Debate: Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

[universe34]

Does the old adage hold true? Is beauty truly subjective, or is there a way to quantify it? I want to see someone mathematically quantify beauty. This should be interesting.

 

[y4r5xeym5]

All mathematical studies I have read pertaining to beauty shows that attraction towards a person is based relative to the person who is giving the attraction. I wish I knew what I did with those articles...

 

[Cognisant]

The objectification of beauty, gah, don't we get enough of this crap in society, need the brown stinking slush of mainstream idiocy defile this forum as well?

@-universe34
Ask yourself why you want to see someone mathematically quantify beauty, and when you've figured it out I daresay you’ll be too ashamed of yourself to want it anymore.

 

[echoplex]

loved the picture, OreSama.

< < < > > >​

I think it depends on how one defines beauty. It seems there are different types of beauty; or at least different ways the word is used (misused?). While it may be true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there are many observable trends regarding the beholder's eye.

In terms of sexual attractiveness (one way 'beauty' is often used), there are tendencies regarding things like waist-hip ratio and symmetry. Though, there is also much variation culture to culture when it comes to things like weight, skin tone, and fixation on certain body parts and features. There is also, of course, the golden ratio, which many believe has a direct relationship with beauty.

While I wouldn't go as far as to say it's mathematical quantification of beauty, we can certainly observe how certain traits, often described as beautiful, have survival and reproductive advantages. However, you can't pretend that's the end-all be-all of beauty, not unless you wish to redefine 'beauty' in such a way. I think there are many aspects of beauty that can be objectively measured, but there will always be variation because beauty 'happens' within our own subjective interpretation. It may be human nature to find certain characteristics beautiful, but it's also well within our capacity to expand our sense of beauty beyond our basic instincts.

Quantification may be possible within specific contexts of beauty, but not for beauty as a whole. The kind of beauty seen in a face is different from that of a painting, which is different from that seen in a sunset, which is different from that seen in the cat Ore posted, etc..

 

[s0nystyle]

There's a difference between beauty and attraction. Beauty can be quantified into particular traits such as:

- Overall facial symetry (however the hell you spell it *sigh*)
- This includes body features in the 1:1 1/3 (correct me if im wrong)

- Body shape (men in general prefer women with bottle-shaped bodies)

- The pronounced-ness-necity of facial features (ie chin + cheekbones)

- etc

They had a special on "what makes people beautiful" on the discovery channel last week, im sure you could find it online somewhere

PS: SHIT i just noticed i repeated what echoplex said

 

[LAM]

It depends on what meaning you are saying when you say beauty. It could just be someone who is too attractive to merely describe them as attractive.

Then there is the beauty that oresama's picture describes, it is something that transcends attraction (sexual or not), it doesn't have anything to do with the genetic love for certain traits which will increase chances of survival, it is beyond simply humans. It can be an emotion, a moment, an object or animal, personality, machine, idea, concept, artwork or basically anything and any combination of anything.
The only thing is that that sort of true beauty can only exist in the viewer, he can try to describe what he feels, but it is extremely unlikely that more than a miniature part of humanity will feel the beauty to such an extent as that one person.

 

[Jah]

I believe that:

Attraction, and thus our assignation of beauty, is decided on the basis of social value combined with genetic compatibility.
Genes decide the general bone-structure and basic muscle-structure of a person, as well as how symmetric their faces will be, and the general healthiness of the person will pronounce these genetic qualities. (genetic potential)

A certain level of good health, combined with good genes and a pretty face will be attributed as beautiful.

This is not alone in altering our perception of whether a person is beautiful; since the general status of the person within the society (High status usually attracts money, though this is not always so.) also will influence a persons opinion and, indeed, their evaluation of the individuals beauty.

The halo-effect works both ways in that a person who may not be especially well-made in purely biological terms may, if demonstrated high social value, seem more beautiful to by-standers. Just like we will automatically attribute high quality behavior to a beautiful person (Believing them to be generous, smart, good etc.).

 

[Dormouse]

It seems to me people can more readily agree upon who is ugly than on who is beautiful.

 

[NeverAmI]

(1+√5)/2

 

[DrSLudge]

This thread doesn't seem to really be a "formal debate" ..... but I want to give my 2cents


I believe there is only one way to interpret the statement "beaty is in the eye of the beholder" and that is... "beauty is judged by the judge"
so that means the main topic of debate: beauty is subjective.

It's true- beauty is subjective.
proof - not everyone agrees on who is beautiful. not everyone has the same criteria for what constitutes to beauty.

