Mental Mapping: From Cognitive Schema to Reality and Back

In the fields of science, medicine, technology, business and law, among others, our perceptions constitute a world of possibilities.  Those perceptions we have signify meanings to be deciphered.  In the pursuit of knowledge, those who seek questions to solve problems learn how to both apply cognitive schemas to reality and conversely reflect back habits of perception onto such mental models of their respective fields of knowledge. 

The experience of art lends an useful comparison.  The great art historian Ernst Gombrich, born in Vienna and knighted by the British, explains in his Art and Illusion the interesting concept of “making and matching.”  Which comes first?  The artist knows they begin with an idea.  Borrowing the ideas of Neo-Platonism, Michelangelo claimed he began with the perfection of l’idea in his mind.  The process of creation was a struggle to embody this absolute essence with truth to reality.  He never found to his satisfaction a reconciliation of the idea of beauty he had in his mind with reality.  Note the distortions of body proportions and age in his Pietà for expressive purposes.

If we take the example of knowledge specialist, they rely upon formulae but also realize the necessity of exercising the best of their judgment to empirical fact.  That latter factor is the indeterminate, which must be evaluated by various operations of objective problem solving.  In the face of the invariable conditions of a given situation, they must reconcile such unknowns with their cognitive schemas or revise them.  Arguably, while artists draw upon reality, they continually go back to an expressive idea as the first principle.  

Unlike the knowledge specialist, the ideas of an artist are inconsequential to life.  Artists can dwell in ideals.  Gombrich reminds us Plato objected to the increasing trend of realism in ancient Greek art.  He found the appearances of things would always be misleading.  This is the world of illusions where the eye is only deceived and our perceptions at best caught in a world of mirrors.  Plato feared the world of the senses. 

Without exaggeration the same may be said of knowledge specialists even while reality is the object of speculation to master.  But what are these illusions that are the culprit of our false perceptions?  Possibly Plato meant the limitations of the human mind bring us the farthest distance from the object of our perceptions.  Those pitfalls of knowledge construction are the way our expectations and biases interfere with the objective construction of knowledge.  We are constantly on the pursuit to match the data of experiential intake with those mental structures we are naturally inclined to form to create what Gombrich called his book, The Sense of Order.

Interestingly enough, the best lessons of circumventing the failures of sensory intake, absorption, analysis and interpretation may be learned from our earliest ancestors homo sapiens sapiens, the masters of the renowned cave paintings in Spain and France.  In their experience of the wild they depicted on the walls of the caves, they apprehended them firstly through fear.  This emotion lent the animals a force of strength both fierce and awesome.

Prehistoric humans’ awesome regard of creatures they depended upon and to which they also felt inferior invested their interest in the vicissitudes of sense experience.  Their pursuit of mastery stems from rigorous analysis of every detail of the anatomy of wildlife, how their bodies looked in motion, and migration and mating cycles.  Early humans saw the animals they worshipped flicker and move magically across the walls by candlelight like ephemera.  Their world was unstable.  Strangely enough, our experience of the world is no different today. 

By their wits alone, homo sapiens sapiens circumvented the natural pitfalls of the mind and relied upon the objectifying functions of sense perception to master their subjective reality. They opened up potentialities of experience by exercising a thoroughgoing and meticulous analysis of empirical data as if every piece of sensory experience were a question to be deciphered.  Seemingly inferior to us, the genius of our ancestors actually demonstrates modern human intelligence’s ability to cross-validate what beliefs we hold to be true by experiential and tacit awareness. Even if we are not dealing with tangible things we see, we can better problem solve by learning different ways of looking. We can learn how to outsmart the fear they had not so unlike our own.

Intuition and Judgment: From Illusion to Tangible Truth

The question of intuition as a form of mistaken perceptions is not new to cognitive psychology.  The subject is of value for discussions of the role of judgment in people in professions in business, science, medicine, and law, or even politics, alike.  Intuition as a form of cognitive bias may be our downfall, but it may also be utilized to our advantage and as such an instrument of incomparable value.   

In order to understand just how cognition and affect combined play a role in the formation of intuitive judgments, take the example of ancient Roman architecture.  Ancient Roman High Imperial art under Trajan and Hadrian is known for its increasing subjective qualities.  Arguably, with its technical expertise and refinement, Roman art reached its peak at this time.

In particular, ancient High Imperial Roman architecture is resplendent, grandiose, and impressive.  It reveals the extraordinary sophistication of that civilization as well as the immensity of its power.  The Basilica Ulpia in Trajan’s Forum is one such example.  Today only the columns are left standing.  The building was used for judicial, banking, and administrative purposes.  In this vast space, the Romans gathered together to execute transactions of Roman bureaucratic and administrative law. 

