Human brains are not Turing Equivalents, they are neural networks that do computations in ways that are not substrate independent. Brains do not store “data” in substrate independent ways and then manipulate that data with math and logic. How neural networks store memories, manipulate data and do computations is not understood, but we do know that it is not like how a computer stores data where any type of data or program can be stored in any type of memory.

A Turing Equivalent can be used to simulate a neural network, but that is not the same thing. An algorithm being run by a Turing Equivalent will always produce the same output given the same input. This is not the case for a neural network.

In principle, a human brain can be simulated on a Turing Equivalent (because a Turing Equivalent can be used to simulate anything). But that is not how human brains operate (as an algorithm being run on a Turing Equivalent).

A problem (and feature) with human brains is that they self-modify and implement “short-cuts”. In the thread on anecdotes, if the Sun is observed to rise every day for 10,000 days, a human brain would self-modify to expect the Sun to rise every day in the future and to come up with rationalizations as to why the Sun God drives His chariot across the sky every day. Usually self-modifications like that are ok and adaptive (that is why evolution configured human brains to be that way), but not always.

Unless you have a theoretical construct for the behavior, you don’t have justification for extrapolation. Observing the Sun rising every day in the past and expecting the Sun to rise every day in the future is no different than observing that in the past, if you poked people with needles they got better, and then expecting that if you poke people with needles in the future they will get better.

In your needle poking experiments, if you notice inconsistent results, you can try to understand the underlying physiology of needle-poking (eventually understanding that it is a placebo), or you can add epicircles of needle-poking mythology (flow of chi in meridians, humours, yin and yang). The same with the Sun rising, you can modify your theoretical construct to explain why sometimes it remains dark (opaque clouds), why the Sun sometimes disappears (solar eclipse), or you can add self-serving epicircles (the Sun God is angry and wants His Prophet to be given gold).

To my little mind what characterises good science is repeatability, predictability and clearly stipulated measurable outcomes. A deeper knowledge of the basics, and of the methods, will certainly help with these. So practice will make, if not perfect, then certainly better.

But how would an artist apply these principles, though? If I am a poet, how would I get repeatability, predictability and a measurable outcome whenever I published a book of poems? If the desired outcome is to sell many copies, then I would turn to advertising of various types – that makes sense, no? And the outcome can be measured at least, though not always predicted or repeated. If the desired outcome is to touch many people with the meanings of my poetry, however, that is not such a clearcut outcome … pretty difficult to assess and not easy to promote.

Question: Art that is repeatable and predictable … is it good art? Here’s another anecdote (I must be entering my anecdotage) … I was wandering round an open-air art fair once when I saw a painting, a watercolour (I have a thing for watercolours as you’ve probably gathered), that I immediately liked – more the theme than the execution, but the execution was acceptable. It was even within my very moderate means, so I bought it and hung it in my hallway at home.

A couple of months later I went to the fair again and lo-and-behold!, the artist had painted some 6-7 repeats of the same painting in various sizes. Presumably she’d been encouraged by one sale to hope for more. I.o.w., she was trying for repeatability and predictability … at least as far as sales went.

Mpf! Why should I feel less than impressed? She had a living to make, after all … but …

“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.”

How pedestrian! And the rest of the poem never rises above this mundane level. But shock! horror! Wordsworth is considered one of the greats! and this is probably the best known of all his poems. But taking an unbaised, un-culturally-influenced view … read it as if you’d never heard of Wordsworth … would you call this a great poem, or its writer a great poet?

So what makes the difference between good art and great art, in any medium?

What makes the difference between a good doctor and a great one? Can a young inexperiened doctor be considered “great”, or must he/she wait till they have twenty or thirty years under their belt?

Btw – @mouse – thanks for the comments on my two contrasting experiences of art from Nowhereville. Yes, I have always remembered those two watercolours and always will. Just how to interpret the remembering sometimes exercises my head, though, and your contribution to my internal debate is much appreciated.

