From: David Musick (David_Musick@msn.com)
Date: Sat Oct 26 1996 - 14:09:03 MDT
Chris Hind wrote: "Out of curiosity I'm wondering how many people on this list
are left brain (engineers) as opposed to right brain (artists) or am i getting
the sides wrong? I find there to be many more engineers than artists on this
list. We obviously need both and we should attempt to utilize both sides to
refine new extropian ideas."
Chris, engineers ARE artists. They are artists who love great precision in
their work. They design their machines and structures according to their own
aesthetic parameters, to fulfill certain functions.
The left-brain / right-brain duality is innappropriate, really. Each side of
our brains has it's own things that it's more specialized to do, but for most,
if not all tasks, both sides of the brain are active. Splitting apart left
and right sides of the brain or separating intuition and logic are
innappropriate, because that's not the way things really are. Our intuition
is a type of logic for dealing with incompete data and finding likely
connections between the data and making reasonable inferrences from incomplete
data. More formal logic is mainly a matter of following the rules of the
game, and the games of formal logic were created, based on people's intuition
of how things work and what is reasonable.
There is no dichotomy between {creativity, intuition and art} and {logic and
engineering}. Logic is a form of art, an expression of people's values, an
expression of themselves. Logic is a more refined and narrow form of
intuition, used for dealing with more complete sets of data.
Logic and engineering are particular types of art, just as painting and
sculpting are. Everything humans do is a type of art (some more refined, to
my taste, than others).
You see, Chris, I am someone who has a great interest in creating things in
many areas of art, icluding mechanical engineering, graphic arts, computer
science, music, philosophy, drama, mathematics, writing and physics. So I
wouldn't fit anywhere in your classification scheme of 'artists' vs.
'engineers'. I am both. I want to express my personal values and desires
through many different media and through many different modes of thinking.
Sometimes I like to express my values through music, sometimes through
writing, sometimes through sculpture, sometimes through mathematics, sometimes
through philosophy, and there are many other forms of expression that I enjoy
engaging in. Many dichotomies that people make are inappropriate to make
because they don't respect the real state of things, and I think the
left-brain vs. right-brain dichotomy is inappropriate.
- David Musick
"Question Tradition" - David Musick
- David Musick
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