Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 2, August 2004
Special Issue: Jacques Derrida’s Indian Philosophical Subtext
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Solso, Robert L. The Psychology of Art and the Evolution of the Conscious Brain. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press, 2003. 278 pages. ISBN 0-262-19484-8 Hardcover: £24.50
Reviewed by
University of Liverpool
Solso’s writing style is generally clear and easy to read. Everything related to the visual presentation—diagrams, pictures, layout and design—is high quality and helpful, which we should hope to be the case with a book about art! I appreciated his brief discussion regarding the cognitive psychologists’ break from the parochialism of the behaviourists, who had unsuccessfully tried to banish the topic of consciousness from psychology. He pointed out the interesting statistic that in 1950 there were about 23 articles published on consciousness, whereas in 2000 there were approximately 11, 480. It seems impossible to prohibit humans from studying consciousness, as it is most fundamental and immediate to our experience.
If you sympathize with Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, then you should enjoy this book very much. But even if you fundamentally reject their philosophical positions, as I do, Solso’s effort to provide a theoretical basis for understanding the evolutionary interplay between consciousness, the brain and art will offer the reader much to think about. However, there are important philosophical problems in Solso’s theory, and I will mention some of them shortly.
Solso’s interdisciplinary work draws data from anthropology, neuroscience, nutrition, art history, and cognitive psychology to support his model of consciousness called ‘AWAREness’. The reason ‘AWARE’ is capitalized seems to be because each letter represents one of the main features of his model, whereas the other elements are secondary. I have provided the outline of his model verbatim (p. 26).
Attention: the focusing of cognizance on internal or external things.
Wakefulness: the continuum from sleep to alertness.
Architecture: the physical location of physiological structures (and the processes enabled by these structures) that underpin consciousness.
Recall of knowledge: the accessing of personal and world information.
Emotive: the affective associated with consciousness. Consciousness is often expressed as a sentience, a feeling or emotion
novelty: the propensity not only to focus on central thoughts and events, but to seek out novel, creative, and innovative items.
emergence: consciousness is distinctive from other neural processes in the respect that it deals with private, internal, and self thoughts.
selectivity: in addition to Attention (see above), humans are constantly selecting a very few thoughts to consider at any given time, which may change rapidly given the intrusion of new thoughts or external clues.
subjectivity: each person’s consciousness is unique. To each his own.
His model apparently applies to consciousness in general, not only to a particular form of consciousness, and the elements of this model must be included for any theory of consciousness. He defines consciousness as ‘A state of attentional wakefulness in which one is immediately aware of his subjective sensations’ (p. 27). Unfortunately, this definition seems to imply that we do not have consciousness while we are dreaming (or just sleeping), and it is ambiguous regarding ‘altered’ states of mind, such is in meditation or after taking one kind of drug or another. Also, I wonder how many of us throughout the day are immediately aware of all our subjective sensations. He does not specify how many internal sensations we need to be immediately aware of, or to what degree, in order to qualify as having consciousness.
Using his AWAREness model as the framework, he wants to provide the reader with a better scientific understanding of the role of the brain and eyes for consciousness and art. To this end, he has selected various pieces of both very ancient and modern art to use as examples. Some of the modern artists include Théodore Géricault, Marcel Duchamp, Diego Rivera, Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell, and Pablo Picasso. He also considers a variety of modern psychological studies involving such things as neurological activity associated with sensory, cognitive and artistic illusions. Further, he uses data provided by radiological science, such as PET (positron emission tomography), MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), and ERP (event-related potentials), because these technologies have ‘allowed curious people to peer inside the human brain while it was processing specialized information, such as looking at a face’ (p. 144).
There are many more interesting points and examples throughout the book, besides the very brief account I have given here, but they all lead to what I take to be seven main claims, which are direct quotations (p. 254 & 257).
1) ‘Neurological processes in all humans are approximately the same.’
2) ‘The historical development of art and the emergence of conscious AWAREness were concurrent and interactive (with consciousness an antecedent to art).’
3) ‘Internally represented impressions are not the same as events in the “real world”.’
4) ‘Perception and cognition evolved for purposes of survival and procreation.’
5) ‘All art (as well as perception) is distorted by the eye and the brain.’
6) ‘We see the world of art (and all other percepts) through individual and collective prisms which are consensually agreed to represent “truth.”’
7) ‘The common denominator between art and science is the degree to which expressions in each domain are compatible with the human mind....As scientists discover laws of the universe that are congruent with the mind, artists discover visual images of the world that are harmonious with the mind. Both explore the truth and beauty of the mind; at an abstract cognitive level, they are identical.’
There are many contentious issues embedded in his main points, but if he has the philosophical expertise to investigate properly these problematic and subtle difficulties, he does not do so in this book. I will here consider some of the more obvious ones. Although he is not concerned with philosophy, he still makes many philosophical claims and assumptions. He does not use these terms, but he seems to be a materialist who also believes in emergence (perhaps epiphenomenalism). However, given point (2) above, and his similar claim that ‘mental experience emerges from neural events’ (p. 23), then several standard but nonetheless challenging problems follow that he seems to ignore; rather, he has simply assumed his position to be a scientific fact. For example, are these emergent states of mind or consciousness non-physical (immaterial) or are they physical? If they are non-physical and he admits that they are real, which I think he does, then that would defeat his materialism because he would have admitted that nonmaterial ‘things’ are real. And he does not tell us what the relationship between mental states and brain states is, which is an important oversight. Further, the emergence of conscious AWAREness, which he leads us to believe is equivalent in meaning to consciousness itself, is somehow both concurrent and antecedent to the development of art (2). Solso does not provide us with a plausible way of making sense of this obvious inconsistency.
Next, since our internal impressions are not the same as events in the real world (3), and perception is distorted by the eye and the brain (5), he should have given at least a minimal epistemological account of how we can ever know anything at all about the ‘real world’. Further, since perception evolved for purposes of survival and procreation (4), yet perception is so distorted and never the same as events in the real world, it is hard to see how we managed to move about successfully enough in this world to evolve at all.
Claims (6) and (7) seem to be at complete odds. Claim (6) implies that truth is merely the act of consensus, but we supposedly distort the real world in our mind. Therefore, it is difficult to take seriously his view in claim (7) that we discover laws of the universe, or visual images of the world, that are harmonious with the mind. To discover a law is to find a truth that exists independently of our opinions about the world, so he should have said that we invent laws and visual images that are not harmonious with the mind because our perceptions are distorted. This part of Solso’s theory is especially problematic.
Finally, Solso also seems to reject reductionism on page thirteen then claims to be reasoning toward physical reductionism on page twenty-three, then leads us to believe that he is not really either ten lines later. Given these various philosophical ambiguities, I have found it difficult to give a concise summary of his main thesis. Perhaps he wants to say that art (and science) could not have developed without the emergence of consciousness, and consciousness could not have developed (or continued developing) without the development of art (and science). It is an interesting thesis, but I think he needs to provide better reasons for believing it.