This reconstruction drawing is very useful.  Notice the exaggeration of its scale and size.  The illustrator has explicitly made clear that for which the space is intended.  Margaret Iverson points out an illuminating insight in Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory.  The Greeks designed the Parthenon, their temple on the Acropolis in Athens, according to rules of measurement and proportion pleasing to the accepted values of universal rightness.  The Romans took the design of the Parthenon but not the same aesthetic principle.  When we look at the columns that recede into depth, the emphasis is less on verifiable measurement and the justness of proportion than the illusion of vastness into infinity and expansive space.

In several studies Daniel Kahneman has explored this very sort of intuitive reasoning, here exemplified by a habit in perception.  He claims that judgments made according to a “heuristic” model tend to exaggerate and overvalue the probability of things.  This is to say when perception offers us an experience of reality that outweighs subjectivity over objectivity, illusory rather than tangible, we tend to exaggerate the importance of things. 

Yet, the Roman legal and bureaucratic system was a formidable tool of logic and reason to administer and control an immensely vast empire.  Western Civilization would not be what it is today.  In fact, much of Roman law still even stands with us. 

The exercise of reason, whether that be in law, the management of business risk, science, or medicine, is a process of creating a coherent and accurate pictures of things. Kahneman explains how in perception, we master our subjective experiences by applying objective criteria derived from reality no differently than when we form preferences and beliefs.  However, we are at a loss when objective measurements are unavailable.  Consequently, we are left with making the most significant choices under intuitive evaluations. 

The psychologist JJ Gibson argued for a theory of “affordances” in human perception to explain how humans seek coherency and accuracy.   Just as when an artist resolves invariant information in a coherent work of art, so too is perception itself an act of judgment of invariants for anyone.  An artwork always begins with an uncertainty, something like a question that poses the possibility of irresolve.  An artist finds clarity working between objectivity and subjectivity.

Gibsons ideas about perception are very much based on bottom up theories of perception versus the top down theories, which argue for the importance of unconscious inference following the ideas of Herman Helmholz.  Ecological optics explains how the ambient optic array is taken in by the eye, processed, interpreted, and resolved.   He recognized how the invariant information available to the eye form “optical flow patterns.”  Through direct perception we interpret these invariant structures without actually needing to rely upon any form of computational logic. 

In drawing comparisons between cognitive psychology and perception, Kahneman ends his study with Amos Tversky claiming human judgment must “reflect the tension between compelling logical rules and seductive nonextensional intuitions.”  The seat of judgment in perception proves to be intuitive in the first instance only to be verified by the way ultimately humans rely upon tacit awareness.  In fact, Gibson even referred to this kind of expertise as a niche, no different than how an animal learns to survive in its habitat. 

Skilling and Deskilling in Art and Business

Since the overwhelming presence of technology in the corporate domain, the issue of skill and competency has become a topic of increasing importance.  The predominant opinion is technology has rendered the skills of workers obsolete, left with the need to build more marketable skills only to be left in the same position again.  Kevin Kelly goes so far as to claim in The Invitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape our Future “:

An AI will think about science like an alien, vastly different than any human scientist, thereby provoking us humans to think about science differently.  Or to think about manufacturing materials differently.  Or clothes.  Or financial derivatives.  Or any branch of science or art.  The alienness of artificial intelligence will become more valuable to us than its speed or power. 

But is this true?  What is left for humans?  As I have pursued in previous blogs, I believe what humans posses and computers and robots don’t is that very human capacity for thought, for perception, which stems from that cross-fertilization of the cognitive AND affective faculties of the mind.  What we recognize is the importance of discovery and solutions tasking (that which can be left up to automated intelligence).  The best innovators out there say that discovery stems from personal experience, such as when the CEO of Starbucks took his first smell of aromatic coffee, which brings on a sudden insight coincidental with business expertise. 

The personal experience innovators draw upon is no different than anyone in a position of a business intelligence analyst.  Affect, drawing upon full sensory perceptions, may determine how we interpret given bodies of knowledge.  Furthermore, since affect overlaps with logic, it is possible to work down from subjective experiences of affect to their logical basis.  Once we achieve this objective, we may draw upon those skills of objective and tacit knowledge to solution task.  And it is those tasks, which may be left up to AI. 

When I looked the term up on Wikipedia, I saw deskilling defines the elimination of skilled labor by technology effecting cost savings due to the lower investment in human capital.  Yet, once we recognize the invaluable worth of human intelligence and its reliance upon the nuances of perception, the fact of rendering many aspects of human capital obsolete appears impossible.  We realize it is not so much what one is objectively looking at as how we see things, and more importantly how this very human awareness and experiential dimension of reality may spark those tasks relegated to formal learning. 

