RE: Non-overlapping magesteria
February 18, 2015 at 1:55 am
(This post was last modified: February 18, 2015 at 2:27 am by Thumpalumpacus.)
(February 18, 2015 at 12:39 am)The Reality Salesman Wrote:(February 17, 2015 at 1:38 pm)Esquilax Wrote: Yes, in that we can discover why it is that certain standards for beauty, or cuteness, or any other attribute of appearance, based on our evolutionary lineage and psychology, and create a rough metric from that. It's not going to be perfect, but then, what is?Why is it that these people only find it worthwhile to ask questions like these about pleasant sensible experiences. Why don't they seek the smell of shit in its purest sense? Why is it that "itchy balls" are not ever searched for In any platonic form sense? Theists seem to suffer from an extreme prejudice with regards to descriptive experiences.
Wait, who are "these people" you're referring to, and are you including me amongst them? You seem to be assuming I'm a theist ... you could not be further from the truth of the matter.
As for why artists don't seek to reproduce itchy balls, I'd imagine that:
1) Much art portrays the unpleasant, no matter the unspoken premise of your point. Check out Slayer, or Heironymous Bosch, right? Free jazz is predicated on unsettling the listener and taking them out of their comfort zone. I used to blast Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" to pay back my asshole neighbor for waking me up at five AM on a Saturday morning. Itchy balls and atonal music and visions of hell populate art, in one form or another.
2) Artists who do seek to invoke the unpleasant experiences in their work don't rise to popularity, generally, precisely because such works aren't sought-after. I mean, we don't need to buy a painting of skidmarks in underwear, right? Most of us leave 'em there anyway, and they ain't pretty.
One reason why art more often focuses on the beautiful instead of the ugly is that the beautiful is often presented as a counterpoint to our ugly world, and the art of beauty is in that sense used to criticize what we've already created.
But the art of beauty is not the only art around. Pollack and Lovecraft and Sonny Sharrock and Andy Warhol and countless others have carved careers out of reminded us how vain, or vapid, or ugly, or evil we humans can be.
(February 17, 2015 at 7:35 pm)wiploc Wrote:(February 17, 2015 at 7:16 pm)Parkers Tan Wrote: And what would those numbers say about the nature of beauty?
Suppose I hypothesized that round faces are more beautiful than other shapes. Suppose, then, I devised and executed an experiment testing that hypothesis. Suppose I showed photographs of faces to thousands of people around the world, and found no significant correlation between basic face shape and perceived beauty.
That would be a scientific fact about beauty.
What, exactly, would that say about the nature of beauty? How would it help to delineate it?
(February 17, 2015 at 7:35 pm)wiploc Wrote: Or suppose you gave it as your opinion that there are no scientific facts about beauty. That would be self refuting. Unless, that is, your claim was merely religious, having nothing to do with science.
Not at all. The thing is, science doesn't address æsthetics. If it did, you could design a paint-by-numbers board and everyone would be as artistic as Michelangelo. That's obviously silly, and the reason why is because artistry is tied up in vision and message and emotional gravity. Science is well-equipped to examine objective reality, but this presumption that it is powerful enough to delineate the emotional lives of people is not borne out by experience.
I'd love to have a heuristic that would let me write a song a day and every one of those songs be perfectly moving and emotional ... but I can tell you, that after thirty-five years writing songs and playing several different instruments: there ain't no such critter. There is no science to good and bad art, no matter the medium, and that is because art is where vision meets technique, and only one of those factors is susceptible to rational analysis.
(February 17, 2015 at 7:35 pm)wiploc Wrote: But you could hardly make a claim about science that didn't bear on science.
Obviously.
(February 18, 2015 at 1:42 am)Chuck Wrote: Beauty exists as a perception facilitated by a combination of genetic and experience based neurology.
Therefore complete description of any instance of perception of beauty must be encompassed by a fundamental description of the mechansim and behavior of the specific instance of the Neurology that facilitated it.
What predictions could such a broadly-stated hypothesis make? Be specific. Could you point to neural connection A leading directly to beauty perception B? Simply describing the neural network and its state doesn't describe beauty any more than describing your fingertips outlines the difference between feathers and frog-skin.
