An Attempt at an Objective Definition of Artistic Intuition
One problem I always have in explaining my work to scientists is why I think it’s possible for artists to use their intuitive perceptions of human behavior to discover observable evidence.
May I remind everyone that all perception is subjective. Scientific objectivity is derived by triangulation among numerous people’s subjectivity.
The question is: What number of people needs to be able to perceive something subjectively in order for it to be considered objective evidence?
An easy line to draw would be to say that objectivity depends on everyone being able to perceive something directly with their senses. But that definition doesn’t work, because it disproves the existence of stars. Stars aren’t observable to everyone, because they aren’t observable to blind people.
An easy solution to that problem would be to say that objectivity depends on most people being able to perceive something subjectively. But that raises the question: Most people compared to what?
This definition solves the problem for a lot of things. But quantum physics depends on objective evidence, and quantum particles aren’t observable to most people.
Quantum particles can be considered objective evidence because they are perceivable to most quantum physicists. Quantum particles are observable to quantum physicists because quantum physicists possess the abilities, skills, and resources necessary to perceive them.
In the same way, the things I have to say about human behavior are considered observable evidence among theatre artists because most theatre artists possess the necessary abilities, skills, and resources to perceive them. From that starting point, theatre artists have proceeded to define objectivity by triangulating among their subjective perceptions.
It could be argued that in order for something to qualify as objective evidence it has to be observable to people using their five natural senses. This definition saves stars from blindness-induced non-existence, but it disproves calculus. The physical act of observation, absent some mental process to connect meaning to the observation, will render the evidence unobservable in practice, because people will forget they’ve seen it. The information will not pass through the person’s psychological sense filters and register in conscious memory. But if observation depends on mental processes attaching meaning to observations, again we’re talking about subjectivity. To most people using their five natural senses, calculus is meaningless because it’s unintelligible.
In the same way that it’s possible for some people to render calculus, quantum physics, or any other complicated pieces of information objective by possessing the mental abilities necessary to attach the correct meaning to them, it’s possible for theatre artists to possess different mental abilities to correctly attach meaning to different pieces of information. By attaching meaning to their perceptions, both groups are able to use the information in self-consistent manners. For scientists to claim that they are capable of doing this with their work but artists are incapable of doing it with their own work simply because the scientists themselves don’t know how to do the artists’ jobs, isn’t science. Forced ignorance by a social consensus of the majority that a small group of exceptionally talented people shouldn’t be allowed to know anything everyone else doesn’t know, is what I call mental communism. As a friend of mine, who coined the term, pointed out to me, the Communists tried to make everyone equal by forcing them to live at equally low economic levels, and where did it get them? Now a lot of people in America try to make everyone equal by forcing them to live at equally low intellectual levels, and where does it get us? People use this tactic all the time to try to prove scientists’ discoveries are wrong. I find it ironic that scientists should use it against other people.
When my grandfather designed airplanes in the early days of aviation, the line between objectivity and subjectivity was completely different from what it is today. In the days before airplane engineers had computers, his brain was the computer. He was using objective mathematics to make his calculations, but he was making those calculations in his head.
Now one of my uncles is a sound engineer. He does the same job my grandfather did, but in a different context. My grandfather had to use a subjective process to conduct his objective calculations, because no one had yet figured out how to build a machine that could carry out the objective calculations objectively. The ultimate proof that my grandfather’s calculations were correct, as were the calculations of anyone who used their own brains to double-check his work, is that none of the planes he designed crashed due to design flaws.
Now we do have machines that can perform objective mathematical operations objectively. But we still don’t have machines that can figure out how to arrange music in ways that will make people enjoy listening to it. Now my uncle’s brain is the computer that does that job. The proof that he succeeds is the fact that people enjoy listening to the music he arranges.
It follows from this that scientists’ and artists’ definitions of objectivity are not two separate things, but two points along the same spectrum. They are not differences in kind, they are differences in scale.
It also follows from this that at the very end of the scale, objective evidence could exist that only one person was capable of observing. It is known that objective evidence exists that no one is capable of observing. It is easily conceivable that objective evidence could exist that only two people could observe. Why should the range skip that intermediary point? For that matter, the simple fact that one of the two people who could observe a certain piece of objective evidence could murder the other person, reduces this question to simple arithmetic.
