Feelings of Structure in Life, Art, and Neural Nets (38c3)

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One of the basic ways we navigate the world is through ‘feelings of structure’ -- our experience of the inner logic of a system or a situation as a tone, a vibe, a mood. I argue that building a technical analogy between ‘feelings of structures’ and autoencoder neural networks lets us construct a kind of theory of vibe: a theory that lets us see how sets of material (/digital) objects express a worldview and vice versa, and that can explain the deep role art plays in expressing, developing, and challenging our understanding of the world. The story I’m hoping to tell builds up to an account of how the aesthetic unity or ‘vibe’ of an artistic work can model the causal-material structure of a lifeworld. On this account, the meaning of an artistic work lies partly in a dense vibe we can sense when we take in the imaginative landscape of the work -- a dense vibe that acts as a structural representation of a looser, weaker vibe present in the real world and teaches us how to feel it. Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 about this event: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2024/hub/event/feelings-of-structure-in-life-art-and-neural-nets/