Is the experience of beauty slipping away in an age of frictionlessness, speed and AI slop?

A.B.C. Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music, and more. Christopher and Pixie's skates flaunted their wealth. 27 white limousines, and the champagne flowed. It couldn't be bigger than Pixie's blonde hair. Spending other people's money, and when they were found out, Pixie paid the price. It's sort of gilded cage that she was a prisoner in. I'm Mark Hamperies. To binge the full series now, search for A.B.C. Rewind. And look for Scace, fall of a tycoon, on the A.B.C. Listen app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello there, welcome to another edition of The Mind Fields. We tried to negotiate the ethical and moral dilemmas of modern life. Well, Italy is my name. Scott Stevens is my real life co-host. Hey, well, how do you think an edition of The Mind Fields would go if we got A.I. to create it, not as a script, but like as a fully formed audio file? It would go the way that, unfortunately, an awful lot of podcasts and novels and other things are going, where people have to do things with such regularity that they effectively become caricatures of themselves. One of my ongoing concerns about A.I., well, is that so many of our habits of speaking and being with one another in production and creativity, we are increasingly having to accommodate ourselves to a measurable and an A.I. legible world, but we're not actually going to do a show about A.I. or about the torrent of digitally produced effluent that is flooding into our communicative and digital spaces. What sometimes referred to as A.I. Slop, we have all these generative tools at our fingertips, anything that is imaginable is now visualizable. I've got a question for you, Elite, so there are certain books or there are certain experiences where being deprived of a visual prop was absolutely vital for the relationship that I had with them. So reading a book for the first time as a child or a young man and not knowing what these characters looked like and then having these characters populate my imagination in such a way. If I had read that with an illustrated version or a picture book or if I had a generative A.I. tool that I could type in what does this look like or give me a video that describes or that portrays the action of this particular book, I mean something vital would have been ruined from, I would have been deprived of my own imagination precisely through the second hand visual prop that I would have been provided. Did you have anything in your earlier life where your mental version of it was kind of decisive for you was precious and being given, say, too early, a visual representation of what it is that you imagined would have soured the experience? Yeah, so the answer is yes, but I can't. It's very hard for me to think of specific examples. I just know that feeling. Like I recognize that experience, so I must have had it. Probably the thinnest version of it is that feeling I would always get whenever I saw a radio announcer that I'd listen to. So they might just be on commercial radio or whatever and then you'd see an ad for them turn up and it was like, no, no, no, that's not right. You don't look like how I imagined and I don't like this. That's the look of irrepressible disappointment that I'm greeted with anytime. I want to see me. It's true. What about a live album that you listened to before you ever saw the band play? No, but I had the experience of watching later a video of that same live album and being very disappointed by it, even though it's exactly the same performance. It's not interesting. It's suddenly it became it became somehow smaller, somehow more mundane and ordinary. A little bit more human. Like yes, I don't know where I would have gone, but yeah, maybe. I just think it became lesser, something. So I'm for me with that experience. This is a really interesting phenomenon for me, because all of the things that were mysterious for us, where imagination played such an important part. And you really imagination is the first human experience of being a creative agent. I mean, even if I couldn't translate what it is I had in my head onto paper. The imagination is still doing something. There's still a creative process where you're lingering with something and you're imagining that you're revising and then you're revising the revision and so on. It seems to me with the entire suite, the panoply of tools that are now available to us, where there is nothing that is imaginable, that isn't representable, that isn't translatable into some kind of image or another. It's led to this phenomenon where our digital spaces are simply flooded with stuff, with things that are might be kind of eye-catching, Brian Cranston with Ronald McDonald with Michael Jackson, for instance, or Martin Luther King Jr. saying horribly racist and obscene things. All of these things are imaginable and suddenly they are producible and reproducible and circulatable. And I think it's awful on every conceivable level. There are certain things about what it's doing to the digital space that I think is really problematic. But what I thought we could do here is to reflect just a little bit on what it's doing not just for our internal lives, but also what it's doing for the shared spaces between us. And what I was imagining here, Willie, is that we could actually group this conversation not around the perversions of AI. And I do think especially when we're speaking aesthetically, there is something about the frictionlessness of these tools. The fact that people can create things without the effort that we usually understand as being bound up with the term creation, or as I say, artistic creation, but also that the things that are produced are so unsuddle. They're so gaudy