Dan Durso

@dandurso.bsky.social

Visiting Assistant Professor, Butler U Ph.D. Philosophy, U of I Urbana-Champaign Philosophy of Neuroscience, Mind, Evolution, & Aesthetics/Neuroaesthetics www.dandurso.com

My paper, “On Stochastic Picassos ...,” has now been published by by JAAC. I argue that Vision Language Models lack the requisite agency and the capacity to manipulate affordances necessary to be responsible for creative action. @amersocaesthetics.bsky.social academic.oup.com/jaac/advance...

On Stochastic Picassos and Why Vision Language Models Cannot Replace Artists

Abstract. Vision Language Models (VLMs), like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, have raised significant concerns regarding authorship and whether A

academic.oup.com

Another great conference from the Deep South Philosophy and Neuroscience Workgroup. I enjoyed explaining why I generated an image of myself, Darwin, and a peacock taking a joy ride.

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I'm looking forward to presenting at the ASA annual meeting. I'll be presenting my paper "How Solving a Dopamine Puzzle Might Resolve the Paradox of Painful Art". I point out that pleasant sensations can still be realized in the presence of painful art due to underlying endogenous opioids.

The American Society for Aesthetics@amersocaesthetics.bsky.social · last yr.

We are pleased to announce that the preliminary program for the 83rd Annual Meeting to commence in Baltimore October 22-25, 2025 is now available: aesthetics-online.org/events/Event... Commentator and chair slots are still needed - contact us at ASA83rdannualmeeting@gmail.com if you are interested.

In a @currentbiology.bsky.social paper earlier this year, led by @laurawesseldijk.bsky.social, we analysed Beethoven’s genome with a polygenic index related to musicality, as a way to communicate limits of genetic predictions at the individual level & the complexity of links between DNA & behaviour:

Notes from Beethoven’s genome

Wesseldijk et al. compare the genomic information collected from Ludwig van Beethoven with population-based datasets used to quantify musical achievement.

cell.com

If we don’t have a critical mass of people in academia who can communicate *something* about the substance of what we do & the value of doing it to people beyond academia, the destruction of higher education is going to go a lot quicker.

And then he ate it. After paying $6.2 million at auction recently, Justin Sun consumed the banana. Is my outrage the result of an artworld that lacks any intellectual foundation that can block practical jokes from subverting its institutions? Or is it that this art/stunt is a reflection of us?

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Seen through this lens, aesthetic experiences are not essentially different from other kinds of experience, disinterested, or involve a unique sort of pleasure. They are rooted in basic reward processes shared with other animals, have motivational and biological roles, and deep evolutionary origins

We abandon the assumption-burdened concept of aesthetic experience in favor of sensory valuation, reframing aesthetic experience as an outcome of domain-general processes in the reward system. These processes integrate sensory information, expectations, experience, context, and physiological states

LinkedIn suggested I send a BD message to someone. It offered to have AI help me compose it. Here is what it came up with, cut and pasted so no mistakes: "Happy birthday!"--I feel blessed, I worked 50 years on AI, & now I am around to witness AI solving all our pressing problems. Magic!

Two of my paintings were used for the cover and the back of the album, The Last Sunset of the Year, by experimental composer Marcus Fjellström. Sadly, this album is a posthumous release. However, it was a pleasure to make a small contribution to this project. www.mi-so-store.com/products/mar...

Marcus Fjellström - The Last Sunset of the Year — mi — so

Miasmah - MIA056 2xLP (300x 180g black vinyl, embossed gatefold sleeve, poly-lined inner sleeves, artwork insert) 2xCD (250x embossed 6-page foldout digipack, incl. 8 page booklet) Both p...

mi-so-store.com