Art or Science?

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Sy Borg
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Re: Art or Science?

Post by Sy Borg »

What of the role of creative imagination in philosophy and science?
Jan Sand
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Re: Art or Science?

Post by Jan Sand »

All new twists of creative art and exploratory scientific theory is the result of inventive pattern manipulation. Science, of course, must confirm the validity of this speculation but art is under no compulsion to justify its delights.
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Re: Art or Science?

Post by Alias »

Greta wrote: February 28th, 2018, 12:46 am What of the role of creative imagination in philosophy and science?
Male and female lead.
The creative leaps of philosophy come from a big-picture imagination, but then the germinal idea must be developed, reconciled with observation, organized and articulated, all of which is uninspired, necessary drudgery.
The great concepts of science go though the same phases.
Great art needs a dozen moments of divine inspiration and a lifetime of learning the craft.
Neither is any good without the other.
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Sy Borg
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Re: Art or Science?

Post by Sy Borg »

Reading the above, Einstein comes to mind: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/im ... magination
For Einstein, insight did not come from logic or mathematics. It came, as it does for artists, from intuition and inspiration. As he told one friend, "When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come close to the conclusion that the gift of imagination has meant more to me than any talent for absorbing absolute knowledge." Elaborating, he added, "All great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge. I believe in intuition and inspiration.... At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason." Thus, his famous statement that, for creative work in science, "Imagination is more important than knowledge" (Calaprice, 2000, 22, 287, 10).
Of course, without the knowledge to bring rigour and refinement to his imaginative leaps, he'd just be another forum member :)
Jan Sand
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Re: Art or Science?

Post by Jan Sand »

It seems to me that the mind manufactures various templates of relationships of abstracts from sense input and these templates can be applied in various ways to guess at reality. A creative mind keeps trying to apply new templates to get them to work better. That covers both art and science. I have never found religion to be more than one of the templates formed so far back in the history of mental exploration that its templates do not match at all with the functional templates useful today.
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Re: Art or Science?

Post by Namelesss »

StayCurious wrote: February 20th, 2018, 5:34 pm Should philosophy be considered an art or a science?

All sciences are feeder branches on the tree of philosophy!!
Science can be artfully done, but that is rare.
Philosophy is an art, and if not artfully original, the 'philosopher' is no more than a bot/drone (philosophologist). Philosophy incorporates all means of Knowing and artfully, originally, synthesizes the results in original theories.
Hence so few philosophers in existence, and less all the time.
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Re: Art or Science?

Post by Jan Sand »

Philosophy is, as far as I can make out, not so much concerned with actuality as more concerned with how and why reality is perceived by limitations of human ability to understand it and relates to human social and fundamental desires and needs. It is probably closer to psychology and social studies and, especially linguistics than the harder sciences of physics and chemistry.
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Re: Art or Science?

Post by StayCurious »

Eduk wrote: February 23rd, 2018, 5:20 am Philosophy, used normatively, is everything left from philosophy, as a whole, when you remove everything useful.
The scientific method, for example, is a philosophy. It's just not normally thought of in that way.
Thank you for sharing, I agree :D
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Re: Art or Science?

Post by Eduk »

Thank you staycurious :-) two people agreeing with me is a personal record I think.
Unknown means unknown.
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Re: Art or Science?

Post by Namelesss »

Jan Sand wrote: February 28th, 2018, 1:21 am All new twists of creative art and exploratory scientific theory is the result of inventive pattern manipulation.
Nonsense!
If you avoided words like "all" or "always", etc... you would fall into less error.
Not that your notion is not true, at times.
Intuition, spontaneous intuition, has nothing to do with the rickety train of thought/ego ("pattern manipulation").
It is simply the genius, the answer, all at once, fully formed.
I don't 'manipulate patterns' when I carve a piece of branch, or throw a bowl from a lump of clay. There is no original 'pattern' to manipulate. Once I make a pattern, perhaps.
Yes, you are correct in all but in your use of the thoughtless term "all". That, in itself, refutes your assertion.
Without it, your assertion is quite valid. *__-
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Re: Art or Science?