and superficial that they also don't create any work in the process of consumption. These things are quickly frictionlessly produced. These things are quickly and without aesthetic or moral nutrition whatsoever consumed. And then they're just gone. And what really worries me is that there is something vital that is being lost or that tends to be lost or that stands to be lost in that process, which is our capacity to understand, to appreciate, to expose ourselves to and to cultivate an openness to, that which doesn't simply kind of present itself as something to be consumed, but rather that which is properly beautiful. Can I share with you an experience that I had? It's actually the opposite of the live album that you just referred to. Music is very important to me, but I tend to be extremely disciplined in what I listen to and what I don't. One of the reasons that it's very easy for me to get tuned stuck in my head and there aren't a whole lot of things that I hate more than that. I don't like being in control of what it is that's rattling around on my brain. Did you ever hear how to solve that problem? No. Anagrams. Truly? Yeah. Someone did a study. I interviewed them once. Anagrams. If you try to solve anagram puzzles, it gets a song out of your head because it's not so difficult that you give up, but it's difficult enough that you might can't do another thing. That's wonderful. Anyway, proceed. So I can't read music. It's one of the great sort of sadness in my life. I can't play anything that was just always going to be the case given my general lack of coordination and weird fingers. I tried cello, weird fingers. But music is vital to me, the exposure to music, the process from unintelligibility to, let's just call it legibility, even if it's not completely intelligible, to intelligibility, to something that's much closer to love. That process of exposing oneself to something over a period of time so that you can see that there might be something there. You just don't quite get it yet. But then you stay close, you Terry with, and then gradually something that was there and that was nice, suddenly deepens and expands and becomes genuinely, genuinely beautiful. And I just, I've been thinking a lot about beauty, about all the contradictions and paradoxes that surround it, one of which I learned from even Arabi, which I'd like to kind of pick your brain about sometime. But beauty is something that is so much larger than us. It's something that's so powerful, and yet it's also so thin. It's so fragile. And if we don't take care of both our experience of beauty, our ability, the cultivation of our ability to be open to beauty, and the various ways in which beauty both draws us beyond ourselves and towards something else, but also the way that beauty can draw us towards one another in the form of connections, leaving connections behind even when the source of beauty, if you like, may have actually fallen simply to our memories or our imaginations. If we don't cultivate that in an age of speed and frictionlessness and AI slop, I worry that we're not just going to lose an aesthetic capacity, I worry that we're going to lose a moral to say nothing of a spiritual capacity. There's so much there. Let me begin with this. Do you believe beauty is objective? Yes, I do. I believe beauty is not the result of perception. I believe that beauty is something that is altogether other than us. Beauty is something that is out there. Right. And that therefore it can't be reduced to subjective judgment. Correct? It can't be reduced to subjective judgment, but I think subjective judgment can be cultivated and chasinged and educated and trained such that it is attuned to alive to that which is beautiful, but it is possible to regard as beautiful that which is ugly. There's a whole lot there. I suspect that's right. That's why I'm asking it. So if we regard the beautiful, the perfect, which I don't, but if we regard the beautiful, the perfect, then there are certain forms of aesthetic judgment and aesthetic expectation that might tend us towards things that are merely attractive. But it seems to me that that which is beautiful has a number of things that are going on with it. I mean, even Arbi refers to the beauty and the magic. I'm not telling you anything here, Willie, but even Arbi has this remarkable treatise on majesty and beauty. They're all sorts of resonances of Plato and Aristotle here, but he develops this idea that if the majesty of God were all the attribute that there was, then the human relationship to God would be one of near all. It would be one of simple intimidation because the majesty of God exists. It proceeds from God, but it returns to God. The majesty of God, in other words, is not for us. Whereas, even Arbi says that the beauty of God, which goes hand in hand with the majesty, proceeds from God, but proceeds to us. It alerts us to that, which is true about God. It draws us towards God. But the very fact that beauty draws us outside of ourselves and towards that, which is incomprehensible to us, means that even as beauty draws, even as beauty relates, beauty also eludes to reduce beauty to that, which is attractive. I think it's to miss the fact that there is something in it that means that even as we are drawn, it's not something that we can either grasp or consume, to assume that we can grasp beauty or consume or possess beauty is to miss precisely what it is that makes the beauty beautiful. But it means that it's then, nonetheless. Yes, that's right. Let's extend that style of thinking a little further. Therefore follows that one has to become capable of or fit to or even worthy of apprehending beauty. I was with you until worthy of. I mean, beauty is democratic. That's something maybe we can come back to. What does that mean? So