If you're referring to aesthetics, I personally think that Internet is far away of being beautiful. It could help us to be connected and make stronger relationships. Nevertheless it is a place where most of the people involved don't know how to behave in. I miss, sometimes, more moderators flowing around in the webs.
For example: in this forum, if the mods consider that we are respecting the rules we are in the risk of being kinked out and I think it is fair. But, in big social media users we do not see the same control. Most of the people spread disinformation and hate without control. It is one of the most dangerous concerns we should care about.
Oh, another thing, inside Twitter, if the users are not agree with you, they quickly call you "fascist"
The fascist word is overused in Twitter

:ok: Great way to get this thread going! Although my intention was to discuss structural aesthetics of the www, it seems content too has a bearing on how beautiful/grotesque the internet is. So, yeah, the web is/maybe a work of art, but the venomous arcachnid at the center is truly hideous!

Exactly, it is a work of art and it has changed the world. But, sadly, most of the people are using a poisonous use of it

:ok:

[reply="Agent
The whole relationship between the internet and beauty is interesting. Initially, computers seemed to be about the functionality but, gradually art became incorporated. This meant that art and design being incorporated, especially in graphics and illustration. When I was at school I wished to be an illustrator but chose not to go down that route because so much was becoming computer art and I wished to draw and paint. I have become aware of the way in which many have seized the opportunity and I had a friend who became a website designer. Also, some individuals make fantastic computer art, for example @PoeticUniverse on this site, and I don't know if you have seen his work.

There have been mixed reactions to the digital age of art but it is also likely that the internet has changed conceptions of aesthetics. Many choose to escape into the comforts of the virtual world, including reading, looking at images and listening to music, in a way which could become separate from appreciation of the aesthetics of the real world. It is a fantasy world with possibilities beyond the ugliness of many aspects of mundane daily lives. Like the media in general there are pictures which are enhanced by technical means and choice of selection. So, it is about the manufacture of aesthetics. Who knows where it will go and will AIs have the 'perfect' bodies, as some may have imagined in a different age as being only possible after a resurrection at the end of the world.

Oh, another thing, inside Twitter, if the users are not agree with you, they quickly call you "fascist"
The fascist word is overused in Twitter — javi2541997

I never get called a fascist. I get called a woke leftist liberal communist degenerate. I used to get called a woolly liberal, which on the whole was rather more accurate.

Regarding the topic - yes, the internet is beautiful. All electromagnetic phenomena are beautiful from the Northern lights to the static on your woollen cardigan and from the sway of a compass to the crackle of connections on an electricity pylon. If you imagine yourself to be a single electron then you can explore the universe. There is also a distant terror in beauty, although you can search terror from top to bottom and find no beauty at all.

I think it depends on the country. Where I live, Twitter is controlled by leftist accounts. Whenever you are disagree with them, they quickly answer with the same word: "fascist" or "bourgeois"
I remember a debate about the monarchy and the the next (I wish) Queen of Spain. The tweets were about insulting her and a reference of guillotine. It was disgusting as hell.

I seldom see leftist accounts, only rightist accounts which are mainly complaining about leftist accounts. I think the algorithms have concluded that I am a bourgeois fascist who needs to be kept safe from leftism. The rightist accounts think that I am a woke leftist communist etc who has no business reading their accounts. I live in England but seem to receive the internet from all kinds of places.

Most interesting — Ms. Marple

You broached an interesting topic: can AI produce art?



If we (make the egregious error) of distinguishing AI from humans based on the ability to create art, write poetry, basically differences based on creativitivity, I'm afraid we'll have to either categorize some of us as subhumans or others as superhumans. That, to my reckoning, is going to go sideways faster than you can say Jack Robinson. That's that!

Furthermore, we seem to make a hue and cry of how the glamor industry in particular and all others in general photoshop their products and services. We do the same for children and we don't complain, hiding the dark underbelly of humanity as it were and applying filters on their minds so that all they see are sunshine and rainbows.

Another point is that the internet is just a modern, technologically upgraded, incarnation of an older version of a knowledge network based on real people and books.

What sayest though, monsieur/mademoiselle?

I was speaking more about the aesthetics of the created bodies of artificial intelligence rather than their specific artistic abilities. Your point about their own creative capabilities would raise the question as to what kind of minds can be created as artificial intelligence?

I was speaking more about the aesthetics of the created bodies of artificial intelligence rather than their specific artistic abilities. Your point about their own creative capabilities would raise the question as to what kind of minds can be created as artificial intelligence — Jack Cummins

What would beauty be to AI? Will it be identical/similar to our own (subjective/objective) standards of beauty? Remember wide hips, a feminine aesthetic feature, has a very sound biological rationale - women with hourglass figures are likely to be fertile and survive childbirth! In short, there's logic to beauty!

