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[mirosurabu]

I guess by sensory experience you mean emotional experience. Some things stimulate cognition some things stimulate feelings. Puzzles stimulate cognition and music stimulates feelings, for example. Games can stimulate both. GTA stimulates feelings and agility. The Sims stimulates feelings and basic cognition. EU stimulates cognition. And so on. And most of these can be mapped by other people as well.

My larger point was that even attempting to convey sensory reality through linguistic means is wrong-headed.

Hm, yes it is impossible. But I never asked to "convey experience through words", but rather to communicate or map the experience. The fact that emotions are closely related to cognition and conceptual world, as you call it, implies that communicating feelings is possible if one tries to trace the cognitive roots.

The abstract words you mention can help. When I say I'm scared, people automatically associate my experience with one of their situations when they were scared. When I say I feel weird and give examples of situations which made me feel in similar way, people can empathize.

you can't describe the color red to someone who was blind from birth

I guess you're implying that some people are not capable of experiencing art because of genetic difference or that adaptation curve in general is impossible or too hard for some people. This may be true, but it's mere speculation and nothing more, considering it's usually hard to prove it. It's just one possible explanation in thousands of more probable ones.

Blind-man situation on the other hand can be easily proven.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Decidedly not, I don't mean emotional experience. Why would I say sensory experience if I meant emotional experience? Feelings are not exactly sensory. I don't think art is primarily about feelings or primarily cognition, although it can often use them to good effect, I think it's primarily about sensation: experiencing something through the senses.

I also don't think you can map sensory reality through language, depending on what you mean by map. The way maps work is they take a real area and provide an abstract representation of that area for use of navigation. I do not think that is possible in the same way that it is with real maps. You can't use an explanation of a particular work as a way to understand or navigate through that sensory work, instead what happens is that you wind up only navigating through that explanation or interpretation instead of the sensory work itself.

I'm also not saying that some people aren't capable of experiencing art at all, it's bizarre  to me that you're interpreting my post in that way. I meant the sentence literally: that you can't explain the sensory/concrete world via the conceptual/linguistic world. A sensory work is something which can only be experienced, not something for which explanation is an acceptable substitute, exactly in the way that you can't substitute for seeing red in words by repeating the sound "red" to someone who has not experienced red and has no reference point to help them understand what you mean by that sound.

Anyway, it seems that despite my attempts to be as clear as possible in what I'm saying, I don't seem to be communicating well. I don't quite know the reason for that: you may just not be used to thinking of the world in the categories I'm using. For instance, you may not be used to the distinction between the abstract and the concrete (which is an important metaphysical concept and, while it seems simple to those who use the distinction, might not be obvious to those not exposed to the distinction).

Perhaps this will help with that: every word, with the exception of proper nouns, is an abstraction: a category of real things, but not itself real. For instance, the idea of a dog is an abstraction, whereas particular dogs are concrete. We experience the abstract through cognition and language, whereas we experience the concrete through sensation. One of the characteristics of people is that they have an abstract facility, whereas most other animals mainly exist on the concrete level. This is also true of the distinction between humans before and after they learn to speak: before we learned to speak we largely had no conceptual cognition, instead living entirely on the level of concrete, sensory reality.

So I'm positing that there are two basic modes of existence, two basic ways to communicate: through the conceptual/abstract, and through the concrete/sensory. The latter is more real, whereas the former is a way to organize the latter into categories and deal with it through simplification, and doesn't exist on its own, but is instead a tool for dealing with the real. Both have their use, with benefits and drawbacks. Explanations of art (and explanations and theories in general) fall under the former, art (and sensory objects in general) fall under the latter.

