Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!isi.edu!smoliar From: smoliar@isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) Newsgroups: comp.music Subject: Re: 2nd rate European Conference Summary: Experience and intelligence: What are we talking about? Keywords: absolute perceptual unity Message-ID: <16440@venera.isi.edu> Date: 22 Jan 91 17:14:06 GMT References: <15268@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> <5121@idunno.Princeton.EDU> <16384@venera.isi.edu> <5376@idunno.Princeton.EDU> <650@anaxagoras.ils.nwu.edu> <16409@venera.isi.edu> <1150@artsnet.UUCP> Reply-To: smoliar@venera.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) Distribution: na Organization: Information Sciences Institute, Univ. of So. California Lines: 78 In article <1150@artsnet.UUCP> mgresham@artsnet.UUCP (Mark Gresham) writes: > As somewhere else rattling about 'experience' vs. 'intelligence' >has been going on, I now throw in my two cents worth: > 'Intelligence' about an 'object of art' is precisely that, and >does have to do with notions of 'structure', though what is >analysed is as much the 'yardstick' as the object we attempt to >analyse ("Measurements measure the measuring means.") > 'Experience' of an 'object of art' is epistomologically quite >different, experience being a diffrerent 'kind' of knowledge from >intelligence. It is not about the structure of the object, but >involve rather 'encounter', what memories we bring to that >encounter (can't avoid that), and the change of 'intellectual >state' to some place other than where it was (i.e., we are 'moved' >by the experience). > Mark, while I appreciate your efforts to try to make sense out of a philosophical debate which seems to get more clouded with every contribution, I must confess to being concerned that there are two many highly-charged words in your above text. I do not mean this as a personal attack so much as a wail of frustration that we all keep getting slammed back against these words like "intelligence" and "knowledge," when each of us is stuck with some naive and idiosyncratic attempt at "understanding" (there goes another one) those words, often with little hope that any two of us can ever bring those idiosyncrasies into alignment. Suppose, for the sake of argument, we wipe the slate clean and put of a rule that we shall not let the word "intelligence" sneak into our discourse. ("For the sake of argument" means "as an intellectual exercise." We cannot prevent the word from coming back to us sooner or later. I just want to try to hold it off at arm's length while trying to get a better handle on what we think we are talking about here.) The reason I suggested trying to push the discussion back to Tinbergen is that what we REALLY want to be concerned with is behavior and how it is manifested. Now in my last article, I talked about trying "to identify those instincts which kick in to modulate musical behavior;" and I liked your amendment to the effect that we cannot, so to speak, build a fence around musical concerns. I agree with this. Behavior is "whole cloth;" and whether or not we choose to call it musical may have more to do with societal conventions than anything else. (There is the old McLuhan joke about Bali: "We have no art. We do everything as best as we can.") If we begin, then, by focusing our attention on behavior, we can start to ask some of the usual reductionist questions which we tend to associate with both scientific and philosophical inquiry. Given a "musical situation," why does an agent behave in a particular way? That situation may be one of composition, performance, or listening (not to mention some combination of these alternatives). However, before we launch into THOSE questions with too much enthusiasm, perhaps we have to remember that cautionary note of Wittgenstein's about philosophy and first worry about how we can DESCRIBE such instances of behavior. If we get too involved with explanation too quickly, we may end up developing a vocabulary for effects which is nothing more than a re-wording of a vocabulary for causes, which might leave us in the same situation as that Magritte painting of a fortress built upon an enormous boulder hovering in the air! I do not, as of this writing, have any "good" answers about how we can describe such behavior. However, I am beginning to develop some rather strong convictions about dangers we should try to avoid. Most important seems to be a need to fall back on what are essentially static and passive artifacts as a foundation for our discourse. I worry that you are using the phrase "object of art" to stand for just such a static and passive artifact. Whether or not I buy all the details of Gibson's "ecological" approach to perception, I do feel rather strongly that we cannot talk about perception in terms of a transformation from some given static data structure of sensory input (like the way we tend to view visual input as a two-dimensional array which corresponds to the retina) into some other, equally static, "semantic" data structure. Life is far more dynamic than that . . . not just to the extent that we are always dealing with new input as time passes but also in that there is far more INTERACTION among mind, the organs of sensation, and the environment being sensed than can be captured by such trivial metaphors of transformation. Thus, any attempt at description which does not show due respect to such dynamics will probably ultimately founder on its own inadequacy. -- USPS: Stephen Smoliar 5000 Centinela Avenue #129 Los Angeles, California 90066 Internet: smoliar@venera.isi.edu