Post by jerlands »

Namelesss wrote: March 2nd, 2018, 7:55 pm I don't 'manipulate patterns' when I carve a piece of branch, or throw a bowl from a lump of clay. There is no original 'pattern' to manipulate.
You're contradicting yourself. Art brings forth the potential that lies within the medium. Clay as an art medium has limited potential but clay as a substrate for life seems to be unlimited. All forms of matter have their original patterns embedded.
"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." - Mark Twain
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Re: Art or Science?

Post by Jan Sand »

The mind is a repository of patterns. Everything we do from necessity or fantasy is a manipulation of patterns. Some have successful results and some produce something interesting and useful and some are complete failures.
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Re: Art or Science?

Post by Jan Sand »

The mind is a repository of patterns. Everything we do from necessity or fantasy is a manipulation of patterns. Some have successful results and some produce something interesting and useful and some are complete failures.
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Re: Art or Science?

Post by StayCurious »

Jan Sand wrote: February 25th, 2018, 3:33 pm As an artist who has had a good deal of science in my education and general life interest I consider the two so closely aligned that I have accepted that they are pretty much the same thing. The human mind is the functioning dynamic of the brain and the brain functions to create what we know of the exterior from the clues fed to it from its sensor system which is a series of continuous impulses. It has to be pretty good at guessing or none of us would survive but nevertheless we all make mistakes, some of which are called optical illusions. But some of these mistakes are extremely useful. Such as looking at a photo or a painting and mistaking it for reality. Leonardo DaVinci was obviously both a scientist and an artist because they are obviously not that different. Science always makes artistic guesses as to the reality of observations and when more observations arrive undermining previous guesses, new artistic guesses advance science because the new guesses have to be modified. Art works the same way in abstracting from nature and representing thought in creative models as does theoretical mathematics.They all work to integrate theoretical abstracts of observation into useful and interesting patterns.
My perspective is less that we are confronting and external world and more that since we are apart of this organism of a universe, we "look inwards" with science. Our skin is a medium through which the "external" confronts the "internal" but the two are merely two sides of the same coin. Just as negative and positive are though to be polar opposites, they're still fundamentally one magnet, similarly just as life polarizes itself into Self experience and Other experience, it can all be perceived as one.

Although I do believe that science can be incorporated INTO art, does that necessarily make them the same thing? For instance, I can appreciate Leo's BEAUTIFUL scientific and his discoveries about the nature of the body and consciousness, but would that be considered both art and science?

I can see how one could argue that science is an art. Do you think that science is approached with more of a inquisitive and explorative attitude and art with a expressive intent, or do you believe they can most fundamentally be used interchangeably?
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Re: Art or Science?

Post by StayCurious »

Atreyu wrote: February 26th, 2018, 8:03 pm
StayCurious wrote: February 20th, 2018, 5:34 pm Should philosophy be considered an art or a science? I was recently listening to an Alan Watts lecture were he defined science simply as "accurate description" which requires rigorous precision and calculable elimination of variables, which is not possible in philosophy the way it is in Chemistry and Mathematics, using contamination-proof rooms and limited variables.

Is the mind too variable for all things to be considered, or are we fundamentally driven by basic needs and desires which can be simply calculated?
Philosophy is more art than science. It's definitely not science, because it doesn't deal with theories, only reasonable ideas. It's not exact and precise enough to be science.

However, it's not properly art either. Art is doing, not thinking...
Is an unspoken poem not still art? I believe the intent of ones perception, expressive or inquisitive, is one of many miniscule concepts that establish themselves towards a direction of approaching either art or science, which both use different philosophies in order to reach their goals.

Scientific philosophies are methodical and done in a manner as to be reconstructable, whereas art in itself has neither of these bounds, which I find more closely aligned with the nature of philosophy than anything else.
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