 

[DylanHead]

http://www.facialbeauty.org/divineproportion.html

 

[Faux Pas]

S'up. (Everything I will say hinges on Physicalism being true)


Rather than attempting to quantify beautiful on a superficial level- through trying to determine patterns in what we observe to be beautiful, why not instead ask whether our beauty can be quantified based on the more objective neural processes in our brains?

Assumedly, every little sense of self and perception we have is a result of chemical reactions in our brain. In that case, even the slippery, subjective concepts such as what we find beautiful can, technically, be reduced to logical, natural and objective processes in our brain.

What I believe is that there is a definite framework for the recognition of beauty, based on this. On a very fundamental level, if past experiences are excluded, then we should, technically, all find the same things beautiful and derive the exact same feeling from it. But, all our perceptions of beauty are derived, and we, as individuals, build upon this framework for the recognition of beauty based on our own experiences (which are imprinted as processes or activities in the brain). But, there are some sources of beauty which are apparently more resistant to change (the golden ratio might be one of them) and still fall within our collective definition of beauty.

Some food for thought: Do different genes between individuals lead to different biological makeups of the human brain? In that case, even on a very fundamental level, there would still be differences in beauty, and perhaps, this would entail that children tend to experience a similar, if not identical, sense of beauty as their parents.

And so, if physicalism is the case, then once neurobiology becomes advanced enough to be able to determine how each individual part of the brain contributes to our consciousness, beauty can be quantified in terms of the processes and activities in our brain. So, if person A finds an object beautiful and person B does not, it is because person A has different processes and activities triggered in his/her brain, and that if such processes are triggered or introduced in person B, that person will feel the exact same thing as person A does.

Of course, this does not answer the question of why we even recognize things to be beautiful, but it provides a means to quantify beauty based on an objective measurement, that of neural processes in the brain.

 

[Cognisant]

Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

Bad pickup line: If looks could kill, you'd be a Beholder, or maybe Medusa.
Followed by the ever tasteless, but contextually ironic: You make me hard.

 

[BigApplePi]

Does the old adage hold true? Is beauty truly subjective, or is there a way to quantify it? I want to see someone mathematically quantify beauty. This should be interesting.

I have asked this question of myself before but since no one else has ever asked it I know, I never thought much on it in depth. Being of mathematical bent I'd love to come up with an answer that can be put into words. Here is what I have so far:

Beauty is objective. It is not simple because it involves an object and an observer. The observer (us) we know is not simple because people are not simple. The object varies. Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder, nor in the object. Beauty is in the relationship between the observer and the object observed. That relationship will vary in complexity as we experience the object. So:

Beauty = the harmonious relationship of the observer and the object observed. The greater the harmony, the greater the beauty. Harmony is investigated by examining the object as a whole and in its details and noting the reaction of the observer.

The underlined below are hyperlinks.

Example 1 of OreSama: Maybe YOU can describe the beauty of The Ugly cat story better than I can. The ugly cat is well defined. We get the picture. We puzzle what the story is about. The cat is rejected for its poor state of affairs just as we might be. The cat suffers. We expect its temperament perhaps to match our outer vision of it. Turns out the cat is unexpectedly loving. This affects us, turns us around. It hits something deep within us. (You define it.) The person who experiences the cat is us. We experience the story. It is simple as a whole but not in its parts. It is believable (self-consistent). Therefore is has beauty. We measure this beauty by the complexity of the relationship: Us and the story.

Example 2 of NeverAmI: This is the Golden Ratio supposedly pleasing to the eye for its proportions. The beauty here is again in the relationship of the observer and the observed. Not everyone is going to notice or care. For those who do there is a certain mystery. The complexity lies within us and within nature. The astonishment is the whole is so simple belying what lies underneath.

Correction: For "relationship", substitute the System represented by the observer and the observed.

Beauty = The amount of harmony for this system.

 

[Cognisant]

Please stop trying to define beauty with a single conclusive definition.

It's subjective, irrational, indefinable, not because there is no applicable definition, instead it's indefinable because there's no single applicable definition, it defies deconstruction because no matter which perspective is taken, you can never describe the entirety.

Escape the tyranny of binary thinking!

 

[I'mProbablyanINTP]

Please stop trying to define beauty with a single conclusive definition.

It's subjective, irrational, indefinable, not because there is no applicable definition, instead it's indefinable because there's no single applicable definition, it defies deconstruction because no matter which perspective is taken, you can never describe the entirety.

Escape the tyranny of binary thinking!

Agreed. It's the same as trying to debate "true love".

Do blind people stop seeing beauty?

 

[BigApplePi]

Please stop trying to define beauty with a single conclusive definition.

It's subjective, irrational, indefinable, not because there is no applicable definition, instead it's indefinable because there's no single applicable definition, it defies deconstruction because no matter which perspective is taken, you can never describe the entirety.