So I'm saying that maps of art will not work because if it could be expressed through abstraction, it probably wouldn't need to be expressed through sensation. And often expressing through sensation is more powerful than expressing through conception. "Slow and steady wins the race", expressed like that, in abstract words, isn't as powerful as the story of the tortoise and the hare, because it isn't as concrete. Summarizing the tortoise and the hare in that way is not just a simplification, but destroys the entire point of the story. And that is a short story (less than a page long in the original Aesop if I remember right) expressly designed to convey an abstraction! Most aren't designed for that. So even in the best-case scenario of a concrete work designed to convey an abstraction, expressing it abstractly simplifies it to the point of being useless.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Also, re emotions, what I meant was something like this: you do not make art out of abstractions, you do not make art out of emotions, you make art out of sensations. E.g., you don't make a sculpture out of ideas of heroism, you don't make it out of feelings of heroism, you make it out of stone (or some other material). Similarly, you don't literally make love songs out of love -- not the idea of love, not the feeling of love -- you make them out of sounds (harmonic sounds, sounds of a particular instrument or a particular singing voice, but still sounds). The other stuff may contribute, you may make it to elicit feelings or ideas, or you may be inspired by an idea or a feeling, but art is still made of concrete, sensory stuff, it doesn't exist on the abstract level or on the emotional level, it exists on the sensory level, and is experienced on the sensory level.

[mirosurabu]

Hmm, you seem to be talking about sense data and sensory perception. Sensory experience is supposed to mean experience on the sensory level. But all experience is sensory, so I cannot grasp what you're trying to say.

I think it's primarily about sensation: experiencing something through the senses.

Since all experience is sensory, and you seem to be focusing on only one specific kind of experience, I'm assuming you mean "unprocessed sensory experience". But can we really experience things without further processing sense data? And how can we know that our experience is unprocessed sensory experience? (as you seem to know with your experience of Opera Omnia)

you do not make art out of abstractions, you do not make art out of emotions, you make art out of sensations. E.g., you don't make a sculpture out of ideas of heroism, you don't make it out of feelings of heroism, you make it out of stone (or some other material).

If sculpture is made of stone, it's more likely that "art games" are made of digits or text than sensations. The analogy does not seem to be proper, unless by "sensations" you mean digits, of course.

[Fuzz]

Here is a quote which sums up a lot of my feelings on this, by a fictional writer in a Nick Bantock book, of all things:

Writing's infancy came in the form of pictures. Later those images became simplified into picturegrams, which in turn became further stylized into symbols, and finally emerged as abstract text formations. These written abstractions are certainly adaptable, they allow us to express many complex notions, however they have isolated us from our picture-mind. Images are more allusive and elusive than text, and so they have gradually became a secondary means of communication.

...Images are multi-faceted and when combined with other of their like, offer multiple possibilities that become so dense they are only negotiable by means of intuition. That's why our overt commitment to linear logic moves us away from an understanding of images.

[godatplay]

In the context of what Paul is saying, you could view Miroslav's problem this way:

The sensory experience must be processed by the cognitive mind and turned into abstract ideas in order to be understood.  Maybe the theories I've learned are outdated now, but I thought it went like this roughly:  senses -> emotions/primitive cognition -> abstract/higher-level cognition.  When your eyes take in the color orange, your brain translates the hues and compares it to other oranges from previous experience.  This could lead to memories of experiencing the warmth of the sun, which makes your brain think "warm."  But each experience has a unique path, with a unique endpoint of abstraction/emotion.  However, don't you agree that there is some overlap between media?  Otherwise we couldn't discuss art at all, and stuff like screenshots would be completely meaningless (instead of partly).

Therefore, the experimental games he's referring are hard for him (and others as he mentions) to process.  That could be because they don't use the proper sensations that translate into the right cognitions or whatever.  But it could also be that people aren't literate enough to translate these experiences.  Going from senses to abstract cognition takes energy and skill.  So then a creator's statement would try to form a "cognitive path" that would have an endpoint close to the work being talked about.  Sure it's not perfect, but it would be helpful for gaining the skill to translate the experience into an idea.  I think that's what he means by map.

Finally, some people's frustration with the statement would refer to the enjoyment they get by using the skill that translates the experience.  Not only that, some of them might also prefer the control they have arriving at their own endpoint instead of having the creator "hold their hand."

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Games are made out of visual and audio elements. They're videogames -- they contain graphics and sounds (or graphical representations of text in the case of IF games). So I don't think games are made out of "digits" or "bits" or something, they're made out of graphics, the code is just to tell the graphics what to do. But the graphical objects themselves are what the game is physically "made" out of. And yes, they aren't tangible, they don't have mass, they only exist on the screen, but they are still sensory objects: a sound or a sprite is a sensory object.

