Drawing; A Tale of Two Realities.
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Isabella Brant by Rubens, c. 1621
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It was in 2022, and a week to a day before Christmas that Talitha had her 97th birthday party. Talitha dressed in her best clothes and jewellery, powdered her face, dabbed herself with Calèche (her favorite French perfume) and descended on the stairs-lift to be the proud host of her annual party. We were all there for lunch; her five children with their families and many grand children, as well as many of her friends who had known her for decades. Her annual birthday party marked the beginning of Christmas week, a festival of re-engagement, exchanging presents and catching up. On Christmas and Boxing day we were at it again as Talitha always demanded we visit her for a family Christmas lunch where she had presents for all her grandchildren. That week she drank too much wine, talked too much, got a bit sloshed and slept a lot.
My brother Crispin was the last of the family to leave. He started the long drive back to the French-Swiss Alps where he lives. Her celebrations over, Talitha ascended the stair-lift to read her newspapers for a while before taking a nap. A little later her carer brought her a cup of tea as she always did and nudged her awake. Her heart must have stopped for an instant. Talitha's face appeared serene and still living but inside her face the lights had been quietly switched off, and her soul had silently lurched into the oblivion of stardust. Poor Crispin had not even reached home when he heard the news that his mother had so gently passed away.
A week later we all assembled to celebrate Talitha's supremely long and eventful life. My sister Nikki adorned the church with the same flowers as were used on her wedding day in 1947 and I put on display the wedding dress she wore on that day, and we all remembered her. In her living room Talitha's chair was empty. I remember going up to her bedroom and opening a wardrobe where all her clean clothes were waiting for her, a breeze with the scent of Calèche brushed my face. That day I felt as if Talitha's soul was still with us. Now, two years later, I still sometimes meet my mother in my dreams, and I have a path where her favourite daffodils bloom in the Spring. We all experience these moments when people we loved are gone but still present.
In 1943 Talitha was a young girl, on the threshold of adulthood and as their youngest student ever at Cape Town University she was studying psychology In those days psychologists were banned from using the words like spirit, soul or consciousness. Psychologists of that age had adopted a dogma that soul was an abnormality that had no place in the physical word. Soul, renamed consciousness, is now more accepted in the physical sciences. Mind sciences have become one of the hottest topics in schools of psychology and philosophy, but the word soul is still largely banned from the scientific lexicon. Personally I see soul as a warmer more accurate word with which to describe my inner thoughts and being, but I guess scientists find it has to many overtones of an after-life, and a consciousness state that might be disassociated from our earthly bodies. For many the word soul implies a consciousness with a separate identity from the body, and whilst I have no objection to that concept, whenever I use the word soul in this article I am NOT acknowledging a disconnection between body and soul.
I am complemented if someone tells me a drawing I have made appears to have caught the soul of the subject. Artists embrace the concept of soul, and a whole genre of music even calls itself Soul. When I was young and starting out as an artist I found looking at portraits boring, but even in those days there were always a few images that mesmerised me. In those days I was living in London and many times I would go to National Galley (London) where I would often spend a long time looking at their collection of Rembrandt oil paintings.
Hendrikje Stoffels by Rembrandt
I have always thought Rubens drawing of Isabella Brant (head of this post) to be the gold standard of portraiture. When we look at Isabella she looks so real that we feel we must know
this person, but of course we do not. Isabella lived over 400 years
ago, yet the image has preserved the sensations we have looking at a real soul. Of
course we are all aware that the image is made up of inanimate pixels, and contains no soul.
A drawing like this skilfully booby-traps our perception into believing
we are looking at a living being.
As an older artist portraiture has become almost an obsession. Everyday I spend hours drawing moving faces from the television screen,
and in the summer I go down to the beach and draw the families eating
ices creams at Saundersfoot. In my mind I often return to the Isabella Brant drawing to guide me in my own more limited ambitions to learn how to better set my booby traps. I still have a long way to go before I reach the nuanced expression Rubens catches so effortlessly.