Additionally, Wikipedia claims deskilling refers to a person becoming less proficient over time.  What this assertion means is when humans perceive some kind of dismal outlook on their lives, it abrades their egos and makes them sallow, in a way tiring them out and depriving them of motivation like an organism sapped of its life instinct. 

Contemporary art historians took this issue to the table already in the 1960s with consumer capitalism, which boomed in the post-war period.  I was shocked to see the blatant misuse of famed Benjamin Buchloh’s ideas on Wikipedia.  They quote from some source.  Deskilling is:

“a concept of considerable importance in describing the numerous artistic endeavors throughout the twentieth century with relative precision.  All of these are linked in their persistent effort to eliminate arisanal competence and other forms of manual virtuosity from the horizon of both artist competence and aesthetic valuation.”

Quite to the contrary, deskilling was a strategy utilized by 1960s artists and even revived in the avant-garde work in recent times meant to undermine the values of competency based upon a kind of hermeneutics of subjective experience. Daniel Kahneman, et. al, discusses the pitfalls of the mental traps of heuristic thinking in Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.  The 60s artists perceived the Abstract Expressionists who preceded them were far too confident and held false expectations about the value of art. While deskilling may appear to be the pessimistic response to this crisis, these artists actually saw potential in redefining labor.  Deskilling was less the reiteration and evisceration of expression in the guise of technology as something which enacted a rote task with the intention of an undercurrent of sensuous experience.  Much of this has to do with our experience of instrumentalized tasks. 

A favorite artist from the 1960s, Saul Steinberg, created parodies of this crisis of deskilling in his wonderful comics.  Look at this drawing of a businessman appearing so despondent.  We think of doodling as having nothing left to do and being bored.  However, observe those doodles as the curve and meander over the page.  While the picture is sad, those lines make us smile.  Why?  The doodle is one of the best ways to let the mind wander and associate.  This is the way we work through confusion, our conflicted emotions, and resolve our ideas. 

Imaging the Invisible

In Sparks of Genius: The 13 Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People, Robert and Michèle Root-Bertstein allude to the importance of “imaging” for people like scientists, engineers and innovators and claim its importance for people in all professions but do not mention any others.  Imaging is especially true for analysts of data of any sort, any information based upon facts or even numbers because these intangible values have an essence that may be visualized.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle held eidos, etymologically related to the word “idea,” is a form or essence of something generated for sensuous apprehension.  He discusses such wisdom in the Metaphysics and claims it is knowledge about certain causes and principles.  While perception alone cannot answer such questions, our conceptualization of theoretical knowledge nonetheless takes shape in our minds in sensuous form as such forms or essences. 

In a way, when an analyst articulates the solution to a problem, they divine the eidos as an act of creation, using concepts, figures and language to render this form or essence.  In this divine science, Aristotle tells us, God establishes the causes of all things and is the first principle.  While certainly humans cannot assume the role of God, this creative spark of humans manifests eidos in the form of an image. 

Visions stem from thought.  When I looked at the illustrations to Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida’s Veils, I mistook the drawings with the hand, drapes, and what appears to be an eye for Bernini’s St. Teresa of Avila.  The story of the sculpture revolves around a mystic saint thrown into a state of ecstasy as she is transported up to heaven on a bed of clouds.  According to St. Ignatius of Lyola the Catholic Church espoused a movement of religious art, which deemed to make religious experience seem as real as possible.  What has always interested me most about the sculpture is the emphasis on different textural values.  The expression of thought takes shape in tangible form.

Cixous and Derrida tell us the image is the site of becoming.  It is the place where thought emerges.  It is a place invested with meaning and therefore also the medium through which judgment takes place.  Daniel Kahneman relates in Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases how many judgments are guided by false intuitive decisions. How then does an analyst ensure the mental model, or schema, he builds in his mind approximates the truth of reality? The eidos clearly represents one facet of that knowledge formation, for it is how we picture things, but the model requires grounding in inferential-based, objective tacit awareness.

Judgment lends itself to the experience of tangibility.  The tactile sense is an expression of causality.  Kahneman shows that inferences from causes to consequences are made with greater confidence than as by inferences from consequences to causes.  In other words, in order to understand a given problem at hand, the analyst must begin with the data to generate an experience of something in reality.  Every time the image is subject to revision by new data, that tangible realization will change. 

