Do you wish there's a god?

[Alan V]

I personally think my assertion is a matter of logic.  The more accurate our perceptions, the better adapted we are to realities.

No, it's just atheistic woo, clinging to religious sentiments about truth.

" The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions — mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never."

https://evolutionnews.org/2016/05/evolution_may_o/

"Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you."

My use of the word "adapted" was confusing, so I apologize.  I did not intend to refer to evolution at all in my statement.

The fact is that, in the short run, we can thrive by both honest and dishonest means in the modern world.  So the question is not "Why be honest?"  The question is "Why be dishonest?"  I can only think of bad answers for the second question.

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Nature is already filled with beauty unsullied by all the self-display of artists.

But no sense-impression of which we are aware is simply a sense-impression. It is already selected, interpreted, made by the mind. This is one of the things that painting does (among many others): it enriches our ability to perceive the world by working in dialectic with sense-impressions. 

I agree that perception is an artform in itself, and that art has the potential to expand our perceptions of the world around us, just as literature can.

If you spend a few years with Kano School or Rimpa Japanese paintings, the world looks different to you. Specifically, the portions of the world which you perceive as worth looking at, and the way your mind selects and interprets those views, increases. You gain greater access to beauty, a wider ability to see and enjoy -- in short, more perception equals greater pleasure. And greater pleasure in the world -- the ability to see and love its beauty -- changes the way the world is for us. 

I also agree that art is largely about selection and emphasis, most often because of sensual or aesthetic priorities. That makes it a variety of entertainment.

Now a person might say "I already enjoy it enough," and for that person I guess it might be true. But he has set up walls for his perception which are not necessary, and blocked for himself all the wisdom which previous artists offer us. 

In my own experience, I adjusted my perceptions in any number of ways to be able to see the positive aspects of various kinds of art. The exercise was worthwhile, but I still ended up with specific tastes and now reject a fair amount which I previously appreciated -- for other reasons.

This is part of what Blake means when he says that when our perceptions are fully open (if that were possible) the world would appear in its truly infinite nature, and that salvation comes from increased sensual enjoyment. The opposite of this is closing ourselves down to the status quo of the interpretations we already have. 

Perhaps a better way of saying this is that the world doesn't come with a message at all, it's we who insert our messages into our art. So we have to be cautious about what we are saying, because some people will mistake pictures of the world for the world itself, per Magritte.

Could you plug this into your system for me, and tell me in what way it promotes questionable assumptions, including consumerism of art? In what way does it decrease or distract from nature, or sully nature with "self-display" of the artist? Would the world be better without this painting in it?

Art is about directed attention. Artists use all sorts of different techniques to draw attention: color, contrast, drama, emotion, permanence, talent, and so on. Any given artifact is saying, "This is worth paying more attention to than something else." That is the artist's assertion. Is it always true?

There's a lot more bad art in the world than good art.