The best way I can describe the way I perceive human behavior is that I’m aware of electricity flowing through people’s brains. I’m generally aware of where it’s coming from, where it’s going, where the person thinks it’s going, whether or not they’re right, where the person is trying to make it go, and whether or not they’re succeeding. Basically, that flow of electricity makes me aware of the circuits the electricity is flowing though, but not necessarily of what the circuits are attached to. I perceive this about people I meet in real life, and I have learned to apply it to an artistic medium. I think it’s safe to say that most or all great theatre artists perceive human behavior the same general way, whether they’re consciously aware of it or not. I’m not the greatest theatre artist who’s ever lived—that would be Will Shakespeare, the Charles Darwin of theatre—so there are other theatre artists who are more perceptive to human behavior than I am.
Personally, I can sense the flow of electricity from landmark to landmark, and sense that I’m sensing that, but until I discovered the Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior, I couldn’t tell what the landmarks were. My mother is perceptive of human behavior to the point that she can walk into a room full of people and know almost instantly what everyone is feeling. Considering that Will Shakespeare turned human behavior into 29 full-length plays that he wrote as poetry, which are unrivalled after 400 years, he must’ve had a sort of telepathy that worked so well he could use it on imaginary characters.
This isn’t literally a sixth sense. (At least, I don’t believe it is, although I may be mistaken.) It’s a very highly developed interaction of the usual five senses, which makes some people aware of certain information that other people can’t perceive. It’s analogous to the way in which a genius IQ effectively gives a person intellectual superpowers that 99% of people assume aren’t possible for people to have.
For myself, I’ve spent most of my life feeling that most people I meet talk “wrong” and think “wrong”. I used to try to tell people that they weren’t talking correctly, but I gave that up long ago because it never worked. I could never figure out how to explain to people that electricity wasn’t moving through their brains the way they believed it was.
The best example I can give of this is superficiality. A person has what I can best describe as a depth of consciousness, which develops as a combination of natural perceptivity of the world and life experience. Materially wealthy people generally have less of it than materially poor people, culturally conservative people generally have less of it than culturally progressive people, culturally insulated people generally have less of it than culturally worldly people, older people generally have more of it than younger people, and people who were raised on Hollywood entertainment generally have less of it than people who weren’t.
When a person observes a certain thing, they make an emotional attachment to the thing to give them their sense of its significance. There’s a certain amount of significance they could give it, a certain amount they do give it, and a certain amount they believe they give it. They always compare the amount they believe they give it to the amount they do give it, without always being aware of how much they could give it. Suppose they believe they’ve assigned it a significance of 50%. If I’m aware that their depth of perceptivity is only 50% of what it could be, that means they’ve only assigned it an absolute significance of 25%. So I don’t agree with them that the thing is 50% significant, or when they act upon the belief that the thing is 50% significant, or when they try to convince me that the thing is 50% significant. It’s much easier for a person to give themselves a sense of meaning to their lives by not developing their depth of perceptivity than it is to develop their depth of perceptivity, because a shallow perceptivity is much easier to fill up. If we assume that as members of the same species we all value our lives equally much, for a younger person, a culturally conservative person, a culturally insulated person, a materially wealthy person, or a person who was raised on Hollywood entertainment, it’s easier to substitute quantity of sensory input for significance of sensory input. Preoccupying themselves with sensory input for its own sake eliminates the need for the critical thought that the development of depth of perceptivity depends upon, and thereby enables them to make their lives feel complete for the least possible expenditure of effort.
At this point I can make a transition from my natural perception of human consciousness to a scientific approach to its application in theatre. What I’ve referred to as depth of perceptivity is synonymous to a systems diagram of their consciousness and subconsciousness.
Amateur artists attempt to replicate human behavior by knowing the things their characters know. They aren’t very successful that way, and usually they can’t figure out why. Professional artists replicate human behavior by developing an understanding of how their characters think, thinking that way, and taking action accordingly.
In effect, a professional actor develops an understanding of how it’s possible for people to think, even though he doesn’t personally think that way. Then he uses that to draw a mental systems diagram for how his character thinks. He then fills in that systems diagram with all the information his character has that’s relevant to the play. A lot of his mental systems diagram consists of empty boxes, and a lot more consist of boxes whose information is much more general than it would be for a real person. But what the actor needs to replicate the behavior of his character is the systems diagram itself, not the information in it.
