Edge is collaborating with the Serpentine Gallery in London on projects at the art/science interface. Last year they looked at equations; this year they’re looking at maps. It’s a playful and broad conception of what constitutes a “map”; you will see a few astrophysical examples in there.
Here’s an excerpt from a map of the emotions by Emanuel Derman, based on Spinoza’s Ethics. I zoomed in on the cluster centered around pain, because that’s what people will be drawn to first anyway.
I would have like to seen a Buddhist perspective on this map.
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Pain -> Reality
It proves reality really is real.
Bonjour,
Vous trouverez ci joint l’adresse de mon Blog ( fermaton.over-blog.com).
C’est une théorie mathématique de la conscience reliant très bien Art-Sciences-Mathématique.
Cordialement
Dr Clovis Simard
How is this a map? The spatial location of the information is totally arbitrary.
Derision… interesting…
Life is pain. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell something.
Lab Lemming,
This is a map in the same way an org-chart or a network topology diagram is a map – it shows how things are inter-related without addressing their positions in space.
@Nex:
But you can have illusory pain–I’ve been hit on the head in a dream, and amputees will hurt in their “fingers”. I guess you could say that the ‘pain’ is real, but the meaning ascribed to it is not, but you’re stuck in a circular regress if you go down this chain of reasoning.
For more cool and artistic science maps, see the recently published book from MIT Press: Atlas of science: visualizing what we know http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12344
Pain is Nature’s way of educating fools.
More grandly: pain is the foreplay of death.
No one ever learns from success, they only learn from failure. And failure is a form of pain.
I love the explanatory power of maps. And I am always impressed by how the process of making a map interacts with the thinking process to generate better quality outcomes.
Sheesh, some of the artists sure couldn’t be bothered to exert themselves with their maps (I’m looking at you, Marina Abramovic, and you, John Baldessari). Or perhaps I am too unsophisticated to appreciate the Duchampian sublimity of their art.