[Fis] Art as human practice

Sat Jan 17 19:32:53 CET 2026

Dear Eric, all,

Thank you for your account of your artist mother. Witnessing artistic
practice is, I think, very important to this discussion.

Your comment about the logic of mathematics and art suggests to me that the
practice of mathematics is not the same as the logic of mathematics. The
former is deeply ontological, the latter an epistemological construct.

Equally the practice of art is not the same as the experience of art. The
biological question is really not what is behind the experience of
listening to Beethoven, but what is the mechanism that makes Beethoven's
sketchbooks - https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketch_(music)__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!VKe8vuOdDiREVVkwUGZ7dnBO2TsMUCbsG-A1NENeMIqYb_AdP9NCEJNZQeJztoH5IQmPfWCrc4eKvLlgOvFNAKg$ 

Could AI do this? Maybe it does - you'll know, Eric, the intense interest
in "latent space" in ML models. Is that a sketch?

My answer is "no" - this has to do with the basic artifice of machine
learning. Whatever the marketing people tell us, it is not "based on neural
architecture" - we don't have ReLu's and convolutions and pooling. Neither
do we "think" like the so called thinking models. And we don't have Von
Neumann architecture.

So what else might? What machine might be able to sketch? What would that
entail?

Best wishes

Mark

Dr. Mark William Johnson
Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health
University of Manchester

Department of Science Education
University of Copenhagen

Department of Eye and Vision Science (honorary)
University of Liverpool
Phone: 07786 064505
Email: johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com
Blog: https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!VKe8vuOdDiREVVkwUGZ7dnBO2TsMUCbsG-A1NENeMIqYb_AdP9NCEJNZQeJztoH5IQmPfWCrc4eKvLlgCyemMsY$ 

On Thu, 15 Jan 2026, 09:27 OARF, <eric.werner at oarf.org> wrote:

> Hi Mark, Marcus, Laszio, Kate and Fis Colleagues,
>
> I don’t know if the creation of art follows the same logic as the logic of
> mathematics. I recall in university  trying to prove some difficult theorem
> will walking down the campus hill back home, I would use fast backtracking
> form some start to the finish (the theorem). By the time I. got down the
> hill I usually had it.
>
> In contrast,  when I do art there is no backtracking only spontaneous
> adaption to what is.  I have a general idea of what I want but the motor
> part takes over to execute.  Not does emotion necessarily play a role in
> the creative process other than the fun of it. Similar to the fun of
> shooting a basketball while jumping and turning high in the air and making
> a perfect shot.  Or the feel of the body and breathing the fresh air while
> cross country skiing. The art of the physical! The very doing of art is the
> deeper beauty.  The end product is just that.  Much like sex but there
> nature can take over to produce its own art and product.
>
> ///Below is from a previous post on the same topic in another thread:
>
> I grew up with an artist, my mother who wanted to be a sculptor but life
> had other plans for her. Surrounded by actual art being done day by day by
> mother or my fathers love of wood and carpentry and me doodling while bored
> in grade school and later doing cartoons and later theoretical mathematical
> cartoons.
>
> As an adult at University I also viewed S.C. Kleene’s Introduction to
> metamathematics as art. Or von Neumann’s mathematical theory of games and
> his mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics as art.  There is a
> wonderful beauty in abstract thought and especially in the personal process
> of construction of new theoretical concepts much like my mother’s actively
> painting an oil.
>
> So art for me is tied to the emotional construction of it.
>
> As for animals and art, my theory of communication and cooperation also
> applies to animal communication.
> For an early version see:
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.tark.org/proceedings/tark_mar7_88/p129-werner.pdf__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!VKe8vuOdDiREVVkwUGZ7dnBO2TsMUCbsG-A1NENeMIqYb_AdP9NCEJNZQeJztoH5IQmPfWCrc4eKvLlgi_vi9aM$ 
> I think animals are highly intelligent and have complex communication
> systems with art being a form of communication important in the cooperative
> ecology of sexual reproduction.
>
> The social cooperation and communication theory links information with
> value and intentional states. I see emotions as a complex of intentions
> (strategic), action-abilities, information and their evaluation.  Art
> combines all these themes.  It is the bedrock of the formation of and what
> makes society possible at all.
>
> This relates to Artificial Social Intelligence
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.07847__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!VKe8vuOdDiREVVkwUGZ7dnBO2TsMUCbsG-A1NENeMIqYb_AdP9NCEJNZQeJztoH5IQmPfWCrc4eKvLlgKkVpIms$ 
>
> Now with AI we are at the doorstep of combining the abstract with
> biological synthesis:
> See my “AI-CAD-CRISPR Protocols to Crack the Cancer Code: Reverse Engineer
> Multicellular Life and Design in silico Brains with Natural Architectures”
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.researchgate.net/publication/395391173_AI-CAD-CRISPR_Protocols_to_Crack_the_Cancer_Code_Reverse_Engineer_Multicellular_Life_and_Design_in_silico_Brains_with_Natural_Architectures__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!VKe8vuOdDiREVVkwUGZ7dnBO2TsMUCbsG-A1NENeMIqYb_AdP9NCEJNZQeJztoH5IQmPfWCrc4eKvLlgCRXZy5E$ 
>
> What will be the role of Art in the Bio-AI world?
>
> -Eric
>
>
> On Jan 15, 2026, at 6:00 AM, Marcus Abundis <marcus.abundis at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> 
> Mark,
>
> In considering all this (well stated by the way!) . . . it seems worth
> keeping in mind that the essence of ‘art’ is ‘to be creative’, to
> produce/seek novel effects in the world. But then how is this seemingly
> erratic creativity (and/or seemingly erratic emotions) not mostly a means
> of mirroring or matching (or racing against) Nature’s own creativity
> (purely adaptive logic)? But Nature creates without benefit of emotions?
>
> Marcus
>
> On Thu, 15 Jan 2026 at 00:35, Mark Johnson <johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Dear Katherine, Francesco, all,
>>
>> If the discussion about art turns to the question of emotion, then it
>> must further turn to the question of emotion and logic.
>>
>> I would suggest that the artist's intuition which drives the creative
>> labour to find form and expression is driven by a "logic" which does not
>> work in the way we conventionally reason.
>>
>> It's not just that "the heart has its reasons that the reason cannot
>> perceive" (and don't we on FIS give it a good try!🤣). It is that Hume's
>> "secret springs of the universe" work in a way which we cannot fit into a
>> conventional logical scheme but which are coherent, and whose coherence
>> finds expression if the artist does their job well. But our logical schemes
>> (from Aristotle to Spencer Brown, Luhmann, etc) are deficient in
>> apprehending this. There are plenty of artless logical descriptions of art
>> to demonstrate this. We need instead an existential logic...
>>
>> We may respond to the coherence of art with feeling, but the feeling is
>> an epiphenomenon. Scholars like Panksepp and his giggling rats tell us
>> something about the emotion and cognition. But it mistakes the
>> epiphenomenon for the mechanism. The giggles are "assenting" to something.
>> What? Why?
>>
>> If we could imagine at the moment of our death what art and logic and
>> emotion are all about, and thought backwards from that moment to the
>> creative moments of living, we would have a better chance of apprehending
>> an existential logic. What would we see? It's a pattern of assent - a giant
>> "yes!". I don't think that's an emotion. It's more like a movement.
>>
>> Best wishes
>>
>> Mark
>>
>>
>> Dr. Mark William Johnson
>> Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health
>> University of Manchester
>>
>> Department of Science Education
>> University of Copenhagen
>>
>> Department of Eye and Vision Science (honorary)
>> University of Liverpool
>> Phone: 07786 064505
>> Email: johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com
>> Blog: https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!VKe8vuOdDiREVVkwUGZ7dnBO2TsMUCbsG-A1NENeMIqYb_AdP9NCEJNZQeJztoH5IQmPfWCrc4eKvLlgCyemMsY$ 
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!VxO1fzqrt33fEhVguijWuQ6yjcfDURMHwUy3bP5IXhO2kWkQAVjGL_4usEK-oK_p9qPMRHPaoq43xubDEWt_1ks$>
>>
>> Onento en que lo desee.
>> http://listas.unizar.es 
>> ----------
>>
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