Portraits are marks on flat paper that we use to trick our audiences into seeing as three D structures, likenesses of people we know and the best are even soulful. What is it that we are "seeing"? I am especially interested in why we see soul in lifeless matter?
Dualism
As a very young child in the 1950s I was sent to a convent where the nuns wore habits. The nuns taught us to pray before and after lessons and told us that we each had a soul, and that after we died our souls would depart from our bodies to ascend to heaven where we would be judged by God for our goodness and sins. These sorts of religions, where people believe the body and soul have separate identities are called dualist.
I was very fortunate in my education, and some years later I went to a Quaker boarding school, which whilst still being nominally Christian had a much more reflective approach. We were taught to sit silently in "meeting rooms" for an hour and only talk when our spirit moved us to contribute to the service. The conversations were rarely about afterlives and almost always about putting ones thoughts into social context. The school naturally had a science department where religion was not even a subject.
Today modern human societies educate their children in schools without any religious affiliation where children are taught one view of reality, the science view of reality. The Science view is a unified reality of the world built on a scaffold of measurements, immutable facts, axioms and theories of Newtonian physics. The technological genius of our societies are is dependent on the factual knowledge of science, and if a fact is discovered to be wrong our unified conception of reality has to be amended to include the new information, otherwise our bridges will fall down and we would not be able to send people safely into space. Everything in technology relies on the successful application of a unified theory of immutable facts. We know science's version of reality is mostly correct because our bridges do not fall down.
If you had been born 800 years ago you would have lived in a pre-science society where knowledge was overseen by the teaching of the Church. Immutable beliefs included a belief that the earth was the centre of the universe and the world was created in seven days. With the coming of science the immutable beliefs of the teachings of the Church were demonstrated to be wrong. Through their telescopes Copernicus and Galileo showed that the earth is a planet that orbits that sun, and today when we send our space ships to the moon we see no evidence of a God that created the universe. The coming of science has changed our view of our bodies too. We can see through our microscopes and our scanners how our mood swings and spiritual well being are directly linked to the biochemistry of our brains and goings on in the physical world. We take drugs to relieved our pain and change our moods. After a bleed on the brain we become speechless, damage in the occipital lobes will cause us to become blind, a knock on the head that separates the forebrain from the midbrain which will cause us to lose all empathy, a lesion to the hippocampus will cause us to lose our abilities to remember what happened five minutes ago.
As science uncovered more connections between our mental experiences and physical make-up it became harder for scientists to believe that body and soul have separate identities. Today almost all neuroscientists call themselves "materialists". They call themselves materialists because they think soul is inseparable from the physical and biochemical make-up of the body. Another word for people who believe body and soul are a unified is "monist"
Philosophy and science have adopted a logical truth that the body and soul are a single inseparable entity, but they refuse to call it soul because for them the word is too closely associated with beliefs in an afterlife and has too much religious baggage, so instead of dividing the reality into body and soul, they divided the world into "body and consciousness". The problem is that name changing did not change them into monists. Scientists found themselves stuck with an abnormality in their unified theory of physics. Their science reality has a place for matter, space, time, gravity and magnetism, but no place for consciousness. If consciousness is not part of sciences unified theory of everything, it is an abnormality that does not fit in. Science and philosophy cannot deny Descartes basic axiom that there are thoughts therefore there is consciousness, and science have not escaped the trap of having two versions of reality; the reality fo physics and the reality of thoughts If they are telling us that they have a unified theory for everything they are only fooling themselves. When they call themselves materialists or monists they are lying to themselves.
Sciences first reaction to their denial was to deny consciousness interacted with the functioning of the body. They shunted consciousness into a lay-by and called it an "epiphenomenon", a
sort of unexplainable and irrelevant scent that magically appeared like a metaphysical cloud inside complex animals for no good reason. As an epiphenomenon consciousness could not, and would not control
the behaviour of the body. Psychologists in those times became obsessive followers of the work of Pavlov with his hungry dogs and bells, and tried to describe all human behaviour in terms of bodily (physical) reaction to stimuli (physical). They called their movement "behaviourism". Behaviourism became a dogma. My view is that whilst there is evidence that free will, and control of the thoughts over our bodies are very complex subject, there is no way I can believe the minds of complex animals like ourselves evolved consciousness for no good real world reason. Even psychologists are on my side in this matter as there is now a consensus that behaviourism cannot be an explanation for all behaviour. Behaviourism, as a theory for all behaviour has simply failed.
