Many neuroscientists are skeptical of some claims made for fields such as neuroeconomics, neuroeducation, and neuroesthetics. The underlying working hypothesis in neuroscience is that every behavior and mental event has a correlate in brain activity. If this hypothesis ever needs to be abandoned in some situation, it would mean accepting a kind of magical extreme dualism in which mental life lies totally outside the natural world. So far there appears to be no need to abandon the working hypothesis. If what these neuro-something fields are doing is simply re-asserting the working hypothesis that there are brain correlates of human activity, then of course it isn?t problematic, but it?s also not very novel or interesting. However, overreaching does happen in those fields, when a big deal is made of functional imaging studies as if these constitute advances in understanding economics, education, esthetics, or other fields. This overreaching is now being called, pejoratively, ?neurorealism? ? the false idea that something people all over the world have experienced for millenia is supposedly ?real? only if a brain correlate of it is found. (A good accessible article about this is athttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1524852/- scroll down to the part about neurorealism.)
Laura?s essay is written in a generous spirit, characteristic of her, and gives a reasonable argument for neuroscience making some contribution around the margins in the field of esthetics. Certainly it is fascinating to find how brain activity differs in people in various states of esthetic appreciation or neurological conditions. However, I think genuine advances in understanding esthetics, as well as economics and education, are unlikely to be found in the output of a brain scanner.

一个简单的事实是，我们没有权利预料我们对彼此的影响。把小便池作为博物馆展品是一个恶作剧。但就它所强调的，而不是僭越的，这一事实可能是一种娱乐，我们可能会“理解”或不理解。核磁共振成像测量放射性标记的糖消耗的活动。但这至少和一些早期计算机在显示CPU活动时闪烁的小灯一样粗糙。就好像你可以通过计算办公室里喝了多少杯咖啡来衡量办公室的效率一样。但大脑并不是一台恩尼格玛机，即使它是如此粗略的测量，也无法告诉我们大脑实际上在交流什么。如果我们知道恩尼格玛系统使用了多大的电压并试图根据这些信息来破译正在发送的信息我们就会输掉这场战争。但是，再说一次，大脑不是机器。我们甚至还没有掌握其中的逻辑，更不用说生物学了。 It is possible to reason in a disciplined and rigorous way far in excess of what logicians or the "analytic school" would now have us believe. And "Neuro-" anything, pursued as if a philosophically interesting subject is a matter more of dogma than of science or art. But the whole point is that art is a dramatic interaction amongst us orbiting the urgent issue of how we understand each other and our world if, far from having a prior claim on that understanding, we need to set each other free to make that understanding as real as may be. Something happens in the brain, sure, but it also happens between and amongst us. The "analysis" of any one "brain" is too crude to achieve the least inkling of what the mind gets up to, and too isolated to give the least inkling of what goes on between the artist and the spectator. You can't expect to find the meaning of our needing each other free in a system hell-bent on tying us down to predictive and mechanistic formulas.

像Gary Washburn在这篇文章中所说的那样，我们应该注意到像磁共振成像这样的脑部扫描方法的局限性。核磁共振成像可以探测的最小体积包含数百万个神经元，它们在做很多不同的事情;只测量平均活动。MRI能聚焦的最短时间是单个神经元事件(如神经冲动)的数千倍。扫描仪的原始数据是一串数字;大脑区域的戏剧性的假彩色图像?是计算机大量统计操作的产物。然而，这些限制没有?这不会使核磁共振成像研究变得无用。他们的研究很有竞争力，并发表在同行评议的期刊上，他们确实显示了在特定条件下，大脑的哪个区域比其他区域代谢更活跃。大脑功能的定位已经为人所知几个世纪了，核磁共振成像只是最近增加我们对它的认识的一种方法。 (By the way, MRI doesn?t involve ?radiolabelled sugars?? that would be other methods such as PET. MRI detects the amount of oxygen bound to hemoglobin in the blood, using magnetism, not radioactivity. However, Gary Washburn?s point is that it measures neural activity only indirectly, which is true.)
More tendentious is saying ?Minds are not machines.? Much would depend on exactly what one is referring to in both the subject and the predicate in that claim. To me it is not convincing to deny categorically that mental phenomena such as thinking and feeling could be either neural activity itself, or an aspect of neural activity, or a direct product of neural activity. While the organization of nerve cells in the brain is arguably more complex than anything else, those nerve cells contain no component or chemical element not found elsewhere in nature. It is comforting to believe in human specialness, but in other areas that notion has been debunked: where we?re located in the universe, what our bodies are made of, whether we can escape the laws of thermodynamics. The last refuge for those pining for specialness is in the relation of our minds to our brains. At this point, the most productive working hypothesis is that we?ll eventually see how it fits in with the rest of nature.
- Steve George

