A fascinating podcast from open-minded arch materialist Sean Carroll. He holds his essentially Cartesian and Humanist stance, but is always open to discourse with people with a contrary position.
This interested me as my belief is that consciousness emerges out of materialism but in the vast network of interactions that occur between material entities, including ourselves and the world we inhabit. Consciousness is in the relationship between material things.
Thus, I believe that our subjective relational experience of material objects through art making and the making of the art object, even if that is a poem or a performance, gives us insight into our experience as conscious material objects. Like Terry Pratchett I believe it is ‘turtles all the way down’.
My current art work is exploring the geological substrate under my walking feet when I go out for my daily walk, as a vehicle to explore my own substrate, my deeper self. Like the alchemists believed, ‘As above, so below.’
See also Process Philosophy and Whitehead’s ideas that things exist as entities but… ‘For Whitehead, actual entities are spatiotemporally extended events or processes. An actual entity is how something is happening, and how it’s happening is related to other actual entities. The actually existing world is a multiplicity of actual entities overlapping one another.’ WIKI
This seems to have some relevance to art as research, as we can explore the experience of the art object as something that is happening.
Moving Space 