The Matter of Vision. Peter Wyeth

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ in the tradition of Darwin now offers material historical examples of how thoroughly science can illuminate the way Cinema works in the brain.

      • Science is now capable of an understanding of Cinema qualitatively deeper than any other analytical framework (An Expansive Materialism).

      • Science and art can be reunited as neurobiology based in emotion has the capacity for a comprehensive and expansive understanding of art that qualitatively exceeds any other framework, and in particular, that of the dominant status-quo based in Language.

      • The passage from science to interpretation necessarily crosses into the realm of theory and philosophy.

      • This project proposes a return to Bacon’s aspiration to scientific method for philosophy, tracing a tradition from Bacon via Newton and Hume that develops scientific method, in particular following Hume in subjecting Reason to Emotion and turning the subjective into raw data for objective analysis, as in Dehaene on Consciousness, LeDoux on Emotion and in Dream Science.

      • The last fifty years of ‘Film Theory’ has been a dead-end, unscientific and merely rhetorical instead of properly scientific.

      • The philosophical elements behind Film Theory are derived from ‘Continental Philosophy’ which itself took a fatal wrong turn with Kant’s aim of a certain autonomy for Reason. As Hume rightly put it before Kant, Reason is and must always be at the service of the passions.

      3From the time of the Industrial Revolution.

      4The Automatic is the term I suggest as a replacement for the negative term, the unconscious, p. 10. See Commentaries for further discussion.

      5‘Cultural’ is used here in a Darwinian sense discussed later.

      6See ‘Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Culture’, Martin Jay, University of California Press, 1999.

      7By Kupfmuller, an Information Theorist – quoted in Norretranders op. cit., p. 143.

      8Dietrich Trinker, also quoted in Norretranders.

      9Quoted in Norretranders, op. cit., Ch.6 ‘The Bandwith of Consciousness’, p. 124, and Part III ‘Consciousness’, p. 211.

      10The term used by Simon Raggett see: www.quantum-mind.co.uk

      11Dehaene, 2014, details extensively the work of the unconscious but asserts that Consciousness is like an executive choosing from vast amounts of material prepared for its decision by the unconscious, whereas my sense is that Consciousness is the passive partner, presented with the choices for attention by the Automatic and reporting back on them to the Automatic in a constant feedback loop.

      12From Norretranders, op. cit., Ch 6 in general, pp. 143–144 in particular

      13Damasio, Descartes’ Error, Quill, New York, 1998.

      14A point well-made by Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain, Viking, New York, 2014, pp. 12, 41–43.

      15While we do not perhaps have to practice Vision as we do Language, as a technical facility, that is distinct from whether we learn from Vision – which evolutionary logic suggests is primary – which things are food, which might suggest danger, which are poisonous etc. Its capacities evolved for survival, but exaptation has made that enormous capacity for information available for Cinema, as it were. See Gould, S.J.; Vrba, E.S. (1982). “Exaptation – a missing term in the science of form”, Paleobiology 8 (1): 4–15.

      16See ‘Cinema and Language’ below, p. 24.

      17Andrew Parker - In the Blink of an Eye, Simon & Schuster, London, (2003).

      18Quoted in Norretranders op. cit., p. 193.

      19According to Bennett and Hacker’s 480 page survey, The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, Wiley-Blackwell, London, 2003, it is not sensible to talk of the brain separate from man, but their whole comprehensive survey is based on a fragment from Wittgenstein to that effect, which I admire on principle as eccentric, but not in practice as creating more problems than it solves, and to no effect, an echo of a current view of their sponsor.

      20See p. 106 for Darwin’s List.

      21Those born blind cannot think in Vision, but as it has been suggested that the brain provides optional overlapping systems where sight is not available, it may be possible that for the blind thought occurs through those systems.

      22Christian Keysers, The Empathic Brain, Social Brain Press, 2011.

      23The area beyond consciousness includes the autonomic, reflex, homeostasis, and their status would need to be clarified as part of a greater understanding of the terrain of the ‘Automatic’.

      24See Dehaene op. cit. for an account of such experiments since the 1990s. The ‘threshold’ method his laboratory uses would perhaps require some development to deal with the issues of Cinema discussed in this book.

      25Hasson et al., Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film, Projections, Vol 2, Issue 1, Summer 2008, pp. 1–26.

      26The issue of developing experimental methods to analyse unconscious activity from films is one to which I hope to return.

      27While the primary mention in the book is of Survival, it is implicit that survival for reproduction is the order of play.

      28In 9 to 5 (1980), Screenplay: Patricia СКАЧАТЬ