Every facial expression, tone of voice, gesture, thought, word, and action that a character in a movie or play ever uses or makes is a product of the character’s genetic makeup and every life experience that’s had a lasting effect on him. This is true for people in real life, which is why professional actors have had to figure out how to do it onstage in order to replicate human behavior believably. With every facial expression, tone of voice, gesture, thought, word, and action of a person you meet in real life, you get a sense of who the person is. Professional theatre artists can decide ahead of time who a character is, and then reverse engineer the character’s life to see what combination of genetic makeup and life experiences would’ve made the character who they are. Alternately, professional theatre artists can decide on how a character’s genetic makeup and life experiences created who he is, and then use his facial expressions, tones of voice, gestures, thoughts, words, and actions accordingly to give the audience their sense of who he is.
Usually, professional theatre artists use a combination of the two, by doing the latter, developing a general sense of who the character is, and then doing the former to fill in the details, by figuring out how the combination of genetic makeup and life experiences affected him personally. In effect, a writer starts with a universal template of a Homo sapiens’ brain, fills in its major characteristics, applies life experiences to it, determines who the character is at the beginning of the movie, and determines how the events of the movie affect the character’s behavior. That covers the character’s speech, actions, and most thoughts. The director and the actor then work together to determine who the character is as a unique individual, and the emotional affect the character’s genetic makeup and life experiences had on him. That determines the aesthetic details of how the character does the things he does. That covers tone of voice, facial expressions, and gestures. The result is a realistic replication of a person.
A novelist has to be able to do all of those things himself. The artistic medium allows less of some, but more of others. To teach myself how to write novels, I had to teach myself how to do all of this.
With a character’s facial expressions, tones of voice, gestures, thoughts, words, and actions, theatre artists give audience members a sense of who the character is in the sense that the audience members are meeting the character as a real person. Personally, I get the sense of who the character is in the sense that I could live his or her life (which is not to say I would want to). If I watch a movie enough times, I could go through and tell you why a character smiled the way he did at a particular moment, and likewise took every other action he took in the movie, in spite of the fact that the actor probably wasn’t even consciously aware why he was making those acting choices at the times he made them. Any professional director could do likewise.
This might sound complicated, but as I said, these are elementary principles of theatre at the professional level. It takes an extreme sensitivity to human behavior to reach the professional level, but only in the sense that it takes an extreme degree of insightfulness of another sort to be able to visit the Galapagos Islands and unravel the origins of species as the cumulative adaptation to environmental pressures. Centuries before Charles Darwin wrote The Descent of Man, William Shakespeare had already turned the contents of that book into works of art, 29 times.
* * *
At first glance it seems that I must be comparing other people’s depth of perceptivity to my own, which would make my observations completely subjective and therefore scientifically invalid. This isn’t true (to the extent that it’s possible for any scientist to eliminate his own subjectivity from his observation process). By perceiving other people’s depth of perceptivity, I quickly add them to my own perception of depth of perceptivity. That means I constantly expand my own perception of depth of perceptivity to include the depth of perceptivity of everyone whose depth of perceptivity I’ve ever encountered.
It’s worth noting here that everyone’s depth of perceptivity has a different shape, which means many people’s depth of perceptivity includes things that other people’s don’t. That means that the floor of my perception of depth of perceptivity isn’t flat, but is made up of the combined shape—meaning lowest points—of the depth of perceptivity of everyone who’s depth of perceptivity I’ve ever encountered. (At least, that was true for most of my life. Now that I’ve figured out how expand my depth of perceptivity by first principles rather than empathically, I can say the floor of my depth of perceptivity is flat—and interpersonal interactions are much less of an adventure these days. But for simplicity’s sake, I’ll keep talking about it in the present tense, just because it probably applies to many other theatre artists.)
This seems at first glance to limit my depth of perceptivity to the combined depth of perceptivity of the relatively small number of people I’ve met in my life compared to the total population of the Earth. This isn’t true either, for two reasons.
First, my perception of the combined total of the depth of perceptivity of everyone whose depth of perceptivity I’ve ever encountered has made me realize how much it’s possible to perceive about the world, and consequently, how much of my own compiled depth of perceptivity I’m not personally using. That has turned my life into an experiment in how to do everything there is to do in the entire world in one lifetime. And that has necessarily brought me into contact with an ever-increasing number of people, with an ever-expanding combined depth of perceptivity. That’s made my perception of depth of perceptivity increase at an exponential rate, and that has turned my quest for depth of perceptivity into an autocatalytic process—or you could say a cascade effect.