During the later part of the 20th century the scientific community's denial that consciousness interacted with the body melted. Over the last 30 years "consciousness studies" have taken centre stage, but consciousness studies have become wedded to a particular framing of an idea they call "the Hard Problem of Consciousness". The hard problem of consciousness was put forward in 1995 by a colourful Australian philosopher who dresses like a beatnik, his name is David Chalmers.
To simplify Chalmers' Hard Question; Philosophers of the mind are now asking "how do physical processes produce the rich conscious experiences of seeing colours, tasting lemons and having feelings?" Very soon after this question was asked an influential philosopher called Daniel Dennett stepped in questioning whether phenomenal experiences (qualia) are real or illusionary. If conscious experiences are an illusion the hard question goes away. For the last three decades the philosophy of mind communities have been divided between these two factions with neither side able to land a solid blow against the other. Out of the stalemate a movement called the panpsychism has been allowed to flourish. Panpsychists, largely led by Philip Goff, propose that consciousness is a attribute of all matter, a bit like mass or gravity. They think even stones contain the secret sauce of consciousness that has been concentrated and magnified by evolution into a powerful force into the minds of animals like ourselves. (reading list below). I think Phil Goff must be wrong because consciousness depends on ownership of a mind, and must be an attribute of both mind and physics. Stones have no consciousness.
Philosophers are doing what philosophers do best: Playing with words and writing books whilst sitting in their ivory towers subsidised with public money. Their hard question is a hoax because it evades the real question which is inescapable: we have both bodies and consciousness, and they were evolved by nature for a purpose in the physical world. Consciousness cannot exist without a mind, and it interacts with the body. How consciousness evolved and how it interacts with body are the practical hard questions.
Whilst Chalmers, Dennett and Goff have been arguing the neuroscience community has gone on investigating and adding to our knowledge on how the relationships between mind and body work. Using this new knowledge as a backdrop new books have been appearing that have attempt to put the emergence of consciousness in the minds of higher intelligence animals in the context of evolution. These books usually start with a few sentences about how when we put hard question of consciousness in the practical context of what we know and how it might have evolved, it simply evaporates. Personally having read many such books I have never seen the hard question evaporate, but this approach, especially when we consider the evolution of consciousness, does bring sharper focus on to Nature's purpose when adding consciousness into the design of her creations. As the clouds have evaporated the interaction between body and soul has become a little more visible.
List of books:
The theory of Two Flawed Realities
Flaws in Objective reality
We are all seduced into believing reality is aligned with truth telling. Sometimes truth is believing what our eyes tell us or other times it is following the science? Realities are constructions of the mind and they are always attempts to impose sense on a universe built out of chaos. There are as many ways to construct them as there are minds to think them. The Case Against Reality by David Hoffman (2020 Penguin) is a must read if you want to go deeper.
For my purposes, which is to demonstrate how drawings work, I will be dividing realities in a traditional way, using two commonly used methods to construct the world. The reality of logic, science and technology is one method we have already been discussing is, the other way of understanding reality is as a product of perception, a manifestation of our "umwelts". Perceptual reality is a method more used in the arts. They are both constructed out the same reality, but the two methodologies reach different conclusions about truth and their conclusions are often 100% in opposition with each other, however their strengths are complimentary with each other.
The success of technology is dependent on the fabric of science, logic and objective reasoning. Objective reasoning is a method of thinking that is mostly unique to the human species which has excessively large front brain lobes where the final stages of these sorts of thought processes are completed, and it has enabled our species to outwit and dominate all other animals with which we share our planet. Knowing the advantages the power of reasoning affords us makes our societies very referential towards science, and as a consequence we often lack scepticism about its flaws. In times of crisis we say things like "use your head", "follow the science" and "don't be so emotional". There is a unspoken consensus amongst us that it is our rationality and reasoning powers, not our humanity, that makes our species superior to other animals. I do not agree.
