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From: eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: "Emotion" vs. "Understanding" (was: Re: emergent properties)
Keywords: intersubjectivity
Message-ID: <3129@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 5 Oct 90 19:59:04 GMT
References: <3549@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <45348@apple.Apple.COM> <3560@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
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Organization: Princeton University, New Jersey
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In article <3560@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
;
;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".  


"Beauty" also means types of historico-critical and individuated 
experience that may or may not aspire (as Walter Pater put it) 
to condition o0f knowledge: Minsky assumes that all such 
experience does indeed aspire to this condition, and if I read 
him correctly he's proposing, not unreasonably, that this 
aspiration serve, where applicable, as the basis of its 
appreciation. In other words, one ought to admire Bach not because of
your affective response to Bach, but rather -- and I'm going to 
try to say this in the way I think Minsky would -- because of 
the resource it provides to cognitive inquiry, in that hrough 
this music one might come to understand more of the mind. In 
other words this music is admirable to the extent that it 
helps build a bigger theory of what the mind is. It is not admirable 
because you have such and such feelings that you think are 
induced by this music. 

I don't know if Minsky will agree with that formulation, and I'll be 
curious to see how he emends it if he does, but I'm going to disagree
with it anyway. What, principally, is objectionable from the perspective
of the cognitive agenda -- that is, the extraction of cognitivity
from the work in question -- is that it doesn't make it clear 
what's being done with time. Music is temporal experience, however 
you can (and I do) cogitate about its nature: it's experience 
with a particular here and now built right into it. Similarly, 
the experience of "the blue sky," if awe-inspiring, is 
basically a "here-and-now" experience, it's a thing that must 
happen to one -- however one coordinates this "happening" -- 
and that experience is quite distinct from any sort of contemplation 
concerning that experience. In short, ACTUALLY doing something 
is quite distinct from reflecting on, or contemplating, or 
cogitating about something.  When we're speaking about "aesthetic" 
experience -- not, incidentally, a term I often take in the 
mouth -- we're speaking, I believe, of the nature, and 
non-duplicity, of these various actualities. 

Now I want to stress these forms of actuality as being the occasion
of the only forms of intersubjectivity known to the human mind. I mean,
by "intersubjectivity," the potential for qualities of experience which
are not directed, or conducted, or steered, by my primary selfhood. 
If awe-inspired by the blue sky I in sense momentarily become the 
blue sky -- I "get into" it, the way you can "get into" your favorite 
music or an engaging film, or anything else engaging. "Engaging" is
a weak word for "willing to cede volitional control" and is a condition
of one's capacity to listen. By "listening" I mean more than what
Minsky seems to mean, that is, "abstracting properties from, and making
theories of" -- I mean something like intersubjectification of self, 
of which looking at a blue sky isn't the worst example I can think of.
The best example I can think of would be something like the exchange
of private consciousness -- as McCluhan said, the ultimate media 
development: and I want to think of advanced thinking as tending in 
that direction, rather than the non-participant position on experience
espoused by Minsky, which finds "feelings of awe" at best "annoying,"
a philosophy which, I assume, at some point must transpose into 
one's private ethics. Probably this lack of sympathy -- or my reading
of this lack -- is what some people here have found disturbing.

En bref, Minsky takes experience and wants to extract from it understanding;
whereas the understanding I seek is how to increase, to perfect,
technologically and through the agencies of thought, the intensity of 
that experience, of which "understanding" itself is no doubt a type.
There are times when I understand things more or less -- in other words
I attribute to understanding the basic actuality of experience.

--eliot handelman
  princeton u., music dept.