[Fis] The genesis of art, love and wellbeing--three roots

[Pedro C. Marijuán]

Dear Laszlo, Paul, Francesco... --and FIS Colleagues,

For the sake of bringing some coherence to the 'underground' ideas on 
art that have been produced lately, let me try sort of a scheme that may 
parallel what Laszlo has presented on the "externalized" art. He has 
brought order and clarity on a phenomenon full of complexities and 
pseudo-complications. The fact that Krassimir has successfully connected 
it with his own approach to Info Theory is revealing. Could we now draft 
an accompanying something on the interiors?
If we follow the metaphor of a tree, the three proposed vectors of 
creativity (originality), communication, and experience seem to capture 
the main 'branches' of the observable art experience, of the art 
phenomenon. What about the 'roots'? Some of us have argued on the 
biological factors,  three of them could be:

--Sense of play. Plenty of behavioral/evolutionary studies... "Animal 
play remains a complex and variable behavioral phenomenon across a wide 
range of mammals, and their mechanisms and functions are not yet ... an 
enigmatic phenomena" It extends to multiple species of birds, reptiles, 
etc. Human neoteny has potentiated and enlarged this sense in adults and 
at the whole social level. The artist plays, listen to Picasso, or to 
any modest practitioner.

--Emotional engagement. As discussed, my take is that the intense 
emotions related to human pair bonding, essentially love, are conflated 
with the above playing with forms, sounds, words, narratives, etc. Let 
us remember Clynes' sentics (thanks, Jerry). It is a gradation, from the 
superficial to the extreme.

-- Aesthetic impulse. I completely agree that Nature is full of Beauty, 
that in plenty of species we can appreciate elegance, majesty, 
gracefulness... Why so much beauty in nature?? No response.
In science we have to look for plausible explanations, or accepting we 
don't have them, and not parroting the selectionist dogma. Well, the 
aesthetic impulse, in our species, looks again conflated with the pair 
bonding complex. In our societies, beauty and elegance --or their 
surrogates-- are looked for, and played with, so intensely in all the 
relational world...

Far more should be worked out, but these three initial pills at the 
'root' may help a little to cohere with the 'branches'.

Best --Pedro

---Helas! Laszlo and colleagues, one of the conditions of the New Year 
Lecture is the January term... Better if concluding comments appear 
during next days.



Antonyms of ELEGANCE: flamboyance, El 29/01/2026 a las 18:00, Paul Suni 
escribió:
> Dear Pedro,
>
> You opened a wonderfully complex topic connecting art, love and 
> wellbeing and challenged us to think about it in the context of 
> biological capabilities. Whereas László's mathematical approach to art 
> no doubt has value, the messy good stuff of interiors including love 
> and individual wellbeing, also remains under-explored, in 
> courageous ways.
>
> The Satin Bower Bird is an amazing artist, whose creations of bowers 
> exceeds the aesthetic creative capacities of most individual humans, 
> in my personal opinion. Science says that the Bower Bird creates its 
> elaborate and aesthetically complex formations because of evolutionary 
> sexual selection, but I strongly disagree with Science.
>
> I assert that the male Bower Bird engages in its sustained and 
> extremely focused artistic activity, because it provides a rich and 
> fulfilling interior experience for the individual bird, which could be 
> partly substantiated through chemical analyses of its neurotransmitter 
> metabolism. It  is a meticulous labor of love that has absolutely 
> nothing to do with reproduction.
>
> After all, the birds do not participate in scientific discourse 
> concerning reproduction or evolutionary theory, at all.  Furthermore, 
> I hypothesize that the bird enjoys the specific degree of difficulty 
> of his creation, which is a biochemically testable hypothesis, I 
> claim. This raises the question of the bird's " human potential." The 
> bird spends 9 months of the year toiling with its creation, and it 
> sticks to his aesthetic project for as long as 30 years, like a 
> true artist - a veritable Leonardo. There are easier ways to get laid, 
> but toiling away is far more deeply meaningful for the bird.
>
> The artistic activity of the Bower Bird nourishes its little bird soul 
> with expansive, love-like feelings ostensibly not entirely unlike 
> Zohran Mamdani experiences when he engages with his idea of the " 
> warmth of collectivism." In its creative love state, the bird is 
> surely as oblivious to the genetic implications of its artistic 
> activity as Mamdani is to the demonstrably potential genocidal 
> implications of his love for collectivism. This state of ignorance is 
> extremely relevant to our discourse on art. I do not mean to offer the 
> analogy as a joke.
>
> Young male Bower Birds have the biopsychological capacity to develop 
> their personal aesthetic sensibilities through sustained independent 
> study of the works of senior Bower Birds. This can be seen from the 
> countless sketchy assemblages that must be produced during their 
> artistic development, before the first satisfactory bower is produced, 
> and female birds care to take a discerning  look, which requires an 
> aesthetic sensitivity, no doubt!
>
> That brings me to the delight that the male Satin Bower Birds bring to 
> the female Satin Bower Birds, who spend considerable time enjoying and 
> carefully assessing the aesthetic merits of beautiful bowers as well 
> as admiring the cognitive and practical prowess of their sensitive 
> male suitors. I emphasize to scientists that most of what I say could 
> be scientifically substantiated, if science adopted a mature attitude 
> towards sentience, and regarded the rich and fulfilling experiences of 
> Bower Birds as important.
>
> Thank you Pedro and FIS colleagues for tolerating some of my surely 
> annoying repetitions. I have received encouragement for them in 
> private communications, and hope that the academic trance in which we 
> are supposed to be held may begin to lift slightly, in my lifetime. 
> Unfortunately, it is the way of academia to protect its psychopathic 
> hold on its intellectual hegemony by shifting content in and out of 
> the same old frames only to change the race, gender, politics and sex 
> organs of its victims, while disseminating its toxicities into society 
> at large.
>
> Cheers,
> Paul
>
>
>
>
>
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