(no subject)
now I will answer some questions you have all been waiting to hear the answer to: What is beauty? What is happiness? What is love? What is the meaning of life?
The answer is that they are all relations of things and not things in themselves. Lets consider an emotional response like love, for instance. It is true that physical events are taking place. But the same drug (in the same dosage) can in fact have diffrent effects on the same person. The reason is because the conscious mind makes aprasials of these stimuli (in this example the love hormones.) An apraisal is just that; it is not the thing itself but an opinion of it. Shut up Andy, wikipedia explaines this so much more clearly:
The distal stimulus provides information for the proximal stimulus. The proximal stimulus registers (onto sensory receptors) the information given by the distal stimulus. A mental recreation of the distal stimulus in the mind of the perceiver is the percept
so a peice of art is not good or bad in itself. A person might get a proximal stimulation from it that leads to a perception of goodness. One could also pass "great art" by if the "great" distal stimulis never became translated into proximal stimuli. For us to reconize art as being "great" we must first hope we even have the sensory aparatus to acquire the proximal stimulation, then we must further relate that to our schemas to form a perception. Happiness is also a relation of real pysical events to the mind of the agent. To experience love or beauty depends on how one relates to the object of love/beauty more than the object itself. of course the real object itself is still the limitator of the distal stimuli it eminates, but perception delimits even the most boring of stimuli by allowing one to relate them in interesting ways to other memories/stimuli.
The answer is that they are all relations of things and not things in themselves. Lets consider an emotional response like love, for instance. It is true that physical events are taking place. But the same drug (in the same dosage) can in fact have diffrent effects on the same person. The reason is because the conscious mind makes aprasials of these stimuli (in this example the love hormones.) An apraisal is just that; it is not the thing itself but an opinion of it. Shut up Andy, wikipedia explaines this so much more clearly:
The distal stimulus provides information for the proximal stimulus. The proximal stimulus registers (onto sensory receptors) the information given by the distal stimulus. A mental recreation of the distal stimulus in the mind of the perceiver is the percept
so a peice of art is not good or bad in itself. A person might get a proximal stimulation from it that leads to a perception of goodness. One could also pass "great art" by if the "great" distal stimulis never became translated into proximal stimuli. For us to reconize art as being "great" we must first hope we even have the sensory aparatus to acquire the proximal stimulation, then we must further relate that to our schemas to form a perception. Happiness is also a relation of real pysical events to the mind of the agent. To experience love or beauty depends on how one relates to the object of love/beauty more than the object itself. of course the real object itself is still the limitator of the distal stimuli it eminates, but perception delimits even the most boring of stimuli by allowing one to relate them in interesting ways to other memories/stimuli.