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byrnema comments on Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism - Less Wrong
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I agree with every sentence you've written except for this one:
Beauty may be context dependent (I don't know what it is actually) but if we have a concept of beauty, then it has evolved naturally within the physical universe. The concept is a property of some minds (human minds), thus its a property of the natural world. I would predict that perhaps not every kind of sapient being, but certainly some subset of all sapient beings, would also develop a concept of beauty. If beauty is an actual property of the natural world, then it has a pattern. It would be easier to understand this pattern if there were other sentient beings with concepts of beauty to compare with. A sentient being could use the meta-patterning of beauty, once identified, to perceive and measure beauty outside its own specific context. I have "faith" that meta-beauty would be beautiful to all sentient beings that appreciate beauty -- this is identical to saying that there is a meaningful pattern.
I could conceivably have a theory of the baby-eaters' concept of beauty, that lets me accurately predict how beautiful they will find the act of ruthlessly eating their sentient young, but I will not find beauty in it, I will not see it as some universal meta pattern of beauty that I can appreciate like my own native concept of beauty. I simply do not find it beautiful that an adaption that evolved in harsh conditions to be cruel to sentient beings would persist beyond those harsh conditions and even become the centerpiece of a moral system. But that is a fact that must be included in any universally beautiful meta-beauty.
Something that is made up isn't part of the natural world and doesn't have to fit any pattern.
Then part of your faith is that nothing like the baby-eaters could possibly exist?
Not that, but that you can't deduce anything about the pattern from things that are made up. The patterns result from having to follow physical laws.. things you imagine don't have to.
Could your view be falsified if baby-eaters or a similar species turned out to be real?
No.
At least one of the following statements has to be true:
Which one do you think is true?
I think (3) is true.
It works like this. I have faith that human beauty isn't completely arbitrary. While some aspects may be arbitrary, there are some rules to it that would be shared by other species that have a concept of beauty. The only reason why there wouldn’t be a common rule is if beauty is completely arbitrary, in which case we wouldn’t expect other species to have the concept anyway. The common rule would validate beauty in different contexts (if the rule applies in a context, then beauty is validated in that context) and would provide the possibility of a common universal beauty (if it is possible to satisfy the rule in a way that is context independent).
(edit: a hypothetical description of this applied to baby-eaters with a pretend meta-rule was taken out because I thought it was inane)
It may be worth asking yourself which fear is driving this faith. If you woke up tomorrow without faith in the universal significance of your concept of beauty, what would change? Are you avoiding some disastrous change in world-view that would alter your behavior, or are you simply addicted to the positive affect you get from contemplating beauty?
These concepts can't be communicated this way. Taboo "faith" and "God" and "metapattern", and see what happens.
A possible common rule of beauty would be that a thing is beautiful if it is appreciated by some sentient being that finds it beautiful. However, this is completely vacuous, defining no constraint on what a sentient being might find beautiful. It does not prohibit arbitrary concepts of beauty. It is also far from fundamental, as the sentient beings are made of complicated physical systems.
Do you have a concept of a common rule that actually implies that some concept of beauty is impossible?
Are you talking about some of the real things that the human concept of beauty has a tendency to latch onto, like symmetry?
This doesn't make it a fundamental property of the natural world. I suspect it's just a label we use for a certain fuzzy class of emotional responses. I'm skeptical that it's all that different from other emotional responses. Consider that humans also share a concept of "creepiness". Do you also have faith that "meta-creepiness" would be creepy to all sentient beings capable of being "creeped out"? It may be tempting to ascribe your reaction to something like a house centipede to a fundamental property of the critter, but "creepy", like "beautiful", seems firmly situated in the class of 2-place words.