one of the things that makes beauty or the beautiful, beautiful, is that while it can be something that is singular, I mean, can we really say that things that are genuinely, genuinely beautiful are infinitely reproducible? I'm not entirely sure that there is a scariness that goes along. Well, no, no, but if you want to take advantage of this starting point, it is utterly singular. Yes. No, it's utterly infinite. Because it emanates from the infinite. So beauty just becomes divine, self-disclosure. And the thing that makes it inexhaustible is its infinitude. The reason I'm sorry, to go back to the question I was asking, beauty in that way is an expression of a certain truth, an absoluteness. And so it therefore becomes possible to imagine a person or a society that has become so deformed that it no longer recognizes beauty is beautiful. And it instead recognizes that which is ugly is beautiful. Sure. Are you prepared to go that far? I tell you why I think you should be. One, I think it flows from what you said. But two, I think if you want to start making the arguments about AI-produced slop to use your phrase that you want to make, I think you need to accept that premise. Look, let me register my slight concern and then a slight counterpoint on the notion of the democratic nature of beauty. I was horrified in the wake of the killing of Charlie Kirk at the way that the language of beauty and perversion or beauty and ugliness were used to describe certain types of Americans. The fact that a particular image of Christian family was called, you know, we are on the side of beauty, we are on the side of goodness, we are on the side of sanctity. And then, I mean, let's just call it straight. Trans individuals were referred to as they are four, no, it's Democrats or left-wing extremists or whatever, they celebrate what is ugly, they celebrate what is perverse. One of the things that, I mean, this is in Plato, it's certainly in Simon Vey, Simon Veyes, where I learned it from. I believe there are resonances of it in Ibn Arabi. One of the things that beauty does, if we think about beauty as something that is out there, something that is transcendental even if it's ephemeral. In other words, it's there, but it's elusive. We approach it and it recedes. One of the things that beauty does is the thing that makes it beautiful isn't just the way that beauty inheres to its own nature, but the way that it's very nature of being beautiful makes that which we see through its light or through its prism beautiful as well. So, for instance, Simon Veyes said, I think perfectly, that earthly things, sorry, heavenly things are judged by earthly things. A divine light is rendered divine by the way that divine light allows us to see things as gracious and as beautiful. If there is a certain kind of transcendental or moral claim that makes things seem ugly, that ought to command our love and our respect, then there is something about that mode of vision, that even if it claims to be beautiful and pure and holy, and it permits us or forces us to see others as ugly or deformed or perverse, there's something about that that can corrupt it from within. So, when I say, when I say democratic, the example for me, Willie, Vesili Grossman, this extraordinary Ukrainian Russian Jewish journalist, he was a World War II correspondent, a novelist later. In 1955, he learned that Raphael's sistine Madonna was on display at a museum in Moscow just before it was being shipped back to Dresden. It was rescued from Dresden and then it was being returned. And Vesili Grossman himself and atheist went to see the sistine Madonna and he had an epiphany, he had a revelation. He said, the face of this woman is the face of every mother. It's a universal face. It exudes a democratic beauty, the depth of the eyes, the tenderness around the mouth, her gentle inclination to the life of her son whom she's holding, who is just about to be rent away from her. He refers to the animal-like tenderness, almost like a horse in the eyes that speaks of a depth. He says that by means of staring at the face of this sistine Madonna, we see that which is essentially human in all humanity. We see that which is endlessly longing, endlessly hoping, endlessly oriented towards the good. He also said we see in the face of this Madonna, the face of the mother who is clutching to herself the child just before being led into the gas chambers of Treblinka. So he sees by means of this object, both a work of art that lends itself to depth, the pond depth, the pond depth, that rewards lingering in its presence. But at the same time through seeing that, he sees others in a more, if I can put it this way, in a more divine light. In that sense, beauty, even though it takes work to achieve and it takes even more work to appreciate, to learn, to make it legible. The effect of beauty isn't just to bring us into a kind of mystical trance, but the effect of beauty is then to allow us to see the rest of the world in its own beauty, which is what makes I think those AI-modified images, where a particular scene is made just that little bit more "beautiful," and yet by making it that little bit more quote unquote "beauty," by turning all the leaves orange, for instance, instead of the usual autumn bappled. By making everything just a little bit too clean, a little bit too perfect, it instead infuses the world with a degree of unreality, exempts us from the world, rather than training our eyes to be able to see the world and the beauty of the world as it in fact is. Beautifully done. I didn't meant he's the way beautiful that you know what I'm saying. You agree with this entry. No, I agree with you, but let's draw a distinction then. There is a distinction between that person whose grasp, whose openness to beauty, whose