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Why is beauty making a comeback now?
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Why is beauty making a comeback now?
The idea that beauty is a social construct (with no deep bedrock in reality) is dead. There are an increasing number of books coming out propounding the notion that beauty is real and crosses all sorts of cultural and historic lines. Joel Garreau responds to Edge publisher/editor John Brockman's request to futurists to pose "hard-edge" questions that "render visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefine who and what we are."
Originally published January 2002 at Edge. Published on KurzweilAI.net January 21, 2002. Read Ray Kurzweil's Edge question here.
My hypothesis is that the modernist/post-modernist idea that beauty is a social construct (with no deep bedrock in reality) is dead.
There are an increasing number of books coming out propounding the notion that beauty is real and crosses all sorts of cultural and historic lines. In their view, that which unites us as a species in the perception of beauty is way larger than what divides us.
My big question is whether, in a disjointed world in which the search for meaning is becoming ever more important, the existence of widely agreed upon ideas of beauty will increasingly become a quick and useful horseback way of determining whether or not *any* complex system, human or technological, is coherent.
This idea draws in part from pre-industrial age definitions of beauty that held that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty -- that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" (Keats, 1820), and most important, "The most general definition of beauty...multeity in unity" (Coleridge, 1814).
Interestingly enough, the idea that I view as increasingly dumb, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" Bartlett's dates only to 1878, which is about when the trouble started, in my view.
Copyright © 2002 by Edge Foundation, Inc.
www.edge.org
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beauty is probably the only objective thing
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Beauty is probably the only objective thing. It is built into at least male cognition. And the confluence of aesthetic and moral judgement has been part of all faiths led by males.
An extreme example is Japanese budo. Here is a good example of it in a modern context:
http://cybercentre.greenpeace.org//t/s/997959242/998146579/998215123/998300310/998468641/index_html
"What we don't need, is to redefine warriors as
educators and leaders as teachers. Let us keep
these things separate, so that each can do their job
properly. A sensei can teach arts of war or peace.
But when the sensei lifts his own sword, he is a
kensai, or sword-saint, not a teacher any more. The
things he must do to preserve what is precious, he
does not call on others to emulate. Rather, he knows
that to take action himself is to enter the Void, to use
his personal ki.
Those who avoid using their personal ki, encouraging
others to expend theirs instead in poorly-directed
efforts to do things too complex for them to do right
(like thinking, for most of the human population, and
certainly coming to "educated" assessments of
biosafety risk or biodiversity harm), are cowards who
simply fail to accept the duty of acting as part of
immune systems and nervous systems of the Earth.
They are simply serving themselves, and deserve no
respect from those of us who know ourselves to be
apes, whose species-specific budo combines in
ways we can never fully understand into the great
bushido, or personal code of honor, of the Earth with
its species.
Educators seek to expand vocabulary, to extend
argument. Warriors seek to restrict it, to clearly
communicate intelligence and to win wars by
restricting the number of false moves."
Beauty is minimal. We could think of it as 0.7 female waist-to-hip ratio for instance, which reduces feminine curves to essentials via the masculine eye.
Or as just simplicity. We should be aware of sexual and frankly martial definitions as above. And probably aware of our biosphere's own "budo" as well:
the composite beauty of all its species, all its genomes. |
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Re: Why is beauty making a comeback now?
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This is like (exactly like) the effort of Robert Pirsig in 'Zen and the Art of the Motorcyle' to define quality. Pirsig notes that although each of us have a very good sense of what things have quality, none of us can actually define what it is.
Oh, we can enumerate certain criteria that a particular object must have to be of sufficient quality for our tastes, but we can just as easily find a counter-example that would meet the criteria but would have us agreeing that it did not have the certain 'something' that embued it with quality.
And for any two objects that we can say have that certain quality, unless the items are identical, we can surely say that one of those objects has the greater quality.
Beauty assumes quality... and I think that once we've defined quality, we've found ourselves a long way toward understanding beauty. In fact, studies have suggested that the human sense of beauty has evolved from our need to filter for a certain level of fitness, in mates, in food, and in safe environments.
In other words, I believe humanity's sense of beauty is the brain's automatic judgement of quality... And if we study the nature of quality, we will surely arrive at a model that includes beauty.
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Beauty: An Off-topic Subject
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Grant,
Need I remind you that your post on beauty is off-topic. We discuss AI and technology here, not beauty.
Since you imply that no one has any idea about what beauty is; people disagree over the same object of so-called beauty; and others get overly passionate (even violent) over the subject, I view any discussion of beauty as, not only off-topic, but a lot like religion. Take it to a church or beauty parlor Grant.
In fact the very discussion of beauty is offensive to those of us out there that might be ugly. And ugliness is a VERY personal subject Grant. So for you to bring it up in a covert way, by attempting to theorize on its antithesis, is insensitive at the least, and ugly at most.
Further, for you to insinuate that it's okay for one person to openly discuss or consider another person beautiful when, in fact, that person just might be ugly, is not only a mild form of reverse slander, but it makes you sort of a hypocrite as well because just last week you imply that that ugly person you were with was beautiful. I quote your very words: "The same person (me Grant) who this week felt that an object was beautiful might say tomorrow that it's ugly." Get it together Grant. If they're ugly this week, they're going to be ugly next week no matter HOW much you've had to drink. And the fact that you consider beautiful things just "objects" and call them an "it" -- please, have some respect. Be a gentleman. At least TRY to stick to SOME objective facts when your bigotry (or booze) forces you to hallucinate or foam at the mouth over this abhorrent, and sensitive little off-topic subject Grant (and you too Solomon and Willie: wipe that smirk off your faces).
So the bottom line is this Grant: If you wanna discuss beauty or any other such nebulous subjects, including, politics, poetry, love or religion, please take them to a church or another forum (or at the very least try to work in some hard-boiled facts about sex, hormones or mind-altering drugs so those of us who want to discuss objective technology have SOMETHING to bite onto that makes sense).
Thanks.
James
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Re: Beauty: An Off-topic Subject - P.S.
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Oh, and one other thing Grant, there is another case where you can probably feel PC discussing beauty here at the MIND-X . . .
Let's say you whack your thumb real good with a hammer, and it swells up. You can say that the swelling was a real BEAUT (short for beauty) because that's the kind of beauty we can measure. We know the lump will be between 3 - 8 millimeters high, and have a diameter of say 2.5 centimeters (given you weren't using a sledge hammer in which case it would be more like 5 centimeters).
We could even discuss other aspects of this beaut like how much energy was imparted to your thumb (F = ma), or how much motion was converted to heat or hot air (the exact words coming out of your mouth) or the exact momentum the hammer had at the moment of impact the beaut was created (P = mv).
If you want to relate all this beauty to psychological considerations we could probably even do this as I would postulate that there would have been a measurable effect on your state of mind and this, of course, could be measured by how much you yell (at the moment of impact or even hours later if your grandchildren make excessive noise in the house, for instance). The psychological effect of your beaut (as plotted from moment of impact to later, delta t) could be measured in decibels, i.e., the louder you yell, the more decibels hence the greater the psychological impact at any given value of t on the abscissa. In this way, we might be able to draw empirical correlations between the humanities (tolerance for kids) and the sciences (various physical impacts on the human body) for the very first time. Grant, that beuat could lead to a Nobel. And even more important, we might even be able to coin a new unit of measure -- the beaut.
James
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