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Comment by contingencies | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't a sober study of the universe and history be more effective?

Once upon a time, people painted with oil paints as closely as they could to still life reality. But something was missing. Cue impressionism. After impressionism, an increasingly vanishingly small proportion of the art world tried to paint still life as an arts career and be taken seriously.

The state of the art, quite simply, had moved on.

And as it is with consciousness.

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This is a circular argument: "X is not Y because it moved on. Why one says it has moved on? Because we see X is not Y anymore"

And so, then along came cameras. So now why should anyone bother with art at all, wouldn't sober photographs taken by cameras more effective at depicting reality?

(No offense to photographers.)

Not all of life is about being more effective and efficient all the time. Sometimes it's worthwhile to see things in a different way, and to open up new ideas.

We are in agreement. Personally I went through a history phase, and photography phase, and a Wikipedia phase: now I'm doing watercolour. I find art history to be very interesting, but mostly only the generalities.

Hmm. It seems to me that the switch from still life to impressionism was due to a change in the goal.

With study vs drugs, the goal is still the same: find out why we're here. Since there isn't a goal change, it's not clear there should be a strategy change.

The problem is the only reasons to suspect drugs can provide "insight" into "why we are here" arise from mysticism and other basically non-scientific things. How does making your brain work differently help us understand reality? Weed doesn't make the ruler more accurate or change size, it just makes you feel good.

> After photography, an increasingly vanishingly small proportion of the art world tried to paint still life as an arts career and be taken seriously.

FTFY

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