Mental models are usually conceived in abstract schemas, typically in the form of geometry, but may also take shape as pictures, which function as symbols.  Should an analyst learn from pictures of art, they would see how the mind transforms a literal idea into figurative expression.  When we articulate our perceptions of a picture in both writing and in speech, the image functions as a platform for things becoming embodied.  The figurative operations of language makes us “touch” upon the values a model represents.  Our awareness is both cognitive on that logical level of conceptualization as well as affective on the level of experience.  In the words of Nelson Goodman in Ways of Worldmaking, “Comprehension and creation go on together.”

Perception Cues in Resolving Conflicting Data

The psychology of perception shows us seeing requires contrast.  Artists learn about color by seeing the difference between the contrasting values of color systems presented against different backgrounds.  We see that our judgments of colors are never independent of context.  Science has also proved that humans may all also see colors differently.  So, aside from changing context that determine color perception, there is also the fact of human physiology.  However, what binds humans together in our world is how affectively we all respond the same to colors. 

Should we take the same principle to matters of decision making of contrasting data, something very similar happens. The simplest forms of judgments we make, those modes of binary thinking that draw upon contrasting values, i.e., evaluative conclusions, require acknowledging how the context of framework of a picture of something change the timbre of our perceptions.  Empirically we may have difficulties substantiating our decisions while everyone shares the same affective experience.  At the same time, we may be rest assured that the decisions we make are justly and objectively shared by others. 

Making those choices involves additional complications.  To begin with, conflicting data reveals contradictions.  Aesthetically, we are confronted with dissonance.  The colors do not resonate with each other, and there is an overall feeling of disharmony.  The given information in a picture fails coherency.  In such an instance, our usual habits of problem solving seem to fail us, and we have nowhere else to turn.  We not only question if our knowledge is illusory but also whether or not we are being fooled by the guise of things.  Left without bearings in tacit awareness and intuition alike, the brain suffers a kind of paralysis from not knowing what to do. 

Caught in the throes of such difficulties, a person making judgments is in no different a position than an artist struggling to render a coherent pictorial idea.  However, the difference between an artist and it seems the rest of the world is she actually leans towards such difficulties of ambiguity.  For an artist, the conditions of alterity proffer the potential of new meanings.  The rest of the world can benefit from this experience to open up new horizons in the mind and shake those old gut instincts that carve out preconceived pictures of the world in our minds.

Few studies have actually been written on how artists handle ambiguity.  Most studies (most notably Rudolf Arnheim) in aesthetics emphasize gestalt perception.  A generation of art educators have followed along the lines of this tradition and established a cognitive model of artistic perception as the foundation for teaching pedagogy.  In truth, the learning to be gained from art is how to resist compacting a work of art into a fixed idea.  When artists are making art, at least those most successful at it, they do not create works with an easy solution.  The viewer must explore the image and seek out those areas to ponder similarities, differences, contradictions and associations.

The poststructuralist literary criticism of Jacques Derrida bears some light on this difficulty of rendering meanings from binary oppositions.  Without discounting its relevance to feminist applications of his ideas, the importance of what Derrida illustrates in his deconstruction theory is the potential of a rigorously logical method of inquiry, which is ironically espoused by those who have no faith in logic at all. As we delve into the mystery of things like words, we learn to unlock modes of thinking, we decipher the ciphers and unveil the apparent guise of things.  The experience is sublime no differently than Theordo Adorno used the word “Erschüttert,” to describe a vision of something that takes us into the deepest abyss. 

In her black and white drawings of grids and circles, the post-war Jewish American artist Eva Hesse embody the idea of dissonance in just black and white, the most basic binary opposition possible.  The power of the visual subtleties of these works cast light on the darkness of an idea.  This darkness which is light brings forth a language of interiority, meanings which are implicitly understood.   The serial pattern seems to indicate an inexhaustibility of a fundamental conflict.  However, we see each of these pictures as a complete statement.  Believe it or not, in those tiny inflections of the graphite pencil and black ink, there is a wellspring of affective qualities.  From this condition of dissonance or ambiguity, the artist finds a place of effusive self-expression, always revolving around one central idea.  Within the parlance of American post-war art, she found the means to structure her expressive message: should we say the life of a Jewish woman or the story of a German tragedy?

For certain, the outcome of a war of signs and meanings can never exist without at least an existential crisis.  In no situation in business, science, technology or law could ever such circumstances appear without a serious conflict.  Where do we look for the outcome?  When we see something that is completely nonsense, a total surfeit of reason stretched to unreason, we may find that answer within the eyes of the beholder. 

