In the Times

The New York Times has some interesting articles online right now.   There is a series of interesting essays on the Future of Computing in the Science section and the philosophy blog The Stone has a very nice post by Alva Noe on Art and Neuroscience.  I think Noe’s piece eloquently phrases several ideas that I have tried to get across recently, which is that while mind may arise exclusively from brain this doesn’t mean that looking at the brain alone will explain everything that the mind does.  Neuroscience will not make psychology or art history obsolete.  The reason is simply a matter of computational complexity or even more simply combinatorics.  It goes back to Phillip Anderson’s famous article More is Different (e.g. see here), where he argued that each field has its own set of fundamental laws and rules and thinking at a lower level isn’t always useful.

For example, suppose that what makes me enjoy or like a piece of art is set by a hundred or so on-off neural switches.  Then there are different ways I could appreciate art.  Now, I have no idea if a hundred is correct but suffice it to say that anything above 50 or so makes the number of combinations so large that it will take Moore’s law a long time to catch up and anything above 300 makes it virtually impossible to handle computationally in our universe with a classical computer.  Thus, if art appreciation is sufficiently complex, meaning that it involves a few hundred or more neural parameters, then Big Data on the brain alone will not be sufficient to obtain insight into what makes a piece of art special. Some sort of reduced description would be necessary and that already exists in the form of art history.  That is not to say that data mining how people respond to art may not provide some statistical information on what would constitute a masterpiece.  After all, Netflix is pretty successful in predicting what movies you will like based on what you have liked before and what other people like.  However, there will always be room for the art critic.