[ExI] More thoughts on sentient computers

[William Flynn Wallace]

Let's devise a measure of feminine beauty.  :I suggest the classical way:
measure breast, waist, and hip circumference.  Totally objective.  Then
create an ideal set of measurements. Every woman then can be classified on
the beauty scale as average, etc.

No one will be happy with that, even though it's totally objective -
right?  OK, so create ideal dimensions of jaw, nose, and so on.  You could
create dozens of objective measures and no one would agree with any of
them.  Objective measure then, isn't the way to go, is it?

The Beatles are the best musicians in history because they sold the most
albums etc.  Agree with that?  But we cannot obtain such measures on anyone
prior to the 20th century, more or less.  How many CDs would Bach have sold
if the tech was there?  The best book in history has to be the Bible - the
most sold.

Nope - cannot go along with any of that.  Aesthetics just isn't amenable to
scientific/objective sorts of measures.  To me it's all qualitative.  And
that means to me that I am just as good a judge as anyone.

In fact, I am the only judge that exists that knows exactly what I like.
That's all I need.   bill w

On Sun, Feb 26, 2023 at 4:13 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
>
>
> *…*> *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] More thoughts on sentient computers
>
>
>
> >>…We judge musicians, actors, writers, all content creators by this
> standard already. spike
>
>
>
>  >…I don't.  To me there are no pieces of popular music that can cast a
> candle flame on the works of Debussy. All popular music in the 1900s.
> All of Debussy.  If one had to go, I'd vote to ditch the popular music.  To
> me there are no quantitative measures of aesthetics.  You are just kidding,
> of course.
>
>
>
> bill w
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> The artist’s income is a proxy of course, but it is the only direct
> measure we have, the only completely objective way to measure it.  I should
> have used the term ‘measure’ rather than ‘judge.”
>
> Of course there will be disagreement on its value (I too am a huge Debussy
> fan) but let us restrict the discussion to those who create a
> non-reproducible object, such as a painting, rather than music.
>
> Certainly this approach injects weirdness.  For instance, the world’s
> current leading graphics artist is Hunter Biden.  He’s made the most money
> selling his paintings, so… he wins.  But somehow… I doubt that a generation
> of aspiring artists will study his work, or that much of it will land in
> the Louvre alongside the Mona Lisa.
>
> But there is no other universal way to measure success of art creation.
>
> spike
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20230226/7e2c6d93/attachment.htm>