Thanks for the correction, I thought I was getting that wrong. But it is not dualism to suggest that matter gets up to more than instrumental reason can get a glimmer of. Matter does lots of queer things that we tend to ignore at the macro-scale. And the life of the cell is more individual than present methods can observe. And that shortcoming ties into the inadequacies of our rational model. How does a mass of cells add up to an organism if there is no external design or operator? No, I did not say there is such a design or operation, but that the design and operation of the organism arises from of highly individualized activities of the cells. It is not a relation of servitude, but of differentiation. Similarly with rational forms, each proposition is formed by a subject a predicate, and a qualifier. The qualification does not extend as the continuity of the rational form, but differentiates it. Life, not just human life, is the spontaneous expression of that differentiation that clinches the real as a differing that does not sustain the rational and mechanical systems we use to probe them. But if a human can see this and yet our systems of reasoning and our machines, engineered to reflect that reasoning, cannot penetrate that difference, this hardly means that it is claiming special a status to refer to it. Rather, it is the rationalists who make the special claim in the face of overwhelming evidence, not that humanity is "spiritual" or "transcendent", but that our systems of reasoning and instruments are deliberately designed to hide their own inadequacies. All matter everywhere gets up to some damn strange behavior that is still not quite squeezed into the box made for it. The quantifier is incapable of revealing the role of the qualifier. The micro individual impacts the macro as the qualifier, but the macro gets read as the quantified. Reason may be blind to the difference, but life is not. Humanity is not special in this, as life goes, but we are rather more articulate than the rest. It's a shame if that quality gets lost in the grosser scale of the count. But wherever a reasonable critique gets dismissed tout court implacable dogma is at the root of it. It is not dualism to point out that there is more to matter, everywhere in the universe, than mechanics can embody.

?Emergent properties? are well-known in science. Molecules have properties that could never have been discovered by studying individual atoms ? properties such as enzyme action that might seem so qualitatively different from those of atoms that they could never be explained in terms of atomic properties. However, studying molecules carefully reveals new regularities that are eventually understood as potentialities of individual atoms. At the next level up, aggregates of molecules have properties that would never have been discovered by studying molecules in isolation. For example, surface tension: the property of liquids that leads to formation of drops and blood rising up a capillary tube. Again, studying liquids leads to an understanding of molecules? potentialities in this situation, not by postulating an ad hoc surface tension force but by discovering general intermolecular interactions that also explain other things such as how two strands of DNA stick together. It would have been unproductive for people in the past to have said, ?Nothing we know about individual molecules in isolation could predict how liquids form drops ? this is a qualitative difference that science with its merely quantitative obsession could never explain.? In the same way, why is it implausible that mental phenomena and complex behavior could eventually be understood in terms of even higher-level interactions and processes among and within brain cells?