Creating a Deconstructive Model to Resolve Conflicting Data

In my previous discussion of conflicting data, I mentioned the feature of ambiguity.  Gestalt psychologists would claim that the inability to distinguish between figure and ground constitutes a sign of madness.  Yet, the unintelligibility and indistinguishability of especially visual, written and auditory sounds is the norm in our world today.  Everything is illusory with exception for those people in empirical professions such as namely science, engineering and education.  Business intelligence analysts must discriminate ambiguous data reliant upon market statistics, which are far from transparent.  They rely upon technology but must utilize analytical and intuitive problem solving techniques. 

Typically, a person in such a business role would be thought to utilize the best of formal learning strategies.  We think of those skills as mastered by rote memory with a sense of a growing tacit awareness of how to apply knowledge to an intentional task.  The truth of the matter is that such learned abilities fail us in the face of ambiguity: where conflicting data present illusion of logical irresolve.  When logic fails us, the mind freezes not knowing what to do. 

Somehow when the mind becomes captured in indecision, we begin to feel the rise of various states of affect.  The painter Wasily Kandinsky alluded to this possibility in his treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art.  A self-proclaimed synesthet, he argued musical tones are no different than colors.  His ideas followed the leading musicians of his time, such as Arnold Schönberg, who explored the possibilities of atonal music.  To the Western ear, such ambient, irregular, and unpatterned sounds seem dissonant and lacking in harmony.  Kandinky embraced this collision of tonal chromaticism in his paintings.  Surely, we may think of these paintings as an expression of conflict, and in the eyes of Kandinsky, such as was the case of Wilhelmne Germany advancing to the frontlines of the First World War. 

When Kandinsky brings to expression this condition of total nonsense as a cacophony of sounds, he found aesthetic resolve by building a pictorial system based on binarism.  The most evident example of this is the way he utilizes either line or color.  In the foundations of Western art, line is given a conceptual component of drawing out an idea whereas color is delegated to the realm of affect and experience.  Visual systems, just like words and sounds, therefore may be reduced to a binary system of opposites, which are also themselves either rational or affective. This situation of how we may decipher signs therefore seems to say that at the basis of an expression is an interplay of both the logical and intuitive, haptic and optical, and visible and invisible. 

If we think about the learning strategies required of business intelligence analysts, who enter into the domain of the subjective and affect, the example of art seems to tell us how we may deconstruct states of affect to an interplay of the binary relationship between mind and body, the objective and subjective.This is to say that affect both stems both from the subjective as well as objective states of mind.In other words, if we deconstruct a sensation or state of affect, we see at bottom it’s logical basis.

In the example of the chaos of Kandinsky’s pre-war paintings, the artist achieves this by the way he uses line and color to achieve a dialogue.  Color creates a mood and flows across the surface in variable degrees of saturation.  Together this colorful arrangement of colors the Germans would call “bunt” creates a plainsong of feelings of an auratic interiority.  On the other hand, the forced black lines with their variability in thickness and length, boldly carve out a more formidable message.  They confine and delimit the areas of color with a sense of tactile awareness.  At basis, such compositions seem to say to us by this withdrawal into subjectivity and spirituality a denial of destruction or rather even the perception of such warfare ballistics as a spiritual rebirth.  The two become the same. 

Faced with an overwhelming mass of data like a cacophonic confusion, those involved in data analysis must learn too how to deconstruct states of affect.  They answer may be found in utilizing intuition and inferences to build binary systems to deconstruct.   Upon analyzing the data as such, the analyst may manipulate it to create a strategic model for a business.

Perceptions of Sense and Nonsense in Data Control

Between the sensible world of embodied knowledge and the incorporeal, processes bring about a “cleavage of the causal relation, “ claims Gilles Deleuze.  The philosopher continues incorporeal effects are never themselves related by causality but are rather only “quasi-causes,” which follow their own logic indicating a relative unity or mixture of bodies which they reflect as the real causes.  Such is the invisible path of cause and effect in the realm of data control.  The corporeal events which lie on the surface are therefore distinct and causally unrelated but also part of a dyadic system. 

The system controlled by data nonetheless reveals itself on a simulacrum, a world of appearances and multitudes indistinguishable but also separate from each other. Everything now returns to a surface.  Philosophers have warned us against this condition of reality as they conceive as something of a place of terror and even madness.  The effects of the incorporeal are like reactive sites on the surface and are the causal effects manifesting themselves in image, sound and language.  They are the loci either of conquest or disaster, pleasure or pain, desire or waste. 

Analysts at Raytheon are responsible for organizing, interpreting and mapping enormous amounts of such data at their disposal.  These industries range from defense and law enforcement to financial and commercial services.  They refer to this situation of a simulacral realty of a rapidly excessive accumulation of data as “digital exhaust.”  The task is difficult to turn the given data of tangible knowledge value to relevant insight.  They navigate Deleuze’s realm of “events” founded upon the idea of a duality of the invisible and visible, nonsense and sense.