It is hard to know what the aesthetics of A1 will be. It may not be based purely on biology like Darwin's natural selection. Perhaps, it may involve blending of the genders at some stage as the creation of androgynous or hermaphrodite superbeings.

When one AI poet drunkenly criticises another AI poet for the shallowness of its simulations and lack of soul then I will believe that AI can produce poetry. Until then, I'm a bit sceptical.

. It was disgusting as hell. — javi2541997

Twitter is a pile of crap, getting crappier.


Darío (Mexico)

I wish we can get rid of it but I do not know how can I help to avoid people to join Twitter.

Protect yourself.

I will do so. Protect yourself too.

What do you mean by “beautiful”? I would define the term as “The properties of a stimulus event which evoke sensory and perceptual experiences that are in accordance with the preferences of the subject”.

I don’t think such properties are found within the parts of the stimulus event itself but rather they are found between the interface of the stimulus and the physiological / psychological response produced by particular arrangements of the sensory / perceptual systems of the subject. Take taste for instance, your particular preferences aren’t within the food itself, but within the response evoked between your developing taste sensory systems and the chemical composition of the food itself. Your sense of taste adapts to the taste stimuli that it is exposed to regularly within the environment. You will acquire taste preferences for a food in correspondence with the stimulus event evoked by the foods exposure to your taste sensory systems.

Another issue is the sheer generality of measuring the internet as a whole with such powerful capacities and wide ranging utilities. I mean, it can literally be used for just about anything regarding the transmission of information. Its analogous to questioning whether or not INFORMATION is beautiful. It encompasses the whole spectrum of possible aesthetic experience and judgment. Aesthetics is not restricted to the natural world but rather it extends to the artificial world as well — to all possible experiences both physical and virtual.

In considering all of this, the best answer I can offer is that it seems to have the capacity for beauty and of ugliness as well.

Im curious. Isn’t the internet a system of networks linking various forms of information between us? Is there not a wide variety of possible information which can effect us in different ways? Doesn’t information produce a diverse spectrum of possible influences and scale the full range of possible aesthetic experiences and judgments? It contains essentially the culmination of our information. Information can be have a positive aesthetic value (receiving praise from friends and family) as well as its negative counterpart (learning that your pet died). Are you making an aesthetic judgment regarding the internet based on the seeming prevalence of negativity within your own personal experiences? Surely it has the capacity for both, wouldn’t you say?

:ok:

I get your point.

Most interesting. — Ms. Marple

We haven't been able to produce an objective definition of beauty. Nor is there a good subjective definition we could work with. Aesthetic appreciation may, therefore, lie in the interaction between subject & (the) object (of beauty). Reminds me of the lock and key model of biomolecular interaction. There's nothing about beauty that's either a ball or a socket, but ball-and-socket, that's beauty! Does that make sense?

Surely it has the capacity for both, wouldn’t you say? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Absolutely. I wasn't referring to all internet itself. I was wondering about how fake news or hate speech spread so easily through social media. We can be agree that Internet has brought us some "facilities" but at the same time, it is a tool which most of the people do not know how to use.
You have put some cute examples but what about the boy receiving cyberbullying or a girl sharing her naked body? Internet can be a dangerous place too.
Furthermore, it is clearly that Twitter as a big social media is used just to persuade their users through fake arguments and stupidities.
We should put some limits to internet

I see. I suppose im more focused on the initial topic. Fake news and hate speech are troubling, to be sure, but they are separate issues. The internet is essentially a super system for transmitting information — a “tool” as you said. It isn’t the source of such things, rather it is an amplifier of a purely human manifestation. Regarding your epistemic point, we seem to have functional knowledge about the internet, but i would agree (as a ubiquitous feature of our epistemology) we are largely ignorant of it in its totality. Im not sure if I would agree with your statement that

most [of the] people do not know how to use. — javi2541997

. Im not saying its false either but rather I would just need to see evidence before accepting your premise. This also depends upon what exactly you mean by “know”.

Cyber bullying, sexual exploitation, and twitters political agenda are genuine issues but alas separate ones from the one I was addressing. It’s easy to trail of topic with such interesting points raised and I just want to clarify that we agree with my original argument and it seems as if we have.

Just out of interest, setting the aesthetics of the internet aside, you seem to be making the argument that the act of sharing our bodies virtually is immoral or bad. Im unsure and thus withhold judgment either way, so maybe you could share with me your reasonings which brought you to that conclusion… Im aware of many negative examples resulting from such behavior but i find those to be judged independently based on consequentialist arguments. I fear I am ignorant to any sound deontological arguments inferring wrongness or immortality to the act itself. If you wish to fully digress from the topic of internet aesthetics, then perhaps we can address the issue of whether or not the act of sexual exposure is intrinsically immoral.

