The Ancient Mariner's Sentience
The Ancient Mariner's Sentience
The New York Times Book Review of Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Australian philosopher and diver Peter Godfrey Smith resonates strongly with the influences in my art and how viewers might perceive it.
As a philosopher, Godfrey-Smith is seeking to explore and discover the elements of sentience. Sentience is defined as the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. In Eastern philosophy sentience is a metaphysical quality of all things that requires respect and care.
He has chosen the octopus as the backdrop for this journey as a result of his diving experiences interacting with these highly intelligent creatures in what he calls a "mutual engagement" observing their different individual personalities in behavior, at play and in recognition.
Godfrey-Smith is more interested in his own behavior and intelligence as he interacts rather than the octopus. What is it he is feeling and how is he behaving in order to understand the world of the octopus and his interaction with it.
This is the state of mind I am traversing in my work with the abstraction of reflections. I am not sure what a snapshot of a reflection might reveal until I have examined it. What aesthetic is the reflection revealing, how is it making meaning for me how does it affect me subjectively. Likewise how does it affect those who view, how does it make them feel , what do they think the image is about.
As Godfrey-Smith writes...."Contrary to some philosophers’ assumptions, consciousness doesn’t just project out; it is a relationship in traffic with the outer world. Consciousness did not “suddenly irrupt into the universe fully formed,” Godfrey-Smith says. “Perception, action, memory — all those things creep into existence from precursors and partial cases.” Asking whether bacteria perceive or bees remember “are not questions that have good yes-or-no answers.” From minimal to elaborate sensing there’s a continuum, “and no reason to think in terms of sharp divides.”
How beautifully he sums up the Ancient Mariner’s Sentience!