To help explain what I'm getting at, let me quote Michael from the Tale-of-Tales forum (developers of The Path), he recently said something which coincidentally ties into what I'm saying.

So, even more important than the fact that every person's interpretation of The Path is perfectly valid, is the fact that this interpretation can be different every time you play, or even change after you stop playing. For me, it's more about the potential of meaning, than about a single conclusion. I think this comes from my dissatisfaction with language as a tool to describe reality. A painting or a piece of music have always felt more "true" to me than a page from the encyclopedia, or even a philosopher's theory.

So that's what I mean. Sensory reality is truer than explanations and ideas, which are always pale shadows of the real world. So an explanation about what Passage (or any other game or any other sensory object) is can only make a mockery of what Passage (or that game or sensory object) is. So in general I think it's a good idea to avoid using ideas for things they are not good at. And they are not good at explaining or communicating sensory reality. They're good at categorizing and organizing sensory reality, they're good for analyzing sensory reality, for breaking it up into parts and dealing with it like an abstract science or theory, but they aren't good for explaining, interpreting, or communicating sensory reality.

Another way to put it is that art is the *inverse* of science. Art seeks to explain the general through the particular, whereas science seeks to explain the particular through the general.

[mirosurabu]

Aha. I am trying to understand what you're trying to say. It seems that you are saying that images and sounds are more powerful than words, right? And by the way, can you define sensory reality? I can't grasp that concept.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I thought I did earlier, but again: sensory reality is the reality of concrete objects. For instance, individual apples are part of sensory reality, but apple (the idea of an apple, or the word) is not. The interaction between sensory reality and our brains are the senses, so sensory reality is anything which can be sensed, along with some things which cannot be directly (but can be indirectly) sensed. Sensory reality would include anything which has mass or energy, and would not include anything which does not.

So, in that sense, sensory reality is more real than ideas, theories, and so on. An apple is more real than the word "apple", because "apple" is just a way of organizing reality, not reality itself.

There are borderline issues, which are what the philosophical branches of metaphysics and epistemology often deal with. For instance, is the *taste* of an apple itself part of sensory reality, or just the apple? The taste doesn't exist in reality but is created by the brain, so in a way the taste is not really real, it's just a way of dealing with reality. But in another sense, the taste is directly chemically tied to reality, so in a way it's just as real as the apple, and certainly more real than the idea of an apple.

Another problem is that theories can be expressed in physical form. If you take Aristotle's theory of Forms and print it out on your computer, it's now a physical object, ink on paper. But it's really just ink on paper, indistinguishable metaphysically from anything else you would have printed. It doesn't somehow give the ideas physical form, the ideas themselves in the theory aren't a part of the sensory world and aren't made a part of it by printing them out.

Also, "powerful" is contextual. In a way, reality is more powerful, but in another way ideas are more powerful. The each have their utility and place, each have their different functionality, so you can't really say that one is more powerful than the other. But you can definitely say that one is more real than the other, and that an artwork is more real than interpretations or explanations of that particular artwork, that an apple is more real than the idea of an apple.

For good books on this distinction, if my own explanations aren't clear or sufficient, you may want to check out the following:

- Any good overview of the history of metaphysics and epistemology or history of philosophy; there are hundreds of these. Bertrand Russell's History of Philosophy isn't the best, but it's the most well-known and approachable.
- Aristotle and Plato in general
- Charles Sanders Peirce's work on epistemology (although it's challenging reading, especially to people new to philosophy)
- George Kelley's A Theory of Personality: The Psychology of Personal Constructs
- Vygotsky's writings in general
- if you don't have that much time or money for books, relevant Wikipedia articles like: 'problem of universals', 'concept', 'abstraction', 'particular', 'object_(philosophy)', and so on. To get a bit more depth you can also read the articles on 'ontology', 'metaphysics', 'epistemology', 'idealism', 'philosophical realism', etc., although those are larger and contain much superfluous (though interesting) information.