1) Things fall downwards, and anyone who disagrees is objectively wrong.
2) Mozart is better than Iron Maiden, and anyone who disagrees is objectively wrong.
I think there are problems with the second statement, and not just that people will stop inviting you to parties. You’re trying to impose your opinions on other people.
There are approaches you could take to determine which art is objectively better. For designing a website, the answer is which gets more hits, or sells more products. But as far as art goes… you could take a democratic vote over which artist is better. You could, in a thought experiment, extend the vote to a sum over the whole of mindspace. You could weight by IQ.
But I don’t want my tastes in art to be determined by a democratic vote of what everyone else thinks. At the end of the day, the people who say “there’s no best way to do it” are not able to work out what the most popular website ever would look like, and saying that the currently most popular site is objectively best would stifle innovation.
They’re not trying to say philosophically universally correct points. They’re not theologians trying to determine whether God could create the perfect painting. They’re trying to teach humans.
But as far as art goes… you could take a democratic vote over which artist is better.
I think the most direct way to do it would be to measure people’s brain activity. I’d be skeptical of self reporting. I think people would be swayed a lot by what they think they should like. I’m pretty sure I’ve read some research on this but can’t recall what it was :/
But I don’t want my tastes in art to be determined by a democratic vote of what everyone else thinks.
It wouldn’t be. In this case “best way” would be defined as something along the lines of maximizing total happiness.
Measuring brain activity is certainly possible but brings all sorts of challenges, rendering this kind of approach far less direct than it may seem on the surface.
However your thoughts about expectations are very much supported by a fMRI study (Kirk et al. Neuroimage 2009, direct link to PDF ) manipulating participants’ expectations about artistic images with the following instructions:
There are two types of paintings. 50% of the paintings have been borrowed from the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Copenhagen, Denmark). The other 50% have been generated by the experimenter by means of a computer program (Photoshop)
Paintings were randomly assigned to these two conditions for each participant, and ratings of aesthetic quality were obtained for each painting as well. Instructions modulated brain activity: the same artistic images evoke different responses in prefrontal/orbitofrontal cortex depending on participants’ expectations, and the same images received higher aesthetic ratings if the participant believed they came from a prestigious museum.
The authors also correlated brain activity with the aesthetic ratings given to each image (collapsed over context). No regions were reliably modulated by aesthetic ratings, which should have been the case if there are some regions that are responsive to “artistic quality” detached from context.
Of course, plenty of potential problems with this study, perhaps the most salient to me being the use of entirely abstract artistic images and artistically naive participants. But it does highlight some of the challenges related to revealing information about aesthetics from brain activity.
It wouldn’t be. In this case “best way” would be defined as something along the lines of maximizing total happiness.
Still, rather than having one universal best art, the best approach is to have different peices of art to apply to different people. There may be a universal best piece of art for one person, but I imagine they would still want variety.
I suppose you could try to define away all subjectivity by appealing to utilitarianism, and maybe a post-singularity optimiser that can simulate all brains to gauge their reactions could create a perfect peice of art by those standards. Its still useless for discussing matters in the present.
Consider the following two statements:
1) Things fall downwards, and anyone who disagrees is objectively wrong.
2) Mozart is better than Iron Maiden, and anyone who disagrees is objectively wrong.
I think there are problems with the second statement, and not just that people will stop inviting you to parties. You’re trying to impose your opinions on other people.
There are approaches you could take to determine which art is objectively better. For designing a website, the answer is which gets more hits, or sells more products. But as far as art goes… you could take a democratic vote over which artist is better. You could, in a thought experiment, extend the vote to a sum over the whole of mindspace. You could weight by IQ.
But I don’t want my tastes in art to be determined by a democratic vote of what everyone else thinks. At the end of the day, the people who say “there’s no best way to do it” are not able to work out what the most popular website ever would look like, and saying that the currently most popular site is objectively best would stifle innovation.
They’re not trying to say philosophically universally correct points. They’re not theologians trying to determine whether God could create the perfect painting. They’re trying to teach humans.
I think the most direct way to do it would be to measure people’s brain activity. I’d be skeptical of self reporting. I think people would be swayed a lot by what they think they should like. I’m pretty sure I’ve read some research on this but can’t recall what it was :/
It wouldn’t be. In this case “best way” would be defined as something along the lines of maximizing total happiness.
Measuring brain activity is certainly possible but brings all sorts of challenges, rendering this kind of approach far less direct than it may seem on the surface.
However your thoughts about expectations are very much supported by a fMRI study (Kirk et al. Neuroimage 2009, direct link to PDF ) manipulating participants’ expectations about artistic images with the following instructions:
Paintings were randomly assigned to these two conditions for each participant, and ratings of aesthetic quality were obtained for each painting as well. Instructions modulated brain activity: the same artistic images evoke different responses in prefrontal/orbitofrontal cortex depending on participants’ expectations, and the same images received higher aesthetic ratings if the participant believed they came from a prestigious museum.
The authors also correlated brain activity with the aesthetic ratings given to each image (collapsed over context). No regions were reliably modulated by aesthetic ratings, which should have been the case if there are some regions that are responsive to “artistic quality” detached from context.
Of course, plenty of potential problems with this study, perhaps the most salient to me being the use of entirely abstract artistic images and artistically naive participants. But it does highlight some of the challenges related to revealing information about aesthetics from brain activity.
Still, rather than having one universal best art, the best approach is to have different peices of art to apply to different people. There may be a universal best piece of art for one person, but I imagine they would still want variety.
I suppose you could try to define away all subjectivity by appealing to utilitarianism, and maybe a post-singularity optimiser that can simulate all brains to gauge their reactions could create a perfect peice of art by those standards. Its still useless for discussing matters in the present.