The Art of Thought

When I was a kid attending elementary school the whole concepts of art and science where pretty well defined for me – art was what we were learning between 10:00-11:00am and science was from 12:00-1:00pm. There were many other fields of study (math, English, literature…) but art and science were their own, separate sections.

I’ve since come to realize that the strictly defined lines separating these two principles are actually quite blurry. I’ve begun to consider whether the standard characterization of art (as defined by the various educational organizations) is actually missing the point. About a month or so ago I ate some philosopher stones (a variety of shrooms for anyone just joining this conversation…) and decided to record myself (I had a weekend to kill). Upon reviewing the video created, I heard myself utter the following phrase – “Thought is art.”

Okay, fine … so that’s not very awe-inspiring; however, what I was trying to express was, at least to me, rather interesting. The only problem is, when you’re tripping on shrooms, words are often hard to come by. In fact attempting to actually explain what you are thinking often interferes with your thought process and usually causes one to lose track of the subject – that’s the problem with psychedelics (such as shrooms). Since I recorded my trip, however, I am able to recall what I was thinking about.

I was actually contemplating life in a way. I was considering the idea that children are so easily taught new concepts while adults seem to have much more difficulty with this – “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks…” Why is that? The conclusion that I came up with is that a child’s mind basically accepts new information mainly because there’s really nothing much more it can do with it. Since a child has very few experiences to use as references, any new information gets absorbed by the child’s mind rather than being processed with respect to earlier experiences (as an adult does). Of course this new information then becomes a building block used as a keystone for that child’s knowledge base and, over time, becomes a part of the experiences used to process any new information received.

Being that I am an engineer and have basically decided to devote my professional life to the study of what essentially boils down to scientific systems, I then began to consider the human body as a system (which, of course, it is). The simplified view of this system is that inputs are taken in and processed – outputs are then generated. The most obvious outputs are various wastes although an easily overlooked output is actually thought. The funny thing about the output of thought is that it is actually not expelled from the system but is rather stored in the brain as another piece of the person’s knowledge. How a person chooses to express (or, as is often the case, to not express) this knowledge becomes the basis for that person’s behavior. It was then that I came to the conclusion that thought is actually art.

When a painter touches brush to canvas, he is expressing his knowledge. When a sculptor creates what he believes to be a finished piece out of raw materials, he is expressing his knowledge. When an architect completes a new design for a building, his knowledge has been expressed. You name the discipline and the bottom line is that anybody involved in it is expressing their knowledge. Therefore thought – the basis of a person’s knowledge – is art.

Yeah, I know, blah blah blah… Who cares? But isn’t that the whole problem? We should all care. If we continue to let the arts be systematically removed from our educational institutions (as is happening more and more these days) aren’t we doing a disservice to future generations? What we are doing is limiting the scope of education to what has already been deemed necessary for the current state of science as we know it. I wonder if including the study of arts could actually lead to more advancements in science as well. After all, the scientist working in his lab is also expressing his knowledge…

Some food for thought…

bis später,

Coriolis