Why are you blind to beauty?

Deleted member 16771 said:
A culture is a closed system in causal terms.

I don't see how this contravenes my point? Innovation can come from within a closed system, and hence we don't need to appeal to 'objective standards' to explain 'improvement'. There is thus no logical ground upon which you can argue against relativism.

I'm not saying I'm a relativist, just that innovation and improvement is perfectly plausible within a closed system.

You can argue against relativism in other ways, just not in terms of logic.
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Ok now im confused. What do you mean when you say a culture is a closed system? And how does that show that innovation need not be objective.
 
wolly.green said:
Ok now im confused. What do you mean when you say a culture is a closed system? And how does that show that innovation need not be objective.
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I mean, the principles against which 'improvement' is measured can be generated from within a culture/system and therefore that your boy's statement that relativism has difficulty explaining improvement is baseless. Therefore no appeal to 'objective standards' need be invoked to explain 'improvement' on logical grounds.

Relativism is a much more intractable problem than that and can't be solved so easily.
 
John K said:
That when our ancestors experienced beauty, it was related to an unconscious perception of a harmony in a particular environment as a whole around them that was good for their survival - conversely if they didn't experience beauty it would imply that they were not in a good environment in which to live successfully.
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I like this, and was somewhere my thinking was going, too... that those 'flowers' are part of an 'ideal environment' rather than being particularly useful themselves (a bit why we like general greenery, too, without being able to digest grass & leaves).

In any case, though, I'm not sure how the evolutionary paradigm can be escaped, or what a notion of 'objective beauty' could even mean outside of that.
 
Deleted member 16771 said:
I mean, the principles against which 'improvement' is measured can be generated from within a culture/system and therefore that your boy's statement that relativism has difficulty explaining improvement is baseless. Therefore no appeal to 'objective standards' need be invoked to explain 'improvement' on logical grounds.

Relativism is a much more intractable problem than that and can't be solved so easily.
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Oh I see. But those principles are only a guess at what an artist is doing. They don't restrict what improvement looks like. Should a sufficiently ingenious individual try to make improvements on whatever it is hes good at, he may very well 'break' those principles and go beyond them into a realm that was previously inconceivable. That's what Godel did when he invented a new kind of proof in mathematics. He broke out of the usual principles of mathematics, and went beyond them. Thats what reality does when it shows us something that is beyond our current conception of it. This is how new principles are created. Further, the "standard" that our ingenious individual is working towards may not be explicable in terms of a limited set of rules.
 
wolly.green said:
I mean recognize when one thing is more beautiful than another. And I mean that aesthetically only.

Anyway,
In his book The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch explains why humans are attracted to flowers. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that bees are attracted to flowers. Flowers provide that life sustaining nectar that the bees need to survive and procreate. Conversely, flowers have a reason to attract bees. They need bees as a vessel to transport pollen. But why should humans be attracted to flowers? We do not depend on them for anything, and they do not depend on us!

The co-evolution of insects and flowers had to involve the creation of a visual code or language for signalling information between them. A bee has to know which flower will give them nectar, and a flower must design some pattern that will attract bees. This code or language had to be complex since the genes that created it faced a difficult communication problem. t had to be easily recognisable by the right insects and difficult to forge by other species of flower. This is because if other species of flower could forge the same patterns, they could cause their pollen to be spread by the same insects. Worse still, if those other species could cause their pollen to be spread by the same insects without having to produce nectar for them, they would have a selective advantage. In other words, that co-evolution between insects and flowers would never have happened. “So the criterion that was evolving in the insects had to be discriminating enough to pick the right flowers and not crude imitations; and the flowers’ design had to be such that no design that other flower species could easily evolve could be mistaken for it.” (Deutsch, 2011) Both the criterion and the way of meeting it had to be hard to vary.

So why are humans attracted to flowers? We know why bees are, but why us? It may seem plausible to think that flowers are not really objectively beautiful, and that their attractiveness is just a cultural phenomenon. But we find flowers beautiful that we have never seen before, and which have not been known to any culture in human history. We sing songs, write poems and tell stories about them. "The same is not true of the roots of plants, or the leaves." (Deutsch, 2011). Well, sometimes a leaf can be beautiful; even the roots can be. But only very rarely! "With flowers it is reliable. It is a regularity in nature." (Deutsch, 2011). So what is the explanation? David Deutsch thinks that the reason flowers can reliably signal to bees across their communication gap is the same reason that we find flowers beautiful. Because there are objective standards of beauty. Flowers are reaching for an objective standard that is difficult to see, but is nevertheless there! Just as human artists are reaching for an object standard that is difficult to see, but is nevertheless there!

