[PassedOut]

phil_20686, on 2011-November-14, 09:14, said:

Humans being what we are, the same painting to the same person can be more or less appreciated depending on what day of the week it is...

Certainly true, but how do you square this with the "objective valuation of 'beauty'" you mentioned earlier?

[phil_20686]

gwnn, on 2011-November-14, 09:49, said:

Sure enough, in general it is wrong to assert something that simplistic ("as long as you can't give me a better definition, mine is true, so there!"). However, in this particular case I don't feel my father's definition (of course it's not just his) is overly inaccurate/heartless/inane. And I honestly don't understand why it's shocking that worth would change over time. Why wouldn't it?

Because surely a better definition of the worth of a thing is the sum of all the use/pleasure etc that one gets from it over its entire existence, which is fixed. The price might measure the use I will get from it in some finite time.

@Passed out: Easily, for humans are not generally objective, The best that can be said is that we are sometimes capable of objectivity if we should put our mind to it. Suppose I answer you in another question: Is it rational for a blind person to conclude that all paintings are worthless?

[PassedOut]

phil_20686, on 2011-November-14, 10:57, said:

@Passed out: Easily, for humans are not generally objective, The best that can be said is that we are sometimes capable of objectivity if we should put our mind to it. Suppose I answer you in another question: Is it rational for a blind person to conclude that all paintings are worthless?

Of course not. My question goes to the subjective/objective distinction.

Granted that humans are "sometimes capable of objectivity if we should put our mind to it." But even if we put our minds to it, how can we say objectively that, for example, a meadow of flowers is more beautiful than a sunset?

[gwnn]

phil_20686, on 2011-November-14, 10:57, said:

Because surely a better definition of the worth of a thing is the sum of all the use/pleasure etc that one gets from it over its entire existence, which is fixed.

Could you explain why? I am trying to understand what makes you this sure, but I can't. I guess I am closed minded but I like attributes to have a meaning in a certain moment of time, not just integrated over all of time (if you excuse my mathematical language).

[barmar]

gwnn, on 2011-November-14, 09:49, said:

Sure enough, in general it is wrong to assert something that simplistic ("as long as you can't give me a better definition, mine is true, so there!"). However, in this particular case I don't feel my father's definition (of course it's not just his) is overly inaccurate/heartless/inane. And I honestly don't understand why it's shocking that worth would change over time. Why wouldn't it?

It may be accurate, but is it a useful definition? It means that the only way to find out the value of something is to try to sell it. As I said above, what does this mean for things you're not willing to part with? How can we appraise things before we put them up for sale, or if we just want to purchase insurance for them? Must we go through the motions of trying to sell them, and then when you get the buyer to agree on a price tell them you've changed your mind?

In many cases you can approximate the value by looking at sales of similar items -- that's what home appraisers use as their starting point. But what do you do for unique items?

And there are still many subjective qualities. An heirloom will have very different value for family members than others. But family members might expect you to cut them a deal (maybe even give it to them for free) based on the relationship.

[mike777]

Of course you dont need to sell something to place a value on something.

In fact I do that for a living.

"But one often places a value on something by putting a price on it."

--




I am now reading the new Van Gogh book. The art is breathless and beautiful and (worthless???) when he lived.

--



Side note on my last visit to France we went to SEVERAL Van Gogh places....my fellow bus mates are bored out of their minds and said so. I was dizzy from the sadness and beauty.

fwiw I have alot of prints on my walls right now.

[barmar]

Are we getting into "tree falls in a forest" territory?

[mike777]

barmar, on 2011-November-15, 01:19, said:

Are we getting into "tree falls in a forest" territory?

If art can make one cry ......I guess so......

[Fluffy]

addding to this discussion, I have a present from '98 from a bridge tournament in my closet wrapped, I don´t know what it is, but I suspect that what it could be worth is more than what it is actually worth, so I keep it wrapped and its content remains unknown year after year. I have a couple more extra now, but the first one was from '98

[phil_20686]

PassedOut, on 2011-November-14, 12:09, said:

Of course not. My question goes to the subjective/objective distinction.

Granted that humans are "sometimes capable of objectivity if we should put our mind to it." But even if we put our minds to it, how can we say objectively that, for example, a meadow of flowers is more beautiful than a sunset?