It's a fascinating subject, and seems to have hit upon your area of expertise, but I suppose nothing could be read into the properties of a link that would imply the properties of a chain, or of a cog (individual tooth) the properties of a gear. All the same, it still comes down to synchrony, it just hides a bit, like the sound that only becomes audible in a noisy background. I'm suggesting something more of a complementary contrariety. Each individual differs from all others such that the whole is emancipated from its antecedence. That emancipation is not the effect or act of any one, but the inability to so assign its source is the effect and act of each one. The only real agency is departure. The only pure act is death. Or, in the case of individual cells, differentiation so complete that the organism as a whole is bound to die (because only reproductive cells conserve the state of "stem"). The organism is a community of sister cells each receded from what is "emergent" of it. It is easy to forget that each cell has that intimate history in the development and life of the organism, and is in that sense irreplaceable without loss. And this certainly includes neurons. But in the logical sense the qualifier is the verb. It is not a quality or "qualia" in the sense of a property or attribute. It is the active character between subject and predicate of each being the other (if the proposition is transitive in any sense). And if that action is indeed active, then the character of the proposition is not continuous to its extension. Difference ensues through which the terms are completed and formal relations realized. But this means the character of those terms limited to the propositional content is a caricature of a dynamic that conceals the fuller meaning of its terms. There is a dynamic to the character of all terms and to our grasp of formal principles that rigid laws of inference more of less deliberately hide. I call it characterology. It is not emergent, since its prime action is to withdraw. As to the aesthetics theme, it's not about the impact we have on each other, but about the impact we recognize we have no right to have. It most certainly is not about which blob in the brain is showing signs of something we call "brain activity", without a clue what that might mean.

I was unfamiliar with the term "neurorealism." I think you capture perfectly the problem with a lot of neuro- approaches to philosophical problems, namely that they waver between stating something not very novel or interesting, e.g. something happens in your brain before you make a conscious decision, and overreaching, e.g. the activity in your brain before you make a conscious decision is itself a decision and therefore we have no free will.

But is it love or ostentation? I would have thought the garden has to be secret to be unambiguous in this. But in any case I don't see the neurology in it. The back garden is a vestige of English village life, in which the community worked together to produce major staple crops, but grew herbs and vegetables, and stabled their animals, each in a private plot called a "croft". This evolved into the garden, but preserves something of the privacy side of English village life. The front garden, visible from the bycicle, is just for show.
But what I am getting at is that there is in all the processes of nature and formal reasoning an energy derived from some mode of withdrawal. The active energy of this departure is the response of which it is opportune that underscores the incompleteness of natural law and formal reasoning. Impassive observation is a deliberate dereliction of this responsiveness that is otherwise so clearly evident in our systems of understanding, as an omission. But this doesn't mean that we can go off inventing things to supply the deficit. What it does mean is that we have a responsibility to respond to reasoned criticism, and, in the course of our going about the usual business of realizing our prejudices intentions and purposes, recognizing that there is an incmpleteness in our designs upon the world that expresses itself, not in clear or direct evidence, but in subtle vrtiations in our convictions we call emotions. These do not relate any actual data or evidence, but give us a hint that there are changes in our convictions that we are not masters of. Only divesting ourselves of that mastery do we become the agents of our own reasoning. But this means being human is intrinsic to achieving knowledge. We must invest ourselves in each other, and not simply observe. The subjective is not unreal. But if we remain impassive observers the whole point gets missed. A brain is a thing, a person is a respondent. You can't grasp the responsiveness, that is the engine of meaning, by denying it.

