Attraction

TBoI p. 357

"Art can be literallt attractive in the sense of causing people to move towards it... [the artist is] being attracted by the idea of a piece of art before [he] has created it."

Theories of aesthetics have never much interested me, but this is going in an interesting direction...

"New art is unpredictable, liek new scientific discoveries... if beauty is objective, then a new work of art... adds somethign ireeducibly new ot the world."

p 359

"Because we are universal explainers, we are not simply obeying our genes."

"We pursue beauty as well as truth, and in both cases we can be fooled."

p 362: Why are flowers beautiful?

"My guess is that the easiest way to signal across such a gap [between insects and plants] with hard-to-forge oatters dersigned to be recognized by hard-to-emulate pattern-matching algorithms is to use objective standards of beauty."

p. 364

"...the amoutn of information in a humam mind is more than that of any species... [s]o human artists are trying to signal across teh same scale of gap between humans as teh flowers and insects are between species."

p 365

"...a good story has a good explanation of the fictional events that it portrays. But the same is true in all art forms... In some, the relevant knowledge is itself not expressed in words... No one yet knows how to translate musical explanations into natural language."

"when a piece of music has the attribute 'displace one note and there would be dinimishment' there is an explanation."

p. 366

"poetry nd mathematics or physics share the property that they develop a language different from ordinary language in order to stste things efficiently that it would be very inefficient to state in ordinary language."

p. 367

"self-expression is about expressing somethign subjective, while pure art is objective."