[Fis] Fwd: What is Art?

Wed Jan 21 01:16:55 CET 2026

Dear John, Marcus, Louis, Eric, Mark, and all FiS colleagues,
We have witnessed excellent argumentations that were both inspiring and
thought provking. I am grateful to participate.
I circulate around an easy question after all these considerations: how the
cellars' cognitive functions, self-cognition, and consciousness relate to
each other, and how "emotion" as a factor links to them. Theoretically, all
living creatures differ from crystals, stones, fluid, or aeriform materials
by having a kind of "decision-making"--an ability of "willing" that gives
them a "plus".
Nevertheless, this ability is not an art form; it is just a differentia
specifica between living ones and those that exist without a
decision-making gift (capability). Art seems to be a step further, which
elevates the material environment to a level that could be called
"super-consciousness", or something like that. Super-consciousness empowers
us not only to shape the world but to imagine it in another way, and create
"new realities"--in a way that would not be possible physically.
This kind of imagination--that exceeds the animals' "rationality"
(causability?), creativity, and communicative acts...
Can we specify--and how can we?--such a "plus" (I called it a "human spark"
in my initial paper), or is this evolutionary thesis just a delusion?
Cheers,
               László

Mark Johnson <johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com> ezt írta (időpont: 2026. jan. 19., H,
10:05):

> Yes! Thank you Joe!
>
> On Mon, 19 Jan 2026 at 08:33, <joe.brenner at bluewin.ch> wrote:
>
>> 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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>
>
> --
> 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!U2oGFRhHxcTY2k-0bUz__02gLk2b70G1DtlFMEnAMksE3r_D7V6YNAJiQJWhynKHZSwXeW92aIx38Yxl5K-Z1atUhQ$ 
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