Seminar 4

Yesterday was the last seminar of ‘Art and the conscious mind’ and its focus was on the self-awareness of the conscious mind. We started this session by looking at a painting of Adam and Eve by the renaissance artist Lucas Cranach the Elder. This painting depicts Adam and Eve just before the fruit was eaten. In it, Eve looks rather devious and Adam quite unsure. As the story goes, once they ate the fruit their eyes were opened and suddenly felt self-conscious. Humans are uniquely self-conscious, we can reflect on our actions and plan for the future. We can also recognise that other people have their own minds and can also recognise this in works of art. Even though we know that the subjects of paintings are produced from paint, we seem to be able to connect with them and read their emotions as if they were real. The big question though is why we need self-consciousness. This brings us back to the ‘hard problem’ that we touched on during our first seminar. This is yet to be solved! Going back to the Adam and Eve story, their life before they were self-conscious was fulfilling and simple. This is true for many animals and babies. Some people think that our self-consciousness is a learned behaviour and was developed through our social interactions with each other.

The philosopher Descartes was troubled by worry all of his life. Descartes infamous quote “I think, therefore I am” was significant in us learning about our consciousness. As long as you can doubt things, you cannot be certain about anything, even the world that you perceive, but being able to think proves that you do exist.

Some philosophers, such as Antonio Damasio think that we have multiple ‘self’s’. These being a ‘core’ self, which is your awareness and your ‘autobiographical’ self, which is your history and you future. This is similar to the extentionist idea that we looked at a few weeks ago. Your mind is possibly a bundle of all things connected to you.

On the other hand. some people believe that we are not actually aware and that we only have consciousness because different parts of our brain are aware of each other.

What is ‘self’ exactly? It is hard to say. When I think about this question, I guess my answer is that ‘self’ is made up of a lot of things. It is made up of you past , future and your physicality. The word ‘self’ is, after all, just a word. A good phrase was used in this seminar. It stated  “I have a toothache”. What is ‘toothache’ exactly? Again it is just a word. When thinking about it, it probably makes more sense to say “I am a toothache” however odd that may sound! Since choosing this module, I have found that I have been thinking about things in different ways…possibly in too much detail. Drawing back to the Adam and Eve piece, life is a lot simpler when there is no consciousness!

There is a theory called the homunculus problem. This theory states that there is a ‘little person’ inside your brain receiving information from the world and making sense of it for us! But isn’t this ‘little person’ just a metaphor for our brain? There are lots of different parts of our brain coming together to make sense of the world. This theory seems very strange and very paradoxical as there would have to be another ‘little person’ inside their head and another inside theirs and so on…

As always, there are many problems and paradoxes when it comes to figuring out our mind’s. The idea of infinite regression is an interesting one. This suggests that our minds are a sequence of loops that don’t break, but just change. In this seminar the following was said to clarify this, “It is a nice day”, “I just noticed it is a nice day”, “I just noticed that I noticed it is a nice day”, “I missed my bus”… If you think about yourself thinking it is rather strange.

Self-awareness has been depicted many times throughout history in Art. One example used in yesterdays seminar was a self-portrait of Johannes Gumpp. This features the artist three times; firstly sitting on a stool, secondly as a reflection in a mirror and thirdly as a painting on a canvas. This piece of art tells us what the artists must have been doing at the time of its creation. Also, it is interesting that when you look at this piece, you perceive the painting of Gumpp sitting on the stool as the real Gumpp and not just a painting!