THE BRAIN AND THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

The brain is an open system continuously attempting to reach the equilibrium with its environment. Its harmonious relation with the world defines the aesthetical experience. This is the primary experience of our to-be-in-the-world, where the perception-action arc in the Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception finds its description. In its continuous dialog with the world, described in the dissipative model as the brain's Double, the brain constructs meanings and knowledge, leading to a meaningful vision of the world. Coherence is the product of the symmetry breakdown induced by the external inputs to which the brain is exposed and manifests itself in the auto-similarity properties of fractal structures. The occurrence of self-similar fractal structures in the brain and in a large number of natural phenomena leads us to the vision of Nature unified by dynamic coherence ruling morphogenetic processes (laws of form) and the formation of meanings.