I started my post-secondary education studying acting, because at the time, being a movie star, playing lots of different characters in lots of different situations seemed to me the furthest extent of a life of adventure a person could lead. But in the process of learning how to be a movie star, it didn’t take me long to learn how to be a movie star in real life. Rather than playing roles and having fictitious adventures, I could just be the roles and have real adventures, and save myself the trouble of auditioning for the parts.
The other reason my perception of the depth of perceptivity isn’t limited to combined depths of perceptivities I’ve personally encountered is analogous to the way a scientist’s intellectual perception of the world isn’t limited to scientific experiments he has personally conducted. Most of what any individual scientist knows about science he learned about from scientific experiments conducted by other scientists. In the same way, in order to play a character onstage or in a movie, a talented actor has to develop a shape (including depth) of perceptivity for the character he’s playing, and then act upon that in the role of his character, instead of acting upon his own shape of perceptivity. To do otherwise wouldn’t be acting, it would be an amateur reciting lines onstage and pretending to be someone else.
As the saying in theatre goes, acting is doing. In order to replicate the behavior of another person, you have to develop a shape of perceptivity for the other person and act upon that. That means that while in character you have to conceal your own shape of perception from everyone else—which includes me.
Since actors have figured out how to replicate the entire realm of human behavior, a relatively small number of people necessarily has figured out how to replicate the combined depth of perceptivity of everyone who has ever lived—or at least, a rough but thorough approximation of that. In the same way that various scientists can each study a different part of science and then another scientist can read about all of their discoveries and thereby develop a broad understanding of science without personally replicating each of their experiments, various actors can each learn how to replicate a shape of perceptivity for certain types of people (meaning roles each actor is best at), and another actor can learn about all of them and thereby develop a broad understanding of the combined shape (and therefore depth) of human perceptivity.
This might seem at first glance to limit actors to replicating shapes of perceptivity that fit within their own shape of perceptivity. This isn’t true either. That wouldn’t let them replicate human behavior believably. In the same way that systems theory is the study of the interaction of variables—rather than the variables themselves—so it is with acting. An actor doesn’t need to know everything that his character knows in order to play his role, he only needs to know that his character knows what he knows, and know enough specific things that his character knows to be able to apply it to the small portion of the character’s life he’s portraying. That means the actor doesn’t need to perceive everything his character perceives, he only needs to perceive his shape of perceptivity. That gives him a framework into which he can fit all of the specific things his character knows and acts upon over the course of the play.
To transition from art back to science now:
Actors replicate human behavior believably by forming mental systems diagrams for their characters’ consciousness and subconsciousness, and filling in details as necessary to portray the character in the play or movie.
Each actor develops a different systems diagram for each of his or her characters.
Actors learn how to do this, mostly intuitively, by a combination of talent and experience.
For actors to portray the entire realm of human behavior believably, they’ve necessarily had to develop character systems diagrams that, combined, encompass the entire realm of human consciousness and subconsciousness.
Therefore, it is conceivable that a person who possessed sufficient talents and experience could combine all of those character systems diagrams into a single systems diagram.
* * *
Now perhaps you can see why I said that I don’t bother citing references because no scientist could learn how to do what I do just by reading a few pages in a book. I’m sure that by now most scientists and actors in the world assume I’m just making stuff up, because what I’m saying is so complicated there’s no way to test it. This is the best way I can think of to explain how I do what I do, because I don’t have and OFF switch for my perceptive abilities. I have no idea what it’s like not to be able to perceive the world the way I do. All I can tell is that most people can’t, as evidenced by the fact that usually people can’t understand what I’m talking about. For most of my life I’ve assumed that all of these things I’ve been talking about were so obvious that everyone could do them. Beforehand I assumed the world was just incomprehensibly complicated, because I didn’t realize that most people were forming their perceptions of the world using only five senses. I sense depths of perceptivity; I don’t sense the existence or non-existence of perceptive ability.
If you lived in a world where everyone else was congenitally blind, they’d say the same things about you that you’re probably saying about me right now. “What? You think you have five senses? But we can’t even understand what you’re talking about. How are we supposed to prove the existence of this so-called ‘fifth sense’ of yours? And even if we could, what would be the point? How would we ever be able to use it for anything?”
The only difference between genius and insanity is that geniuses figure out how to prove the things no one else can perceive about the world are real.