A beautiful building is only as good as the correctness of its foundation, framework, materials, and construction. Those qualities can only be assessed by those with expertise enough to understand their importance. Beauty in its proper place is the output of the intersection between a craftsman and a engineer. Beauty is optional, but it makes life more worth living. The same is true for code - attractive code is optional, but it makes being a SWE more rewarding.

It is the humanness that is the difference, that which exists outside the abstraction of the imposed categories. The human cannot compete with the machine which ingests ALL works and renders the patterns easily available. The artist toiled to perfect those patterns, and now is no longer granted the decency of reaping the fruits of their labors. Humans can give, the machine can only take.

Art is not just about the thing produced, stripped of its context and significance, and forced to be interpreted by ignorant minds who, in their ignorance, consider themselves capable of deriving meaning of value out of words and pictures they can scarcely comprehend from their own limited perspective.

The significance of all art is derived from its historical context, the authors implicit intentions and mode of creation, and the unique experience generated from an individual consuming the art. If you suggest only the consumers experience matters, then you are free to forgo the greater appreciation of art in favor of the lessened experience of it if you wish. For greater awareness and understanding of the details of the parts allow us to better understand the significance of the whole. Only art that is of little value is lessened by our deepened understanding of it.

I suppose it is antithetical for a tech bro to value virtue and wisdom, for that path is less profitable (monetarily) than the unjust path, and so never shall the two meet. Having money as the standard of the good life, and lacking in equal proportion any merit of virtue and wisdom, what is left for them but to aim wanderingly off the cliff?

The article is correct to call them children, for that is what our modern education makes of us. So bleak and inhospitable is the modern education that it likely does us more harm than good, for it abstracts the world of meaning away and replaces it with lifeless mind-numbing facts. And in that gloomy room they are fed to the wolves, or made to become a wolf themselves. Most adults are still traumatized from their educations, they still dream about it, they still carry on their childish behaviors; few ever mature and become wise.

There's nothing simple about this vast interconnected mess we find ourselves in, and even for one seeking to better themselves, they are, lacking good judgment, more likely to select the bad thing over the good thing. As it's no easy task to determine the middle way, to re-evaluate ones values, and find harmony with oneself and their environment, we can forgive them for having no idea what they're doing. They're kids with too much money, a poor education, and a withering spirit, and their attempts to exert their will on the world will send us further into our dark ages. All that one can do is educate themselves, and see the light themselves, and live by example I suppose.

Who is more correct, the child or the adult? If you suggest the child, then what do you say to the adult who objects on the grounds of the meaning of the sounds uttered? The adult would say that though the sounds are pleasant to the ear, they are not good to the mind. Thus, rather than affirming the child's vision, they would reject the pleasant sounds with poor meaning in favor of higher quality ones which are as equal in their harmonic value as with the greater quality in their meaning.

As for the infinite regress, that only proves the value of knowledge all the greater, for if we can expand our knowledge on the origins of something continually, so too can our appreciate of the thing grow in proportion. This only leads to a richer and deeper appreciation for life. In this way I can reread or rewatch a show in time and see more and know more than in my first experience, and so grows my appreciation for the details that I missed the first time. And this may only occur if the subject at hand is of good quality in the first place, for else when we descend further into the details and meaning we would be dissapointed at its lack. But that which is rich in meaning lacks none and may reveal itself new with every experience. This is why knowledge of the good is required, and why AI and lackluster artists may only produce pleasant sounds.

The issue with the reduction of art to experience is that it ignore that our knowledge shapes our experience, and so the more we know about an artist and their process, the more different our experience of their art will be.

If one sees the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, they might not think much of it if all they know is that it's very popular. Another who knows why the Mona Lisa is particularly popular, because of its historic theft, has a different experience of it. And the person who knows of Da Vinci's life, who has read his journals, knows of his elaborate painting process and sophisticated details and meaning supplied in his paintings, why that person derives much more joy out of the work than one who merely sees it as a visual appearance producing merely a arbitrary liking/disliking.

Perhaps you might enjoy an AI composed track, but would you not enjoy it more if instead that track were human produced, particularly if you held more knowledge of the people making it?

As for meaning living in the reader, that cannot be true, for a person can find meaning in tea leaves or moving clouds. True meaning, as intentional, is not derived, but supplied, and it is the goal of every reader to behold the authors vision. That one fashions a different interpretation for themselves over the authors intentions is of necessity, for no two minds will see alike, but to look only for the reflection of oneself in art and not look beyond, why that is the death of art, for art is the revelation of the soul.

For a real musician, AI is already too much. For there to be meaning and soul in their music, is must be derived from the intersection of their skills and imagination, whereby the unconscious can make itself manifest in the utilization of ones virtues. Delegating this process to a black box deprives the art of its unique individual perspective that can only arise out of the finitude of human experience and learning. For though the black box may have superficial knowledge of generalizations of many such perspectives, it smooths out all paths into bland sameness. Thus no real artist of merit has any use for AI, for it is always of a lower degree than the more powerful tool that is their mind.

Socrates as created by Plato acts as a sort of aesthetic beauty which adds strength to Plato's words by the seduction of Socrates. Just as Alcibiades is attracted to Socrates because of his character, so too are we the readers supposed to be. Plato attempts to elevate our conception of Beauty from the beauty of a particular (like the good looks of Alcibiades) to Beauty itself (as in the form).

In this way, Beauty is a tool which can make more attractive certain ideas by its association. The history of advertising is testament to such utility. In this way I do not think that beauty is linked to goodness or truth as a requirement, but bares only the right relation to them when it is used in their service. That is, the value of beauty is determined by goodness and truth, such that if something is beautiful but lacking in goodness and truth, though it remains beautiful, the value of beauty above all else is shown absurd. All values seem to work like this, where any value held as the highest value will in time negate its own value by the relative excess of itself to other values.

All that is to say, that the wise person utilizes beauty as a means of reifying the value of the true and the good. From this perspective, it is true knowledge that redeems the tactic of beauty (such as rhetoric) from sophistry. For the good word to not fall upon deaf ears, one must compete with the sophist and provide the same level of beauty but with right ideas. Of course, claims to true knowledge must be justified, and we should not appeal to beauty for their verification.

I think more that beauty is a sign of intellect, and intellect is a prerequisite for true knowledge. To create beauty requires knowledge of patterns and skill enough to weave those patterns together into something greater than the sum of those patterns. True knowledge cannot be known for certain we might say, but if one has it, it will be knowledge of true patterns of Nature, and so such a person would be in possession not only of true knowledge, but also of beauty since the patterns of beauty would be derivative of the patterns of Nature.

Thus, in writing of what is true and good, it is very likely to be beautiful, since the knowledge necessary to apprehend beauty is the same knowledge that is capable of producing it, and beauty flows most naturally where it is most welcome. But beauty fails in its virtue if the underlying content does not reflect reality.

I think we're mostly saying the same things but I find it a bit weaselly to say that something loses beauty when it loses truth or goodness, when what it loses is simply the truth/goodness. That our value of beauty changes in proportion to its relation to goodness/truth, does not mean that the beauty itself has changed. It is not beauty alone which will save the world, but goodness and truth delivered in the guise of beauty.