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  David DenHerder

  14 years ago

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  "Everything that is beautiful is orderly, and there can be no order unless things are in their right relation to each other." -- Robert Henri
  
  Some time ago, I read about some of the same conclusions about the left brain (verbal, rationalization, etc) you mentioned and I've thought a lot about it. It occurred to me that it's more fundamental than just verbalizing or rationalization, that the left brain constantly tries to define order, categories, or relationships, and verbalizing and rationalization are merely two of MANY methods by which these definitions are expressed. I realized that if this is the case, then there must be definitions of order, categories, or relationships that can't be easily verbalized or rationalized, but must be expressed some other way: music, art, design, engineering, writing, craft, planning, etc. So, of course, this is "happening all of the time." The best art/design/creations/etc can all be characterized by the their parts and it's whole being consistent with some order, nothing extra and yet complete. Sometimes this order is very subtle, sometimes very obvious. Sometimes the order is something that humans have been aware of for all of history and sometimes this order is something newly "discovered." Sometimes it's . . . well you get the point.
  
  Oddly enough, it's a mathematical phenomena that illustrates it best for me, I'm thinking of Julia Sets and the Mandelbrot Set. Julia Sets (named for a french mathematicion named Julia), observed in the early 1900's, are simply small sections and parts of the what is now known as the Mandelbrot Set. But, of course, Julia didn't know this. His discoveries were forgotten until Mandelbrot, using computers, discovered the entire set. So here is what makes chills run down my spine -- that fantastically complex, yet beautiful, and infinitely variable pattern HAS ALWAYS BEEN THERE, SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME! But nobody knew about it until Julia and Mandelbrot. And nobody sat down and said "OK, I'm going to design a Mandelbrot Set."
  
  So this is what the best artists/scientists are doing. They're not creating order, they're discovering order and figuring out how to best express and/or demonstrate that discovery. And to discover, they need to see clearly (right brain) and they need to be able to make sense of what they see (left brain), and then, on top of that, they need to have the tools, skills, and/or talents to demonstrate it.
  
  Ok, that was really long, I'll stop now.

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  Philippe Holthuizen

  14 years ago

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  '...such that the left eye connects to the right eye...' seems a mistake. Shouldn't the second 'eye' be 'hemisphere'?

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  Daniel erwin

  14 years ago

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  Perceiving the limitations of perception is tricky stuff, but it looks like you've caught hold of a couple clear borders here. Any idea how the situation changes when the perceiver becomes well-practiced at obseving the limits of what is perceived vs. inferred vs. assumed? Is there always another level of assumptions and inherited predispositions lying behind any rational verbal thought (despite the fact that arbitrarily many layers thereof have been shed), or can the process of creativity or synthesis also be usefully described in terms of trying to explain ambiguous unknowns just by tossing together whatever we happen to have lying around?

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  David Middleton

  14 years ago

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  For an amusing fictional case of the split brain read "Peace on Earth" by Stanislaw Lem. The protagonist has his corpus callosum accidentally severed (you 'll have to read it) and finds himself in the interesting position of having to figure out how to communicate with his "other self" to save the world.

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