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Comment by hall0ween | Hacker News Reader

> No, the human was never a core factor. People who enjoy a van Gogh - or any other work - primarily do so because it has particular qualities they appreciate

I don't follow. How about the 20k year old cave paintings in Lascaux? Are you saying "What you appreciate about it isn't the craft, or the story and history behind it; you care about only some of it's qualities?"

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It's an extremely valuable part of history, for historians, archeologists, etc. The people who created those works too can be considered a "work", something to be studied the same as that which they did/made are studied.

OK, and so other artists can be studied too, and aspects of their creativity can be studied, and this doesn't have to be formal but can amount to just liking the artist's creativity. But you said "being human-made isn't an intrinsically appreciable quality".

That word "intrinsic", what does it mean in this context? You're sure it means something?

Sure, anything that can be sensed/known, can be studied.

It means that one cannot experience (look at, listen to, etc) a work and honestly say "I appreciate how this was human-made". There's no quality that can be imbued into a work that makes it discernable as made-by-human, as opposed to made-by-machine, or even made-by-nature (and eventually, maybe even made-by-alien). Not like one can discern and appreciate the lines and colours in a painting, or the tones and energy of a song. The maker of a work is extrinsic to it.

But there's no quality that makes an object discernable as anything at all; it's all theories. You don't absorb facts about reality through a sense organ, you start with a theory - such as "this is hexagonal" or "this was made by a human" - and test it. I diagnose that you are suffering from inductivism.

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