Escape the tyranny of binary thinking!

Are you talkin' to me? Huh? Isn't YOUR statement a violation of what your statement says? I meant my statement to be all inclusive. You say beauty is subjective & irrational? Remember Si? Please give example of this. Where is the irrational -- in the beholder or the beheld? If I look at Van Gogh's sunflowers, is it beautiful because it says something or ugly because it fails?

 

[BigApplePi]

Agreed. It's the same as trying to debate "true love".

Do blind people stop seeing beauty?

Are those rhetorical Qs or would you like a try at answers? I'm sure some INTP will venture answers.

 

[Cognisant]

Are you talkin' to me? Huh? Isn't YOUR statement a violation of what your statement says?

Though subjectivity is of course subjective, the concept of subjectivity to which we ascribe the label "subjectivity" is not, it's a rationalization of irrationality, for example the answer "I don't know" implies that the answerer does know that they don't know, but that's irrelevant because it's not the question that was being asked, i.e. to discover what the answerer does know, not what s/he doesn’t know.

Defining the label “subjective” doesn’t undermine the subjectivity of subjectivity.

You say beauty is subjective & irrational? Remember Si? Please give example of this. Where is the irrational -- in the beholder or the beheld?

In relationship between the beheld and beholders (plural).
Hence the term "subject-tivity", because each beholder beholds the beheld differently, thus subjectivity isn't derived from either, it's like how life is the balance point between chaos and order, a derivative of two that results in something greater than the sum of its parts.

If I look at Van Gogh's sunflowers, is it beautiful because it says something or ugly because it fails?

I have no idea, it's your perspective.

Truth is not biased.
(You can quote me if you like )

 

[I'mProbablyanINTP]

Are those rhetorical Qs or would you like a try at answers? I'm sure some INTP will venture answers.

Hahaha, I suppose it's both.

It's rhetorical, but the intention was to make the observer realise a blind person could still find beauty in many things beyond the visual, (smell, touch, warmth, talking to someone, whatever that person finds beautiful is beautiful) and that arguing about 'beauty' is pointless because it is subjective, much like 'love' and by extension 'true love'.

"can a blind person still see beauty?" just implies that seeing isn't entirely visual, and beauty isn't entirely based on beauty, so it's obviously not true. Our perceptions can easily be swayed or fooled, so don't get too caught up in the visual or you might miss the rest.

Beauty is hardly ever visible at eye-level, really. I don't think I've ever seen a persons exterior and known them to be beautiful inside

 

[BigApplePi]

Hahaha, I suppose it's both.

It's rhetorical, but the intention was to make the observer realise a blind person could still find beauty in many things beyond the visual, (smell, touch, warmth, talking to someone, whatever that person finds beautiful is beautiful) and that arguing about 'beauty' is pointless because it is subjective, much like 'love' and by extension 'true love'.

"can a blind person still see beauty?" just implies that seeing isn't entirely visual, and beauty isn't entirely based on beauty, so it's obviously not true. Our perceptions can easily be swayed or fooled, so don't get too caught up in the visual or you might miss the rest.

Beauty is hardly ever visible at eye-level, really. I don't thonl I've ever seen a persons exterior and known them to be beautiful inside.

Yer right. The "eye" of the beholder could be the

ear - there are at least two threads going right now: "Worst Music Ever" and "Love song favorites" which have something to say on beauty
nose - I imagine a wine taster knows a beautiful bouquet.
touch - soft velvet, silk

 

[BigApplePi]

Looks like your post is getting closer to what I'm looking for. Now if only I'm not up a blind alley!

Though subjectivity is of course subjective, the concept of subjectivity to which we ascribe the label "subjectivity" is not, it's a rationalization of irrationality, for example the answer "I don't know" implies that the answerer does know that they don't know, but that's irrelevant because it's not the question that was being asked, i.e. to discover what the answerer does know, not what s/he doesn’t know.

I'm a little uncertain how to grab the meanings of the terms "subjective" and "objective." When I talked about the system of observed and observer I was shooting to have that objective from the POV of someone outside and studying the system.

Let's run with this example and see how it goes. There is the expression, "Can't see the forest for the trees." When one is in the forest one sees a lot of trees, gains experience of defining a tree and can check this out with his forest fellows. Though there can be disagreement there will be large agreement as to what a tree is and so we can call this view "objective." Not so with the forest. As one moves within trees, one sees one is somewhere but only relative to other trees. their is no standing outside the forest to tell what it is. The best one can do it describe the locality or say one is in "some" environment. Another in the forest may see a different locality. So one's view of this "forest" as a locality is subjective.

I want to apply this to the observer-object system of beauty.

Defining the label “subjective” doesn’t undermine the subjectivity of subjectivity.

