Proust Wasn’t a Neuroscientist

PROUST WASN’T A NEUROSCIENTIST MURRAY SMITH My response falls into two parts. In the first part, I begin by addressing the concerns raised by Sherri Irvin regarding the role of neuroscience within the model of triangulation advanced by Film, Art, and the Third Culture (hereafter: FACT). This leads me through a variety of considerations, including the distinction between explanandum and explanans, the nature of the supervenience relation holding between neural states on the one hand and psychological and phenomenological states on the other, and the methodological or episte - mological character of triangulation. In unpacking the latter claim, I draw a comparison between biological motion and the biological – or, better, biocultural – cognition that a naturalistic approach to the mind points us towards. In the second part of my response, I pick up on Elisabeth Schellekens’s focus on the phenomenology of aesthetic experience, and my particular conception of it. I seek to allay Schellekens’s worry that my account of aesthetic experience encompasses ‘too much’ by emphasizing again the importance of the explanandum–explanans distinction, and relatedly, by stressing the distinction between the content of aesthetic experience and the explanation of such experience. I stress the differences between the explanatory goals of the theorist with the creative and aesthetic goals of the artist (while acknowledging that theorists need to observe a principle of explanatory relevance, lest their theories become ‘bloated’ in the way Schellekens fears). I conclude by arguing that a naturalized aesthetics is able to accommodate the particularity of specific artworks and of individual appreciators, and that such accommodation is not in tension with the tradition of scientific psychology. I In her commentary, Sherri Irvin recognizes the centrality of the triangulation model to the project advanced in FACT – the effort to coordinate evidence from introspection and phenomenal reflection, psychology, and neuroscience in the study of the mind in general, and in relation to aesthetics and aesthetic experience in particular. In commenting on the model and the book, Irvin points to a number of ways in which we share common ground. In agreement with both Irvin and Elisabeth Schellekens – and indeed, I believe, with Nanay – I take the clarification and explanation of aesthetic experience to be central to the enterprise of philosophical aesthetics. Irvin also notes the ‘anti-reductivist flavour’ Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 125–38 125 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 125 of FACT, notwithstanding the seriousness with which I take (neuro)science.1One way in which this is manifest, as Irvin points out,2is in my concern with the overreaching and ‘overinterpretation’ widespread in cognitive neuroscience, where bold claims and speculative edifices are built on the basis of preliminary and often very limited neural evidence. The most sustained critique of this tendency is to be found in Chapter 2 of FACT, where I coin the expression ‘neural behaviourism’ to describe and refer to that strain of neuroscience which treats neurophysiological evidence as if it spoke for itself – as if it were meaningful without being intermapped onto evidence from experience and psychological theory. But Irvin has doubts about the level of confidence that I place in neuroscience (or at least the neuroscience currently available to us): the findings of contemporary neuroscience, she states, ‘tend to be pretty primitive’ and ‘coarsegrained’.3More specifically and more fundamentally, Irvin challenges my view that there is an ‘interdependence’ among the three types or levels of evidence which makes it impossible to hierarchize their significance. She argues that, at least with respect to aesthetic experience, there is an asymmetry among the levels which makes phenomenological evidence – the evidence of experience itself – the most significant kind of evidence available to us. She holds this because ‘when it comes to art and aesthetic experience, the phenomenological is irreducibly not just one of the legitimate targets of our interest, but the primary one’.4Irvin also contends that, so long as we hold that mental properties supervene on neural properties, psychological evidence takes priority over neural evidence. I’ll return to the topic of supervenience shortly. But the immediate point to take stock of is that, on Irvin’s view, in contrast to mine, there is a clear hierarchy among the three types of evidence constitutive of triangulation, in which phenomenology is at the top and neurophysiology at the bottom (neural evidence is ‘subservient’ to the other kinds of evidence).5 Note, however, that there appears to be a strong and a weak version of Irvin’s objection to the role of neuroscience in aesthetics. Certain passages in her commentary imply that the problem is (or might be) that neuroscience is too young as a science either to make much of a contribution, or for us to know whether it might make such a contribution, to our understanding of aesthetic experience: Proust Wasn‘t a Neuroscientist 1Sherri Irvin, ‘The Nature of Aesthetic Experience and the Role of the Sciences in Aesthetic Theorizing: Remarks on the Work of Nanay and Smith’, Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics 56 (2019): 105. 