Meeting on the arts and making decisions

We had our Ideas Cafe meeting last night.

As usual, we had a delightful diversion from the topic.

After my introduction of how the arts appeal to the emotional side of our consciousness while we typically think that we decide with our rational side, Shula quickly pointed out that the two need not exclude each other.

If we are truthful with ourselves,  we very often make decisions based on our urges and inclinations and use our rationality to justify the decision afterwards.

We decide to have chocolate because we like the taste and want to.  The argument that dark chocolate is healthy for us usually come a bit later.  Not that many of us force ourselves to have dark chocolate for medicinal considerations.

I have read in some of the brain science books that people who suffered damage to certain parts of their brain that create emotion and compassion in us actually have a lot of difficulty making decisions.  They forever go back and forth between the pros and cons of minute matters like what to have for lunch and cannot make up their minds.

Rationality is more suited to analysis rather than synthesis.  If there is a proposal in front of us, we can take it apart and debate the pros and cons of each aspect rationally.

However, sitting on our own and wondering what to do next,  there is a world of possibilities and we need motivating forces to narrow our focus for us before the analytical side of rationality can drill into.  Emotions and urges motivate us.

Art is such a wide topic and I define it as something that evokes an emotional response from the person perceiving the art.  Some in the discussion would not include advertising as art because it is intended to persuade us towards a goal.

We acknowledge the complicated intertwining nature of art, emotion, and decision making but Mano's question of how do we guard ourselves against external manipulation and influences in our decisions turned the discussion.

Shula pointed out that education is manipulation but perhaps in a good way.  A sure way to construct effective filters for undesirable outside manipulation in our decision making is to use our past experience as feedback for the next time we decide.

Sam and Colin pointed out the subtle use of colours in places like McDonald Restaurants to encourage their customers not to linger and in prisons to calm inmates to minimize riots.  These are subtle subconscious influences that we likely do not know unless we search them out.

Then there is the lack of something as an influence. The absence of certain information will certainly change our decision making.  How do we know something should be there if it is not there?

The word manipulation is so loaded with negative meaning that we ended the discussion with our resident linguist's explanation that the word "influence" came from the sense of the river flowing into us.  Manipulation, on the other hand, tends to be acted on us by other humans with intention.  Thus the weather influence what we do but not manipulate.

We did not spend that much time on the arts,  it will have to be revisited at another discussion!