I don’t think we are too far off in our ideas on the topic.

You are using the term “art” to denote educated guessing with incomplete information or when complete information is to onerous or unecessary. I see it the same way. (correct me if I am wrong in your assertion)

However, when you say:

There are no algorithms for communicating with language or with any other medium.

I disagree. I think that those algorithms as merely very complex, much more dynamic than most scientific algorithms, and we have much less resolution to derive them.

I am certain that you and I agree that neural cytoarchitecture is what dictates consciousness as well as our actions and perception of the world around us. If we had more resolution and could process it, then creating “art” in the common sense (visual media, etc) can be reduced to these algorithms. My argument was that on top of all of the limitations in doing this I have listed before, there is significantly more heterogeneity in neural cytoarchitecture and more pathways to achieve the same desired outcome.

“science” is merely the term we use to describe how we re-iteratively refine our resolution for any outcome on any topic whilst minimizing bias, confounders, and fallacy.

I see science as primarily a reductive process, the attempt to understand reality in an algorithmic way. I am using algorithm in the sense of a Turing Equivalent process, algorithms are what computers do. Algorithms manipulate facts and data using logical and mathematical rules.

I see “art” as a non-algorithmic process. There are no algorithms for communicating with language or with any other medium.

Humans and animals have the ability to estimate quantity. This estimation ability works pretty well, but it is not exact. Humans also have the ability to implement the counting algorithm. The counting algorithm gives exact answers (when implemented correctly), but there is significant overhead associated with counting if the numbers to be counted are large, thousands or millions.

I see doing science as the equivalent of implementing the counting algorithm. Art is implementing the non-algorithmic estimating ability. Another term for that is intuition.

In my work, I use both. For most things, there isn’t enough data, or the systems are too complicated to be able to understand them algorithmically. Just because the systems are too complicated to reduce them to algorithms, doesn’t mean that you can just make stuff up.

Human brains are fundamentally non-algorithmic in the sense that Turing Equivalents are algorithmic. Humans can emulate a Turing Equivalent, but doing so is clunky and slow.

Medical intuition is what comes from practicing medicine. There can be good practice that leads to good intuition (that is when wrong intuition is noticed and corrected) and bad practice. Intuition is good for hypothesis generation. You still need to do the hypothesis testing. If your intuition suggests something, you test it and are confirmed, then you can strengthen your intuition. If it is not confirmed then you can strengthen your intuition also.

Intuition is like art. Every piece of hand made stuff is “art”. The question is always is it good art. Every medical idea is a type of medical intuition. For medical intuition to be useful it has to be good. This is where controlling and keeping track of confirmation bias is most important. CAM practitioners have their intuition and don’t recognize that it is all confirmation bias. Good doctors have good intuition, but it is always “trust but verify”, that is you trust your intuition until you can verify it and you always test it to verify it.

The phsyician that knows every variable is no more able to craft a therapy for asthma that will work for every single person than an artist with the same knowledge could craft a piece of art that will convey the exact same message to every single person.

The higher variability in the “subjectivity” of art (is it good, bad, convey the intended message?) is because there is more variability in the neurobiology, cultural milieu, and personal experience than in leukotriene receptor polymorphisms. Biology is more constrained than culture and is certainly less plastic than neurophysiology and the cerebral cytoarchitecture.

As for your question, I believe it was quill who said that they are quite interwoven concepts with much fluidity.

For me, the “art” of medicine is getting the desired outcome, often with incomplete information. The way I envision this is as follows:

Lets say I am a painter and I want to express some idea in my head. I’ve been to art school and been painting for many years so my technique is quite good. I also have had a number of art openings and seen people’s reaction to my art and various other people’s art and have read book on the topic as well. So now, I want to achieve an effect. First, I decide what effect I want and what I would be happy with. I picture it in my head and then pull from my vast repertoire of technique, theory, experience, and start formulating the piece in my head. I think about how I expect people to react and then I make my art and put it out. I gauge the response, both in person and from critics, and then determine if I achieved the goal or not. I adjust technique and strategy as necessary. Repeat.

