Neuroaesthetics is contextual

Critiquing neuroaesthetics

Reductionism

According to philosopher Alva Noe, neuroaesthetics cannot capture the complexity and richness of aesthetic experiences. For example, asking research participants to provide a discrete rating about an image reduces a dynamic experience to a static event on a timescale much shorter than typical in a gallery. Moreover, aesthetic experiences lack clear temporal boundaries- did they stop in the gallery or when back at home once we no longer think about them?- and can be significantly reinterpreted by future experiences.

Relevance

Neuroscience may even be irrelevant.

Neuroscience could be relevant if it provides ‘constitutive claims’ that the activity of certain brain regions in some way constitutes aesthetic experiences; however, this claim does not intuitively seem very plausible.

Alternatively, neuroscience could be relevant if it provides ‘evidential claims’ about activity in brain regions that correlates with certain conscious experiences. However, how can evidential claims made from the third person perspective of neuroscience capture the first person, subjective perspective of what it feels like to have an aesthetic experience? This touches on longstanding problems in the history of philosophy and contemporary debates about phenomenology and the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness.

Noe seems to go even further; for him,‘art isn’t a phenomenon to be explained’ because art is ‘a research practice’ to investigate the world and ourselves’. An artwork forces us to interrogate it- what is this artwork and what is it for?- thereby illuminating the background context of bodily, cultural, social and political assumptions that we normally take for granted. For Noe, art is more than responses to stimuli; art seeks to question these responses.

Reframing neuroaesthetics

The Beholder’s Share

Reductionism can be avoided if neuroscience focuses on the phenomenology of art. The ‘Beholder’s Share’ is a concept in art history that stresses the role played by the viewer (beholder) to complete artworks. Various art movements, such as Impressionism, Expressionism and Cubism, highlight how the viewer completes artworks by perceiving objects out of disconnected brushstrokes, ambiguous shapes and disembodied colours.

Neuroscientific theories reveal that our perceptions arise from our brains making best guess predictions to infer the causes of sense data based on our background context of prior perceptual, affective, cognitive and sociocultural beliefs, knowledge and expectations.

In The Experience Machine, philosopher Andy Clark explains that the brain is never passively responding to the world but ‘before new sensory signals arrive, the predictive brain is already busy painting a rich picture of how things are most likely to be’ and ‘the role of the sensory information is mostly to nudge the brushstrokes when they fail to match up with the incoming evidence.’

These insights highlight the relevance of neuroscience. That perception is a generative act makes ‘constitutive claims’ more plausible. ‘Evidential claims’ may be feasible if we recognise that the hard problem may not be the real problem of consciousness.

They also support Noe’s understanding of art as a research practice to illuminate this background context. These contextual factors that frame and modulate aesthetic experiences also lead psychologist Ellen Winner to conclude that anything can be treated as art by adopting an ‘aesthetic attitude’ so that we attend to it in a special way: the question is ‘when is art?’ not ‘what is art?’.