2Ibid. 3Ibid., 105, 107. 4Ibid., 107. 5Ibid., 106. 126 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 126 the suggestion that the three levels exist in ‘a tail-chasing form of interdependence’ strikes me as premature: the present coarse-grained state of much neuroscientific knowledge doesn’t permit it to have a very robust explanatory role. It remains to be seen whether the apparent primacy of the experiential level will recede as the underlying neuroscience becomes more sophisticated.6 Other passages imply a stronger, more conceptual objection, based on the fact that both our experiences and our psychological capacities supervene on neural states and processes. Given this, Irvin argues, ‘the prospect of neurophysiological data making an independent contribution to aesthetic theorizing, even once the science is far more advanced’, is in doubt.7 Here it is important to introduce two rejoinders to the strong version of Irvin’s objection. The first concerns the peculiar status and role of experiential evidence in the model of triangulation advanced by FACT. Such experience, I argue, plays a dual role in theories of aesthetic experience: it functions as both explanandum and explanans.8How can that be? As Irvin stresses, our aesthetic experience – whether of artworks, natural phenomena, or the facets of everyday experience – is the very thing which theories of aesthetic experience seek to explain. But I contend that, additionally, what we have to say about aesthetic experience – the way it feels to us; the way we characterize it – plays a role in our explanations of such experience. This is one of the peculiarities of the science of mind which marks it off from all other domains of science, where the pursuit of the ‘view from nowhere’ is an appropriate governing ideal. That ideal of course has an important place in the cognitive sciences as well. But unless we take the stance that the ‘view from somewhere’ – the data of first-person experience – is entirely epiphenomenal, experiential evidence is bound to figure in our explanations, even if such evidence is defeasible. To take one example from FACT: according to the orthodox theory of suspense, suspense arises when, in engaging with an unfolding sequence of events, we hope for certain outcomes, fear for others, and, crucially, lack knowledge of the outcome. But this gives rise to the problem of ‘anomalous suspense’9– the apparent experience of suspense in contexts where we do know the outcome of the narrative in question (either because it is a well-known real-world narrative or because of repeated engagements with specific fictional narratives). Various solutions to this problem are possible, some of which hold that the emotion we 6Ibid., 108. 7Ibid., 100. 8Murray Smith, Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 62. 9Richard Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). Murray Smith Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 127 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 127 experience in such contexts really is suspense. But if we wish to defend the idea that suspense is or can be experienced where we already know the outcome of a narrative, experiential evidence will be relevant. Thus when my body tightens up at the prospect of the hijacking of the flight depicted in United 93, and it feels to me like I am experiencing suspense in relation to that possible event, that counts as one form of evidence in favour of the hypothesis that I am experiencing suspense. We need to be careful here with regard to what the evidence of experience is evidence of – what exactly is the explanandum? There are two candidates: our experience itself and the psychological capacity associated with the experience. Can our experience be evidence of our experience? There is something worryingly circular about that thought. Our experience (qua experience) just is constitutive of what we want to explain, and in that sense we can’t be wrong about our experience. But we can be mistaken about the psychological skill or capacity the exercise of which creates the experience. As I note in FACT, our ordinary experience gives us the impression that our visual system affords us a uniformly coloured and detailed visual field. But as research on peripheral vision and on inattentional and change blindness shows, it doesn’t! Christopher Chabris and Dan Simons refer to this phenomenon as the ‘illusion of attention’. They note that ‘we vividly experience some aspects of our world, particularly those that are the focus of our attention. But this rich experience inevitably leads to the erroneous belief that we process all of the detailed information around us.’ So our visual experience is characterized by this illusion, and such experience gives rise to mistaken beliefs about our visual capacities.10 (The same may be true of suspense; our experience of what feels like suspense in anomalous cases, like those noted above, may be misleading; the jury is out.) Thus it is cogent to think of our visual experience as evidence for our capacities or skills – misleading evidence, as it turns out in this case – in a way that it isn’t cogent to think of experience as evidence of experience. My second response to the strong version of Irvin’s objection focuses on the role of supervenience. Irvin and I are in agreement ‘that the phenomenological and the functional/cognitive supervene on the physiological’.11 But we differ on the significance of this relationship. While I grant that there is an ontological hierarchy among the levels in the triangulation model,12 I insist on two further points. First, that the more basic level of neurophysiology in the ontological Proust Wasn‘t a Neuroscientist 10 Smith, Film, Art, and the Third Culture, 61, 235nn11–13; Christopher Chabris and Dan Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us (London: HarperCollins, 2010), 7. 