NavList:

Hewitt, you wrote:
"Right on, Jeremy. Art rhymes with heart: Art reaches your heart; your heart responds."

Hmmm. Art does that, yes. An artist produces some product and that product "resonates" somewhere in your brain in a way that is visceral and difficult to articulate. Sure. That's fine. But when was the last time you got that feeling from a latitude and a longitude?? The product of celestial navigation is a position (and an error ellipse!). My "heart" has yet to respond to a pair of sexagesimal numbers. :)

I think part of what you're trying to describe is that "zen" feeling. You feel at one with the natural world... you take your observations with no active concentration, but you "just know" when they feel right. And the unconscious nature of the skill feels good, and this is SIMILAR to the ease that an artist has while working on art. An artist produces art, but a skilled and experienced competent navigator has an artistic "feeling" about the work.

It used to be trendy to talk about "right brain" versus "left brain" activities: right brain was supposed to be artistic and intuitive while left brain was said to be logical and analytical. And certain tasks were said to "become right brain" activities when a certain level of ease and skill was achieved. That language has mostly been jettisoned by modern psychology since it over-states the case for brain lateralization, but there are still distinctions between tasks that are accomplished without active which draw instead on long-term experience. Driving a car is probably the best example. When was the last time you had to "think" about staying in the lanes on a highway? You just DO. Maybe some of you have read Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" which is a fascinating meditation on modern research in cognition and its practical consequences (a "mass market" work, but I can recommend it strongly --here's the Wikipedia "Cliff Notes": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow). Students of celestial navigation, just learning it, have to think through every step. It's analytical thought, and it takes concentration. Experienced celestial navigators can do it in their sleep, and they have an "intuitive sense" that raises a flag when there's something amiss. But is this really any different from an experienced driver of an automobile?? If I slow down a bit just before an accident occurs up the road because I could "sense" something was about to happen, does that mean I am clairvoyant? Or does that mean that there is an "art" to driving? Or does it just mean that experience generates automated, skilled behavior which the conscious mind does not actively monitor?

I'll conclude with this: I still can't see any sense in which celestial navigation itself qualifies as an art in any direct, non-metaphoric sense, but I'm interested in hearing more, and you may yet convince me --stranger things have happened.

-FER
PS: regarding "stranger things", tonight's new Nova on PBS (9pm EDT) is apparently about the Chelyabinsk fireball, in case anyone's interested. I'm not expecting anything brilliant, but it may be worth tuning in ("tuning in"... now there's an expression that won't make sense anymore in the very near future... right up there with "rolling down the window" in a car!).

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