Thinking With Art
Much of our world today is governed by structured thinking and reasoning. Perhaps not day-to-day life for individuals, but business, government, science, and technology are all operated through well-defined rules and processes. This is a reductionist approach to understanding and affecting the world.
The reductionist approach works for things that are well understood, but I’m not sure it’s always as effective when faced with great uncertainty or ambiguity. Things like human behavior or topics at the edges of science like consciousness are harder to deal with analytically than physics or chemistry.
As such, I wonder if some ideas are better explored through other ways of thinking, such as art. This is more context-aware, more grounded in human experience and society. Although there are reductionist elements to it, perhaps in the craft portion, there is also an intuitive, creative aspect. Perhaps this is a way of thinking through a topic in ways different than typical rational processes.
For example, I’ve noticed how my own photography can be a sort of conversation with myself or might interact with other people in a sort of non-verbal conversation.
One area where this seems useful is the study of consciousness. One researcher has pointed out how some literature and movies do a good job exploring human reaction to artificial intelligence, which is just one piece of this puzzle. Might this not be more generally useful? Science fiction, for example, has been generating stories about AI for a long time and occasionally some stories probe the issues in creative ways. If nothing else, this seems helpful for clarifying questions we need to ask about being conscious, with which research can follow up.
Obviously, literature is not the only form of art. This begs the question of whether other art could be used to explore artificial intelligence and consciousness. This question is becoming increasingly relevant as AI development is accelerating, and because our understanding of the human mind is not, many researchers are warning that we need to be learning faster.
Whether this could fit in with my own photography is yet to be seen, but it seems like an interesting question.