Not quite giving all the answers but certainly giving strongly relevant
evidence. Why should there be this radical gap between science and the
humanities? Pictures, moving or otherwise, get processed by the multiple
mechanisms of the visual system and how that processing takes place
can't fail to tell us something about film and the other visual arts.
This doesn't result in the sort of crude reductionism proposed by
someone like Pinker, but it does give hope of pushing things forward.
If it turns out that the mental state we have while watching films is
nothing like the mental state of dreaming, the proponent of a view that
holds that seeing movies is like dreaming will have at the very least to
explain in what non-literal way movie-viewing is like dreaming.
j
Henry McKean Taylor wrote:
>> Given that we now have ways of testing for the presence of dream
>> states and perhaps other related states of consciousness the time may
>> be over for this type of armchair speculation. In fact I wonder if any
>> neuropsychologist has done any work in this area.
>>
>
> Yes, this is the eternal promise that positivist Naturwissenschaft
> holds for us all, isn't it? Trust the good old neuropsychologists to
> give us the answers! How presumptious of humanities
> armchair-speculators to assume being able to answer these questions
> without "hard" (empirical) data.
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