[Fis] Fwd: What is Art?

[joe.brenner at bluewin.ch]

Dear John,
 
We have not talked to each other recently, but I follow your work with interest and wanted to applaud the last three lines of your 19.1 note: ... "the 'logic' of the Cosmos. Symbiogenesis is the mechanism by which life has acquired the logic of the Cosmos. In other words there is a continuum from the foundations of the Cosmos to life that is expressed in art."
 
The image it evoked was that of my sculptor father, Michael Brenner, making a bust of me at age 10 in his studio in New York. He danced around his easel in a frenzy (frénésie) , chopping away at the emerging marble head, sweating and grunting. Art comes more easily to many, but I suggest that its becoming is always partly unconscious, an expression of the energetic foundations of existence.
 
Cheers,
Joe

> ------but ---- Message d'origine ----------
> De : JOHN TORDAY <jtorday at ucla.edu>
> À : fis <fis at listas.unizar.es>
> Date : 17.01.2026 22:58 CET
> Sujet : [Fis] What is Art?
>  
>  
> Dear FIS, I am of the opinion that art is an expression of consciousness, raising the question Art as to what consciousness is? I fell down this 'rabbit hole' twenty years ago, having performed a series of experiments to understand how and why Parathyroid Hormone-related Protein (PTHrP) is necessary for the formation of alveoli in the lung (Rubin LP, Kovacs CS, De Paepe ME, Tsai SW, Torday JS, Kronenberg HM. Arrested pulmonary alveolar cytodifferentiation and defective surfactant synthesis in mice missing the gene for parathyroid hormone-related protein. Dev Dyn. 2004 Jun;230(2):278-89)? The duplication of the PTHrP Receptor gene during the water-land transition amplified all of the vertebrate physiologic adaptations to land- lungs, kidneys, skeleton, skin- and since PTHrP is a stretch-sensitive gene, I tested the hypothesis that PTHrP mediated the vertebrate adaptation to the force of gravity. If cells are exposed to zero gravity they lose their differentiated phenotypes (i.e. they devolve), and when yeast are exposed to zero gravity they cannot conduct a calcium flux, meaning that they are unconscious. Moreover, human consciousness has been driven by bipedalism (Torday JS. A central theory of biology. Med Hypotheses. 2015 Jul;85(1):49-57), freeing our forelimbs for tool making, including language as a tool, and locomotion. Importantly, both language and locomotion are under control by the FoxP2 gene, so that positive selection pressure for FoxP2 would have coordinately stimulated language and locomotion, expressed through our hands and minds as art of all kinds- literature, painting, sculpture, music- in other words, art is a manifestation of our need to communicate with our environment and with other humans.
>  
> Furthermore, all of the above is due to the evolution of homeostatic control of energy due to Symbiogenesis (Sagan, 1967), or the assimilation of factors in the environment that threaten homeostasis, including the elements in the Cosmos, the latter being an exaptation (Gould and Vrba, 1982) of Stellar Nucleosynthesis (Hoyle, 1946), or the serial chemical reaction of hydrogen and helium to form the stars, the elements being their byproducts in the exact order of their atomic masses as thec
> Your comments and criticisms are welcomed.
>  
> Best, John
>  
> 
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