In relationship between the beheld and beholders (plural).
Hence the term "subject-tivity", because each beholder beholds the beheld differently, thus subjectivity isn't derived from either, it's like how life is the balance point between chaos and order, a derivative of two that results in something greater than the sum of its parts.

I have no idea, it's your perspective.

Truth is not biased.

Yes each beholder views the subject differently. I know I'm skipping around but let me take this example. We can later see if it can be generalized. I once wanted to claim this woman "beautiful." If that's true as objective observers we would try to define what viewers see that makes this so:
http://img.listal.com/image/369634/500full-jessica-biel.jpg

Many would see her beautiful and the reasons might be: she has regular features. No blemishes, looks healthy, has no "off-putting" characteristics. Not everyone would agree so we look for boundary conditions. If the viewer is young she may too old. If the viewer is gay or a hetero woman she may or may not still qualify as beautiful. If the viewer is a frog or someone who doesn't care, beauty won't even be considered. So we try to bracket who the viewers might be and what they see to have her qualify. Then, "She is beautiful for these viewers" and in the world of these viewers she gets a rating measured on some scale.

If we stick with a beauty rating just from the observer, we wind up with beauty as relative to the observer and call it "subjective." I say instead it is objectivity partly the beholder and partly within the object and partly how the beholder views the object. (She has regular features, I like regular features, I am in the spirit of looking for regular features.) It is the whole. Yes the whole (system) is greater than the sum of its parts.

(You can quote me if you like )

[/QUOTE]
I did.

I wrote the above over a split time period so if it doesn't read clearly or smoothly blame it on ???

 

[DrSLudge]

the debate was never to define beauty is just asks to defend or challenge the statement that beauty is in the eye of the beholder...

it's true, it is, because different beholders can have different opinions on the same beheld.

 

[BigApplePi]

the debate was never to define beauty is just asks to defend or challenge the statement that beauty is in the eye of the beholder...

it's true, it is, because different beholders can have different opinions on the same beheld.

Where do YOU think beauty is Dr. SLudge?

 

[Jill BioSkop]

To continue on what Faux Pas said:
If you assume that feeling something is beautiful is an emotion at least most people feel, and that as an emotion it has or arises from physical manifestations in the brain, you could measure it via electrodes, brain scans ect- then relate the intensity of those manifestations as measured to what the subject describes feeling.

If a significant correlation if found you could measure that for a lot of people for the one thing under the same conditions (lighting, mood of the observer, background colour, temperature, etc.) and then assign it a measure of beauty based on the average of those measurements or something (or just the sum, as a lot of people are more likely to talk about an experience (in this case the experience of appreciating that thing) if they liked it, and then the 'beauty score' takes in account popularity).
I hope that makes sense.

What about writing down an equation (or expression or process) a majority of mathematicians find beautiful? Wouldn't that be a mathematical expression of beauty, although not general?

I think BigApplePi's definition is as close to a general principle as you can get.

Using the senses of touch and proprioconception for spatial perception (by that I mean perceiving the physical 3D shape of something) will give you sculpture appreciation.

@I'mProbablyanINTP: Can you have false love? Isn't it more a question of confusing love with other emotions, rather than a 'true' and a 'false' kind of love?

 

[BigApplePi]

To continue on what Faux Pas said:
If you assume that feeling something is beautiful is an emotion at least most people feel, and that as an emotion it has or arises from physical manifestations in the brain, you could measure it via electrodes, brain scans ect- then relate the intensity of those manifestations as measured to what the subject describes feeling.

If a significant correlation if found you could measure that for a lot of people for the one thing under the same conditions (lighting, mood of the observer, background colour, temperature, etc.) and then assign it a measure of beauty based on the average of those measurements or something (or just the sum, as a lot of people are more likely to talk about an experience (in this case the experience of appreciating that thing) if they liked it, and then the 'beauty score' takes in account popularity).
I hope that makes sense.

What would be the state of mind of an appreciator of beauty? enrapture? Peace? Hauntedness? Coolness? Preoccupation? Immersion? Would any of those light up a common brain area?

What about writing down an equation (or expression or process) a majority of mathematicians find beautiful? Wouldn't that be a mathematical expression of beauty, although not general?

I have such an equation where mathematicians did exactly that. Know which I mean?

I think BigApplePi's definition is as close to a general principle as you can get.

Thank you. Thinking of beauty as being a system is not especially pleasing. There's got to be a better way.