Surely art like beauty lies in the eye of the beholder and Plato and me. And art and beauty lies in everything can't you see? The eye, the beholder, like everything else are One or the same. The beholder is beauty too. Then why would science try to measure and separate the mind from everything else? Is it only man's folly that they lose their way?
I've posted my essay called "Art" in prior PT discussions and think (brain) esthetically I should post it again here today:
ART
Sometimes people can define art as a beautiful painting or a drawing hung on the wall of an art gallery. Dance and music are also great expressions of art. I envisioned art a few summer days back in everything that was everywhere. This essay is about what I saw and how I got there on that very special day.
我决定骑自行车穿过这个城市中最古老、也是我认为最好的社区，寻找最好的花园。这是一场比赛，我是裁判。我没有把我的周末花在园艺上，也从来没有在园艺比赛中担任过裁判。我也从来没有骑着自行车随便闲逛过。使用它进行锻炼和山地速度冒险是常态。这似乎是个令人放松的主意，所以我就出门了。在我的竞赛早期，我发现了一个如此巨大的住宅花园，它为所有其他花园的评判设立了标准。花园里的一切都很美。它有颜色、阴影、图案和位置。房间很干净，修剪得很好。 It had meandering walks with areas for contemplation. I stopped for a while and saw the garden and its diverse vegetation as a piece or pieces of art. The rest of the day from there or then on became an art show. I saw artistic gardens and flowers everywhere. I began to smell the art, it was intoxicating. I started to see art in the design of homes too, and how the gardens were meant to complement each other. I saw it in entrance ways, stain glass windows, and staircases. There was art in the majestic tree lined streets. I eventually made it downtown to the river where everything drains including meandering bicyclists. Someone had designed the most unbelievable fountain with marble walkways and hanging baskets of flowers. I talked with a few bystanders in the art gallery I was traveling, and noticed they had art all over them. It was in their jewelry, hair style, clothes, and a smile that remains etched in my mind. I stopped in a cafe for some nourishment and also to come down a little bit. Unbelievably, the food was artistic, made by artisans in a dining room that defined decor in a unusual way. When I came back outside I looked up and saw cotton ball clouds on a turquoise canvas, oh please stop!
I ended my trip or art show five hours later buying the best garden in the city a first place award. I see art much more often today and in many more places. Not like that special day but much more than I ever had. Art is in everything, and is made by everyone. I would like to thank all the special artists who create everything.
PS: Slowing down could be the key to see.
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我曾饶有兴致地读过萨克斯、拉马钱德兰等人的著作，其中提到了一些人的思想在改变状态下的成就。当然，这是一种推测，但我怀疑精神错乱的程度和个人创作艺术品的倾向之间是否存在某种关联。有些人认为所有的艺术家都有某种程度的疯狂(我使用的是艺术这个术语的最广泛意义，包括雕塑、绘画作品、所有类型的音乐、文学等)。人们从小就能表现出艺术能力;可能由于受伤或疾病而获得这种能力;能够(在某种程度上)通过兴趣和意志学习如何创造艺术;如果/当“正常”的认知恢复时，失去艺术技能/能力似乎都指向大脑的可塑性和心灵的短暂性。一切都很神秘，虽然，也许，黑暗的奇妙。我不断为不断涌现的新科学感到震惊(或者仅仅是对旧科学定义的扩展?)有很多事情需要考虑…… Great post, Ms. Maguire.
Neuman

How do we make the world see what its paradigms prevent it, and us, from seeing? One by one just spreads something like madness. But where do you go to give the world "what for!" ? I can see the attraction of drugs, but it seems a mistake to suppose they can help the process along, since, if anything, it is a matter of elevating the rigor the world is not now prepared to achieve. If it were true (which I doubt) that drugs help us see things that are more real in some sense, they most certainly do not make us more competent to introduce that elevated rigor.

虽然第一个滴落的作品是在时间限制下完成的(它需要在特定的日期装饰佩吉·古根海姆公寓的走廊，那里一周内将举行一个派对)，但后来使用相同的技术和材料(快速干燥的Duco房屋涂料)的绘画展示了创作者的姿态，而不是图像。波洛克能够在一个以操纵拍卖价格而闻名的画廊系统中出售这些画作，与其说是对艺术的评论，不如说是对资本主义的评论。