understanding of beauty is so comprehensive that they are capable of seeing what is beautiful in anything, and that person whose sense of beauty is so deborched that the things they respond to and call beauty are not the beautiful aspects of things. So to put it in similarly grand terms, there's a person who can find light in the dimmer situation, but there's a person who also just celebrates the darkness. Sure. They're not the same thing. No, that's right. I would say that there is a difference though between the celebrating of the darkness, which, I mean, that's borderline sociopathy. That's, I mean, if we're talking in a religious or a theological register, I mean, we are referring there to kind of the deepest and most corrupt forms of idolatry, for instance. I'm not talking about that. Sure. I suppose I could be, but I'm just talking about notions of beauty. Sure. We're starting from a perspective that says there's a thing called beauty. We're then going to a position that says the thing about that is it casts such a light and it is so vast that actually one of its great gifts is to shed light on everything that you see so that you start to see what is beautiful in things. The step you can't go to is to say, and therefore everything is beautiful. Oh, no, that's right. There still requires the discernment, the capacity to discern that which is actually ugly. And it is entirely possible to conceive of a person or a group of people or a society or whatever that loses that discernment. Okay. Look, I don't fundamentally disagree with that. The only two slight things that I would say, one is I think that could well be more a form of callousness or inattentiveness, the calcification, the covering over of the eyes, where we've become so driven by mere taste, by a kind of culinary appetites, that that which is sort of transitory, we take nourishment on it, or we're just so busy or we're just so technologically addicted that we can no longer tell the difference between that which in a moment pleases us or tickles our fancy and that which really does nourish us. So it may well not proceed to the depth of kind of corruption. It could simply be callousness or inattentiveness. The other thing that I'd say, well, it is that beauty is something that is out there. It's not simply a projection of the ego or of the senses. But one of the things about beauty is that it causes a genuine confrontation with beauty causes the ego to recede. We begin taking up less space in ourselves and that which is beautiful becomes taking up more space to us and to our senses. And so that's the other thing that can lead to corruption when we just want to see that, which satisfies us, that which reflects the ego. But the beautiful is also fleeting. It is ephemeral. One of my favorite philosophers, if that even is John Kerevich, says that the genuinely beautiful is like a soap bubble. You approach it and it's gorgeous and then it pops because you weren't sufficiently careful to simply say that everything is beautiful. I think misses the particular, not just the character of beauty, but also the extent to which the senses need to be trained to be able to see that. And so you do have those moments. I think terms like epiphany is right. When you're walking and you see a bird in the most unusual and delicate position, serenading the morning, there is something about that that is beautiful, but it just struck me at that moment. And as soon as I would never be able to capture it, you'd never be able to capture it or even reproduce it. So I think to say that confrontation counter with the beautiful allows us to see that, which is beautiful, is not the same thing as saying that everything is beautiful. We just need to have the eyes to see it. All right. You all listening to The Mindfield on ABC Radio National, well, hey, Dali is my name Scott Stevens is my co-host and as always, we have a guest. Our guest is Daliya Nasser. She's associate professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney. She's embarked on what sounds to me to be a wonderful long-term research project on the experience of beauty and its cultivation. Daliya, thank you so much for joining us once again on the Mindfield. Thank you for having me. Yes, so I've been listening to the two of you talking about beauty and there are certain words that struck me in your conversation and that I want to think about. And the one that you said a lot is vitality, Scott, and that was really interesting because what is it about beauty that makes us think about it as having vitality or increasing our sense of vitality or giving us a sense of life and liveliness that we're alive. And I just want to think about that with you because you started out discussing the kind of experiences of AI and what sometimes these disappointments on the one hand AI but also on the other hand the disappointments you first imagine these images in your mind and reading a book and then when you see someone drawing them, there's a disappointment and there's this disappointment is because perhaps because and I wager that it is because in your experience of reading that you were engaging in a lively kind of creative capacity as a reader and then that was part of the experience of beauty that you felt something creatively as a reader and enhance your feeling of yourself. And so when you were disappointed it was a sort of like oh that feeling of liveliness that I had that feeling of being engaged creatively with this work is no longer there because it's been replaced by these images that someone else has produced. And I think there's something to that as well in the experience of AI because so much of what the experience of beauty is about is about this feeling of being alive, being here and being grounded and AI does exactly the opposite of that. It