Further thoughts on trying to objectify and quantify beauty. I want to answer if this is possible and what are the limits in answering and may go about this in a round-about manner. Suppose instead of being asked about beauty we were asked about water or wetness. How do we tell if something is wet? Suppose we find ourselves in a forest of oxygen and hydrogen atoms, fully knowing this is how wetness and water breakdown. Dare one say the oxygen is like the object of beauty, meaningless as to wetness without hydrogen? Dare we say the hydrogen is like the observer, sensing beauty but unable to identify the source? Put the molecules together and we get water, a system of H2O. Still no wetness until we have someone touch the water.

Okay wrong. I could have started with water as the object of beauty and the person as the prospective sensor of the beauty. There is no wetness without the entire system of person touching water. Can we now say beauty is neither the object nor the person's feeling but rather the person's experience of the object?

Now we return to the OP. We take statistics of people randomly selected from some identifiable large group. We deliver an object and ask them if they experience beauty giving them a rating scale of 1 to 10. We now have a measurement of beauty for this large group. The OP has been answered: We have both objectivity and a measurement. Q.E.D.

Objection: Suppose a professional art critic comes along and says, "Your judgment is B.S. This so-called art is crap." Or alternatively, "This is a masterpiece and no one recognizes it." Does that blow the objectivity conclusion?

Answer: If the art critic is articulate and listened to, the group will have learned from the critic how to judge art. That will have been factored into the group's judgment.

 

[I'mProbablyanINTP]

To continue on what Faux Pas said:
If you assume that feeling something is beautiful is an emotion at least most people feel, and that as an emotion it has or arises from physical manifestations in the brain, you could measure it via electrodes, brain scans ect- then relate the intensity of those manifestations as measured to what the subject describes feeling.

If a significant correlation if found you could measure that for a lot of people for the one thing under the same conditions (lighting, mood of the observer, background colour, temperature, etc.) and then assign it a measure of beauty based on the average of those measurements or something (or just the sum, as a lot of people are more likely to talk about an experience (in this case the experience of appreciating that thing) if they liked it, and then the 'beauty score' takes in account popularity).
I hope that makes sense.

What about writing down an equation (or expression or process) a majority of mathematicians find beautiful? Wouldn't that be a mathematical expression of beauty, although not general?

I think BigApplePi's definition is as close to a general principle as you can get.

Using the senses of touch and proprioconception for spatial perception (by that I mean perceiving the physical 3D shape of something) will give you sculpture appreciation.

@I'mProbablyanINTP: Can you have false love? Isn't it more a question of confusing love with other emotions, rather than a 'true' and a 'false' kind of love?

I agree with you, I'm pretty sure . I think it'd be so hard to quantify beauty using those brain scans because the things I love one day are the things I hate the next. Maybe my brain scans would reflect passion somewhere? Anything that makes me feel passion is beautiful as wrong as that is.

Evoking an emotional response is beauty? Don't know, could be.

But I agree with you. And I have no real answer to my rhetorical question, just implying "fake love" or "true love" are all measurements of "love", and before you can measure them you need to define love, and since you can't define love, you can't argue "false" or "true" love. If that makes sense.

 

[Jill BioSkop]

[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Long post is long.
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What would be the state of mind of an appreciator of beauty? enrapture? Peace? Hauntedness? Coolness? Preoccupation? Immersion? Would any of those light up a common brain area?

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… [FONT=Arial, sans-serif]I don't know. ^^' Those words strike me as things that could come alongside the experience of something as beautiful, or as a consequence of it. I don't see them as included in it. 'Feeling beauty' is one type of emotion and those words are all other types, and they can be related or very closely associated but one cannot define the other imho.[/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Practically-speaking I'd just ask the observer to tell us themselves when they feel something is beautiful. It's a rough-and-ready method, to get something to build on. I wouldn't ask them exactly what they feel when they identify something as beautiful because it'll probably muddle most of them and distract them from the actual vague feeling you want to measure. It'll just scramble the measurements. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]You can then refine the questions in terms of wording and differences in connotations for different people or groups of people, to ferret out how to refer to the same vague feeling in most people. Ideally we'd get feedback by discussing with people why they answered as they did. Less ideally we'd guess. [/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]I remember reading somewhere that there where two types of beauty, the pretty and the sublime. The point was made in relation to gender bias, with a list of adjectives for each, with pretty being feminine, small, more often colourful, down-to-earth ect. and sublime being big, transcendent, overwhelming, masculine etc. One could use the dichotomy and test separately for either side of it, with pictures of flowers and the earth from space for eg. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]The pretty stuff could be associated with feelings of 'I like that', 'OMG so CUTE!!!!1!', 'Nice flowers', while the sublime stuff would be more likely to sound like 'Wow' or 'Amazing!', or leave them speechless. You could give a questionnaire to fill in for each object.[/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Maybe we'll end up approximating 'beauty' from a pattern of activity as correlated with how people described the experience. 'Sublime' could cause one pattern and 'pretty' another, and we'd have to unknot the effects of memories et al. from them. [/FONT]

I have such an equation where mathematicians did exactly that. Know which I mean?

