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24

Apr

2010

art, biopoetics, darwinian literary criticism, games

“Moved to tears”: A biopoetical reading of the art game Passage

[I]t was a simple game that explored a universal subject (Rohrer, 2008, par. 9).

passage1

Passage

In a world where everything seems to change at a breakneck speed, one might very well wonder what remains the same throughout the ages, considering the modern pressurizing tendency to change, evolve and progress. It is from the premise that there is a fundamental human nature shaped by evolution that the biopoetical approach to the arts aims to discern the biologically determined components of the artwork that precede culture – in opposition to many streams of art criticism, which directly dissect the historical and cultural properties of the works. It is in search and in defense of the value of biopoetics that this essay will interpret one artwork assuming the biopoetical framework –also to be called Darwinian art criticism– as stipulated by one of the field’s most prominent and eloquent founding fathers: Joseph Carroll.

Click here for a biopoetical reading of the art game Passage

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21

Apr

2010

accursed share, reproduction, second cumming

22

Mar

2010

altruism, evolution, game theory, Kitcher, natural selection

Philip Kitcher and Psychological Altruism

Chimpanzee coalitions - a form of proto-sociality?

In his Psychological Altruism, Evolutionary Origins and Moral Rules (1998), Philip Kitcher gives a novel account of the evolutionary development of the human capacity to form altruistic valuations (to adjust preferences on the basis of the perception of other organism’s desires). According to Kitcher, human beings have a ‘fragile’ capacity for altruism, the origins of which are not be located in a pre-historical form of “Prisoner’s Dilemma”, but in a more ‘trivial’ development: the dynamics of forming alliances and coalitions among pre-social animals. To account for the development of proto-sociality, we should not imagine a hypothetical scenario of individual organisms calculating fitness benefits, a scenario which, Kitcher claims, presupposes a stable “pool of possible partners”. On the contrary, we should look to explain the formation of that very ‘pool’, the minimal form of animal sociality. That formation, he speculates, can be explained by pre-existing dispositions to form altruistic evaluations towards animals with whom the agent has a history of interactions. Continue reading

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20

Mar

2010

Cioran, Jenseits

The Horror of Originality

I’ve been meaning to post this for quite a while, but a disorientating Saturday morning seems like a perfect time for a Cioran homage:

“A conformist, I live, I try to live, by imitation, by respect for the rules of the game, by horror of originality… It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false.” – E.C.

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18

Mar

2010

action, experience, PPR, telic, thetic, Tim Bayne

Bayne and Pushmi-Pullju Representations

Tim Bayne

Tim Bayne

I just came back from a Tim Bayne lecture at the faculty of philosophy. Bayne is a researcher at Oxford University, working in Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Action. The topic for the talk, appropriately, was at the intersection of those two fields. Bayne is interested in the phenomenology of action; or more precisely – in the phenomenology of agentive experience. How does it feel like to act in a world? Is there a core to agentive experience, a structure which we can isolate and whose properties we can determine, identify and classify? Moving rather swiftly through these main issues, he identified a propositional core of the experience of agency, something on the lines of this:

“I experience myself as performing X”

Isolating a core propositional content of the experience of agency, Bayne moved to the central question. Namely, what is the direction of fit of agentive experiences? Are experiences of action thetic, having mind-to-world direction of fit, or are those experiences telic, possessing the opposite direction of fit? In other words, are experiences of action belief-like, having veridicality conditions (e.g. I have a certain belief concerning the most successful football club in England; a belief which can be true or false)? Or, are they desire-like, having satisfaction conditions (e.g. I want Arsenal to be the champion of England; and that desire can be fulfilled or frustrated)? Continue reading

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