My question was designed to expose the individualist cant that you put on objectivity. You seem to think that something has objective value if and only if we all agree that it has the same value. This is not a good definition. For example, a share has an objective value, based on the future earnings it entitles you to, however, its uncertain as we do not know the future earnings. All agree that it has a fair value, and we can work it out historically, but the uncertainty surrounding the future means that people will disagree about what it is. The market aggregates this disagreement into a price.

A similar thing should happen with beauty - we recognise that it has value not only because we appreciate it, but also because other people have appreciated it and will appreciate it. Of course, there is uncertainty because we do not know with any certainty how many people will appreciate it in the future. This gives us a measure which is objective, but still uncertain. We can apply it to the past and say, the sum of its value up to now is all the appreciation people have had from it up to now, plus some expectation of the amount that people will value it in the future. This is entirely analogous to a share price.

Of course, there are many other ways to define beauty, but this seems to nicely straddle objective and subjectivist points in a believable way. Mozart is better than the Beatles because up util this point more people have appreciated Mozart in the 400 years his music has been around than have appreciated the Beatles (probably). At some point in the future this might change, but this is merely the "historic" value. The objective value will be defined when a thing is lost or destroyed so that its value can never be added to.

Of course, this viewpoint is not without flaws, as if i create a beautiful painting and then burn it it is basically worthless. Or it might make artificial trees more beautiful than real ones since they last longer. However, these are not unworkable difficulties. Simply use appreciation per view or some such.

Of course, one can phrase this in a theist viewpoint - the objectivity of beauty is God's opinion on it. Since we were created to be similar to God in some ways it would make sense that the aggregate of human opinion over a large number of humans in a large number of cultural contexts should be a pretty good approximation of God's opinion.

[phil_20686]

gwnn, on 2011-November-14, 16:13, said:

Could you explain why? I am trying to understand what makes you this sure, but I can't. I guess I am closed minded but I like attributes to have a meaning in a certain moment of time, not just integrated over all of time (if you excuse my mathematical language).

You sound like a condensed matter physicist. If you were a GR theorist you would only think in world lines. And if you were a quantum theorist you would only think in path integrals.

By the ergodic theorem summing over time is just the same as summing over an ensemble - i.e. it its equivalent to taking a large numbers of humans from different cultural contexts and measuring them right now. I only didn't use it as a practical matter that we might expect cultures in the future to be much more different than current world cultures are from one another, so the averaging confuses the argument a little I think.

[y66]

phil_20686, on 2011-November-14, 10:57, said:

Because surely a better definition of the worth of a thing is the sum of all the use/pleasure etc that one gets from it over its entire existence, which is fixed. The price might measure the use I will get from it in some finite time.

The sum of a thing's use/pleasure over its entire existence is not the same thing as a thing's present value. In Pulp Fiction, that gold watch was obviously irreplaceable to Butch since he was willing to give up his life to get it back. But I doubt he could have insured it for more than a couple hundred dollars or that it would ever occur to anyone besides him that the value it acquired during those years it was stored away in a coffee can or up his father's ass in prison camp increased it's value in the marketplace to an arm's length buyer. Its patina maybe.

[phil_20686]

y66, on 2011-November-15, 09:12, said:

The sum of a thing's use/pleasure over its entire existence is not the same thing as a thing's present value price.

[gwnn]

The ergodic principle is cool Phil but I still think a half full beer bottle is worth less than a full beer bottle, even though summing through all their existence (past and future) they provide, in principle, equal pleasure. Am I misunderstanding you still?

[y66]

The sum of a thing's use/pleasure over its entire existence is not the same thing as a thing's present value or its price.

[PassedOut]

phil_20686, on 2011-November-15, 09:02, said:

My question was designed to expose the individualist cant that you put on objectivity. You seem to think that something has objective value if and only if we all agree that it has the same value. This is not a good definition. For example, a share has an objective value, based on the future earnings it entitles you to, however, its uncertain as we do not know the future earnings. All agree that it has a fair value, and we can work it out historically, but the uncertainty surrounding the future means that people will disagree about what it is. The market aggregates this disagreement into a price.