[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]I'm not sure. Golden ratio ( (1+sqrt5)/2 if memory serves)? E=mc**2? However you make up fractals? [/FONT]

Thinking of beauty as being a system is not especially pleasing. There's got to be a better way.

[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]If you want to define the terms used in a language A, you need to make up a new language B (a metalanguage) to define them in, so that there will be no connotations or baggage skewing your definitions, and all that read them can be absolutely sure of what you mean. You can't objectively describe a system while staying inside it, because it mean you have a point of view, a bias of perception, blind spots regarding which part of the system you address and how. You are subjective by definition. Only by standing outside of the system can you take it in in its totality and objectively ('truly') perceive its components and how they relate. By that virtue, you'd need a new language C (a metametalanguage) to describe language B in and so on ad infinitum. [/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]If you try to systematise an emotion, to make a metalanguage to describe it in, you can't use emotions in that metalanguage. But because emotions are an issue that emotionally affect us, our emotions in regards to them will be hurt or annoyed when being ignored when thinking of this important subject.
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[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Short version:
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[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]I think beauty perception is an emotion, and we have emotions about it. To analyse emotions objectively you can't use emotions. Emotions don't like being ignored. It's doomed to go against the grain.
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[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]I don't think the way is at fault, the methodology just rankles a bit, through no fault of its own.
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Can we now say beauty is neither the object nor the person's feeling but rather the person's experience of the object?

[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Beauty as an experience makes sense. I don't have a clue how you'd measure that though. You could treat the effect of the experience on the observer as an approximate measure of the experience itself. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Do experiences imply some reciprocity? Does the object experience the viewer, or experience being experienced? Does experience imply sentience, or a nervous/perceiving system of some sort? Could two objects experience each other (eg: cue ball clacking into another)?[/FONT]

Now we return to the OP. We take statistics of people randomly selected from some identifiable large group. We deliver an object and ask them if they experience beauty giving them a rating scale of 1 to 10. We now have a measurement of beauty for this large group. The OP has been answered: We have both objectivity and a measurement. Q.E.D.

[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]To quibble, I don't think we get objectivity in either of those procedures. We get a quantifiable measure of people's subjective impressions, and we can do statistics on it help make up our minds about whether to believe the numbers. We can give an arbitrary 'beauty rating' for that object. We assume that rating is related to what the experience of beauty is. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]To clarify my position, I don't think we can absolutely objectively define beauty due to being subject to the feeling, and thus inside the system, but we can get good indirect measurements of it via its effects. [/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Also, maybe beauty i[/FONT][FONT=Arial, sans-serif]s[/FONT][FONT=Arial, sans-serif] an innate quality of an object, but some people can't perceive it. What then? Their 'defective' perception would skew our results and muddle the issue. [/FONT]

[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Objection: Suppose a professional art critic comes along and says, "Your judgment is B.S. This so-called art is crap." Or alternatively, "This is a masterpiece and no one recognizes it." Does that blow the objectivity conclusion?[/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Answer: If the art critic is articulate and listened to, the group will have learned from the critic how to judge art. That will have been factored into the group's judgment.[/FONT]

[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]If the art critic is articulate and listened to he'll be more likely to convince the group, this partly dependent on how distant from the group's own expectations his interpretation is. [/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]As said above, I don't think that experiment is objective, because you can't tell if the art critic was right or wrong. It is all a question of opinion, if their criticism makes sense to me I'll respect their opinion. If they start babbling about symbolism and how the carrot represents capitalism and the feather's corporations I'm likely to dismiss them as idiots. However they may be right and I blind. Supposing you came onto the scene and had to decide who to side with, how would you decide without relying on your own subjective taste? [/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]The easy answer's to ask the artist what they meant. Their art is an expression of what they perceive. One could judge the accuracy of the critic by how it relates to the originator's worldview. But in this case a good critic reads people well, and isn't commenting about the art itself. [/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]If we define 'beauty' as a property of an experience between two things, would it be a quality or a quantity of the experience between them? Hatred can be intense. There could be more than one quality defining an experience, and different quantities of each? [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]I think this relates to how I would interpret brain measurement. I'd look for a pattern of several areas being fired in certain intensities and timings, rather than just specific areas lighting up. [/FONT]

I think it'd be so hard to quantify beauty using those brain scans because the things I love one day are the things I hate the next. Maybe my brain scans would reflect passion somewhere? Anything that makes me feel passion is beautiful as wrong as that is.

