Art at the Boundary of Science and Consciousness

Art at the Boundary of the Science of Consciousness

Michael Punt and Robert Pepperell

First delivered at "Towards a Science of Consciousness", University of Arizona, Tucson, April 9 2002

As the interdisciplinary character of 'Toward a Science of Consciousness' has shown over a number of years, without recourse to other fields of enquiry it may be that the habitual explanatory practices of conventional science are somewhat limited. Given the evident interest here in the interface between art and science the question becomes what is the most useful division of labour? In the next twenty minutes I am going to outline a position that Robert Pepperell and myself have sketched out in response to this question as a consequence of our recent book, "The Postdigital Membrane" by citing concrete evidence of the productive effect that can arise when art and science are integrated, not in the laboratory or the studio but in entertainment. Not infotainment of course but the barely differentiated practice of science in the laboratory and science in the popular theatre. This ambiguous space between theatre and science has been colonised for centuries by the public spectacle of the conjuring trick. A first rate magician ensured that the audience understood the interval between conjuring and magic and conjuring and science as analogous. Through this management of interval the conjuring show thrived, and magicians made huge fortunes on the assumption of an implicit unity between the thinking subject and the objective world. In earlier times, the problematic of this continuity was reflected in the elusive quest of the alchemist whose task of explaining the continuity between the worldly and the other worldly was like turning base metal into gold. Our thesis is that in this theatrical/performative space between science and art there is a transferable intellectual model of a view of reality as discontinuous that classical physics and philosophy could not envisage until recently, but which has now become almost commonplace.

Although they are uncomfortable fellow travellers for the rationalist, often accused of intellectual profligacy (and even charlatanism), the function of both the magician and the artist conjuror (as distinct from the artist replicator) has consistently provided new metaphors for what would otherwise be unthinkable. In this paper we will argue (through analogy) that the role of these actors is to liberate the more circumspect and constrained methods of scientists and philosophers, for example, by acknowledging the irrational processes that often lie outside the bounds of other explanatory systems. What follows is broadly in two parts: the first sketches the problem of conjuring and after a brief segue the second by Robert Pepperell introduces some issues of logic and painting. We would be hard pressed to identify our individual contribution in these sections and taken together we express facets of the idea and close with a provisional conclusion.

In 1983 I had the privilege to be asked by Roy Ascott to contribute to what I now realise was a ground breaking collaborative project that brought the artist's creative intelligence and electronic media together in a single time/space performance. Around twenty six artist from all over the world were invited to adopt Proppian functions and create a simultaneous fairytale in electronic space. Cast as the trickster, we had the function of derailing the narrative so that the Prince's heroic recovery would make him a better suitor for the Princess. One day more by chance than design we performed a conjuring trick in data-space at a time when the Prince was taking up a little too much of my time rambling on about philosophy and history. To paraphrase what followed: the conjuror offered to perform a trick and asked the Prince to sit centre stage on a chair, and showing both the Prince and the audience that there really was nothing hidden up his sleeve he pulled a small revolver from his pocket, and after pointing out to all who cared to see that the chamber was chock a block full of bullets he placed the gun against the Princes head and with a dazzling smile pulled the trigger. The Prince died instantly. As you can imagine what followed was a stunned silence in the email traffic and a certain ill feeling. Nonetheless It was an intoxicating moment, terminating a fragment of consciousness in the network. Something close to a miracle had happened, something concrete had been conjured from nothing that was signified by its absence or loss. Ejected from data space finally I then wrote a detective novel, 'The Banana Man' in which the author developed characters and killed them at random.

My only excuse was that at the time I was reading about conjuring and looking very hard at the picture of the conjuror by Hieronymus Bosch. In it we see a trickster working the crowd in a street and making a merchant vomit a frog while performing some obvious sleight of hand. The merchant is so incensed by the banality of the cup and ball trick that he has overlooked the miracle of the frog and is also oblivious to the fact that the conjurors' assistant is picking his pocket. The more he argues with the conjuror the more vulnerable he is to being duped and the more likely he is to miss the evidence in front of him, that sometimes miracle can happen and things we do not understand do coexist with those that we do. Bosch's painting is more than amusing depiction of a merchant loosing face in front of the peasants - it is a treatise on conjuring. The professional magician knows that the hand is never quicker than the eye (even merchants know that it seems) but the skill is misdirecting the audience so that the focus of attention is on the wrong place at the right time. Bosch's lesson is that conjuring tells us that habitual thought can lead us astray.

Here is another painting of a conjuring trick - An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump this time we might call it scientific experiment, that an itinerant lecturer is performing for the benefit of a small family gathering. This time a bird can be taken to the brink of death and saved by the turn of a tap. Like the other magic show in the Bosch painting the more we argue the more likely it is that the bird will die and the greater chance that we will miss the trick of it, and overlook the miracle before us. Here of course the trick of it is that by creating an vacuum we perform a murder with an invisible weapon much as the trickster did in 1983; the miracle is that with paint and canvas a complex matrix of human perceptions and beliefs (the collective consciousness of the lecturer's, the gathered group of enthusiasts and sceptics, and of course the artist's Joseph Wright's as well as the endless network of natural philosophers who Wright was connected with) has been transported from 1765 to the present.

