From Unconscious Inference to the Beholder’s Share: Predictive Perception and Human Experience

Author:

Seth Anil K.

Abstract

Science and art have long recognized that perceptual experience depends on the involvement of the experiencer. In art history, this idea is captured by Ernst Gombrich’s ‘beholder’s share’. In neuroscience, it traces to Helmholtz’s concept of ‘perception as inference’, which is enjoying renewed prominence in the guise of ‘prediction error minimization’ (PEM) or the ‘Bayesian brain’. The shared idea is that our perceptual experience – whether of the world, of ourselves, or of an artwork – depends on the active ‘top-down’ interpretation of sensory input. Perception becomes a generative act, in which perceptual, cognitive, affective, and sociocultural expectations conspire to shape the brain’s ‘best guess’ of the causes of sensory signals. In this article, I explore the parallels between the Bayesian brain and the beholders’ share, illustrated, somewhat informally, with examples from Impressionist, Expressionist, and Cubist art. By connecting phenomenological insights from these traditions with the cognitive neuroscience of predictive perception, I outline a reciprocal relationship in which art reveals phenomenological targets for neurocognitive accounts of subjectivity, while the concepts of predictive perception may in turn help make mechanistic sense of the beholder’s share. This is not standard neuroaesthetics – the attempt to discover the brain basis of aesthetic experience – nor is it any kind of neuro-fangled ‘theory of art’. It is instead an examination of one way in which art and brain science can be equal partners in revealing deep truths about human experience.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Subject

Political Science and International Relations,Geography, Planning and Development

Cited by 20 articles. 订阅此论文施引文献 订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献

1. Being alive to the world: an artist's perspective on predictive processing;Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences;2023-12-18

2. A hole in a piece of cardboard and predictive brain: the incomprehension of modern art in the light of the predictive coding paradigm;Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences;2023-12-18

3. Order and change in art: towards an active inference account of aesthetic experience;Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences;2023-12-18

4. Aesthetics and predictive processing: grounds and prospects of a fruitful encounter;Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences;2023-12-18

5. Shaping Films from the Inside Out: Embodied Mental Schemas in Filmmaking and Viewing;Baltic Screen Media Review;2023-12-01

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