Well, if you have no doubt, Ash, there's little point in any further discussion. That being sai, is your lack of doubt on the matter innate as well.? Or are you just a pig headed old fart who doesn't want to listen to reason irrespective of its source?
Christine has another conversation closer: "shut the **** up. I'm not listening any more"
Try it. It's more direct and honest.
Let me try to help folks grasp my concept.
@ Tom: as you said "shut the **** up", I don't rely on you reading this. However, I do understand why you find my sweeping statement highly questionable as that would, for many folk, indeed be a first reaction!
In reference to emotions, there's a school of thought that holds that some "emotive reactions" such as disgust:revulsion or pity are innate and some others constructs of these. From the standpoint of evolutionary biology this seems reasonable and correct to me and I have almost zero doubt that is in practice, "no doubt" in common parlance.
Similarly, I'd hold that beauty is made up of fixed components in various proportions like, for example, complex, culture-specific "emotions" are made up in some societies. Examples would be
Berserk: Here in a few societies, someone exposed to have committed some crime such as theft which can't be repaid will have a "spell" of behavior, running around breaking things and seemingly out of control, like a child. The community respects this as the person giving up entirely and the man is given help and not punishment.
Taboos: for example, the female nipple - Embarrassment and anger on seeing an exposed female nipple in public. This can be so extreme that the person involved can be looked down on and demeaned, while other societies have no reaction of such severe anti-social character.
So for Beauty, I hold that there must be some fixed and some (culture-specific) constructed combinations of such "fixed elements" which evoke a reaction of "beauty"
This reaction to different mixtures of
"fixed"* elements can be demonstrated in the human perception of colors. "Blue", for example is an experience or perception but the mixture of photons of various energies evoking such a certain impression can be different on each occasion we perceive that identical color,"blue". So any natural color, (apart from the very rare circumstance we see pure single energy photon light, is merely a construct in our brains. Still, there must be, in our neural circuitry a set of discriminatory rules by which different sets of wavelengths of light are experienced as "red", "green", "blue" or any other color.
I see no reason why we should consider, unless we are conducting some scientific research project), that some entirely different method of recognizing "beauty" or "good composition" is achieved in any other manner. In short, I have no doubt that beauty is made up of some collection of fixed elements to which we respond with that singular experience of "beauty".'
Asher
Fixed* By the term "fixed" I mean some unique characteristic that the brain recognizes and reacts to such as size, symmetry, disorder, color scheme and the like, each of which can be described and qualified by a further set of characteristics, such as, (but not limited to), "extent" or "orientation" or "relative location".