Arscientia: The role art must play in science

Si la subjetividad (la anteposición del yo y mi experiencia ante el fenómeno) es tradicionalmente tan inoperante-inútil-evitada en la ciencia, aquí viene Jonah Lehrer a cambiar la (anquilosada) perspectiva:

"Neuroscience has yet to capture the first-person perspective. Its reductionist approach has no place for the "I" at the center of everything (...) Artists like Woolf (...) have amassed a large body of knowledge about such aspects of the mind. They have constructed elegant models of human consciousness -las novelas per se- that manage to express the texture of our experience, distilling the details of real life into prose and plot. That's why their novels have endured: because they feel true. And they feel true because they capture a layer of reality that reductionism cannot."

Salvando el vacío entre las culturas.

" ...the deepest mysteries of the brain (...) will require a new scientific approach, one that is able to incorporate the wisdom of the arts. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff. Neither truth, when seen alone, is our solution, for our reality exists in plural"

¿Una cuarta cultura? ¿Será?

"If we are serious about unifying human knowledge, then we'll need to create a new movement that coexists with the third culture but that deliberately trespassess on our cultural boundaries and seeks to create relationships between the arts and the sciences. The premise of this movement - perhaps a fourth culture- is that neither culture can exist (O por lo menos progresar) by itself. Its goal will be to cultivate a positive feedback loop, in which works of art lead to new scientific experiments (o hipótesis o modelos, o interpretaciones de los datos), which lead to new works of art and so on. Instead of ignoring each other (...) science and the arts will truly impact each other. (...) Art will become a crucial source of scientific ideas."


Tal vez más importante que el desesperanzador (y más perjudicial que benéfico, a mi gusto) artículo de C.P. Snow sobre Las Dos culturas sea este ensayo de Jonah Lehrer que apareció en SEED, Noviembre/Diciembre 2007.