Within various domains of art and science, there are extraordinary creators like Beethoven and Einstein who are widely known to have contributed greatly to their respective disciplines. But is art really subjective? "Was Beethoven fooling himself when he thought that the sheets in his waste-paper basket contained mistakes: that they were worse than the sheets he would eventually publish?" (Deutsch, 2011). Was he merely meeting some arbitrary cultural standard like buying the right sort of coffee to satisfy the latest lifestyle fad? Or is there substance in saying that Beethoven's music really is far better than pre-schoolers banging wooden spoons against metal pots? "Is there only 'I know what I like,' or what tradition or authority designates as good? "(Deutsch, 2011). All of these arguments assume that for each standard, there is a culture in which people enjoy and are deeply moved by art that met it. But surely there is more to standards than just this? Surely only exceptional standards, those which great artists have spent entire lifetimes working on, are chosen to be cultural norms? "Quite generally, cultural relativism (about art or morality) has a very hard time explaining what people are doing when they think they are improving a tradition." (Deutsch, 2011).

This is my argument for why there are objective standards of beauty. And why you can be wrong about what you think is beautiful. Now, when I asked why people are blind to beauty, I meant why can they not recognise when one piece of art is more beautiful than another. I don't care about sexual attraction, or attraction to flowers. Everyone has that. Im talking about beauty in ART.
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Food for rabbit hole:smile::
https://news.emory.edu/stories/2013/12/smell_epigenetics_ressler/campus.html
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sc...ries-passed-down-in-genes-from-ancestors.html

Other than that I get what you mean, and people have tried to rationalise why certain art is more beautiful than another.. but then at the same time people literally have no idea why they like what they like and I think same thing can go for art. Yes sure, lets just rationalise e.g. what strokes are beautiful and what strokes aren't... still, that doesn't really answer the question of why we find certain art more beautiful than another. :fearscream:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-second-noble-truth/201711/you-dont-know-what-you-want


Also... maybe it just sums down to the communication we have with art just like bees have with flowers. I mean, things need to resonate with you on some level so you hang something on the wall :blush:
 
wolly.green said:
That's what Godel did when he invented a new kind of proof in mathematics. He broke out of the usual principles of mathematics, and went beyond them
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I think Godel's incompleteness theorems are truly beautiful, though I have to confess I haven't looked at the maths in detail for decades. They appeal to me aesthetically because they are delightfully iconoclastic - they shove a bulldozer through the idea that logic is somehow the fundamental scaffolding of the universe, and they do it by turning logic on itself in a glorious act of justice. And they don't do it by trashing logic in mindless vandalism - no, they put it in its place as just another servant, not a master. This has the same beauty as when Wegener was proved right about continental drift, when Einstein had to accept that God really does play dice with reality, and when the Berlin Wall was torn apart by the People. There is something exquisite about these dramatic turns - even more so in reality than in a work of art.
 
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I'm no academic, philosopher or art major, but I think aesthetic appreciation ultimately ties into how intimately one is acquainted with a subject or if the subject invokes reflection on things one already finds appealing. The more nuances you notice, consciously or unconsciously (which are based on your build up of contrasting experiences of such subject or related subject) the more thorough your enjoyment of a piece. Aesthetic taste, for most people, is intuitive...and often hard to qualify.. and that's why most people conflate it with simply liking what they like.
 
Analysis of Beauty

When one is exploring unfamiliar country and, rounding a corner, gains suddenly a prospect of some well-remembered landmark; or when, engulfed in a crowd of strangers, one is suddenly confronted by the face of a friend, the reaction is often a feeling of surprised gratification. If the emotion evoked by the unexpected appearance of a familiar mathematical artifact is strong enough, we may feel that the artifact is “pleasing” or even “beautiful.” Accordingly, surprise may be considered to be an occasional ingredient of mathematical beauty. We may surmise that the sudden emergence from a mathematical process of a familiar concept or symbol in an unexpected relationship will sometimes evoke a faint pleasurable emotion, and, afflicted as we often are by the poverty of our vocabulary and incapable of describing our mental reaction more precisely, we may describe the novelty as “beautiful.”
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Puzzlenuzzle said:
Food for rabbit hole:smile::
https://news.emory.edu/stories/2013/12/smell_epigenetics_ressler/campus.html
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sc...ries-passed-down-in-genes-from-ancestors.html

