Marta, Philosophy graduate student at CUNY + Resident Philosopher Nicholas Whittaker explore talkPOPc Topic #3 "Art as Cognition"

Timestamps:

• 01:00: Explaining cognition. Brain activity, and higher order brain activity
• 01:55: Is the art experience higher order? It depends on context. Are you creating art? If you're thinking about what you want to do, higher order. Purely reacting, perhaps not
• 03:45: The Art Critic and Pro Artist: Higher order, but are they also using lower order or is it purely high cognitive capacities at play. Lower cognition might feed into higher order
• 05:55: Jamming with music, or taking an approach with a cognitive lens. Why does a string of notes appeal to me? How do I draw it out and sustain it over a full song?
• 07:20: Could we do a piece of art that is emotional? Can we intellectualize emotion? Artificial Intelligence, can it create what we deem art? It has the same formal features, but maybe there's something missing
• 09:55: Can we tell the difference between AI based art and human based art? Making music with bodies in a space. Tiny factors affect our output, not so much for AI. 
• 11:40: Maybe emotion comes from imperfection. Non-ideal circumstances color what we do. Even if it seems perfect, it isn't, and perhaps that's the value
• 13:45: We need to feel the dynamics of a medium. The struggle is beauty
• 14:40: Dancing to techno music, not so much higher order. You're moving your body. It's an interaction. Still man-made music, we still seem to get the slight imperfections from which we derive pleasure. 
• 16:40: We do things for a reason. An AI doesn't have that motivation. We poke buttons or play a violin for reasons. 
• 18:15: Thinking at the club. Do we lose something when we take ourselves out of that moment? Thinking vs acting. Two different experiences
• 19:30: The nature of Aesthetic Experience: A gut reaction, and taking a step back to analyze and reflect it. Does an Aesthetic Experience need to be intellectualized? Maybe not
• 20:30: Pharmaceutical Experiences. Does it count as an Aesthetic Experience? Some argue that it makes the experience cheap. Any time our brain activity changes, it'd become Aesthetic Experience.  Should the category be narrow or broad?
• 23:15: Yuriko Saito and Everyday Aesthetics. She argues that every second of our life is something aesthetic, but it's a little boring most of the time. 

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