11 Irvin, ‘Nature of Aesthetic Experience’, 107. 12 Smith, Film, Art, and the Third Culture, 234n6. 128 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 128 hierarchy should not lead us to make any fallacious inferences about the (ir)reality of psychological states or conscious experiences: the ontological hierarchy gives us no reason to think that the mind in general or consciousness in particular are any less real than the brain states on which they supervene. Although Irvin does not address this point, I am confident that here, too, we are in agreement. Where there is a difference, if not a disagreement, between us concerns the nature of triangulation. At least by implication, Irvin treats triangulation as an ontological claim; that is what the supervenience relation describes. But I frame triangulation in methodological terms: ‘no item within these bodies of evidence is insulated from revision or rejection – so elimination of even long-established, cherished beliefs and theories is certainly possible. In addition, no straightforward methodological hierarchy among the three levels of analysis is established: no one of the three types of evidence necessarily overrules the others.’13 The idea here is that, in our search for an understanding of the mind and of aesthetic experience, we can begin with evidence of any type – experiential, functional, neural – as all of them will (or at least can) lead us into the space of explanation, where any given piece of evidence may intersect with any other. I grant that, given supervenience, differences at the base level of the brain may not manifest in differences at the supervening level of the mind; but of course they can and often do, and that is all that is necessary to ‘license’ attention to neural evidence from a methodological point of view. The example of mirror neurons is telling in this respect: mirror neurons were initially discovered by accident when the neuroscientists involved were running experiments designed to test for a quite different set of hypotheses about brain function in macaque monkeys.14 But once this unexpected and anomalous neural data was on the table, hypotheses about the functional and experiential states it might be underpinning could be (and were) framed. Note that this is precisely why I don’t claim that ‘neurophysiological data [makes] an independent contribution to aesthetic theorizing’,15 but rather that it exists in a relation of interdependence with functional and experiential states. This interdependence claim cuts both ways as far as neuroscience is concerned – neural evidence is given a significant role, but it degenerates into meaningless ‘neurobabble’ if cut loose from experiential and functional evidence and interpretation. One might also make this methodological point in epistemological terms: triangulation bears on how we gain knowledge of the mind – how we discover its mechanisms, processes, and other characteristics. It leaves the ontological 13 Ibid., 60. 14 Ibid., 64–65. 15 Irvin, ‘Nature of Aesthetic Experience’, 100 (my emphasis). Murray Smith Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 129 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 129 hierarchy, described by the supervenience relation, intact. Ontologically, a tiger is a tiger because of its genetic make-up; but we get to know if a tiger is a tiger by looking at its observable features and behaviour. What cuts ice epistemically may be ontologically blunt. What more can be said in support of the methodological and epistemological value of triangulation in general and the neural level of evidence embedded within it in particular? In a striking passage which resonates strongly with those trends in contemporary philosophy of mind which accord substantial weight to the body and the brain – such as embodied and 4EA accounts of the mind – Darwin recorded the following thought in one of his notebooks: To study Metaphysic, as they have always been studied, appears to me to be like puzzling at Astronomy without Mechanics. – Experience shows the problem of the mind cannot be solved by attacking the citadel itself. – The mind is a function of the body. – We must bring some stable foundation to argue from.16 We might consider Darwin’s idea here in connection with the literature on biological motion. It is now well established within perceptual psychology that our minds are adapted to detecting the distinctive contours and rhythms of biological motion, as it is manifest in the movement of humans and other animal species. Among the possible forms of motion, biological motion is quite distinctive, and quite different from the artificial, technologically enhanced forms of motion we humans have invented. (Of course, it is a racing certainty that some future technologies will emulate biological motion, for various purposes.) And the distinctiveness of biological motion is ineluctably tied up with – one might even say constituted by – the bodily forms of animals. Darwin is inviting us to make the leap and accept that the mind, just as surely if rather more subtlety, is tied up with the form of the body and the brain (the brain being nothing other than a particularly intricate part of the body): ‘The mind is a function of the body.’ John Searle, Patricia and Paul Churchland, and a great many other contemporary philosophers of mind would agree. Searle, for example, has argued that ‘the brain is a biological organ, like any other, and consciousness is as much a biological process as digestion or photosynthesis’.17 The mind cannot be understood without an understanding of its architecture, and the architecture of the mind depends Proust Wasn‘t a Neuroscientist 16 Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries, ed. Paul H. Barrett et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Notebook N, 564; quoted in Smith, Film, Art, and the Third Culture, 57, 64. 17 John R. Searle, ‘Consciousness and the Philosophers’, review of The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, by David J. Chalmers, New York Review of Books, 6 March 1997, 50. 130 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 130 at least in part on the architecture of the brain (or the brain-and-body). We can speak not only of biological motion, but of biological cognition. On this view, the brain is the vehicle of biology, the organ that evolved in the human species in such a way as to create a behavioural and cognitive gulf between Homo sapiens and all other species. But we should not take talk of biological cognition to exclude culture as another shaping force in human cognition. As I argue in Chapter 6, phylogenetically speaking, culture emerged from our biology and then developed as an additional domain in which human cognition is forged, in tandem with underlying biological processes; according to one version of this view, human evolution has occurred through ‘genememe co-evolution’.18 From an ontogenetic and development point of view, the psychology we are left with must be understood in biocultural terms; talk of ‘biological cognition’ is not intended to deny or obscure the importance of culture in cognition.19 Culturally shaped cognition is to biological cognition as artefactual motion is to biological motion: both artefactual motion and cultural cognition build on affordances in their respective domains, for movement in the physical world and thought in the space of reasons and cognition. II Schellekens, like Irvin, puts the nature of aesthetic experience at the centre of her response, recognizing the significance of the issue to both FACT and Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception. She notes that both books are concerned with what is ‘phenomenologically distinct about aesthetic experience’,20 arguing that this is a litmus test for any naturalistic account, since (Schellekens contends) naturalism tends to be reductive, erasing the very distinctiveness that it must capture and explain in order to succeed. Irvin, as we have seen, remarks on the efforts I make to resist such reduction, giving rise to the ‘antireductivist’ aroma of FACT. Schellekens captures my characterization of aesthetic experience very effectively, drawing on the term retrospection to evoke both the idea of ‘savouring’ rather than merely having an experience, and to point to the complex temporality and reflexive intentionality implied by this conception of aesthetic experience. ‘This “savouring” or “retrospection”,’ Schellekens writes, 18 Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 19 Consider, for example, the case of sociomoral disgust alluded to in my ‘Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Précis’, Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics 56 (2019): 98. 20 Elisabeth Schellekens, ‘Psychologizing Aesthetic Attention’, Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics 56 (2019): 111, also 114. Murray Smith Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 131 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 131 combines a whole host of states and abilities both in what we might call its production, its phenomenology, and its aftermath. It is not only reflective and emotionally laden, it is also self-reflective and affectively enjoyed as reflection or retrospection. We have an experience and at the same time an experience of that experience: aesthetic experiences are enjoyed, felt, and retrospected upon in a special way quaobjects of a special form of self-consciousness which is distinctive of aesthetic attention.21 In her commentary, Irvin sounds a note of dissent – or least notes an important qualification – on this topic, to the effect that ‘savouring does not necessarily imply enjoyment, but it does imply really tasting as opposed to just absently swallowing’.22 While the pleasurable character of aesthetic experiences of which Schellekens writes – such experiences are ‘enjoyed’ – appears to have a kind of normative weight, neutral or negative aesthetic experiences are surely not only possible, but part of the landscape of actual aesthetic experience. True, we ought to seek positive aesthetic experiences, but often enough they fail or disappoint. Likewise, we ought to seek the right and the good – but things don’t