Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!media-lab!minsky
From: minsky@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Marvin Minsky)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: emergent properties
Keywords: Sparseness_Theory
Message-ID: <3560@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Date: 4 Oct 90 00:45:31 GMT
References: <3499@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <1990Oct3.183522.17076@riacs.edu> <3549@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <45348@apple.Apple.COM>
Reply-To: minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge MA
Lines: 62

In an earlier note, Douglas G. Danforth asserted that

>>> Every once in a while we reremember that the blue of the sky is
truely amazing and not just a consequence of Rayleigh scattering

and I argued back that 

>> I don't find the blue sky truly amazing.  I do find that it
sometimes activates some primitive emotions that I don't understand --
and have trained myself to regard this as more annoying than amazing.
This leads me to do more experiments and try to refine existing
theories.

Then nsj@Apple.COM (Neal Johnson) retorted that

> Primitive emotions_? Why "primitive"? Why "annoying"? Why do I find
this response leading to a point of view that is ultimately
de-humanizing since awe, mystery, and the aesthetic experience are
human? Why do I feel that you must live in a pretty barren world full
of theories and intellectualizations but no beauty? What is wrong with
being awed by a blue sky? Why must you reduce it to a better theory?
Is it because beauty can't be quantified, that mystery can't be
explained? Are we just supposed to ignore these things "untouchable"
by the scientific method? What is to be gained by this reductionism?

It seems to me that njs identifies awe, mystery, and the aesthetic
experience as "human".  Well, I beg to differ.  Those, in my view are
the barren world of infantile thought.  Yes, I don't like "beauty"
because I have certain suspicions about what's happening "I like
something without knowing why".  My view is that the brain has many
parts and many processes.  And the very things Neal likes to wallow
in, I suspect, are mainly the situaitons in which certain brain-parts
are stimulated by poorly-known "innate releasing mechanisms" of the
kind described by Lorenz and Tinbergen.  Because of the -- I said
"primitive" to mean evolutionarily early -- way those brain-parts were
connected in our early ancestry, those beauty-and-mystery-and-awe
activities "take over" and inhibit the more recent developments that
evolved in our journey from monkey to sapiens.  The joke, to me, is
that THINKING is the glorious part of being human, and I have not the
slightest reason to suppose that Neal's emotions when transfixed by a
stupid blue sky or (I dare to say) stupid Rembrandt Portrait that
people think show the character of a mind from the lines in a face --
that those emotions are any more subtle or elevating than those of a
mouse under whichever conditions evoke similar cognitive arrests.  

The cream of the joke is in the suggestion that people like me live
"in a pretty barren world full of theories and intellectualizations
but no beauty."  The "but" is misplaced for two reasons.  First, it is
the world of beauty that is, in my view, barren -- because it is based
on little parts of the brain paralyzing the big parts.  It is no
accident, I say, that people can say so little about why beauty is so
great and powerful.  It is, I claim, because there's almost nothing
much to say.  You can't keep your eye off that girl because of certain
curves.  You have no choice, because your little curve-detector truns
off your huge choice-engines.  You can't bear the absurdity and
shallowness of this, and so write thousands of years of stupid poems
praising flowers (which you appreciate probably LESS intensely than a
honeybee) and likening women (with real brains) to them.  Beauty, fah.

Sorry to flame so long at such trivial matters.  Back to
philosophy/science/psychology?  Thanks, guys.  Why don't the students
argue more?