[NetBehaviour] a few random items -- Black Swans on the Side of Good; a brief reply in honor of Leonardo's birthday yesterday.

[Max Herman]

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No person in the first five hundred years after Leonardo's death suggested in any known writing that the world's most famous artwork, a rather small portrait that English-speakers call the Mona Lisa, is an allegory of experience.  

What does it mean that five hundred years and six months after Leonardo's death, someone did?  Maybe nothing, but maybe something.  We know with certainty that one "bit" in the network we call human history changed from a "No" to a "Yes": "has anyone ever suggested that the portrait is of Experience?"  No or yes.

Whether a one-bit change in the the planet's information fabric can have a multi-bit impact is a question of circumstance and other environmental factors including free choice.  To know if any given local change might affect the macrocosm, we can ask what it does to a given microcosm when it occurs.  This is like how fungi work; what is adaptive on a small scale may lead to adaptation on a large scale.

When a person looks at the Mona Lisa -- and despite everything that has happened, many still do -- what do they see?  What happens to them?  Many different things, of course.  Mostly however they are saying to themselves "I am seeing the Mona Lisa; it's a famous painting; it's kind of ugly; she is smiling; I kind of like it but not really."  That is about all that happens.  If they are in the Louvre seeing the real canvas, they might add "it's cool that I'm in the Louvre seeing the real Mona Lisa so I'll take a photo of myself and the Mona Lisa in this cool moment to show my friends and family and the whole world if they care to see.  I am somebody."  

Now, we can ask, what would change in the final outcome -- for, as we know, they who would have the cake out of the wheat must needs tarry the grinding -- if the average ordinary person said, in addition to the above, "someone said this is a picture of experience, like the statue of liberty is a statue of liberty."

What might this average microcosm of human perception, cognition, and experience then say?  It's all subject to chance and specifics, of course.  

They might say, "who cares that stuff is all stupid."  Or, they might say "my friend A said they think it's experience.  What even is experience?  You can't paint a portrait of something invisible.  Who cares."  They might say "I heard that someone said this might be a portrait of experience, I like ideas and discussion topics about paintings, I saw it on a web site, maybe it is experience.  In my native language, Italian, that word is 'esperienza' which is kind of a nice name for a painting.  And hey, after all, am I not 'experiencing' this painting?  So it has to be experience!  Oh funny.  I'm hungry oh there's the cafe I'll get a croissant."  

The point is, people could say or experience something, or nothing, in great variety if they were to engage with the small one-bit question "Is it Experience?" when they are looking at the Mona Lisa.  This variety could occur, let's say, in July and August when so many visitors from every athletic nation are in Paris for the Olympics.  (In ancient Olympic days, in Greece, the word for experience was "empeira," as in the English word "empirical" or based on fact and observation not theory.  If we pay respect to the Olympics, we should also pay respect, you could easily argue, to their word for experience "empeiria" and the high value they placed on it just as they placed high value on throwing the discus and javelin and running fast and jumping high, and wrestling, even boxing.)

Suppose an Olympic visitor from nation A and one from nation B stood together before the Mona Lisa, La Joconde in French, and said to each other "have you heard the idea this might be an allegory of experience?  In my language the word for that is 'experiencia' and I wonder if it's true."  The other person could say "the word for experience in my language is 'Erfahrung' and I don't think it's an allegory.  There's no concrete features of experience in the image and if it were an allegory the artist would be explicit; and if it were originally a quiet secret we'd have deciphered it by now.  No, it's just a mysterious smile."  That could be the end of the conversation and could ruin the friendship.  Or, a third person C nearby could say "my word for experience is Erfaring, and there's no doubt at all we're experiencing this canvas right?  And the painter probably knew people who spoke different languages would look at it, even sometimes together.  So it is a painting of an experience, prima facie, and therefore a painting about the word experience, and isn't that a bit of an allegory?"

All three might laugh a little, or feel charmed by this chance exchange, or might even become friends and have lunch together, share stories, and foster hope and goodwill.  It certainly could happen, but realistically only if the hypothesis -- and we may or even must leave it at that -- of the portrait being an allegory of experience were to have been published.  It's too unlikely, like a tornado hitting a junkyard and building a jetliner, to ever happen if no one has published the hypothesis first.  Too much entropy, and no matter how much you stir you can't unmix the chocolate milk (cacaomaelk in Danish, like Erfaring).  

Now what if a person from nation D, and another from nation E, heard the people talking from nations A, B, and C; and suppose the nations of D and E were at war or contemplating war but some citizens of each also wanted to find a peaceful way to avoid war.  These two other nations, D and E, might use different words for experience: let's say, "experience" and "esperienza."  They might say, these two people from D and E, not knowing each other or where they were from but liking each other's faces and the cuts of their respective jibs, that "if only all nations could share the one thing they have in common -- experience -- and build a just peace on that."  "One can dream," the other might say, and smile.

In the midst of all these tenuous, intangible, evanescent conversations in the big room at the Louvre, what if let's say some little bit of buzz started to happen as these things sometimes do.  No one throws soup over it, but let's say some goofball started jumping up and down saying "Experience!  Experience!  Experience is her name!" like a complete fool.  Then maybe a half dozen other clowns joined in.  No harm done, they would get told to be quieter, but in July that place will be a madhouse anyway.  People will be crammed into that room with a tall ceiling like a layer of sardines at the bottom of a shipping container.  They'll be burping, farting, sweating, and cursing like sailors every one even though they maybe got there by a flying not a floating ship.  No one will care much if one shouts like a lunatic "Her name is Experience!" and laughs like a buffoon; some might even smile slightly at the sight.  It might break the monotony of the long lines, cramped corridors, and overbusy lavatories.