The seated figure in the foreground in The Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump seems uninterested in the experiment - he like Joseph Wright is much more concerned with the metaphysical questions released by the science and the painting. As he contemplates the candle and the skull he highlights the various illusions that this experiment and painting propose. Not least that truth might be, can also be, also an illusion. Robert Pepperell suggests that it reverberates with Joseph Jastrow's story that of the nineteenth century French chemist Chevreuil who determined that the movement of a pendulum held by a subject over various samples of matter was attributable, not to para-scientific phenomena, but apparently straight-forward auto-suggestion, what is now called "ideo-motor suggestibility". What was once a spectacle that entertained the public since Roman times, The Chevreuil Pendulum test (as it is now known) is still used in psychology to measure subject suggestibility under hypnosis. Pepperell's point is that some philosophers of mind, with the same respectable distrust of illusion as Chevereuil, have been pre-occupied with the idea of "The Illusion of Consciousness" (most prominently Daniel Dennett in "Consciousness Explained", 1991) as though it were some grand deception, or trick, to which we, like the merchant in Bosch's picture, succumb to by being ignorant of the true state of affairs. However rather than being summarily dismissed as inherently deceptive, we might want to reconsider illusions as presentations of the true state of affairs - things as they really are: that is more than one thing at a time.

Take for example this digital photograph recently taken at the Musée Grevin of French people looking at a waxwork display of Valasquez painting the Spanish Court. Here, the spectators are not deceived into believing these wax dummies are living people from history, nor would they believe that they are nothing more than lumps of wax in costume, after all the painting in the tableaux is a painting of a figure in the tableaux (presumably Phillip IV) and is a copy of a painting made three and a half centuries earlier. In the alchemy of the wax works nothing is just one thing and the contradictory elements solidify into a unified real. One explanation of this is that the impulse to make sense of contradiction is so powerful that in order to resolve them one way or the other we are willing believe the unbelievable even if that way defies the laws of science.

But science's mission is to find out what is really going on - at least a science practised in the shadow of the tradition of the Enlightenment, informed largely by Aristotle's "Principle of Non-Contradiction" in law and logic. As foundational as this principle seems to our formal understanding of the world, it is not universally applicable, nor indeed is it universally embraced. Since the middle part of the last century a form of logic has been slowly emerging which seems more able to cope with the seeming paradoxes and contradictions of our everyday experience. This fairly obscure branch of logical theory is broadly called "paraconsistent" or "dialethic". Paraconsistent logic accepts valid states of simultaneous contradiction. It is, however, seen by many in the logic community as lacking significant real world applications. As a logical system it shares much, in spirit if not in formal structure, with the eastern traditions of Tao and Zen in which states of mutual contradiction are a common part of everyday experience. But a century or more ago western European artists were familiar with paraconsistency and it figured in their intellectual palette. The avant guard was attracted to simultaneous contradictions as it refuted the bourgeois imperative of the monocular representation. Some paintings and sculptures, as well as music of the early twentieth century art showed paradigmatically that we are able to comprehend contradictions fully without necessarily having to resolve them into a whole.

Consider the painting 'The Dressing Table' by Picasso, made in 1910 was produced at the zenith of analytical cubism. Those unfamiliar with cubism tend to see at first what looks like random patches of grey and brown paint, perhaps some buildings or strips of newsprint. It takes some time and concentration to see what is quite clearly a nineteenth century dressing table, complete with drawers, keys, legs, a glass and toothbrush and a mirror. It takes further concentration and goodwill to see the painting is also a symbolic portrait of Picasso's then lover, Fernande Olivier, which includes the typical Picassian erotic symbolism (the key between the legs, the nipples) as well as her inverted portrait in the mirror. Picasso's "The Dressing Table" can be at least three things at once, without appearing contradictory or any of the readings being mutually exclusive, is a testament both to the investment in pigment as a conduit of human intention and the capacity for paraconsistent awareness in the viewer. As Arthur Danto has provocatively suggested: "If a mere bit of paint can be of the Passion of the Lord, why on earth not a state of our brain?" To imagine that the silent, monochrome fabric and paint could sustain noise, colour, passion and belief is no greater step of faith than to believe the stream of text in the 1983 performance sustained the execution of a Prince.

None of this is especially new. What seems clear however is that we need a scientific method, particularly in the study of consciousness, that can allow something to be more than one thing at the same time, without dismissing the overall state as an "illusion". To do this we must recover the power of analogy - that is rebuild our sensitivity to the networks of similarities in differences - which is the locus of conjurors, artists, and happy to say, some philosophers and scientists of the mind who appear to be on similar tracks. Given this emerging consensus it would be fairly simple if scientists became artists and artist became scientist or we all followed the yellow brick road to an undifferentiated land of Oz. But perhaps at the boundary of consciousness where reality is always present through analogy - that is the similarity of different states: its phenomena and its description, when increasingly in science as a whole we must contemplate ten or eleven dimensions in order to account for matter consistently, eradicating difference is to fritter an asset. In thinking in a more interdisciplinary way about consciousness we need to reengage the skills of the alchemist and the artist to do what they have been trained to do and have been good at doing regardless of contemporary tastes: that is managing interval, reifying illusion and celebrating paraconsistency.

To return to the question of the division of labour between scientists and artists there are some moves that we can make now. For starters artist can make explicit to scientists the shared heritage of the intellectual productivity of unresolved contradiction, and relieve us all of the Sisyphian task of ultimate resolution, that is the pointless effort of claiming he real from illusion. The reward is that the science of consciousness might no only solve some of its own fascinating problems but might also open the way to a new and valuable epistemology for other fields of enquiry.