Perception underlies the job of a data analyst even while the information she controls is invisible.  Perception is the reception, organization, interpretation and analysis of information in sensuous form.  A data analyst organizes, analyzes and manipulates data.  Which is to say; the job of an analyst is not only conceptual based on facts – memories, reflections, and inferences – but it is also based on sensuous perception – states of affect and intuition. 

The analysis of the sites of reception in technology have long been discussed by thinkers going back to the early twentieth century.  On the cusp of the rise of fascism, Walter Benjamin wrote about these sensuous expressions on the surface of the simulacrum.  Somehow I think we all have experienced this force of the perceptible, that we are “impacted” by the experience of something yet hardly “touched by it.”  Benjamin was namely thinking about Dadaism and early film.  Benjamin namely considered such aesthetic techniques as a form of opposition though clearly today in an age of data warfare we can see they prove to be a site of resistance. 

From an alluring appearance or persuasive structure of sound the work of art of the Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics.  It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality.  It promoted a demand for the film, the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator.  Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

Art history teaches us the foremost strategy of disruption in the Dada aesthetic is shock.  This tactic is accomplished by the juxtaposition of conflicting information, which arouses awareness of our perceptions.  Whereas we immerse ourselves into a seamless experience of bounded contemplation when we look at a painting, something Benjamin tells us is an impossibility in our age of mass technological reproduction, a Dada collage by John Heartfield or Hannah Höch will serve to demolish one’s expectations. 

As we apprehend these sites of disruption, people’s capacities of attention fail them, and they are thrown into a state of distraction.  Benjamin notably identifies this structure of thought is namely tactile rather than optical, i.e. embodied versus intuitive, visible versus invisible, the spoken versus written word, and deductive versus inductive thought.  Such capacities of thought also draw upon habit.  Those sites of reception upon which we contemplate the effects of technology – images, sounds, and words – require tactile appropriation. 

The data analysis maneuvers between instrumentality and resistance, going between those two poles of the optical and tactile, invisible and visible, subjective and objective, intuitive and tacit.  Yet, as separate as these two positions may seem, by are actually conjoined in a dyadic relationship.  For what actually requires the capacities of an awareness of states of affect and subjectivity also requires a facility with memory, reflection, and inferences.  Such a specialist must be able to think from both positions. 

Deleuze recognized such a paradox in Sense and Nonsense.  Should we think of the construction and deconstruction of mental models, a problem in intuition and logic arises.  To begin with, in the realm of mind – the invisible and subjective – there is actually an underlying foundation of reason.  Here are the words of a language that refer to themselves logically but in the way they only make sense to themselves, defy reason.  In the construction of mental models, one thinks additively like a sculptor makes a sculpture to build up an expressive idea.  In the deconstruction of mental models, a person must work from affect down to logic.  What is insensible may be graphed onto an intelligible surface. 

Learn to look at the contemporary African artist El Anatsui’s “tapestries.”  Seemingly drawn upon the prized tradition of African textiles, the artist appropriates his tactile skills to another medium: the detritus of Western commercial capitalism.  How strange it is we both love the silken appearance of these drapes that hang monumentally on the wall but also sense a resistance. Their mportance is disguised. Anatsui is actually deconstructing a mental model in his critique of Western materialism  The dreamy aura of is art is understated by a sense of melancholy.   Underneath it all we glimpse into the heart of impoverishment.  Melancholy may also be the side effect of shock, which is that site of destruction filled with memory. 

Seeing Judgment

“This was a clear instance of a mental shotgun.  He was asked whether he thought the company was financially sound, but he couldn’t forget that he likes their product.”  - Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman discusses how judgments happen.  Those small decisions we make – “like or dislike”, “good or bad,” etc. – are actually not sound judgments at all even while we would like to think of them that way.  We can look at a situation or even a person holding certain expectations whether that be a business plan or our perceptions of the leader to be the captain.  Our perceptions of things are always filled with misconceptions and personal biases.  Any aspect of business involving sound judgments requires self-awareness and a clear sense of objectivity about how we are thinking about things.  We must think about our own thinking.

In instructional design educators have established how such “metacognitive” abilities of problems solving allow a person claim personal agency over their judgments.  In order to make judgments, we must have strategies as well as a way to monitor and evaluate solutions we find to the questions presented to us.  This process is simultaneously deconstructive and constructive.  On the one hand, we seek to find the inconsistencies, contradictions, and ambiguities in habitual judgments, and then from the wreckage we build back up a new picture of things. 

