The Art of Mind

“The Art of Mind” is a project to explore the possible value of photographic art as an aid to exploring and understanding the human mind, especially consciousness. By “photographic art” I mean standard photography, interactive 360 panoramas, and the combination of these that I call “photoportals“. These are presented in the other parts of this site. Because the project also includes a deliberate exploration of consciousness, a Resources page lists various materials that I’m working with to develop an understanding of it, organized in a way that others may find helpful. The following describes my thoughts about this project.

Although the human mind has many components, consciousness is really my focus. Many people associate it with different levels and types of thinking, emotions, awareness, perception, and so on. My focus is on the increasingly common definition of consciousness being “felt experience” – the purely subjective experience of what something is like.

The challenge of understanding how consciousness could result from physical systems is considered a hard problem in the sense that there seems to be no known path or technique for physical systems to exhibit conscious behavior, yet it is our most fundamental and common experience. In addition to the fact that there is no known way for consciousness to emerge from physical systems, the purely subjective nature of it means that standard objective scientific methods are probably insufficient for studying it.

Neuroscientists do study the ways in which brain activity and structure relate to consciousness. However, because of its purely subjective nature, the only “measurement” of consciousness is through the personal introspection and reporting of test subjects. These reports give some indication of conscious behavior, which are then compared to measurements of the brain. This process is often performed on subjects who are also exposed to various factors that can affect conscious states, such as drugs, brain injuries, meditation, and so on. Through these studies, correlations are established between brain structures and behaviors. However, these are only correlations, they are not yet generally considered to explain how the conscious states come about.

Because of this subjective nature, philosophers play a significant role in the study of consciousness by bringing rigor to the reporting and reasoning that is necessary to interpret the myriad observations and to help guide possible directions of scientific work. They use the tools of reason and logic, as well as well-established philosophical principles, developing a specialized branch of philosophy called “Philosophy of Mind”.

One of the tools that are commonly used are thought experiments – carefully thought-out imagined scenarios that are used to pose questions, interpret observations, explore limitations in understanding, and so on. Some thought experiments have become widely shared. They provide another tool for different people to compare notes. The activities described so far are helpful techniques for wrestling with the observations being made by scientists and others working in the field, but they are not the only tools. It is sometimes pointed out that art has a long history of probing the human experience in ways that are penetrating yet still often shareable.

Thus, an obvious question is whether art could be deliberately used as a tool for exploring and understanding some of the questions about consciousness. Perhaps, for example, as a type of intuition pump, in which people explore ideas through their intuitions rather than reason alone. One suggestion has been that things like aesthetics may indicate mental states that are related to the felt experiences are the root of consciousness.

To that end, I’m interested in finding out whether photographic art could be useful in this way. Early efforts (thinking about qualia and dualism, for example) show promise, and even if they don’t actually pan out, the attempt seems fun and interesting. As a result, I hope to continue to develop the Art of Mind as a component of this web site.