takes us away from the here and now from the experience of the singular. It gives us lots of images that are easily reproducible and replaceable and instead of giving us the sense of ourselves making us feel something which is exactly what beauty does and grounding us in this immediate encounter with something in front of us in this experiential world that we are part of it just it takes us away from all of that. And so I want to say I want to put a little bit of emphasis on this vitality aspect of beauty and I want to argue that this experience of beauty is actually not only something that we need to flourish but it is urgent in our time where this sense of ourselves, the sense of being grounded, these encounters and direct experiences are becoming less and less a part of our lives and therefore we feel less alive. Can I ask you just one quick question though darling just to pick up something on what you said I mean I think that's that's right the idea of you know when we hear terms like transcendent it's very I don't know about you it's very easy for me to kind of slip into sort of a degree of impersonality when I hear transcendent I think Kant when I think Kant I think the stars when I think the stars I think that which is simply out there therefore beyond reach but there is something about the notion of beauty and the vital that which yes there is surface but beneath there's something there's something there's something there's something that invites there's something that recedes yeah but there's a particular worthy use just before which is the word feeling yeah one of the things about beauty is its irreplicability there is the encounter and yet you know that that moment of encounter I'm going to do my best to recall it I might do my best to translate into some other medium whereby I can I can not quite relive but I can at least articulate it I mean the ability to become articulate I think and why it is we find things beautiful as vital but there's something about the beautiful and the fleeting that I have that feeling of the beautiful I have that feeling and the memory of the encounter remains yeah but why is it that something more than the memory of the encounter doesn't remain well I think so what what happens when we experience beauty like you were saying earlier it's unpredictable you're walking you have no expectations it's serendipitous you can't force the experience of beauty that's I think something that we haven't emphasized enough it's in the same way you can't force love you can't force the experience of beauty you're walking you suddenly see a bird that is singing a song and then wow and you're taken aback and whatever you were thinking about before is put aside and you just stand there and you don't want to move you want to dwell with this experience you want it to continue and the question is why do you want that why why don't you just move on why don't you return to the thoughts you were having before about your plans for the day and my answer here is that it's because beauty is elusive it's precisely because you can't capture in any concept so yes beauty itself is a concept but it stands for something that is beyond any articulation and conceptualization it is pointing to this deep experience that we human beings have and so it's it's a good word to use but what it's indicating is something that is supra conceptual that can't be just explained away so when we look at the world word usually we see a chair we see a table and we just move on we're constantly applying concepts but then here you stop and why do you stop why is this experience different from when you just look at a chair or a table and you keep moving it's because your concepts are inadequate and you don't have the right way of expressing it and this inadequacy I want to I want to argue is precisely this experience of pleasure that emerges out of beauty you are reminded that there's more to the world than these concepts that you have that there's something there that is deeper infinitely more important than than the ability to conceptualize to put things into propositional form and also then all the tasks you had set up for your day this is somehow much more important much deeper and that's why it is by its nature something that is going to be elusive and what it does is it points to a different way or a different motive knowing absolutely and that's the different and that's exactly this so it grounds you it reminds you of something that you somehow forgot that's what I want to sort of emphasize and it reminds you of your belonging to this world whether it's because of this bird and you think why is this song this bird song making me feel this incredible feeling why and maybe it's because I'm part of this world and this world is somehow not alien to me as I it's not just out there it's it's something that I belong to and it gives us the sense of belonging that we might have forgotten we'll see even our view would put it differently though wouldn't he he'd say it's actually taking you to something outside of this world it depends what we mean by this world right I want to distinguish to the world of busyness and getting stuff done and then the world of really actually being attention and this is I think where the Imanada be a connection comes through because beauty invites us to become more attentive to things that we would otherwise rarely notice a bird right how often are we looking out for birds unless we're keen bird watchers and then it invites us to become more attentive to to open ourselves to experiences we wouldn't otherwise be open to and in so doing we feel ourselves expanding we feel like we're connecting to the bird in a way we wouldn't otherwise be able to and that connection is drawing us to a world beyond let's say the world of