Just to lay my cards on the table early I will summarise my opinion here. Human superiority is our humanity, and our ability to magnify our consciousnesses to levels of enrichment other animals cannot reach. This ability is partly because we have enhanced rationality, but our frontal lobes enable us with many new instruments of thinking. Working memories, autobiographical memories, religions, language, the arts and beliefs that are shared outside the consciousness barriers of individuals. All these things contribute to our magnified self awareness, shared cultural achievements and self discipline. I hope as the story I am about to tell unfolds you will understand my view better.
Flaws in science reality
As I have already mentioned we are taught in our schools to revere science's version of reality. If we are to be dispassionate in our analysis we must at least start by diminishing the cultural bias against the alternative umwelten reality of perception (subjective) that has a different method of making sense of the chaos of the universe. As discussed consciousness simply cannot be accounted for by science. This alone should be a red flag that the fundamentals of science are in need of amendments. Sadly consciousness is not a lone red flag, there are other red flags that warn us of abnormalities in sciences version of reality.
Science is a distorted and incomplete view of reality, but the distortions do not affect how well our technology works on our planet, so they are put to the back of minds. They are however measurable. Time is not linear, it exists across a warped universe, and an atomic clock launched and sent around the earth will register time at a different speed to one left on the Earth's surface. Science's matrix of facts get more bizarre as we drill down into the reality of particle physics, where theorists begin to abandon the hard language of measurements for subjective language of qualities like "charm" and "strangeness". Quantum physics is weird too. A theory called "entanglement" postulates communication between electrons across the universe that happen faster than the speed of light.
The hard question of consciousness is not an anomaly that cannot be filled with a Newtonian explanation, it is instead just one more example that teaches us to recognise that science is an incomplete account of reality. We can all agree science is certainly a dependable tool of thinking that affords us to make excellent technology that helps our species dominate the other species on Earth. In his book (recommended above) David Hoffman summarises in his book more hard questions "matter and space arise from conciousness - as a perceptual interface". Evolution has not endowed us with an ability to look at reality squarely. This is not a new thought, 2300 years ago Plato likened our perceptions and conceptions to a flickering shadow cast on a wall by an unseen reality. Science tries to be objective, but it can never be the-be-all-and-end-all of reality, because it can never be more than an interface that hides an unseen reality behind a veil of virtual icons. Science is one of many virtual tools that contributes something important to our enriched consciousness, in the end it is no more than one of many versions of reality that we use to flourish and keep us safe in the daily routines of our lives.
In 1969 I
was a first year student at Bangor university. I used to collect money
for a third world charity. The work involved knocking on doors of
students in the halls of residences and asking the owners to sign up to
donate. I remember meeting this couple, a young man and his very pretty
girlfriend, who were very committed Christians. I was perplexed by
their faith which was so out of place in the zeitgeist of that age of
flower power and hippies. We talked a while and the young man passed me
a bible opened at King John 1. The gospel of St John starts with the following words: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him;". I was unimpressed but the conversation has stuck with me.
Science
was designed by the ordered minds of the elite thinkers and
philosophers in civil societies, and as the bible says for philosophers
and scientists and technologists "the word" is the beginning. Without
words there is very little opportunity to expand logic. My cat,
Chachamulu, will never be a philosopher, scientist or inventor because
he has no language. Even though my Chacha has no words, he does have
perception that enable him to hunt, find food, fight other cats, poo and
play. He has a reality that gives him unspoken values and guides him
to look after himself. He did not have to go to school to learn how to
survive and live a worthwhile life. Chacha's reality is his
perception.