Suppose then a bit of a topical kerfuffle set in about these holy clowns at the museum.  Some experts or commentators might say "oh she's not Experience, we have no documents stating that, and no one painted allegories of Experience in 1503 anyway."  Then another expert, needing to advance themselves and covetous of the first expert's high salary and status, dissents, heaven forbid, and says "Well what if Leonardo was the first?  He made written allegories of Experience so why not a painted one?  And De La Hyre painted Experience in 1650.  There's always a first time."  The second, aspiring expert might get brutally punished, fired from their job even, but they might not care, thinking "I was sick of that stupid place anyway."  Or, they might recant.  Then a third and a fourth expert, or non-expert, one established and one aspiring, might rinse and repeat for no particular reason at all, just because people bore easily and like to have something to talk about.

You might also see a lot of dissenters crawl out of the woodwork to say "We should give this possibility a chance; what if it is Experience?  That would mean a lot to world culture.  It would connect us all, and provide us with a common set of roots from this famous artist and scientist, and might even give us a canopy of branches to shade us from the ever-crueler sun as the planet shrinks and the climate changes.  I say why not?  Where's the burden of proof?  This isn't a criminal or even a civil trial, it's art for heaven's sake.  It deserves a hearing same as all these swimmers and bikers deserve a race be it by road or river."    

Without doubt, if the above happened it would count as a "black swan" event.  No one could have predicted it, but it would have an inordinate effect.  The Summer Olympics of 2024 might be known forever after as the Paris of Experience, where for some fortuitous reason the European tradition and the rest of the world's traditions rebalanced themselves successfully into a better place, as so many Parisians have hoped for and despaired of these last long centuries.  

Could this weird constellation of chances be an at least measurable contribution to the good, however anyone might define good, a lucky break for the planet amid a long history of unlucky ones?  Maybe.  It might be worth a toss.  No one can say for sure.

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________________________________________
From: NetBehaviour <netbehaviour-bounces at lists.netbehaviour.org> on behalf of Max Herman via NetBehaviour <netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org>
Sent: Monday, April 15, 2024 6:10 PM
To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
Cc: Max Herman
Subject: [NetBehaviour] a few random items


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Prehistoric science, a la Graeber and Wengrow's "Dawn of Everything," from the preface to an old book from 1969 by Giorgio di Santillana:

"This time I was able to grasp the idea at a glance, because I was ready for it.  Many, many years before, I had questioned myself, in a note, about the meaning of _fact_ in the crude empirical sense, as applied to the ancients.  It represents, I thought, not the intellectual surprise, not the direct wonder and astonishment, but first of all an immense, steady, minute attention to the seasons.  What is a solstice or an equinox?  It stands for the capacity of coherence, deduction, imaginative intention and reconstruction with which we could hardly credit our forefathers.  And yet there it was.  I _saw_.
Mathematics was moving up to me from the depths of centuries; not after myth, but before it.  Not armed with Greek rigor, but with the imagination of astrological power, with the understanding of astronomy.  Number gave the key.  Way back in time, before writing was even invented, it was _measures_ and _counting_ that provided the armature, the frame on which the texture of real myth was to grow."

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Don Quixote, who circa 1605 said "Experience itself, the mother of all the Sciences" and used the word "experiencia" forty additional times, discussed in a post about avoiding the European/Ottoman conflict's new variation in the US/China rivalry by using lessons from early modern Spanish fiction:

https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-2404/msg00000.html

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Tampere University has a study center for the History of Experience:

https://research.tuni.fi/hex/

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Mary Baine Campbell article about alchemy, AI/GPT, and the homunculus, which argues that metaphor was "the supreme figure of early modern poetry":

https://arcade.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/article_pdfs/roflv01i02_02campbell_comp3_083010_JM_0.pdf

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“We know that, during the Renaissance, a lot of imagery was intended to be enigmatic — it was intended to be interpreted in many ways and to kind of spark discussion,” Nogueira said. “And so if we find some of it confusing today, it’s not just because we’re centuries removed — it was intended to be that way.”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/05/style/hidden-faces-met-museum-renaissance-portraits/index.html

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Whitehead quote about Leonardo from "Science and the Modern World," perhaps not quite right if indeed La Joconde is Esperienza, and given that Leonardo wrote "Experience, the interpreter between formative nature and the human race, teaches how that nature acts among mortals":

"Perhaps the man who most completely anticipated both Bacon and the whole modern point of view was the artist Leonardo Da Vinci, who lived almost exactly a century before Bacon. Leonardo also illustrates the theory which I was advancing in my last lecture, that the rise of naturalistic art was an important ingredient in the formation of our scientific mentality. Indeed, Leonardo was more completely a man of science than was Bacon. The practice of naturalistic art is more akin to the practice of physics, chemistry and biology than is the practice of law. We all remember the saying of Bacon’s contemporary, Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, that Bacon ‘wrote of science like a Lord Chancellor.’ But at the beginning of the modern period Da Vinci and Bacon stand together as illustrating the various strains which have combined to form the modern world, namely, legal mentality and the patient observational habits of the naturalistic artists."

[Some believe it was actually Leonardo who discovered the circulation of the blood.]

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Book from 2016, "Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature":

https://academic.oup.com/book/26933

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