The mind in the cave: consciousness and the origins of art

The discovery of cave paintings made by our Upper Paleolithic ancestors in Western Europe was an astonishing find – so astonishing, that they were originally believed to have been fakes. However, as more sites were uncovered, their authenticity was confirmed. But how could these people, who at the time of the discovery were believed to be merely dumb brutes, create such beautiful and naturalistic representations? And an even more difficult question to answer was, why? In this thesis I examine the phenomenon of Paleolithic cave art and what it might be able to tell us about the minds of the Cro-Magnon artists who produced it. I survey the paintings that have so far been discovered, as well as the processes involved in creating them. I also discuss and critique a selection of the many theories that have attempted to explain the motivation behind this radically different type of human behaviour. But due to the lack of hard evidence, none of these theories are ever likely to be fully su...

NOTES ON SUBJECTIVATION, CAVE ART, & WHY WE HAVE EXPERIENCES, 2020

The question I'm addressing in these short notes is whether the concept of subjectivation 1can fruitfully be applied to the quite sudden emergence of a new pictorial culture in the cave art of the upper palaeolithic. This will involve speculating about human mental evolution – and will eventually lead to a more general discussion about the nature of subjective experience.

Art and Adaptability: Consciousness and Cognitive Culture (Brill/Rodopi 2018, ISBN: 9789004354524, 216 pgs., 5 color illustrations) represents over three years of work and the culmination of a trilogy of books, written over the course of more than a decade, addressing the arts and humanities in light of evolution. Art and Adaptability argues for a co-evolution of theory of mind and material/art culture. Art and Adaptability argues for a co-evolution of theory of mind and material/art culture. The book covers relevant areas from great ape intelligence, hominin evolution, Stone Age tools, Paleolithic culture and art forms, to neurobiology. We use material and art objects, whether painting or sculpture, to modify our own and other people’s thoughts so as to affect behavior. We don’t just make judgments about mental states; we create objects about which we make judgments in which mental states are inherent. Moreover, we make judgments about these objects to facilitate how we explore the minds and feelings of others. The argument is that it’s not so much art because of theory of mind but art as theory of mind.

Art Therapy, 1998

Background In 1994 the keynote speaker at the American Art Therapy Association's annual conference was Ellen Dissanayake, who presented the results of her research on art and its role in various cultures. Dissanayake was trained in the West, but as a graduate student she traveled to Sri Lanka. She reevaluated her own Western beliefs when she observed and participated in traditions of the Sri Lankans and (later) other non-Western cultures (Dissanayake, 1994). Dissanayake has written two books on people's relationship to art; both are highly relevant to the art therapist. In 1988 she published What is Art For?; and in 1992, Hoivw Aestheticus: Where Art Coines Frorn and Why. In her address to the AATA, after tracing the history of the Western view of art, in which art is separate from daily Life, Dissanayake expressed the hope of changing that paradigm. Dissanayake (1992b) regards art as a natural human function, not separate but included in many aspects of everyday living. My palaeoanthropsychobiological view is that in order to include human history, human cultures, and human psychology, art must be viewed as an inherent universal (or biological) trait of the human species, as normal and natural as language, sex, sociability, aggression, or any of the other characteristics of human nature. (p, 169

Anthropology of Consciousness, 1998

This brief overview argues that the evidence of the images themselves, as well as their contexts, suggests that some Franco-Cantabrian Upper Paleolithic cave art was, at least in part, intimately associated with various shamanic practices. Universal features of altered states of consciousness and the deep caves combined to create notions of a subterranean spirit-world that became, amongst other ritual areas, the location of vision quests.

2022

My thesis is that a new approach to aesthetics can catalyze the transformation of consciousness from exclusively mental-bound operations into a receptive supersensible state. This sudden metamorphosis can be seen as a reactivation (as well as a retrofitting, perhaps) of a mode of pre-verbal consciousness which the author contends was the common operation of the human mind prior to the development of human language. It is the same mode of awareness sought by shamanic practices. In the creation of art, a supersensible aesthetics may help induce this emergent integral consciousness, as foreseen by Gebser, without loss of previous evolutionary structures. Such an aesthetics of the sublime has the ability open up truly new "organs of perception" in the viewer, perceptual systems that have been emerging recently and now become available to individual and collective human conscious experience. Such modes offer previously unimaginable new ways of embracing the multiple dimensions beyond space and time, and of connecting the collective human psyche that has become increasingly fragmented in the digital metaverse. An Appendix is included with paintings by the author created from direct exploration of n-dimensional states to invoke supersensible perception.