The house that chance built (and the weird fabric of subjective reality)
"I will only believe it when I see it with my own eyes" is a common exclamation that demonstrates how closely we identify reality with what our senses are telling us. Believing what our eyes tells us is a much older version of reality than "following the science". Rationality ordered thinking done with words, mathematics and logic is at most a few thousand years old and is associated with the pre-frontal cortex that is especially enlarged in humans. On the other hand subjective perception has a history that goes back to the very foundations of life and is the reality that my cat Cha-cha lives in. It is even the one we humans use most of the time in our daily lives.
Notice the word "Believing what one sees". Science thinking requires the adoption of immutable facts, believing is mutable. What I believe today can be different from what I believe tomorrow. As we dig deeper into perception we will discover our brains are set up to constantly challenge and re-evaluate beliefs, almost minute to minute. Chacha lives in a world of the present, and does not live in a world of immutable facts and science. The differences between mutable reality and immutable reality are at the heart of the difference between objective thinking and subjective thinking, and acknowledging the difference will be very important later when we come to discussing how drawings work.
The birth of life was the most improbable big bang event in the history of the Earth. On the internet I found a
nice analogy of how improbable the birth of life was; imagine that it
was raining lego bricks and out of the chance falling of the lego bricks
a perfect house was built?
Whilst this analogy gives and good picture of the unlikelihood of the birth of life, it has a big weakness. What was born was not an immutable object. The thing that was born was life. Life, in all it forms, is mutable through and through. Life is a shape changing event on a time line that is only sustainable through guzzling constant supplies of energy. Life is never static. If your energy supply stops, your heart stops and you die, and then you disintegrate back into stardust. When life stops guzzling energy it disintegrates.
Strictly speaking stones are mutable shape changers too because the weather erode them over time, but in terms of human times scale they are immutable and the shape changing is erosion. The living cell do not erode because they repair any breakages in their structures, their mutability is of a different sort, their mutability are like Theseus' Boat .
The
Greeks had a thought experiment called the Theseus Boat Paradox. The
story goes that Theseus, the king of Thebes who slayed the Minator, had a
boat that was hundreds of years old. Over the years it was repaired
again and again, until every bit of itself had at some point been
replaced during repairs. It was a different boat, but it was always Theseus Boat. Cells take in nutrients and throw out waste, so they are like Theseus
boat. A cell is an event, and if you freeze a moment it is a unique moment in the life history of the cell unlike any other moment in its life.
It is objective immutable fact that Thyseus's boat is a different boat from the on that first set sail, but as a subjective mutable belief it is the same boat that was built hundred's of years earlier. We can say the same about your fingers. Objectively the tiny fingers you were born with are different from the big ones you have as an adult, and we can say the same about your soul which is composed of disparate elements of your perception which are ever changing. Perception views objects as mutable and even as they mutate the unity is same.
Returning to the rain of lego. It was not only a house that was built. It was a shape changing house that guzzled energy, could
repair and reproduce itself and had the wits to do these things to survive in a hostile environment. In my new analogy the wits are perception and intelligence, but that does not mean the first life forms had consciousness. In the beginning life forms had no brains, so early life forms were without thoughts and had to run on "intrinsic intelligences". Today we have a huge diversity of life and most still do not have minds. Bacteria, plants, moulds, algae and even many multicellular animals like sponges have no minds, so all these life forms are run on intrinsic autonomous
intelligences without consciousnesses.
Patterns
Perception co-evolved with the evolution of the body, and it reflects the forces out of which it was forged. Mutability combined with a flexible view of unity is a fundamental way that subjective thinking differes from the objective analysis that science does.
When the life stops guzzling energy it disintegrates, this makes life dependent on its food supplies never running out, which makes evolution very focused on the strategic use of energy supplies. A big principle inherent in life is energy conservation and efficiency. Perception reflects these goals in many ways. The Human brains is about 2% of our weight but they consume 20% of the energy budget. It is a little misleading when scientists talk of human having big brains since most of the components of our brains are roughly in line with what we would expect for a mammal of our side. But one component si stupendously large, this is the neocortex.
