The Cult of Doing

 The brain is sympathetic with the world. That it its job. It is not a stone that weathers rain and sun without question. It is dynamic and sensitive to the world which is how organisms with brains are acutely sensitive to their environments.

Now we enter the complex bit. Is our sympathy with the world all there is? Does everything start with the world and organisms are only ever reacting to environmental stimuli.

Is art just a response to stimuli, or does the human add something. Perhaps even something of "themselves?" 

Certainly at one point all philosophers agreed that knowledge begins with experience. Kant fleshed out a theory for the "synthetic a priori" which means actual knowledge that can be derived before experience but which is not "obvious". That the angles of a triangle add up to 180 can be logically deduced, but this depends upon the assumption of flat Euclidian space. The two are interchangeable. IF you define the angles to sum to 180 you are also talking about flat space. But what is space? This cannot be "experienced" since experience depends upon space. So Kant argues for an unlimited hierarchy of transcendental truths that we can extract from experience, but which experience depends upon rather than come through experience. SRH shows that such dependencies must exist. You can't have experience or knowledge that is self-evident or independent.

But I digress look how hard it was for philosophers to get away from the idea that the brain is just a passive sympathetic organ that responds to the world. That all knowledge is just passively injected through the senses.

But knowledge is only the start. The main question here is where does action and doing come from. Is it just the passive reaction to experience?

Imagine someone who behaves without any sympathy with the world around. It is cold and raining so they wear a t-shirt. It is hot and sunny so they wear a thick coat. People would think them mad.

The ability to be sympathetic to the world is certainly something we expect of a healthy person.

Artists obviously struggle with this. If all an artist does is respond sympathetically to the world then they would not be seen as "creative." Artists do rely upon inspiration, and they do need to be culturally sensitive and not too ahead of the times. They have to "add" something to their experience. It cannot just be passive. Even with "realist" painting where the artist seeks to add nothing and just reproduce what they see, the irony is the level of skill required to do this. To exactly replicate is far from a passive process, it requires millions of decisions and accurate craft. But you could argue that a machine can do this, and while it is not passive the decisions that a realist artist makes are just technical skill not content.

So let us separate action and doing into the physical skill and the content. A bad musician may still play a great piece of music, while the great musician may still play rubbish.

Ok time is short for me let me get to the point.

There are 2 extremes of thinking here.

(1) The Worm view of the brain where it is purely a reactor to stimuli.

(2) The God view of the brain where it originates "new" things.

The truth is actually these two coming together.

There is no God capability to individuals. I remember as a child one of my first stages of thinking aged 5 was about the process of creation itself. If I was to be successful I need to be able to create. But where do new ideas come from. Invent a new mode of transport? That was my particular question. It is interesting that we seem stick with what we already know. Walking, running, cycling, driving, flying, swimming. What you already know is easy. But something new seems impossible.

And yet creation does happen. People do invent, things do change. Who first started using the world "sick" to mean good? Its not particular creative, its just a reverse in meaning, but someone had to initiate it, and it had to catch on.

Often people create at the same time. Darwin and Wallace both came up with the evolution by natural selection at the same time. Leibnitz and Newton came up with Calculus at the same time. Altho in both cases there are questions of plagiarism, there was genuine independent creation too.

It seems to me that creation does not just occur at the individual level. It is changes in a society and community that cause seeds to grow in individuals. I may think I am very smart to be using a laptop but of course it is the culmination of centuries of human progress, countless individuals involved in the gradual development of this entity. It is a community effort, and the humans alive in the age of IT are part of that community and learn the skills needed to be part of that community just as people learn the skills to be part of their community regardless whether that community hunts the forests or works in a post-industrial society.

So creativity is not the product of an isolated individual brain. It is a community thing. An emergent property of the collective. But a collective like a brick wall is made of individuals. We have the classic Individual/Group antimony here. And creativity comes from that.

Going back to our man wearing a thick coat on a sunny day. If we were to try and be a God like creator the chances are we would miss the mark and create stuff that had no meaning of significance to people. We could gain some kind of cult status where people follow us simply because we are original and apparently disconnected from the world around us. Some might say Damien Hurst and Tracy Emin achieved this. Tracy herself says that what she was making wasn't really supposed to have a wide audience. That kind of ironic, knowing and intellectual art makes no sense outside the circles of high art. Yet she was propelled into the public sphere and most people didn't understand her art. She gained a cult following, but her art was meaningless to most. I wonder whether you see this in music also. Sometime just being different is the artists only way of trying to define themselves. And indeed different attracts attention, but often it has no staying power because it simply doesn't make sense in the context. Times may change and the art become relevant, but as an individual this cannot work.

So we see that humans are neither completely sympathetic like worms, and they are not God like creators either. They are a subtle organic mix of individuals in societies and what they do neither a simple reaction to the world around them, nor a radical innovation in the face of the world around them. There is a slow evolution of human society, culture and language that mediates the world around us so that our actions are really a very deep interaction between world and brain.

The point of this blog was to end the idea of isolated islands of individuals who process information and then make personal decisions on how to act. What I called the Cult of Doing. The causes amongst other things the problem of freewill. When action is seen as mediated by a society and culture the individual and the collective come together to inform action.

From the misunderstanding that is the Cult of Doing humans appear to be faced with a blank sheet of what to do. Especially for the young who feel that they must "do" something with their lives. This is just a misunderstanding. All societies and cultures have predefined roles that mediate the problem of life. Be that being a farmer or a writer or unemployed slob. Of course the "unemployed" is simply a creation of Capitalist society, it never existed before Capitalists took over industry and started hiring and firing people.

So "what to do with my life" dissolves. It is just the result of a mistake. Life will find you! But we are not worms waiting to react to stimulation. But we are not Gods either upon which all the questions fall to us to solve.