efficiency in every dayness and so yeah yeah yeah sure I just think what what I mean is how would we say in the the moment you're having there is a moment of encounter with divine attribute and so the world is merely one prism through which that's being expressed it's not that the world is generating this yeah sure and that would be his distinction but leave all that aside for a moment yeah are we saying to come back to where we started which is AI generated slop we really have to go back well I think so yeah um are we saying that something like AI is incapable of generating this yeah I want to say that yes because and I'll I'll tell you what is a really important factor of the experience of beauty where does this pleasure come from I want to say one of the crucial elements of this experience of pleasure and beauty and I want to distinguish it as you have done this pleasure from mere sensation pleasurable sensation which you know I can eat a bar of chocolate and feel like it's really tasty but that's different in kind from the experience that I have when I'm surprised by the bird song for instance so this experience of beauty I want to say one of its key elements is this sense of belonging to the world right and I think here I want to draw an Immanuel Kant whom you have mentioned and he says precisely this he gives this example of bird song and he says you're walking outside and you hear a bird song and you are just amazed by and you go looking for this bird and then you go and find that a human being was doing it and what happens then and he says deep disappointment right and then the question is why is that an experience of deep disappointment or we can say what about fake flowers you see these beautiful flowers you approach them they're made out of some you know plastic or whatever and you're like oh they're not beautiful anymore and so the question is why not and my suggestion is that it's because the experience of beauty gives us a clue that we belong to this world this world that is beyond the human world right and when it's just something that is a human creation like someone imitating a bird song then it loses that crucial element of sense of community with the more than human for instance right and it loses that sense of ah nature and the and culture are not opposed right that's I think a crucial aspect of the experience of beauty that it shows us that we are continuous with the natural world and here I don't want to say you know I want to connect with Ibinator B2 because I think the natural world would then be seen as a kind of a symbol of something that is not merely you know these physical stuff but is actually an expression of something wonderful great divine and so on and if that gets lost and I think with AI that's definitely not there then we don't have that distinctive pleasure instead we might feel it for a moment and then when we find out that it's AI generated we we will feel disappointed you listening to the Mindfield on ABC Radio National will lead Ali's my name Scott Stephens is my co-host the voice you just heard there belongs to Dali Anasa who's associate professor of philosophy at the university of Sydney all right Daliya so that's very well explained I suppose there are questions of degree here that interest me so so much of what we regard as beautiful in the realm of say art broadly defined is mediated through unnatural technology shall we say think about anything that requires electrification you know microphones certain kinds of instruments etc think of digital forms of art that nonetheless have an artist behind them but this is not a person who is any longer you know crushing pigments derived from flowers in order to produce a particular color on a palette that is then turned into a thing of I don't know holographic forms of art and as distinct from sculpture from marbles or something like that in other words we have these expressions of of beauty and let's presume that we can find beautiful examples of these things I think that's a given but let's just not debate that for now just we have these expressions of beauty that are deeply unnatural in some way they're not really evoking our relationships in the natural world in the way that something like birds on would be yeah if beauty is possible in those circumstances yeah why isn't it possible in the sort of limit case yeah great yeah so I have been thinking a lot about this and I think yeah we listen to music that is generated through all sorts of technological means and yet we feel a connection and the question is why do we feel a connection to that and it's usually and I would say it's always but let's just say usually because the singer or the lyrics or if it's instrumental music the sounds are things that we want to ascribe to someone who has had experiences that are being reflected in these and these experiences are therefore they're revealing something that we can connect to right so let's just say lyrics of a song a lot of people love Taylor Swift right and they would call her songs beautiful if we suddenly said Taylor Swift songs are not really written by her and and they love them because they think she is writing about her own experiences right and there's an agent there who has had these experiences who understands what it means to go through all of this who understands what it is to be embodied right and has written these out of this this understanding and a depth of experience and suddenly somebody said actually she didn't write any of these these are AI generated what's going to happen right it's because we think that there's going to as soon as we say oh we're no longer connecting here there's no sense of mutual understanding between us this person is not expressing experiences there's no person there at all then we're disappointed and I