I would like to know what the difference is in the brain scans of someone who doesn’t like a work of art because they don’t understand it, and what it is after they come to appreciate what is going on. This episode breaks my heart. Ken and John seem to denigrate modern art (postmodern) because they just don’t get it. Whereas, if they would have only taken some time to become more educated on the subject, they might have found that artists like de Kooning, Duchamp, and Warhol ARE philosophers. They created art not because they wanted to make something pretty, but to ask the questions what is art and why. It's important to understand that in the right context before you ask if appreciation can be a simple matter of neural activity.
重要的艺术家经常问什么是艺术，他们想出一个新的方式来看待这个主题，以便在讨论中添加一些新的东西。印象派画家们在讨论中加入了一些新的东西，因为他们说:“嘿，如果我们不只是尝试画一些看起来很像现实生活中的东西，而是也试着传达你在那个地方的感觉呢?”由此，艺术世界开始包含一些以前从未有过的新东西。立体派的作品，如果观众可以从只能从一个固定的有利位置看东西的牢笼中解脱出来，并且可以同时从多个角度看它，会怎么样?“什么是艺术?”波洛克试图将焦点均匀地分布在画布上。达芬奇在《蒙娜丽莎》中通过搅乱透视法来尝试拥有多个焦点，而波洛克则试图扩展这个概念，他创作的作品中，每个部分都是你“应该”看到的部分。就像仰望星空一样，每一个区域都是独一无二的，但表面上看起来也和其他区域一样。
杜尚，德库宁和其他人所做的，是探索艺术是什么这个问题的边缘，以便不仅理解这个主题，而且理解我们与艺术的关系。沃霍尔制作了这些肥皂盒。他从一家商店买了洗衣粉盒，并尽可能精确地复制它们，所以在合理的距离内你无法区分他的作品和商业产品。这件作品很重要，因为他在问，是什么让他的盒子成为无价的艺术品，而它实际上与毫无价值的消费品没有区别。他通过让艺术与非艺术的东西几乎完全相同，并让观众问自己为什么他们会觉得有区别(即使有区别)，来扩展艺术。杜尚不只是把小便池放在博物馆里，称之为艺术。他就是这么说的。事实上，还有比这聪明得多的事情在发生。他会把一些物品拿出来展示，就好像它们只是简单地从生活中拉出来展示(现成的)，但私下里他会改变一些东西。除非你观察力很强，或者知道他的真实意图，否则你是察觉不到的。 One was a shovel that just seemed to be a shovel, but he shaved the round handle into a square. And you can say that is still just as stupid, but it is vitally important. What it does is ask what makes something art, not just that the artist transforms something but also if that is something the viewer is aware of or not. He had to conceal that he changed something because the work had to be on some level something that was not altered in any way, and at the same time actually was. More than just an inside joke to make fun of people pretending to ‘get it,’ it was a serious inquiry that is both things: art and not art; original and unaltered, and transformed with intentionality by the artist. The thing that makes it one or the other is solely the awareness of the viewer. As artist, he removes himself, while at the same time becomes the subject by making the work be about the question: is the artist important to the work itself.
de Kooning asked the viewer to consider something similar with his erased Rauschenberg. He asked Rauschenberg for one of his drawings because he wanted to take an eraser and remove his art from the paper. Rauschenberg hated the idea of having someone destroy his art, but begrudgingly handed it over because he recognized the importance of what it would reveal about the question what is art. de Kooning took an eraser and removed Rauschenberg’s drawing from the page, and offered it to the world to ask the question: who is the author of the work. Rauschenberg put art on the page, but de Kooning was responsible for how the work looked now. Both men put work into the piece, one trying to create something that was tangible, and the other trying to create something intangible by removing it. He pushed the boundary of what is art by presenting a piece that asks which is the artist/author, and is it both equally?
为什么这些不是哲学问题?美是一种纯粹的审美，还是它的某些部分超越了观众所看到的概念?在他们如何诠释艺术上，观众不也是艺术家吗?人们提出了比“你认为这漂亮吗”更大的问题，我希望人们能理解这一点;因为这些问题揭示了我们与艺术、美的关系，以及我们与它的关系如何重要，这真的很有趣。

for reference on Duchamp:
http://www.marcelduchamp.net/marcel-duchamp-impossible-bed/