Gideon Polya/ MWC NEWS

http://mwcnews.net/content/view/17895/42/
”Deep Mind” Painting
“Deep Mind” is a huge painting that explores the World Within, the Mind, and prompts
questions such as What are we? Who are we? Why are we here? How do we balance and
control the dichotomies within us of light/dark, human/animal, good/bad, peace/passion,
joy/anger, love/hate, altruism/greed?

This indeed is an ambitious painting, my first attempt in Art to address the big question
about Life, the Universe and Everything (the answer to which according to Douglas
Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is simply “42”). I have painted a further version
but a Loved One who is my most trenchant critic says that she loves this later version but
it looks better rotated 90 degrees - perhaps after 42 attempts (hard work painting huge
paintings this size!) I will find the Answer.

This reminds me of the Buddhist parable about an illiterate peasant who asks the Master:
“I am just an ordinary Man, I toil hard for a living, I am untutored and I do not know how
to read – how can I find the Answer?” The Master replies “Take a bag of rice on your back
and climb to the top of the Mountain and you will find the Truth”. The peasant does as he is
instructed, climbs the Mountain and finally reaches the top, casts down the bag of rice and
takes in the enormous view. The Master was Right – he has Arrived.

Agnostic humanists such as myself approach Ontology (the Science of Being) through the
Popperian Scientific Method involving the critical experimental testing of potentially
falsifiable hypotheses, refining our models of reality and then repeating the process.
Theists give up on the objective, scientific approach to the Answer and typically accept
ancient stories from our ancestors as metaphors for reality. However Humanists, Theists
and Buddhists can find a common ground in Art which all three accept as valid
metaphorical, poetical and Artistic attempts to get to the Truth of things.

Let me give you a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the World of “Deep Mind”.

Technically, this is a huge painting (1.3 metres by 2.7 metres) painted in acrylic on high
quality doubly-primed canvas. The dominant underlying geometry is a classical Golden
Rectangle employed by the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Egyptians and also widely
exploited by painters since the time of the Italian Renaissance. Arising from this
fundamental geometry (mathematically, a Fibonacci Sequence of 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13, 21, 34
…; the Da Vinci Code) are elements including (1) the Divine Sections (that divide the
Golden Rectangle to form a square and another Golden Rectangle, these Golden
Rectangles having the property that the Length is 1.618 – or phi – times the width); (2) 2
dominant circles (encompassing the obverse dichotomies referred to in the first sentence
of this essay); (3) the central Vesica Pisces symbol from the overlapping of these Circles
(a simultaneously sacred symbolism for the Christian fish, the Son of God in the Human
Womb, the Gothic Arch and profane symbolism for the female vulva and the male penis
and thence phallic bombs, bullets and missiles); and (4) the Sacred Flowers from the
intersection of the Circles with the Diagonals of the Squares into which they fit exactly
(these cruciform – cross-like - structures are sacred in representing the Cross and the
Christian Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit plus the Blessed Virgin and profane in
that 4 is “lucky” and they resemble Paris quadrifolia or Truelove, the aphrodisiac and
poisonous European plant that was used to bring “luck in Love” in Chaucer ‘s “Canterbury
Tales” and in Chaucer’s Medieval Europe) (see “Sacred & Profane. The real Da Vinci Code
exposed” on MWC News ).

However “Deep Mind” also draws upon the Artistic Metaphors of Islamic culture. Thus
underneath the classical Italian Renaissance Golden Rectangle symbolism is one of the
patterns used in the wonderful Tile Art patterns of Islamic Art from the Alhambra Palace
in Spain to the glories of Isfahan, Samarkand and Bokhara. There are generically 17 such
kinds of patterns (defined by my great uncle mathematician George Polya of the Swiss ETH
and America’s Stanford University as 17 plane symmetry groups and exploited by the great
Dutch lithographer M.C Escher who was in correspondence with George Polya for many
years).

The Islamic Tile Art patterns were created when Muslim civilization was a light in the World
at the time of the European Dark Ages. These patterns arose from the Biblical and Quranic
prohibition of graven images and always included an Imperfection as a metaphor for our
imperfection as compared to the perfection of the Creator. I have described this cultural
conflation by the acronym PEACE – which stands for Polya, Escher, Alhambra Cultural
Ecumenism (see “Alhambra Pollock” on MWC News).