[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]You still have a relationship with those things. :smiley_emoticons_mr Relating to the above response, maybe the proportions of qualities change depending on your mood. Maybe your mood is one of them. I'd be looking at your mood at the time the scan is taken. I'd be much to difficult at that point to correlate your reactions from one day to the next.
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[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Evoking an emotional response is beauty? Don't know, could be.

But I agree with you. And I have no real answer to my rhetorical question, just implying "fake love" or "true love" are all measurements of "love", and before you can measure them you need to define love, and since you can't define love, you can't argue "false" or "true" love. If that makes sense. [/FONT]

[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]I think beauty is from the emotional domain because all the best descriptions of beauty are vague and depend on the receiver having emotions to understand them (eg: I assume you'd understand if I spoke of something as touching. But how would you explain 'touching'?). It also has little use apart from being factored in analysing people's behaviour (eg: regarding caterpillars: “EWWW!! Kill it!! -Why? -It's fugly!! -..?”) and as a shortcut to decide whether you fancy someone.[/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]It makes sense. You could always agree on a working definition of love, which would be understood by all parties to not represent the real thing, but to be close enough for their needs and purposes at the time. A first brick to build on. And maybe if later the house is nice and strong and you've got more insight you can go back and change the brick, but in the meantime you've got to start somewhere. [/FONT]

 

[AlisaD]

Please stop trying to define beauty with a single conclusive definition.

It's subjective, irrational, indefinable, not because there is no applicable definition, instead it's indefinable because there's no single applicable definition, it defies deconstruction because no matter which perspective is taken, you can never describe the entirety.

Escape the tyranny of binary thinking!

I think I love you.

 

[BigApplePi]

[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Long post is long.
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[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Well we both made long posts. I don't know if I can do justice to yours -- there are so many points. Also Beauty is being discussed on more than one thread so there may be overlap and good points elsewhere. I guess I'll just dive in.[/FONT]

… [FONT=Arial, sans-serif]I don't know. ^^' Those words strike me as things that could come alongside the experience of something as beautiful, or as a consequence of it. I don't see them as included in it. 'Feeling beauty' is one type of emotion and those words are all other types, and they can be related or very closely associated but one cannot define the other imho.[/FONT]

Feelings certainly lie within the eye of the beholder. Man, the social animal shares those feelings. I'm still looking for objective descriptions or sources from which emotions may or may not be derived.

[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Practically-speaking I'd just ask the observer to tell us themselves when they feel something is beautiful. It's a rough-and-ready method, to get something to build on. I wouldn't ask them exactly what they feel when they identify something as beautiful because it'll probably muddle most of them and distract them from the actual vague feeling you want to measure. It'll just scramble the measurements. [/FONT]

[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]You can then refine the questions in terms of wording and differences in connotations for different people or groups of people, to ferret out how to refer to the same vague feeling in most people. Ideally we'd get feedback by discussing with people why they answered as they did. Less ideally we'd guess. [/FONT]

[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]I remember reading somewhere that there where two types of beauty, the pretty and the sublime. The point was made in relation to gender bias, with a list of adjectives for each, with pretty being feminine, small, more often colourful, down-to-earth ect. and sublime being big, transcendent, overwhelming, masculine etc. One could use the dichotomy and test separately for either side of it, with pictures of flowers and the earth from space for eg. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]The pretty stuff could be associated with feelings of 'I like that', 'OMG so CUTE!!!!1!', 'Nice flowers', while the sublime stuff would be more likely to sound like 'Wow' or 'Amazing!', or leave them speechless. You could give a questionnaire to fill in for each object.[/FONT]

[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Maybe we'll end up approximating 'beauty' from a pattern of activity as correlated with how people described the experience. 'Sublime' could cause one pattern and 'pretty' another, and we'd have to unknot the effects of memories et al. from them. [/FONT]

Different kinds of beauty categories? That sounds good. Offhand things like "cute" or "pretty" might refer to particular aspects of the whole where not everyone would share that appreciation. The sublime could refer to the more general where the appeal is so broad and universal as to be astonishing.

[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]I'm not sure. Golden ratio ( (1+sqrt5)/2 if memory serves)? E=mc**2? However you make up fractals? [/FONT]

Somewhere I saw a list of the top ten most appealing mathematical formulas. e to the pi i = minus one was way at the top. The reason is because it combines three most useful, deep mathematical concepts into one formula and the answer is the astonishingly simple minus one.