always work out that way. ‘Disvalue’ is an aspect of both ethics and aesthetics.23 So what is basic to aesthetic experience in this respect is keen and self-conscious attention to the quality of the experience, however pleasurable or otherwise the experience turns out to be. Schellekens’s description, taken alongside Irvin’s qualification, pinpoints the kind of aesthetic experience I strive to theorize in FACT.24 But Schellekens worries, if I can pursue the metaphor introduced by Irvin, that all may not be well underneath the aroma and the flavour of the account. The description of the phenomenon to be explained – aesthetic experience – may be attractive; the naturalistic theory advanced to explain it is greeted more cautiously. Schellekens worries in particular that I am ‘trying to fit too much into the account of what is supposed to be our distinctly aesthetic phenomenology’.25 I take it that Proust Wasn‘t a Neuroscientist 21 Ibid. 115. Chapter 7 emphasizes the retrospective dimension of aesthetic experience, especially as it bears on empathy (Smith, Film, Art, and the Third Culture, 196–97). There may also be a connection between the retrospective aspect of aesthetic experience and the ‘lingering effect’ of such experience, as discussed by Nanay and Schellekens. See Bence Nanay, Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 16–17; Schellekens, ‘Psychologizing Aesthetic Attention’, 112–14; Bence Nanay, ‘Responses to Irvin and Schellekens’, Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics 56 (2019): 120–22. 22 Irvin, ‘Nature of Aesthetic Experience’, 102. 23 On this point, see my review of Aesthetic Pursuits: Essays in the Philosophy of Art, by Jerrold Levinson, Philosophy 93 (2018): 467–69. 24 Paisley Livingston has queried whether the conception of aesthetic experience explored in FACT is, in fact, too narrow and too demanding. See Paisley Livingston, ‘Questions about Aesthetic Experience’, Projections 12 (2018): 71–75; and my response, ‘Film, Art, and the Third Culture – A Response’, Projections 12 (2018), 116–19. 25 Schellekens, ‘Psychologizing Aesthetic Attention’, 115. 132 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 132 Schellekens’s worry here arises from the very ‘thickness’ of the thick explanation that, as we have seen, she rightly adduces goes hand in hand with the metho - dology of triangulation. If everything from neural networks and mental modules to selection pressures and evolutionary niches to affect programs and extended minds goes into the theoretical mix, what hope is there that the intricate structure of retrospection is going to survive, let alone be discerned and explained? Here again it is important to hang on to the explanandum–explanans distinction. Those items which seem most alien to descriptions and explanations of aesthetic experience, including neuroscientific evidence, reference to subpersonal mechanisms and processes, as well as the adaptive unconscious and implicit bias, play their role in the engine room of explanation. They bear upon what Schellekens refers to in the quotation above as the ‘production’ of aesthetic experience. Generally speaking, none of these factors shows up in our conscious experience, even if their consequences do; and so none is part of the content of aesthetic experience. ‘Exactly what do we find behind the “door [to] the firstperson perspective within a scientific approach to the mind”?’ asks Schellekens.26 We find, exactly, the contents of experience – what is available, with all its fallibility and fragility, to introspection and phenomenological reflection. The point is ‘simply’ that, to reiterate one of my responses to Irvin, such aesthetic experience is not only the target of explanation, but – conceived in functional terms, as a distinctive kind of capacity – one type of evidence that we can marshal within the explanation of that very target phenomenon (see p. 128). It is easy to understand how, given this dual role, it might seem like I am cluttering up the space of aesthetic experience itself with a lot of apparatus that doesn’t belong there. That is why the explanandum–explanans distinction is so vital. Relating my exploration of Edgar Reisz’s Heimat (1984–2013) to Nanay’s treatment of certain works by Paul Klee, Schellekens suggests that these analyses may ‘affect’ our experience of the artworks concerned.27 With regard to FACT, however, affecting the appreciator’s experience is not my primary goal. That’s the job, in the first instance, of the artist by means of the artwork, and, in the second, of the critic through their criticism of the work. As a theorist, I would substitute the word ‘explain’ for ‘affect’; explanation, once again, is the name of the game in theory construction. I insist upon drawing firm lines between three roles we can play in relation to artworks, and the distinct activities that playing these roles entail: making artworks is distinct from appreciating them, and both are distinct from explaining them. That is not to deny that there are points of connection and similarity, nor that the same individual can occupy these different roles with 26 Ibid., 116, citing Smith, Film, Art, and the Third Culture, 117. 27 Schellekens, ‘Psychologizing Aesthetic Attention’, 116. Murray Smith Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 133 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 133