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Grognor comments on Things you are supposed to like - Less Wrong
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I think it's more a case of us not being good enough at them yet. An aesthetic experience isn't going to affect everyone in the same way, but neither is aspirin. We can still count on reliable clusterings of similar reactions and go from there.
I agree with your last sentence but not your first. Aesthetics is pretty reliable among humans, but what about in minds-in-general?
After all, dung beetles probably consider dung to be pleasing at some level. The beauty of dung, art, a piece of music, etc., is not "true" or "false".
"Aesthetics is pretty reliable among humans, but what about in minds-in-general"
I don't think that's relevant. A fugue's job description doesn't include entertaining killer robots from outer space, it's supposed to entertain humans.
In general, I think any artwork should be judged (not enjoyed, but judged) based on whether the author succeeded or failed at what [s]he, personally set out to do, and whether it was a hard thing to do - whether it is creating music that is different from all other music in every way imaginable while remaining musical, or writing a novel that avoids all unrealism, or just figuring out what makes museums accept works for which "garbage" is a description, not an insult. Basically, the same way you'd judge an engineer.
Now I wish there were a classical music piece entitled "Fugue in G for Killer Robots from Outer Space".
Sort of like this?
I, uh. Wow. I did not expect to like that nearly as much as I did.
Ah, for future reference: this looks to me like a case of defecting by accident. If you intended insult, of course, feel free to disregard this message.
I hadn't seen any of Flight of the Conchords before, and was wary of it (for reasons of genre) once I clicked the link, but that was a pretty fun song. Sorry for the illusion of transparency on my part.
No problem; and thanks for explaining, actually. I was having trouble coming up with a reason why you'd expect it to be bad other than a low opinion of my taste, though I was pretty sure that wasn't the case (for one thing, I don't believe I've commented on music on this site).
Incidentally, you wouldn't believe how long I agonized over a way to bring that implication to your attention without defecting by accident (by seeming accusatory or insulting) myself. This stuff is harder than it seems.
In that case, we've both learned something about communicating on the Internet. Tsuyoku naritai!
See Schmidhuber (of AIXI etc):
I'm watching his '09 Singularity Summit talk now. Is there a reason I shouldn't consider it massively important?
It's been a while since I read his writing on this topic, but I remember thinking that it is a cute idea, yet I really wanted experimental backing (which ought to be easy to do) and the generated stuff didn't seem very pretty.
A good general artist should be able to study dung beetles for a while and then construct an optimally pleasing piece if dung. Doing so would be a valid act of artistic expression, and in fact the idea is pretty interesting and novel, so it might give quite a bit of status if done well. If I had more time and access to dung beetles I would give it a go, since that kind of cogsci crossover and provocative thing is right up my alley. I'd not be surprised to see a TED talk about it by some artist who did it either.
I am surprised no one has brought up http://www.xkcd.com/915/ yet.
(I may one day regret posting this comment, but... when that XKCD was published, I remarked in
#lesswrongthat it was entirely correct, and pointed to myself: as a result of my years cleaning a dog pen, I had developed distinct aesthetic preferences as far as feces went. They can vary widely in attractiveness based on coloring, water-content, foreign bodies, etc.)How about just getting more accurate about what actually happens (in terms of interaction between sound waves, light waves, and brain) when we perceive art? Surely we are doing this.