Earth Art in Mind. Investigations into the Mechanics of Aesthetic Emotion and Implications for Cognitive Science

Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship J 1877 Earth art in mind: investigations into the Mechanics of Aesthetic Emotion and Implications for Cognitive Science Thomas RAAB 08.05.2000 It is now widely recognized that the study of "emotion" in - its widest sense, including categories such as affects, sensations, feelings, moods etc., lie at the heart of a veritable understanding of both the human mind and the functioning of our perceptual-cognitive apparatus as conceived of by the cognitive and brain sciences. Even taking a strict materialistic stance on science, one cannot circumvent the question of "emotion" both as an phenomenological first-person fact and as an important cognitive control mechanism. Therefore, the cognitive science and Artificial Intelligence communities have begun to understand that only the most detailed and stringent description` of what is happening to us as obviously emotional subjects can warrant further scientific progress. The only way to tackle with the "hard problem" (Chalmers, 1995) of the relation between mind and its embodiment is to know how mind could eventually be defined, how it functions, and then trying to relate this definition and functioning to neurobiological data. I do not even hesitate to say that the viability of the very design of scientific experiments both in neurobiology and cognitive psychology is dependent upon the knowledge of the mental events to be expected, because they are part of the experimental setup itself, thereby determining the interpretation of the expected results. The trend towards the study of emotion was and is constituted by a variety of eminent researches in the cognitive sciences coping with the analysis of emotion (e.g., Damasio, 1994; Minsky, in prep.; Varela et al., 1991; Wiener, 1998) Under the auspices of these recent developments, particularly taking into account the revival of introspective empiricism, considerations on the subjective effects of landscape and the avant-garde art tradition of land art can be considered a case study for the first person empirical research into the domain of emotion. No doubt that the emotion of being touched in front of desert or mountainous landscapes or, only categorically different, particular earth art pieces of the 1970s is a phenomenal fact. Yet, such settings also give rise to the hope that a stringent introspective analysis within an adequate terminology is possible, because the "input situation" is well controlled in a spatiotemporal sense. What may be the function of aesthetic emotion, if any? Can it be even correlated with neurophysiological data? This project aims (a) at a phenomenological-psychological clarification of -the various phenomena of emotion in the terminological framework of automaton theory as suggested by Oswald Wiener, and, (b) at an detailed analysis of the particular kind of emotion of being touched ("Ergriffenheit"), drawing on a variety of material of the cognitive sciences and philosophical psychology that seems relevant at this particular point of time.