Cells have suites of sensors on their surfaces measuring the environments that are looking out for nutrients to
take from the environment. Inside their walls they have a self regulated internal milieu. To regulate the well-being of the cell they must have had a
intrinsic perception of what the cell/boat is, which parts of internal
milieu needed to be preserved and nurtured, where the boundaries are
between the cell and the outside world. They have to intrinsically know which parts of themselves are used-up and
need to be spat out back into the environment as waste. The cells idea of unity is mutable. Theseus' boat, while maintaining a stable identity, sees its identity as mutable. The way perception evolved it became adept at
dealing with structures that mimic Theseus boat.
Man made AI products are going down a similar line of developments. Your iPhones know to turn themselves off to save running the battery, and can reply to your questions, but they run on intrinsic intelligence not consciousness down when they are not being used. The combinations of perceptions and consciousness are a relatively recent development of evolution only found in higher order multicellular creatures with substantial brains and minds. Even creatures with minds, like ourselves, with consciousness most of our daily lives are run on mindless forms of intrinsic intelligence. For instance your heart rate is run on autonomous intelligences that are outside the control of your consciousness, but your body has an intrinsic intelligence that perceives when your blood oxygen levels are low and your heart beats need to be speeded up. Some actions are in-between mindless and mindful, for instance you can hold your breath, but mostly your breathing rate is thoughtless. Your sight, which you may feel is totally under the control of your consciousness, includes a feature called blindsight which seems to be dumb and without consciousness.
Notice I wrote "suits of perceptions". This is another important divergence
between objective reality and subjective thoughts. In the subjective
world unity is always very problematic, mutable and porous. The
plurality and disunity of our thought landscapes will be central theme I will be returning to again and again as we unpack the subjective mind and how drawings
work.
Some scientists speculate the birth of life
happened in primordial soups with amino acids, others that
meteorites rich in organic chemicals rained down on the earth surface.
If the first lego house was witless it would never have lasted more than
a fraction of a second, but the house that chance built had wits that it has been able to go on evolving
and developing. Our bodies are made up of mindless cells with intrinsic sensors and intelligences (plural).
.
The
self aware conscious perceptions out of which our souls are made are an
addition on top of intrinsic intelligences, they are the icing on the
perception cake found only in higher animals, especially mammals and
birds. Humans have extra thick layer of icing because we have an
enriched consciousness that gives us reasoning and our humanities like
seeing souls, the arts, hared community beliefs and values, and cultural
hand downs.
Perception in always invoking unity in the sense of Theseus boat, not the sense of science. Science unity is immutable, life' sense of unity if a Theseus boat sense of its own unity and identity. Cells are mindless, but there perceptions are working on modes of thinking that are conceptually different and weirder than science uses. I will demonstrate later how this rule is carried over into drawing.
Cells also needed a wide range of wits;
Exteroception: Wits that told them about the outside world that told them about the world outside. Was the world too hot, too acidic, too dry?
Interoception: Wits that told them about their internal milieu
Again in mindless cells these divisions are all maintained by intrinsic intelligences, but they are part of the Theseus boat sense of self. Unity for a cell is a collection of items that have a common interest, but are again in a dance of association. These divisions in perception are hard baked into how our perceptive apparatus evolved and are reflected in how our souls have been set up. I am mentioning them here because they demonstrate how we talk of having one soul, when in fact the fabric of soul and subjective thoughts are multifaceted.
Returning to the lego houses. We speculated how the natural selection evolved houses with different structures and wits for different niches; hot vents and cold water seas. Another thing they did was combine into strings, like streets
A cell living within the framework of a multicellular world would need communicate to work together. The social lives of cells are again intrinsic, but they are surprisingly complex relationships with checks and balances that often almost replicate moral behaviours we associate with having a soul.
Returning to our first lego house could reproduce itself and was mutable It gave birth to more lego houses, and they mutated according to the use cases where they lived. Sometimes natural selection selected for structures and wits that were good at harvesting energy in the thermal vents of deep oceans, other times the cells resided in cold northern seas. Who knows? But the different houses had different strategies to survive, and as the houses evolved so did their wits too. Perception had to be mutable like the structure of the houses were. We find ourselves at a model for the inception of the mind-body paradigm. The physical reality of the lego house and the peceptual-self-identity reality of the lego house were from the very beginning one thing.