Yet Man’s attempts to deal with the Inner Reality of the Mind and the Outer Reality of the
physical world date back to the figurative cave paintings by Europeans and Indigenous
Australian aboriginals of 20,000 years ago. Such figurative elements can be seen in “Deep
Mind” at various levels – behind the complexity one can see large figures that in the upper,
sunny, light, “good” zone are Ascendant and in the lower, darker, subterranean, ocean
deep “bad” half of the painting are Descending like Fallen Angels. In addition there are
smaller figures that repeat this theme of Ascendant Good and Descending Bad, a
dichotomy first explored by the early agrarian Persian proto-Zoroastrians in Iran as early
as 6000 BC.

On top of this complexity I have represented molecular, microscopic and macroscopic

aspects of the reality of “Deep Mind”.

Thus at the molecular level (perceivable by highest resolution electron microscopy) we can
discern a dominant geometrical theme resembling a DNA double helix of the genes that
program our existence. The individual helical strands can represent the alpha-helices of the
DNA-encoded proteins that make up most of our physical reality (together with water and
thousands of other small and large molecules – for a rapid guide to this complexity see my
huge pharmacological text “Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds. A
pharmacological reference guide to sites of action and biological effects ”).

At the microscopic level I have represented neuronal connectivities, the neuron cell bodies
(the blobs) and the axons and dendrites connecting neurons to each other in such a way
that “the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts”. Indeed if the World survives
George Bush, Bush-ite-driven global warming and the nuclear threat perhaps in a century
there will be robots whose connectivities are such that we will have created true Superman
intelligences vastly superior to our own. These neural net representations are indeed
disturbingly anthropomorphic like the medieval Mandrake Roots to which great superstition
was attached.

At the macroscopic level the two dominant circles represent the fundamental dichotomies
of Deep Mind - the light, human, good, peaceful, joyous, loving, altruistic Person
shadowed by a dark, animal, bad, impassioned, angry, hateful, and greedy Alter Ego. Just
as there is no escaping our shadow out in the sunlight, we cannot ignore the remnants of
our animal evolutionary history (Tyrannosaurus rex and ourselves have common
ancestors). However our intellectual and moral evolution does not simply involve natural
selection of hard-wiring genes (DNA) – it also involves the selection of “memes”, or ideas
and cultural elements through societal selection of words, writing, music and art(see
Richard Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene”).

Indeed “Deep Mind” illustrates this selection of “memes”, encompassing perceptions of

Mind and Reality from 20,000 year old European and Aboriginal cave paintings,
Zoroastrian, Greek and Egyptian elements, Medieval and post-Medieval Islamic Art,
Renaissance Italian Art and post-Renaissance European Art combined with molecular,
microscopic and macroscopic Scientific images of the Human Mind – with the overall,
“order in chaos” Big Picture resembling post-war American Jackson Pollock Abstract
Expressionism.

I have been invited to take part in a public panel discussion of Australian Humanists over
the question “what does Humanism mean to me?” In reading and thinking about this
question I stumbled upon this definition of the Humanist Ideal from leading Australian
philosopher Professor Brian Ellis: “to respect equality in the dignity of everyone”.
Hopefully the silicon-and-steel (or possibly carbon-based Buckminsterfullerene-, organic
semiconductor- and carbon nanotube-constructed) Superman of the future, conscious of
his ontogeny (the history of his development) will “respect equality in the dignity of
everyone” and obey Biochemist Isaac Asimov’s First Law of Robotics: “A robot may not
injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”.

“Deep Mind” is a cultural conflation of many views of the Human Mind that summarizes its
animal past and bubbling, interacting good/bad dichotomies. In a sense we have already
arrived at a version of the robotic Superman. Recent “memes” from the outstanding
Australian bioethicist Professor Peter Singer (author of “Animal Liberation” and now at
Princeton University, USA) instruct that human beings are obliged “not to injure a human
being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”. Indeed he has
extended this ethical imperative to not inflicting avoidable pain on any sentient creature.

However this First Law is being grossly violated in the 21st century - 16 million people die
avoidably from deprivation and disease every year (about 10 million being infants) on a
Spaceship Earth with the First World in charge of the flight deck. The World ignores the
horrendous carnage of the racist Bush I plus Bush II Asian Wars, an Asian Holocaust that is
still continuing and which has already consumed 8 million people ( see “Body Count. Global
avoidable mortality since 1950”: http://mwcnews.net/Gideon-Polya and “United State
Terrorism. 8 million deaths & media holocaust denial” on MWC News ).

Send the image of “Deep Mind” to everyone you can with the message that Peace and
Love is the only way, that we must try to understand ourselves and others and “respect
equality in the dignity of everyone”.