Lets say I am a doctor (a little less of a stretch here) and I want to help my patient live with asthma and improve his life vis-a-vis this condition. I take the plethora of knowledge I have on the topic, my skills in picking appropriate medicines and interventions, and then my experience in dealing with patients and what their typical response is to certain interventions. For example, I know that Pulmicort is actually rather difficult to use effectively since it is simply technically more challenging to do so. If my patient strikes me as better able to comprehend and do this, I may go for that. If I determine he isn’t, then I may go a different route. I then think about how typical people react to being diagnosed and to various treatment options and decide where this person might lay in the spectrum. I tailor my rhetoric and “pitch” to try and engender the most engagement with his disease and treatment since I know this will help achieve the best outcomes. Then I gauge the response, both in person at the time, and at follow up visits. If possible I seek comments from family or friends if they happen to be around for the consultations. Then I judge how effective it all has been and decide if I need to amend my plan, change my rhetoric, or whatever to engage my patient and improve outcomes. Many times we (as physicians) settle for sub-optimal outcomes because we recognize that for myriad reasons a particular patient simply won’t be able or willing to adhere to an optimal regimen and would be lost to follow up.

To me, that is the science of art and the art of medicine. It is taking all those little cues and fusing it up with evidence to generate outcomes we want.

Medicine without art is the doctor who knows everything, but has terrible outcomes because his patients think he is an a$$hole.

Art without science is the artist who keeps failing and making bad art (i.e. technically poor or simply always unable to convey the message the artist wants) time after time after time.

Where I go even further is to say that all of these variable could theoretically be known in advance and the best outcomes in both art and science can be realized. If an artist knew every variable involved with the creation and perception of art, then it would become trivially easy to target the art for the optimal outcomes (no matter what that may actually be). If a physician knew every variable involved with the management of John Doe’s disease, then it would be trivially easy to generate a treatment and plan for maximal outcomes.

This is why I say it is all fundamentally rooted in science, it is just the resolution we are capable of in determining the variables, our ability to predict outcomes based on them, and how far removed the surrogate markers we use are from the thing we actually want to measure varies quite a bit (but is constantly improving).

The one underlying theme here is that the universe is statistical in nature. Having perfect knowledge of every variable doesn’t mean we can predict with 100% certainty anything. It just means we can be close enough to 100% for any purpose we may want. All we do is improve the accuracy of our predictions by adding in more and more detail and using less removed surrogate markers in our endeavors. In another thread it was commented that we can never predict the decay of a single uranium atom. This is true, but we can say how likely it will be to have undergone decay in a certain time frame (though never 100%). So it isn’t just accepting that medicine is not decipherable with certainty, but that the whole universe is not. But we can get close enough that rounding error makes it pointless to fret over the uncertainty.

Firstly, You get the award for medical doctor/student visual artists! I’m kinda relieved, actually It was beginning to seem weird.

Secondly, If medicine is an art, that probably explains why every time I meet with my Rhuematologist I have the same sensation as coming out of a theater after watching a really avante garde play, that seemed deceptively simple but leaves me so completely without closure or certainty that I think “I must have missed something.”

Really, in my mind, every doctors visit should be like a formulaic children’s mystery novel. Introduction, mystery and clues, mystery solved, resolution. Charming characters are nice.

This may be why I’m so resistant to your idea. Perhaps in the back of my mind I hold medicine apart as that one thing that should be decipherable with certainty*, but reality creeps in.

I think I will start approaching my doctor visits with the same attitude that I approach art (of different types), Which is to rely on this Billy Collins poem**.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176056

But I admit, after all that I’m still curious about the art of medicine. Here is something that might help, if you have time. How is medicine different than art? What is that point in medicine where science switches to art? Is there a point? I don’t know if I can answer this for my work, so apologies if that’s too odd.

