Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

mighty Alps, whose white and shining pyramids and domes towered above all, as
belonging to another earth, the habitations of another race of beings” (p. 97). To be
sublime was to reflect a greatness that could not be completely understood. “The
immense mountains and precipices that overhung me on every side—the sound of
the river raging among the rocks, and the dashing of the waterfalls around, spoke of
a power mighty as Omnipotence” (p. 97).
Sublime Nature appeared frequently in musical Romanticism. Longyear’s
(1988, p. 12) examples include “the forest paintings in Weber’s Der Freischütz or
Wagner’s; the landscapes and seascapes of Mendelssohn and Gade; the Alpine pictures
in Schumann’s or Tchaikovsky’s Manfred” to name but a few.
Musical Romanticism also took great pains to convey the imaginary or the
indescribable (Whittall, 1987). In some striking instances, Romantic composers
followed the advice in John Keats’ 1819 Ode on a Grecian Urn, “Heard melodies
are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.” Consider Schumann’s piano work
Humoreske (Rosen, 1995). It uses three staves: one for the right hand, one for the
left, and a third—containing the melody!—which is not to be played at all. Though
inaudible, the melody “is embodied in the upper and lower parts as a kind of after
resonance—out of phase, delicate, and shadowy” (p. 8). The effects of the melody
emerge from playing the other parts.
In certain respects, connectionist cognitive science is sympathetic to musical
Romanticism’s emphasis on nature, the sublime, and the imaginary. Cartesian philosophy,
and the classical cognitive science that was later inspired by it, view the
mind as disembodied, being separate from the natural world. In seeking theories that
are biologically plausible and neuronally inspired (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1986;
Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986c), connectionists took a small step towards embodiment.
Whereas Descartes completely separated the mind from the world, connectionists
assume that brains cause minds (Searle, 1984).
Furthermore, connectionists recognize that the mental properties caused by
brains may be very difficult to articulate using a rigid set of rules and symbols.
One reason that artificial neural networks are used to study music is because they
may capture regularities that cannot be rationally expressed (Bharucha, 1999;
Rowe, 2001; Todd & Loy, 1991). These regularities emerge from the nonlinear interactions
amongst network components (Dawson, 2004; Hillis, 1988). And the difficulty
in explaining such interactions suggests that networks are sublime. Artificial
neural networks seem to provide “the possibility of constructing intelligence without
first understanding it” (Hillis, 1988, p. 176).
Musical Romanticism also celebrated something of a scale less grand than
sublime Nature: the individual. Romantic composers broke away from the established
system of musical patronage. They began to write music for its own (or for
the composer's own) sake, instead of being written for commission (Einstein, 1947).
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