think it's because what happens in the experience of beauty is again the sense of we're all part of a world together this connection this enabling of relationships and the fact that this particular agent Taylor Swift or whoever it is has had these experiences they are real experiences and they have to do with being human I mean don't we need to differentiate between art and the beautiful 100% okay I was just using because well it had given us these examples of artworks and I would say not every artwork is beautiful yeah does it need to be in fact the two are totally you know they can come together but they can be separated and not every work thing that is beautiful is art as in the case of the bird so 100% can I just also sorry Daly this also raises I think a really interesting question about both the beautiful and just to go back to bird song so our yard is populated with cooker burrows and magpies I adore them both on this walk there was a magpie about two meters away from me on the ground it didn't hurry away it looked at me looked up exposed its throat and engaged in a warble that was so opulent and so excessive and okay I'm personifying here but so proud of itself it was excessive and entirely unnecessary it looked for all the world like it did it because it had pleasure doing it and the way that we talk about the non-human world is that things exist and act out of instinct and for survival and here you have this moment of no utilitarian benefit that I could discern it was a moment of pure encounter and I just looked and I listened and I wondered at the opulent uselessness of it isn't there something about the beautiful in that very uselessness it isn't something that offers itself to us to be being used by the ego or used in the service of some mechanism or some overarching goal it just exists and it invites us to stand and to listen and to wonder yeah yeah a hundred percent you know Judith Wright's poem magpies I'm sure yeah and I just I think it's one of the most brilliant and most beautiful poems ever written and and she says for each is born with such a throat as things has gone with every note I think that's such a nap description of that experience you were describing now yeah there's something about the uselessness of beauty I don't want to say no beauty is useful clearly it's not and there's something about the fact that you can't really do anything with this experience that makes you want to to carry with it because it eludes practicality perhaps you could say instrumentalization and that's not instrumental that's right useless yeah I just like the term yeah but there's also I want to say just because it's not something that you can instrumentalize doesn't mean that you need to separate it from every day life and I think one of the a kind of big mistakes that we have made in the history of aesthetics and thinking about art is because we want to say art is not useful or instrumentalizable it is also outside of the world it becomes sequestered into museums or special experiences you have to go up the coast to have an experience of beauty because that's where the pristine beaches are or whatever and I want to push back against that and I want to say the beauty does not have to be opposed to practicality and we can have beautiful objects in the every day and in fact I think there's this wonderful Japanese art critic so it's a Yanagi he's from the early 20th century and and he said our aesthetic sense and he's speaking here about Japan in particular but I think it can be applied to the rest of the world our aesthetic sense has been severely impaired owing to the fact that beauty and life are treated as separate realms of being beauty is no longer viewed as an indispensable part of our daily lives and I would have to say I completely agree it's because we've sequestered beauty because we've emphasized so much oh beauty can't be made into a practical object we have left it to museums and concert halls and let our world become conquered by ugliness and and I think this has impaired as he says our our capacity to experience beauty to recognize beauty and also the fact that we're satisfied with living with ugliness is a strange thing that we're just happy to buy really ugly products at a discounted price and stock up our kitchen or our house with them just for the sake of efficiency and so on or for because they're cheap and he says in fact most of the time these ugly things don't even live up to fulfilling the goal that they were supposed to be they break quickly they don't do the job well and so on whereas things that are created as they're practical but they're also beautiful and created therefore with those two things in mind will last a lot longer and can fulfill a goal but nonetheless still be beautiful and I so I want to push back against this beauty should be useless and say beauty has a place in our everyday lives and it has and in fact the fact that we have sequestered it to the useless is a problem absolutely right so this this comes back to the tell us a beauty right this this is why I keep harping on I mean Scott introduced it in Arabic so it's not my fault but um that was all for you Wally that was all for you because his starting position is that this is all an expression of divine beauty this is an expression of therefore divine attributes and particular divine attributes if that's the case then there is an intimate connection between beauty and truth and divinity and so to beautify things is an act of spiritual devotion it is not merely an act of kind of aesthetic indulgence it's not necessarily about instrumentality but actually those even that shouldn't necessarily be separated because if you want something to embody you know to embody some kind of spiritual nourishment or you want it to enrich your your