We have a word for the collection of wits a lego house has; "Umwelt". The lego house that lived near a hot vent on the ocean floor had different sensory structures and wits to the ones that lived in cold ocean currents. They had different umwelts. The cold ocean version had structures that were good at living in the cold, and wits that sought out cold water environments. The hot water version had plastics that were heat resistant and a different set of wits with a different set of sensors for finding their niche. Every life form has its own umwelt which has been selected for living in its niche. A city of houses has more diversity and complexity than a stand alone house, and a country contains many cities. Multicellular organisms have organs like hearts (cities) and the organs live in complex relationships with each other with collective needs (foreign policies). So the umwelts of higher animals are more layered and complex than the umwelts of a humble bacteria. As multicellular animals became more complex so did their umwelts, and they needed brains (governments). Few people understand that umwelts are layered, mutable and very reactive to events, this is because they have to be constantly evolving and they have to be reactive to events in the outside world. So your umwelt has permanent features like colour sight as well as reactive features like feelings of well-being that are different in the morning from your umwelt in the evening. This is only a very basic introduction to give you some sense of the meaning of what an umwelt is. Again we are discovering aspects of reality that have big implications for understanding how drawings work.
Human umwelts are the most complex of all because besides including colour sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing our enriched consciousness skills give us a wider array of perceptual tools that include language, reasoning and we are able to develop with perceptual concepts, even identifying with other consciousnesses sensing souls can be thought of as belonging to an umwelt. Umwelts are very dynamic, changing according to the well-being of the owner, and will change between the morning and the evening. I am parking this subject here but be advised that drawing is about understanding how umwelts work, and that we will be returning to the subject in detail..
Intrinsic Morality
Brains versus Man Made Machines
All man made machines, AI intelligence and computer programs work in the Objective reality mode. We simply do not have the science to include consciousness in the design of our hardware, so computers true are monist in design and nature.
The wetware of the brain works on neurone carrying electrical pulses, and the synapses are either triggered or not triggered which gives an impression that they are binary like computer hardware, but the similarities really end there
The Mind-Body Paradox
From the inception of life evolution has been advancing along two fronts concurrently, evolving physical structure hand in hand with the wits of having virtual perceptual reality. The combination of the two realities are baked into life forms, but the way our minds grasp the physical and the perceptual world are worlds apart (pun intended). Plato was right we do not see reality veridically, all we are seeing is the shadows and light dancing on cave walls and this does not tell us a lot about what we would see if we looked out from the cave entrance. Our wits were crafted and selected for by evolution to keep our physical beings safe and nurtured, not to give us answers to our metaphysical questions. Even our best scientific minds cannot untangle the paradox nature has thrown at us. Our conscious minds are simply unable to envisage how it all fits together. But it is a so-what paradox, because we do deal with crossing the division every day, such as when we use inspiration and gut reactions to guide us which new scientific theories to try and carry forwards and look for philosophical answers to problems. The division is in our minds, not in reality proper.
The two methodologies for seeing reality often come to conclusions that seem the same, but they never are, and we will be coming to this when we came to examining how drawings work. For the moment I want you to see the division between the two methodologies, because after you begin to see these it becomes easier to deal with them. Here is a simplified analysis of the differences.
Objective reality:
Objects described and ordered in terms of measurements and numbers
A single unified listing that collates and relates all facts together in a single flat matrix
Immutable Facts
Dispassionate
Subjective reality
Mutable beliefs that are in a constant state of challenge and re-clarification
Layered recursive structures amalgamated into useful units by chunking
Pattern mapping and relationships
Qualities not measurements
An ability to create fake porous unities that are mutable units and discardable
Focus distortions and umwelts
Affordances
Emotions and feelings
The Mind-Body Paradox
I do understand that my introduction to drawing has taken us to a place that might feel very heavy. I hope you will hold with me because once you see the concept that there we live two realities understanding and getting pleasure from the act of drawing suddenly becomes a lot more fun.
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