically, it’s useful for any cogitating creature to be able to quickly compress and analyze (and especially, of course, predict) data it gets from the outside world, and the greater this capacity, the more useful it is. Thus, a drive to perfect its compression algorithms should be inbuilt in any thinking being – and this, he argues, is exactly what our drive both to create and appreciate art amounts to, in the abstract: compression is based on recognizing patterns and symmetries within the data – each such pattern can be used to reduce the total amount of storage space needed (think about how you can easily represent the string ‘aaaaa…a’ as ‘na’, n being the amount of times a occurs; a seemingly random string is much harder to compress, to the point that incompressibility and randomness are often used interchangeably in information science). Artworks, then, are a way of communicating compression algorithms, by exhibiting certain symmetries (as the OP already remarked, a key element of music is that it consists of structured sounds); interesting is whatever teaches us new ways of compression, and beautiful is that which we can effectively compress.
I totally get that. That reminds me of some points made in Jonah Lehrer’s book How We Decide (link to previous thread where I discuss it) - Lehrer basically asserts that our Executive Consciousness can only handle 5 - 7 elements at once - a common assertion - but then goes further to say that our subconscious represents all the other data that might contribute to our processing of the information in our Executive Mind. But since we can’t handle more data elements - and having perfect access to the data in our subconscious seems to require a savant-autistic type of modification to brain function, one of the ways that our brain “compresses” that data and brings it to our executive function is via emotions. So getting “a bad feeling” about something represents a data-compressed hunch, just like looking at the SI Swimsuit issue compresses a bunch of data into “this female would make an ideal genetic mate / she’s beautiful”
My point - okay, Humans have acquired this compression ability through evolution because it aids survival. But man do we use it for a far more varied set of uses - could the same thing be said for the basic phenomenon of self-awareness?
The OP reminds me of something I call the curious case of the violins. Most of us respond deeply and viscerally to the sound of violins played well (and even more viscerally to the sound of violins played poorly). Yet, we’ve only had violins for a few centuries, barely a blink in evolutionary time. Why?
You might want to compare your theories with those of Ellen Dissanayake, who tries to explain the evolutionary development of the arts, including music:
Hmm - could it be related to the fact that a violin occupies very similar space to the human voice - I guess mainly female? And so well-played, it taps our brain like a voice would; when poorly played, the distinctions vs. the human voice are especially…jarring?
Just thinking out loud…
Wendell Wagner - thank you for that; I will review it later today. I don’t know that I have a theory, per se - my working assumption is that I, as a layman, am trying to think through something that is much better understood by the science pros. By throwing my idea out there, I kinda expect someone to say “no, no, no - you are trying to frame the topic *this *way - here’s why that doesn’t work. Instead, we have come to frame it THAT way - and here’s why…”
Looking to get a little ignorance fought, if you will.
Update - I read about that woman’s books, WW - fascinating. She is definitely asserting something different from me - whereas I posit Art (in this case, music) as a byproduct that emerges from an evolutionarily-important trait (hearing), she seems to be asserting that Art is a central aspect to our evolution.
WordMan, I would say that you do have a theory. It may not be a particularly well formulated theory. I have no idea whether it’s a correct theory. It is a theory though.
Incidentally, don’t try to subscribe to Lingua Franca with the order form on that page, since the magazine folded shortly after that issue.
And yeah, of course it is a theory - kinda by definition. But I am not trying to trumpet it as a bullet-proof discovery - it is a naive layman’s working hypothesis looking for clarity. I was kinda hoping some Doper neuro/anthro/bio//musico/psychologist might frame how their discipline looks at these types of questions…and I appreciate the connections you’ve made.
I didn’t post earlier because I thought you were focusing on self-awareness as a trait and the uses of self-awareness, which I can’t say much about.
But, in regards to music, there are several functional uses apart from an outgrowth of hearing. Music is excellent for aiding memory. How many adults still sing out ABC’s, for example? And plenty of people can sing along to a 40-year old song, but have trouble remembering the street they lived on for five years. Before writing, any kind of mnemonic device would have been very valuable.
Music also helps people coordinate group activities. Slaves in the South used music to keep in time with each other. Deckhands on sailing ships did the same thing. Rowers have always used drums and often chants.
So I suspect that music as a purely entertaining art form
Great points - music is the manisfestation of the brain organizing parts of itself so it stands to reason it can be part of the mind’s organizing activities. Thanks.