spiritual existence then beauty becomes a part of that and particular forms of beauty and so on I mean that that that's right Wally but I think one of the ways that that impulse expresses itself is when we experience beauty the experience may have been solipsistic it may have just been alone but that's not where it ends I mean how many times have you heard something and you grab someone and you try to introduce it in other words there's something about the nature of beauty that it can't just be kept to oneself it something who said anything about it being kept to oneself that's not part of the point is more that it is to infuse everything because it's expressing the grandest truth it's not something that is shoved in a box and kept elsewhere yeah that's a very different worldview from the one that has prevailed a sort of post enlightenment worldview which wants to understand truth has discovered through rationality and all the sort of instrumentality that that kind of ends up implying right and you see the way that gets expressed in I don't know modern forms of architecture in you know brutalist phases my God in what the communists did and the way in which they conceived of beauty and the way in which they can see that which is material and instrumental as opposed to that which is not that's a totally different way of understanding the world and if we are to make any sense of our wholehearted embrace of AI it generated slop it is surely that it derives from that latter way of viewing the world right once we understand things in these sort of thoroughly material instrumentalist terms well of course AI generated slop will do it has to do it takes all the boxes it's convenient it's quick it abys your demand it gives you what you need when you need it yeah yeah sorry and here's the test that I always tell people that okay great how would you feel if in a generation or two your grandchildren never get to experience beauty as you've experienced it how would you feel about that imagine a world in which they don't get to hear the song of a magpie because it's just AI generated imagine a world where there are no amazing stretches of wood or beach or where concerts are no longer played by humans or instruments are no how do you feel about that and most people are going to say oh I'd feel sorry for my grandchildren but they're missing out something really essential yes until it's pointed out to them that their parents might feel the same about the world exactly and this exactly yeah but that's just because they don't understand what's right about this particular yeah but yeah well let's I mean I just want to let me put it this way you started out by talking also about the importance of beauty for democracy and you haven't come back to that and I want to say so not only is beauty important for connecting to individuals but it's also important for our social well-being and it has a role to play in democracy and perhaps the most obvious reason is because if we think about what the experience of beauty again is it's calling two aspects of ourselves to work together so we often think of ourselves as divided between intellect on the one hand and sensation on the other and the sensation is just the pleasure-seeking aspect the bodily and then the intellect is the world of ideas the world of morals the lawful you know the categorical imperative of content and so on and then we have this turbulent relationship between the two and the enlightenment view there is well the the intellect has to control the body right it's a top-down approach and a lot of the thinkers that came after the enlightenment saw that this was a deeply misguided way of thinking not only is it is it a form of control and unfree them right so you don't feel actually free in yourself when one part of you controls the other but it also mirrors a monarchy it's the personal version of a of a political monarchy and the way to overcome this both on an individual level where you feel like you are free within yourself and on a political social level is through the experience of beauty and this is a strange claim but it's because beauty is uniquely able to draw out both our sensuous and our intellectual capacities and not only that but also to bring them to harmony so in a work of art or in the experience of a magpie what draws us first is something sensuous it's not a purely intellectual thing right we've already discussed that but on the other hand it is not just this pleasure of mere pleasure if we want to it's not just charming and delightful but there is something that keeps us there that we want to carry with us caught put it and there is we want we discern meaning beyond anything conceptualizable right so there's a meaningfulness to this experience and so it brings together these two aspects of ourselves and through that we are unified internally and therefore our freed we're not imprisoned by either our bodies or our minds and the consequence of that is that we are able to become citizens rather than subjects citizens of a republic rather than subjects in a monarchy if we continue to be internally dominated by one part over the other then we're also going to allow ourselves to be dominated in a kind of social political space as well you put a bow and a beautifully bow and a third i always such a joy to have you on so I really appreciate your time great to talk with you that is Dali Anasar who's associate professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney our guest for this week's edition of the minefield we'll be back on radio national next week but in the meantime or even thereafter you can listen to us anytime you'd like on the ABC Listen Up you've been listening to an ABC podcast discover more great ABC podcasts live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.