The human mind draws upon both tacit and intuitive awareness in a effort to create knowledge.  These are the perceptions in raw form that we have to deal with.  In part, they are quite viable, but they also require this metacognitive awareness.  Seeing how such evaluations are processed in the minds of individuals, we can see how important the selection of leaders is.  Too many like minds are actually to the disadvantage of organizations.  The streamlining of skills and personalities actually weaken an organization.  A very successful company, Deloitte, capitalizes on a diverse set of skills and backgrounds and even hires people such as actors, musicians, and artists seeing the potential of their valuable contributions. 

Kahneman shows how our inclinations to develop “mental shotguns” combined with what he calls our desire to seek out the illusion of “intensity matching” explain why we have intuitive judgments about things we actually know very little about. How interesting that Deloitte would be hiring those people who seem to be most inclined towards subjective and intuitive thought!  Perhaps the reason is because, as Kahneman describes intensities and mental shotguns, we find that because of the way artists see things, they tend to weigh less the importance of things in terms of value and desire less to match like with like, and in terms of mental shotguns artists are less inclined to succumb to excess computation – that way the mid works to overestimate things, especially when we are confronted with a surfeit of information. 

Among art historians, the practice of connoisseurship has long been debated.  For some, the practice weighs as a measure of authenticity and value whereas more recently experts look at the study of drawings as an exercise in how the ideas and expressions of individual artists take shape in sensuous form.  For example, the 18th century artist Tiepolo, long loved by art historians for his masterful ceiling paintings, especially in Würzburg, Germany, and especially his lyrical pen and ink drawings, represents the epitome of the gold standard in the study of the Old Masters. 

Take a look at Tiepolo’s Psyche Transported to Olympus, we see the goddess of mind or soul being transported up the gods to be immortalized and brought in union with her love Eros. She covers her hand over her eyes because she was afraid to see.  From the story we learn Psyche had been a beautiful woman who was untouchable, and she had to seek out love by learning how to look.  In Eros, she discovered what she valued.  The old fashioned connoisseur values the drawing by its material effects: the saturation of the brush, control of line, and overall pleasure of how the composition integrates into a whole.  However, the contemporary connoisseur sees the subtle inflections in the intonations of the brush, the strength and tenderness of line, and the “non-finito,” i.e., how our imagination can creatively add to the traces of what is faintly visible.  This is about seeing value as a factor of learned skill, individual expression, and the capacity of poetic imagination.  So too in business strategy do wee see how we may be too blind and filled with expectations to recognize tangible value. Yet, in those things we find them, we discover the knowledge value of learned skill, an uniqueness and individual quality, and a beautiful story. 

Perception and Positive Thinking

The human faculty of perception touches upon both spheres of the brain.  Quite the contrary to most art educators, it is not just a cognitive ability. 

It is interesting to consider how living in a world of an intangible flow of information networks impacts perception in this very regard.  The philosopher Paul Virilio landed upon this difficulty when he wrote about our perceptions of this infinite landscape before us:

With “teleobjectivity,” our eyes are thus not shut by the cathode screen alone; more than anything else we now no longer seek to see, to look around us, not even in front of us, but exclusively beyond the horizon of objective appearances.  It is this fatal inattention that provokes expectation of the unexpected – a paradoxical expectation, composed at once of covetousness and anxiety, which our philosopher of the visible and invisible [Maurice Merleau-Ponty] called PANIC.  – Paul Virilio, Art as Far as the Eye Can See

From brain science we learn how important the limbic system is for maintaining our “focus.”  This large brain network affects emotions.    The limbic system includes brain regions such as the amygdale, hippocampus, cingulated gyrus, orbital frontal cortex, and the insula, which are connected in various ways.  It is either or both how perceptions affect our emotions or how emotions affect our perceptions that is key to understanding how we organize, categorize, and interpret the world.  The limbic system also affects us behaviorally in terms of our drive. 

In other words any sort of confusion that provides a stimulus and hits a hot spot in the brain has the potential to function as psychological warfare.  We have seen much of this in recent years in politics and no doubt also the technology sector.  This particular strategy can cause chaos for reasons of evoking a confusion of primary rewards and primary threats.  We lose the ability to trust our perceptions no longer knowing whether or not we should trust what we see.  Interestingly enough, this is actually visible in an MRI. 

All over the brain is sabotaged. Our memory is affected.  Also having so much to do with the prefrontal cortex area of the brain, the destructive force of “drama” (not to be taken lightly) causes problems in understanding, deciding, memorizing, and inhibiting.  In the postindustrial world where capital is held in the hands of those who control the flows of information, danger is not an irrational emotion. 

