The respective role of science and art

This is a difficult subject mixing neurobiology with the interpretation of art. Edward O. Wilson offers, however, a simple distinction between science and art. Science can translate a certain perception into another language. "We [humans] can translate the energies of magnetism and electricity into sight and sound, the sensory modalities we biologically possess. We can read the active neural circuits of bees and fish by scanning their sense organs and brains". By doing so, we can then know what type of perception all species possess assuming that each perception corresponds to a specific and different neural activity.

But what science cannot translate is the feeling of the perception. We will a priori never be able to feel the magnetic and electric perceptions of the bees and fish. We can imagine it. We can study it. But we cannot experience it. "But", as Edward O. Wilson emphasizes, "incapacity is not the point" as art fulfils another role. "Art [...] transmits feelings among persons of the same capacity. In other words, science explains feeling, while art transmits it."

But Wilson wonders "how can we know for sure that art communicates this way with accuracy, that people really, truly feel the same in the presence of art?". My personal answer to this question is: who cares? Do we have to know if the feeling transmitted by art is the same for every person? As long as something is transmitted, as long as art triggers some kind of reaction, a good or a bad feeling, as long as an original message has been sent and received, that is what matters according to me. But this is my usual romantic definition of art. A bit anarchic and maybe too relativistic.

But what if art does transmits the same feeling? what a victory for a universal language. Wilson thinks that it is indeed the case. And how do we know it? "We know it intuitively by the sheer weight of our cumulative responses through the many media of art. We know it by detailed verbal descriptions of emotion, by critical analyses, and in fact through the data from all the vast, nuanced and interlocking armamentaria of the humanities".

A difficult and fascinating subject indeed.

The brain and the learning process

Edward O. Wilson explains why it is difficult to understand how the brain works; the brain was made to survive, not to understand itself:

"All that has been learned empirically about evolution in general and mental processes in particular suggests that the brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive. Because these two ends are basically different, the mind unaided by factual knowledge from science sees the world only in little pieces. It throws a spotlight on those portions of the world it must know in order to live to the next day, and surrenders the rest to darkness. For thousands of generations people lived and reproduced with no need to know how the machinery of the brain works. Myth and self-deception, tribal identity and ritual, more than objective truth, gave them the adaptive edge.
That is why even today people know more about their automobiles than they do about their own minds-and why the fundamental explanation of mind is an empirical rather than a philosophical or religious quest. It requires a journey into the brain's interior darkness with preconceptions left behind. The ships that brought us here are to be left scuttled and burning at the shore."

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience, Chapter 6.

Maybe, such explanation may give a beginning of answer of why passion -or the absence of reason- plays such an important role in human society.