This project goal is to bring the academy more close to people and we think that art is the way for that. With that in mind, we want to produce a bounty in which the NEAR community can express its creativity by creating art from philosophical thought experiments.
benefit/justification: the benefits of the project are: (1) to spread philosophy and its thought experiments through the artistic NEAR community; (2) to create products that could be sold by the DAO and be used to get resources; (3) to integrate The Philosophers DAO more deeply with the community of creative artists on NEAR and to spread The Philosophers DAO’s Community; (4) to produce art NFTs and transactions on the blockchain; (5) to bring university professors to the ecosystem, who could be the next collectors when they understand well how web 3 works.
the project
The project is to give an acquisition prize of 100 usd in near or dai for each of the 4 best pieces of art produced by the community in our bounty. The pieces of art must not be minted, because they are going to be minted by us, with the due credits, in our store and with royalties and revenue splitted equally between the artist and The Philosophers DAO; they must come with a cover image (an associated image - if the art is an image, it can be itself) they can be pictures, including memes, videos, poetry, 3d objects, gifs, and should express the following thought experiment:
Thought experiment: Mary’s room
The Mary’s room is a famous philosophical thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson in 1982. The experiment describes Mary, as a scientist who lives in a black and white world where she has extensive access to physical descriptions of color, but no actual human perceptual experience of color. The central question of the thought experiment is whether Mary will obtain new knowledge when she goes outside the black and white world and experiences seeing in color.
The thought experiment was originally proposed as follows:
Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like “red”, “blue”, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence “The sky is blue”.
The big questions are: what will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?
Consultant: Jackson, Frank (1982). “Epiphenomenal Qualia”. Philosophical Quarterly. 32 (127): 127–136.
timeline
week 1: to launch the bounty and publicize it.
week 2: to publicize the bounty.
week 3: to choose 4 winners, to mint the NFTs.
week 4: report and accountability.
budget
4 winners (best art chosen by council) x 100USD (100 USD in NEAR or DAI, whichever is more convenient for the DAO, and NEAR value will be measured according to the exchange rate used by NEAR to pay the DAO)
Subtotal: 400USD