Other than that I get what you mean, and people have tried to rationalise why certain art is more beautiful than another.. but then at the same time people literally have no idea why they like what they like and I think same thing can go for art. Yes sure, lets just rationalise e.g. what strokes are beautiful and what strokes aren't... still, that doesn't really answer the question of why we find certain art more beautiful than another. :fearscream:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-second-noble-truth/201711/you-dont-know-what-you-want


Also... maybe it just sums down to the communication we have with art just like bees have with flowers. I mean, things need to resonate with you on some level so you hang something on the wall :blush:
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What do mean by resonate though? Im not sure what you're trying to say? Are you saying that beauty is subjective?
 
Deleted member 16771 said:
I mean, the principles against which 'improvement' is measured can be generated from within a culture/system and therefore that your boy's statement that relativism has difficulty explaining improvement is baseless. Therefore no appeal to 'objective standards' need be invoked to explain 'improvement' on logical grounds.

Relativism is a much more intractable problem than that and can't be solved so easily.
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I'd actually argue that the problem with citing improvement is even more basic than that: Have aesthetics really improved (societally) over time, or has our desire for novelty caused certain aesthetics to decline in value while changing circumstances change which things resonate with us?
 
In the Wings said:
I'd actually argue that the problem with citing improvement is even more basic than that: Have aesthetics really improved (societally) over time, or has our desire for novelty caused certain aesthetics to decline in value while changing circumstances change which things resonate with us?
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Like Sir Mix-a-Lot’s seemingly revolutionary emphasis on big butts which was in stark contrast to the popular aesthetic norm of skinny butts! Profound!
 
Speaking of aesthetics of art... I have to say I enjoy the shape, colour and social tone of this one most thoroughly.

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John K said:
I think Godel's incompleteness theorems are truly beautiful, though I have to confess I haven't looked at the maths in detail for decades. They appeal to me aesthetically because they are delightfully iconoclastic - they shove a bulldozer through the idea that logic is somehow the fundamental scaffolding of the universe, and they do it by turning logic on itself in a glorious act of justice. And they don't do it by trashing logic in mindless vandalism - no, they put it in its place as just another servant, not a master. This has the same beauty as when Wegener was proved right about continental drift, when Einstein had to accept that God really does play dice with reality, and when the Berlin Wall was torn apart by the People. There is something exquisite about these dramatic turns - even more so in reality than in a work of art.
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Wow, I just love the way you put that. But I have to ask, do you also believe that reason is overrated?
 
wolly.green said:
Wow, I just love the way you put that. But I have to ask, do you also believe that reason is overrated?
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Well to answer that we might run way outside the scope of your thread Wolly :D. I am a positive skeptic by genetic disposition so I tend to take a viewpoint as a working proposition subject to open ended verification rather than an absolute truth. I am also comfortable with holding several viewpoints about some aspect of the world and switching between them even if they have contradictory elements - as long as they provide the potential of a rich field of insight.
So if we take the way humans relate to the world, my perception is that it’s based on models. At its most fundamental level, the software that generates our minds relates to our raw sensory input by translating it into these models before we are able to perceive it. What we experience is the model, not the actual world itself directly. Our conscious minds would not be able to make any sense of the raw sensory input without this process.
Now humans have developed an ability to abstract this model building process and use it to relate to big picture views of the world as well as to our immediate in-the-world situation. In just the same way as with everyday perception we then often confuse these models with the actual world that underlies them. You see this very clearly with scientific theories, none of which explain the world in its fundamental reality, but all of which give good heuristic models of it, valid within definable limits. However people often talk as though these scientific models were the reality rather than its partial simulation.
Now I think that logic is like this, but at a more basic level. It’s a device of the mind by which we model reality, but mustn’t be confused with the real thing. The problem of course with taking a skeptical approach to logical rationality is that there are no alternative obvious analytical modelling tools with which to critique it other than itself. My preference is to assume that it is a useful modelling device that is a feature of the way the human mind is constructed, but that it too has a scope of validity that is less than the real world. It is a mistake to conflate the two and Godel’s maths give some evidence that supports this idea. An implication is that there could be aspects of the world that are qualitatively beyond our ability to conceptualise with our existing mental tools. It would be a grave flat earth kind of error if we fail to recognise this possibility.
 
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