*Of course I know better, but knowing is different than accepting, I guess.
**I’m really sorry FL, But it’s true, I even bring the poem for my students to read when I do a workshop.

I don’t think I have the knowledge or time at the moment to really engage in this very interesting conversation, but I few thoughts….

I know a few physicians and med students I know are quite capable artists. One makes his own guitars, another is a talented painter, and another is quite skilled at drawing. In fact, I learned a fair bit of anatomy from a YouTube user named HyperHighs who is a very talented artist.

Mouse says:

Some visual arts take a pretty big investment in time to gain competency and get satisfaction from. Many folks find learning to draw or paint as adults very frustrating. Their vision of what they want to produce is very different than what any beginner can produce.

This to me is evidence of the refining processes which is the same as scientific refinement and inquiry. I think it is more than just technical skill, but also thinking about what effects you want to elicit from your audience.

As for how we recognize artists… once again, there is a scientific process to this. Some artists want their work seen and appreciated by as many people as possible. Some want a specific narrow niche. Some actively market and some don’t. How they go about it to elicit the responses they want is at base a scientific process. Some are better at certain aspects than others. My argument is essentially that, just like the science of medicine, certain artists can get lucky and stumble back asswards into an effect they want and the noteriety they wish but those who systematically work at it will achieve better results more often.

In any event, I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday (well, I guess the Americans here). The fiance and I are in already in a constant struggle to keep the family from making vastly too much food. Happy problems to have.

You saw those watercolor paintings, you remembered them, in a tiny way they changed you, if only by how you view watercolors in the future. The fact that the artist’s career wasn’t advanced is sad, but that just means that the artist isn’t making a bunch of money for his work. Most artists could pursue a different line of work, if they wanted to make more money, but for some crazy reason we want people to see our work and be affected by it in some way…even if it is a tiny way.

I do know artist who are natural self marketers, but it is a balance that is difficult, because the marketing could be a full time job. Some of the self-promotion is enjoyable. When I’m showing work, I enjoy talking to folks who come in to look, because it’s helpful to see how people are reading the work. In fact, that’s part of doing the artwork, the conversation between the artwork, myself and the viewer.

The things that is really intrusive is the endless paperwork of applications, correspondence, photographs of works, self-promotional materials, show planning.

That probably relates to the medical person as artist too…everyone just wants to do the actual work and leave all that promotional stuff to someone else.

“Kultakutri “I would argue that the recognition of artist as someone special stemmed from a bunch of guys wanting better pay.”

Or that my notion that art is “usually considered to be something that is unique and attempts to communicate an emotion, experience, opinion or visual principle. I have never thought of art having a scientific process, although art techniques certainly use scientific principles, chemicals, color theory, construction, physics may all be needed depending upon the type of art.”

elicits you comment – “This romantic notion of art is actually a fairly recent phenomenon (and one, sadly, that refuses to die). It all started in the Renaissance, when a group of painters wanted to be paid more because they argued that their art was something more than just a craft (such that of a cobbler or a vase maker).”

I genuinely want to know if you believe that the uniqueness I see in the work of all the artist that I spoke of above, is actually the result of a few guys in the Reniassance who wanted to make more than cobblers?

It not like art that can be traced back to individual artists starts at the Reinassance. There are identifiable artists from ancient Greece and Early Medieval period on. Maybe before, unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of early art history.

Advertising, relentless, unblushing and expensive.

If you don’t have the money to advertise, then word of mouth. But it’s a chancy method, that. Two anecdotes – ‘pologies! – from my own experience. But they point in opposite directions, so I shall post them as examples of the unreliablity of personal experience.

