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Chris Quackenbush's avatar

Did you ever see this nice essay "A Natural History of Beauty" https://meltingasphalt.com/a-natural-history-of-beauty? It's about how beauty might evolve as a repeated multiplayer game.

Your idea reminds me of that framework! Especially when you mentioned the symmetry of flowers.

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Judith Stove's avatar

Would such a project allow for finding even Socrates beautiful, as Alcibiades - by then filled with love for him - eventually did? What about, as Marcus Aurelius wrote, seeing the beauty in such things as the broken top of a bread loaf, or 'ears of wheat bowing down to the ground, a lion's wrinkled brow, a boar foaming at the mouth...the gaping jaws of wild beasts,' and old people, which, he argues will only be seen and appreciated by a sensitive person (Meditations 3.2)? Can AI be trained to recognise beauty, if it doesn't feel love?

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