If you want to define the terms used in a language A, you need to make up a new language B (a metalanguage) to define them in, so that there will be no connotations or baggage skewing your definitions, and all that read them can be absolutely sure of what you mean. You can't objectively describe a system while staying inside it, because it mean you have a point of view, a bias of perception, blind spots regarding which part of the system you address and how. You are subjective by definition. Only by standing outside of the system can you take it in in its totality and objectively ('truly') perceive its components and how they relate. By that virtue, you'd need a new language C (a metametalanguage) to describe language B in and so on ad infinitum.
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]If you try to systematise an emotion, to make a metalanguage to describe it in, you can't use emotions in that metalanguage. But because emotions are an issue that emotionally affect us, our emotions in regards to them will be hurt or annoyed when being ignored when thinking of this important subject. [/FONT]

I agree with what your are talking about but am still thinking about it. The topic I think is, "How do we treat experience?"
1. New inputs from outside the system.
2. Do these new inputs belong to a separate system and do we assume they are good?
3. Feedback loops within the system.
The problem is, as you've observed, what do we do with undefined new inputs? Others have proposed a dialectic:
Thesis -> Antithesis -> Synthesis
I have been too distracted to work on a thread I started on "How to Understand."

[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Short version:
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[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]I think beauty perception is an emotion, and we have emotions about it. To analyse emotions objectively you can't use emotions. Emotions don't like being ignored. It's doomed to go against the grain.
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[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]I don't think the way is at fault, the methodology just rankles a bit, through no fault of its own.
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I think emotions are just a form of feelings. Those feelings are within us and are crude. We are reacting to the outside world which has something we interpret as beauty. Beauty is an abstraction from the outside world.

I offer this for study and may continue later:
http://www.nextnature.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/sunnybergman_530.jpg




[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Beauty as an experience makes sense. I don't have a clue how you'd measure that though. You could treat the effect of the experience on the observer as an approximate measure of the experience itself. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Do experiences imply some reciprocity? Does the object experience the viewer, or experience being experienced? Does experience imply sentience, or a nervous/perceiving system of some sort? Could two objects experience each other (eg: cue ball clacking into another)?[/FONT]





[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]To quibble, I don't think we get objectivity in either of those procedures. We get a quantifiable measure of people's subjective impressions, and we can do statistics on it help make up our minds about whether to believe the numbers. We can give an arbitrary 'beauty rating' for that object. We assume that rating is related to what the experience of beauty is. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]To clarify my position, I don't think we can absolutely objectively define beauty due to being subject to the feeling, and thus inside the system, but we can get good indirect measurements of it via its effects. [/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Also, maybe beauty i[/FONT][FONT=Arial, sans-serif]s[/FONT][FONT=Arial, sans-serif] an innate quality of an object, but some people can't perceive it. What then? Their 'defective' perception would skew our results and muddle the issue. [/FONT]




[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]If the art critic is articulate and listened to he'll be more likely to convince the group, this partly dependent on how distant from the group's own expectations his interpretation is. [/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]As said above, I don't think that experiment is objective, because you can't tell if the art critic was right or wrong. It is all a question of opinion, if their criticism makes sense to me I'll respect their opinion. If they start babbling about symbolism and how the carrot represents capitalism and the feather's corporations I'm likely to dismiss them as idiots. However they may be right and I blind. Supposing you came onto the scene and had to decide who to side with, how would you decide without relying on your own subjective taste? [/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]The easy answer's to ask the artist what they meant. Their art is an expression of what they perceive. One could judge the accuracy of the critic by how it relates to the originator's worldview. But in this case a good critic reads people well, and isn't commenting about the art itself. [/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]If we define 'beauty' as a property of an experience between two things, would it be a quality or a quantity of the experience between them? Hatred can be intense. There could be more than one quality defining an experience, and different quantities of each? [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]I think this relates to how I would interpret brain measurement. I'd look for a pattern of several areas being fired in certain intensities and timings, rather than just specific areas lighting up. [/FONT]






[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]You still have a relationship with those things. :smiley_emoticons_mr Relating to the above response, maybe the proportions of qualities change depending on your mood. Maybe your mood is one of them. I'd be looking at your mood at the time the scan is taken. I'd be much to difficult at that point to correlate your reactions from one day to the next.
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]
[/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]I think beauty is from the emotional domain because all the best descriptions of beauty are vague and depend on the receiver having emotions to understand them (eg: I assume you'd understand if I spoke of something as touching. But how would you explain 'touching'?). It also has little use apart from being factored in analysing people's behaviour (eg: regarding caterpillars: “EWWW!! Kill it!! -Why? -It's fugly!! -..?”) and as a shortcut to decide whether you fancy someone.[/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]It makes sense. You could always agree on a working definition of love, which would be understood by all parties to not represent the real thing, but to be close enough for their needs and purposes at the time. A first brick to build on. And maybe if later the house is nice and strong and you've got more insight you can go back and change the brick, but in the meantime you've got to start somewhere. [/FONT][/QUOTE]