The first one is an elderly Zulu man, a sculptor of religious themes in wood, living far out in the bush, a long way from universities and museums, who was “discovered” by a visiting nun who just happened to be the sister of some big wheel in Germany. She proceeded to do everything in her power to publicise him including showing off his work to everyone that came to the convent (that’s how I heard about him), and opening up a market for him in Germany through her many high-level contacts.

The second anecdote that “proves” the opposite … some years ago I stopped off at a small ropey hotel in a small ropey African town, and while I was waiting for someone to help me, I looked around at the foyer. There were two medium size original watercolours on the wall and they were superb (imho!). Clear, authoritative, sensitively done, not at all like the usual hotel decorations. But the signatures at the bottom were indecipherable. When at last I got someone to serve me, I asked where they came from and was given an indifferent shrug, “Dunno, they’ve been there for ages”. Seems no-one had ever “discovered” this particular artist and they were fated to “waste their fragrance on the desert air”.

Sometimes I look at magazines, although, to be honest, I’m not into the New York/West Coast art scene and that’s what a lot of the magazines are about. When I go to the children’s hospital where my son’s doctors are (where I have also shown work) I look at the art. About 1/2 my art history I learned from art history professors with books, slides or in museums (mostly London museums) the other half from my art professors with books/slides with an occassional museum/gallery visit (Detroit or Toledo).

Right. Those are actually the ones I am interested in, since I am very interested in the dissemination of things. Why is it that the New York/West Coast art scenes are more talked about than artists in say, Detroit, Toledo, or Houston, all of which all have valuable art scenes (and art collections)? How did the artists featured in magazines and museums get to be featured there? Because I don’t think this has anything to do with individual talent. Not that I am denigrating individual talent. I’m sure there were a lot more talented painters in the Renaissance than what is represented in the canon, just as there are many worthwhile artists in places other than New York or San Francisco. I remember a conversation I had with a French poet and philosopher of mine, who came to San Francisco. He asserted there were at least 500 good poets living in the United States at the moment. He was of course lowballing that number. But that idea excited him tremendously.

But sadly, not even half of those poets will get a book deal. Much like there are many artists who will never have a breakthrough. Because none of them will have the financial backing to be able to be promoted and therefore enter collective consciousness. Think of how much the Surrealists owe their fame in the US to the Menils for example (the Menil Collection in Houston probably has the largest collection of Surrealist art right now, including world famous pieces by Max Ernst and Giorgio di Chirico). Or the artists who managed to thrive thanks to the patronage of Don Fisher (the founder of GAP).

Yes, talent should be part of a conversation about the arts. But it is not the only factor.

I set up a booth at an Art Fair, then chat with my neighbor artists and those who come in to see my work. I nip out to see the work of other artists when I get a chance. I keep in touch with old artist friends from previous jobs and look at their work when I get a chance. I meet artists through the occassional workshops I teach and see their work in class, often they bring pictures of their other work or if I get a chance I go to a show they tell me about. I look at the work of art instructors I’ve taken classes from. I look at other work at the Art Center that shows my work. I go to local galleries when I get a chance or galleries or museums or churches or other art sites when I travel. When I’m bored I google things like “mixed media artist” or “altered books” images. If I go to a party and someone asks what I do, I say “I’m a mixed media artist” and often there’s another artist there and then we need to exchange urls or look at art. Sometimes I look at magazines, although, to be honest, I’m not into the New York/West Coast art scene and that’s what a lot of the magazines are about. When I go to the children’s hospital where my son’s doctors are (where I have also shown work) I look at the art. About 1/2 my art history I learned from art history professors with books, slides or in museums (mostly London museums) the other half from my art professors with books/slides with an occassional museum/gallery visit (Detroit or Toledo).

I would argue that society perception that art is unique to the artist is from observation of the innovative and exploratory nature of art (as well as the fact that people generally are somewhat unique, unless they are intentionally imitating) rather than a response to the marketing efforts of Reniassance artists who wanted to earn more than tradesmen.