A similar thing should happen with beauty - we recognise that it has value not only because we appreciate it, but also because other people have appreciated it and will appreciate it. Of course, there is uncertainty because we do not know with any certainty how many people will appreciate it in the future. This gives us a measure which is objective, but still uncertain. We can apply it to the past and say, the sum of its value up to now is all the appreciation people have had from it up to now, plus some expectation of the amount that people will value it in the future.

No, I am saying that -- unlike money, distance, or time -- there is no way to measure the amount of appreciation felt for works of art or the beauties of nature. So, no matter how hard we put our minds to it, we can never objectively determine what you describe as "the sum of its value up to now is all the appreciation people have had from it."

But even if that sort of valuation made sense, you'd only be measuring the reactions of people to a thing, not the properties of the thing itself.

[phil_20686]

gwnn, on 2011-November-15, 09:35, said:

The ergodic principle is cool Phil but I still think a half full beer bottle is worth less than a full beer bottle, even though summing through all their existence (past and future) they provide, in principle, equal pleasure. Am I misunderstanding you still?

I think we understand each other. This example simply asserts that "value" should be future orientated - the fact that you only have half a beer still to drink, compared to a full beer, is what is important. That is certainly what the price would measure if you tried to sell it. But that means you are assigning no value to your past experience. A point of view which seems oddly blinkered. It seems to me that a full account of worth should take account of what has happened, what is happening, and what will/might happen.

EDIT: try attempting to apply this attitude to people: Is an old man "worth" less because he has fewer days to live (probably) than a young man? This seems analogous to your beer example. Compare this to valuations of a fetus - which are often historic, in the sense that it is deemed to be `less than a human adult' because it has not achieved consciousness yet. Empiricists often embrace Presentism implicitly, which is the belief, essentially, that neither the past nor the future are "real" but only what is happening exactly now. This seems like an untenable position for a physicist.

[phil_20686]

PassedOut, on 2011-November-15, 10:13, said:

No, I am saying that -- unlike money, distance, or time -- there is no way to measure the amount of appreciation felt for works of art or the beauties of nature. So, no matter how hard we put our minds to it, we can never objectively determine what you describe as "the sum of its value up to now is all the appreciation people have had from it."

But even if that sort of valuation made sense, you'd only be measuring the reactions of people to a thing, not the properties of the thing itself.

This sort of valuation does make sense. Appreciation of beauty exists, it is technically difficult, maybe impossible, to measure it, but that does not negate that it is a thing which could in principle be measured. It is implicit in our daily lives that this is so, we say x is more beautiful than y, if measurement was impossible this would be a content free statement.

The inability to assign a number to something is not a weakness.

Your second point opens a messy can of worms, but let me attempt to bypass it by saying - all measurements are measurements of the reactions of people to a thing, not the thing itself. This is because all measurements are made at some point by the interface of consciousness on the material world through your body. I stress that this does not mean necessarily that one cannot obtain objective information about the material world, but it does indicated that there are situations where the properties of a thing are indistinguishable from the reactions of people to that thing.

[phil_20686]

y66, on 2011-November-15, 10:05, said:

The sum of a thing's use/pleasure over its entire existence is not the same thing as a thing's present value or its price.

An assertion is not an argument.

[PassedOut]

phil_20686, on 2011-November-15, 11:33, said:

This sort of valuation does make sense. Appreciation of beauty exists, it is technically difficult, maybe impossible, to measure it, but that does not negate that it is a thing which could in principle be measured. It is implicit in our daily lives that this is so, we say x is more beautiful than y, if measurement was impossible this would be a content free statement.

The inability to assign a number to something is not a weakness.

Your second point opens a messy can of worms, but let me attempt to bypass it by saying - all measurements are measurements of the reactions of people to a thing, not the thing itself. This is because all measurements are made at some point by the interface of consciousness on the material world through your body. I stress that this does not mean necessarily that one cannot obtain objective information about the material world, but it does indicated that there are situations where the properties of a thing are indistinguishable from the reactions of people to that thing.

Quote

The inability to assign a number to something is not a weakness.

It is if you need to calculate a sum.

Quote

...we say x is more beautiful than y, if measurement was impossible this would be a content free statement.

Only if one considers subjective statements to be content free. I do not.

Quote

...all measurements are measurements of the reactions of people to a thing, not the thing itself.

Here you are shifting to a second order. In context, your statement applies to measurements of people's reactions to the thing, not to measurements of the thing itself.