It
is a rare opportunity for someone like me, who uses the scientific method to
understand the human imagination, to have a sounding board for my ideas in a
truly reflective artist, particularly one who works in a medium that is very
close to my own heart – the theatre.
Thank you Ric for abiding by the rules of improv with your “and yes”
gesture. I will only address some of
issues you highlighted here, or else this will go on for pages on end.
Although
it is true for all art forms, theatre provides an obvious space for exploring
what you beautifully termed the "degrees of proportionality between
stimulus and cascade" where the distinction between reality and fantasy is
patently questionable, especially when considering the immersive and
collaborative moment-to-moment experience of blending that occurs between both
worlds during a performance. In fact, the mere preparation for a role can lead
to a conceptual blurring between the actor/character, and can lead to
fundamental shifts in conceptualization that can manifest in positive ways in
terms of gaining insight to one’s own self (the example of Dustin Hoffmann in
Tootsie: http://tinyurl.com/dhtootsie)
or have a negative impact by resulting in debilitating emotional distress (the
example of Daniel Day Lewis and Hamlet: http://tinyurl.com/ricbook).
This
would suggest that qualitative distinctions like active-versus-passive are
rather arbitrary, and that a continuum-based perspective must be necessarily adopted.
Incidentally, this is what bears out in the empirical evidence from my own work
in the neuroscience of creative conceptual expansion where I look for
commonalities between the active and passive modes.
It
is worth noting that such a continuum is also apparent in art forms that don’t
inherently feature the temporal dimension. Alison Jackson’s photography (http://tinyurl.com/TEDalison), for
instance, provides stellar examples of the dynamic nature of the active/passive
continuum. Realism is usually conceived of in a bottom-up manner, such as in
the context of computer game programming where so much of the focus is on
creating worlds that are as accurate and representative as possible in terms of
perceptual features. But Jackson takes a top-down conceptual approach to
creating realism. She does this by presenting peephole/voyeuristic/mind’s eye
views of scenes using perceptually degraded images of celebrity doppelgangers
engaging in the kind of activities that we imagine then to be doing in private.
The audience takes the leap into the narrative and unwittingly participates in
completing the fake story by believing it at some level.
So
why do empiricists make these arbitrary divisions? I suppose that the simple
answer is that there is no other way to commence the scientific exploration of
difficult constructs. We have to try to systematize and identify the essence of
the phenomenon in question. The course of action, in my own case, is to then investigate
it using a variety of direct and oblique approaches where the focus is not only
on gathering proof for the ideas, but also establishing conditions under which
they would be disproved. And the impetus is to go beyond each step by exploring
and building on the insights, integrating the many intricacies, and eventually (hopefully)
cultivate or evolve a comprehensive and systemic understanding of what is going
on.
A central
feature of art as the delivery system for fundamental insights or truths is the
participatory/collaborative nature of its myriad forms. It works when the
expressions of truth resonate with the audience, and there are unlimited
manifestations of such expression. The fourth wall, in contrast, is entirely opaque
in the case of scientific enquiry. And the task is to arrive at “the truth” in
the form of generalizable principles. One is solely dependent on linkages to be
formed or altered between the various nodes of one’s own knowledge network to arrive
at the crucial insights. The mind’s penchant for detecting conceptual
isomorphisms makes this task easier, but at the same time also difficult as the
bias to be seduced by easy explanations that resonate as true leads one to
slide down the path of least resistance, clinging to ideas that only have
manifest or face validity. The history of ideas is littered with so many examples
of how scientists get things spectacularly wrong, despite the best intentions.
Speaking
of isomorphisms, the dynamics of the theatre actually bears several strange parallels
to the workings of the brain. As a narrative plays out, the objective
reality/fiction distinction is blurred for the actors and the audience with both
engaged, albeit in different ways, in the continual cycle of perceiving and anticipating
this illusory world. A similar cycle is echoed in the brain, a supremely
complex system, which fundamentally operates in service of receptive-predictive
functions across different modes and contexts of experience. One can take this
even further. Despite having to continually process information that varies in
terms of how disjunctive it can be relative to one’s real world, there is rarely
a sense of confusion or existential panic that stems from engaging with fictional
worlds. We can be deeply and emotionally immersed in such worlds and leave them
unscathed, with our conceptions of reality still intact. This stability in
phenomenology corresponds with certain aspects of processing in the brain,
which is continually bombarded with information about the outer environment. The
stimulation that is received by our senses is perplexingly complex and
relentless. Into the brain goes chaos, but out of it comes our ordered view of
the world.
Such
cycles bring to mind something that Aryeh spoke of during his presentation in
Salzburg. About how the space between the real and imaginary world is where
creativity exists.
Thanks
again Ric for this gratifying and helpful exchange!
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