Suddenly, we recognize the value of mindfulness art offers to us today.  For as reasons as simple as helping us overcome distraction, it is highly useful.  Art teaches us to draw upon all sensory experiences.  It actually also teaches us to doubt our perceptions and find ways to analyze them.  It serves an integrating function for the ego as well, adding to mental and emotional clarity.  Some experiences of art, especially those that are written about, can also offer an inner sense of resolve because in writing in contrast to spoken language, we explore our own subjectivity, and the brain naturally wants to achieve insight. 

These landscapes of the mind in art can better prepare us to conquer Virilio’s “teleobjectivity.”  Perception, both subjective and objective, affective and cognitive, intuitive and tacit, neither solely in the mind nor body, to be found neither far nor near is the experiential domain of Reality we can also call art.

I know this is true about Mark Rothko.  The man suffered even in his own lifetime rumors of suicidal hints in his paintings, and that myth has even amounted to an Off Broadway show, “Red,” designed for fame by exploiting a myth about artists with drug and alcohol addiction problems.  Everyone seems to see the same thing in his painting.  We look for the easiest thing we can recognize and which draws upon preexisting knowledge and experiences.  To look at a Mark Rothko painting, we must see Nietzsche’s Dionysian and Apollonian poles of what is rational ad irrational, visible and invisible.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust

What Human Perception Can Lend to Artificial Intelligence

How often do we exclaim “I can’t believe my eyes!”  The distrust of vision goes back to the earliest stages of developmental psychology in our childhood.  Art historian Ernst Gombrich once wrote about the drawing habits of children and differentiated between knowing and seeing.  But do we really know without seeing?  It seems part of human nature to withdraw from the sensory world when reality threatens comprehensibility.  A long time ago, the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer wrote Abstraction and Empathy, one such treatise on the subject of naturalistic and abstract art.  While the language of that book dwells within fascist ideology, the book has continued to arouse interest on this very provocative topic.

Going into the 21st century, we find ourselves confronting a reality that demands we find the right questions to solve our problems.  Kevin Kelly writes about the twelve technological forces that will shape our future in his book The Inevitable.  He describes one of those as cognifying.  Acts of disruption in technological innovation bear an impact more powerful than in the previous industrial world. But what role do human have?  He argues we are in a race with machines.  In the future a person will be paid as much as they are able to work with robots.  He seems to leave the future in the hands of robots, but his last sentence of that chapter on cognifying is the bottom line: “Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters.” 

Which is; that goes to say the future lies in the hands of dreamers.  Dreamers do not rely on what they already know, just as schools mistakenly teach kids to rely on remembered facts without teaching them how to exercise their perceptual skills to organize and interpret the data of sense perception.  No doubt will one day AI be able to exercise perception to find those answers better than we can as human perception is not infallible.  The dreamer must stand before reality and seek the questions, which we can leave up to AI to answer. 

We find ourselves positioned in a reality that encases us somewhere between knowledge and illusion and eye and mind.  How are we to posit the questions that allow us to short-circuit the brain with its expectations and logical confinements so that we let utilize our perceptions to explore what we seem to keep ourselves from seeing?

Rudolf Arnheim, gestalt psychologist of empirical aesthetics and author of Visual Thinking, a meditation on perception as a cognitive faculty of the mind, argues the sense data of our perceptions are transparent.  He wrote:

Theorists, philosophers, and psychologists differ in the precision by which they define their concepts.  Quantification allows for measuring and counting but is not necessarily closer to the truth of descriptions.  Any level may be the appropriate one for one’s objective.  What finally matters is how deeply one penetrates to the core of what one is looking for. – Rudolf Arnheim, Two Ways of Being Human

But if we look for what we pursue, thinking that we will be on some path of discovery, our knowledge stems rather from inside the mind.

To deconstruct a perception, just like a text, we need to maneuver between the inside and outside the object of representation.  This is no different than wavering between reason and affect, as the philosopher Jacques Derrida argues based on his reading of Emmanuel Kant that reason itself is based on affect.  We must constantly be asking ourselves what we are looking at inexhaustibly.  The core of something does run very deep; Derrida calls this a lacunae.  It is both summons an opening but also the limitless closure of an abyss. 

The possibilities of perception are therefore limitless.  They are also at the same time delimited by a liminal condition of a kind of “frame” or “framework,” which Derrida calls the parergon.  The practical implication of this in the postindustrial world of data is the framework of knowledge value that serves innovation. 

 Much weight is placed on uniformity of knowledge value within organizations whereas in fact to strategically align a business in the globalized economy a multiplicity of perspectives is necessary.  Leveraging knowledge value requires constant inquiry into strategies of interpretation in pursuit of solutions.  Once we know our secret strategies we may better approach the world of information.