[-empyre-] Re: love, sacrifice, and the eternal return

Miguel Santos cosmicshit at mac.com
Thu Oct 30 04:25:48 EST 2008


Hi,

I would suggest that we could draw some ideas from David Chalmers,  
Australian philosopher, when he talks about hard and easy problems of  
consciousness. The hard is about experience, in this case love; the  
easy is about  the functionality of the experience, what neurons are  
fired up when, we think,  we are in love. They are very different  
problems.  Artists, due to the nature of their discipline, are very  
well positioned to address the hard problem, on the other hand,  
neuroscientists are very well positioned to address the easy problem.  
When Chalmers talks about easy and hard he is not saying that one is  
better than the other, or more important, the difference is due to  
the tools available to address them: there are available tools, more  
or less developed, to deal with the easy problems, so the reason to  
be named easy. The hard problem, requires new approaches that pass  
through first-person methodologies, such as the ones normally used by  
artists that most times result on the proposition of questions and  
not answers.
Will stop here, the paper is available at: http://consc.net/papers/ 
facing.pdf

Having said the above, it might be of interest to take a look at the  
documentation of a show i did this summer, Love Forbids Us To Love:
http://www.santosmiguel.com/2008/love-forbids-us-to-love/2/

All the best, Miguel



On 29 Oct 2008, at 16:54, Christina McPhee wrote:

> well, neuroscience might 'characterize' experiences of love in  
> terms of desire if folks can find ways of testing an hypothesis  
> with a specific population.  Scientific method is a rich form of  
> query that yields very specific answers to very specific questions  
> about the structures of material knowledge.  Poetics is much more  
> adept at
> complexities of desiring practices.     We don' t call them love  
> letters for nothing.
>
> Tina Gonsalves' work (see last month) touches on this in her poetic  
> restructurings of neural emotional pathways via responsive video  
> performance.
>
> kisses,
>
> c
>
>
>
> On Oct 29, 2008, at 8:32 AM, anibalmastobiza at terra.es wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> i´m a newcomer, but cheking and reading all the fantastic posts  
>> made on the subject of love and desire... i notice that there is a  
>> general trend of opinions that suggest love, desire and other  
>> human experiences are ungraspable and inherently subjective and  
>> private, only to be captured by the narratives of poetics,  
>> literature...
>>
>> Recently, there is a growing increase of data in a subfield of  
>> neuroscience called the "neuroscience of desire"  that pinpoint  
>> the mechanisms of human desire either as reflected in sex (Schober  
>> JM , Pfaff D   The neurophysiology of sexual arousal.   BEST PRACT  
>> RES CLIN ENDOC MET 2007 SEP;21(3):445-461) or other facets of   
>> human conduct in which desire is involved, such as artistic tastes  
>> (Kawabata H, Zeki S 2008 The Neural Correlates of Desire. PLoS ONE  
>> 3(8): e3027 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003027) etc .
>>
>> What is your opinion?
>>
>> neurosciene one day will characterize the traditional ungraspable  
>> meaning of human experiences such as desire and love or not?
>>
>> Greetings.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Ahora también puedes acceder a tu correo Terra desde el móvil.
>> Infórmate pinchando aquí.
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
> Christina McPhee
> http://christinamcphee.net
> http://strikeslip.tv
> http://naxsmash.net
>
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>
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>
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>
>
>
>
>
>
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