I don't think it's pedantic or too obvious to complain that there's no clear distinction in the OP (or in the discussion in general as far as I can see) between the internet and the web. Asking "is the internet beautiful" looks like a rather old-fashioned, anachronistic question, like asking "is transportation beautiful?" Are we talking roads, urban planning, aircraft design, or your new carbon road bike? The fact is that the internet has become almost as much a part of life as transportation. It's not some thing whose beauty can be evaluated as such.

The internet is the computer network over which data is moved around in various ways. It's the servers and cables and home computers. Among the various ways there are of moving data around on the internet are email, file transfer, instant messaging, and the world wide web. The web is the collection of interconnected pages (some of which can be used to access other internet applications like email).

But even if we narrow it down and ask "is the web beautiful?", this similarly might have to be narrowed down further. The principle of the technology (HTTP, HTML, etc) and the flow of information are certainly impressive and wonderful, but what can we answer beyond that? It's a bit like the question "is music beautiful?" The alternative answers I might give are (a) yes, in principle and in general, the fact of music is a beautiful thing; and (b) it can be. Same goes for the web I suppose.

I think that makes sense. Sort of like the mereology between an object and the arrangement of its constituent parts (at what point does an accumulation of water droplets become a puddle, pond, or sea?). I hold the view that aesthetics is best defined subjectively. I define “subjective” as something which is dependent upon a mind to (conceptually) exist. It is true that a mind likely depends on objective things for concrete conceptions to abstract into such things as aesthetics, but once abstracted such things are no longer dependent on objectivity. Like loosing ones sight (objective) though nonetheless retaining mental representations of visual information. They are based, perhaps dependent, upon objective information in their manifestation, but what makes the difference is that subjective information has the capacity to continue in its absence of objective information.

Im not saying its false either but rather I would just need to see evidence before accepting your premise. This also depends upon what exactly you mean by “know”.

It could be an evidence the age of the users. It is scary how young are the users around internet. Being young is related to childish situations. This context provokes toxic or cyber-bully actions. Why this situation happens? Because these kids do not know how to act properly through the web.
In the other hand, sure older people is guilty too. A fake news or a poisonous comment flow through internet as quickly as a twister. Instead of stopping it, many people take part of it just for business interests.
I do not want to sound that boring or populist but I think it was a disgrace the act of Elon Musk buying Twitter for $ 43000 Millions. We have a lot of troubles in the world but the richest in the world knows that the real power of manipulation is on internet and that's why they want to be there. Cleaning up their image.

I don’t think those arguments are valid. The issue is whether or not the act of exposing oneself on the internet is intrinsically wrong or immoral. Whether the act itself is wrong Irregardless of the consequences or end result. I interpreted you to be making a claim, namely, that exposing our bodies on the internet is wrong/bad. This implies that every such act is wrong simpliciter, with no conditions or exceptions. I see many obvious ways it could result in bad ways but your claim seemed to go beyond that. Maybe if i put it in argument form it will help.

I’ll attempt to represent you as best i can in logical notation.

Starting with your conclusion:

C) The act of exposing your body on the internet is immoral (as in all cases).

Now, I requested the premises from which you drew this inference from. This is what you gave me so far:

P1) If you are young, then you don’t understand what the act of exposing yourself on the internet results in.

The reason it isn’t valid is because the truth of the conclusion doesn’t follow from the truth we assume in the premise. If the act is wrong simpliciter, then it must include those of us who are not young and not ignorant of the consequences — which is another issue, the argument introduces consequentialist terms in the premise to infer a deontological claim. If the act is wrong always, then the consequences are irrelevant. See this is the problem im having. I think a possible world exists wherein such an act can be done without any negative consequences, and such an existence means it is logically possible, thus there is no contradiction derived and a contradiction is necessary for your proof. The act of exposing yourself can’t always be wrong and also sometimes (in a possible world) not wrong. Therefore it can only be one or the other and it seems as if you are arguing from the position that it is always wrong. In order to establish a proof you would have to derive a contradiction from the claim that “it is logically possible to expose yourself on the internet and cause no harm” or present what properties within the act itself constitutes it as always morally wrong. The latter commits us to take absurd positions entailed within the logic (e.g. A possible world wherein the act is realized and results in an infinite utility gain — be it predicated upon units of happiness or pleasure or avoidance of suffering), because if you say it is ALWAYS wrong them I can introduce a possible scenario in which the good gained is infinite and since you are committed to the view that it is always wrong you then are committed to say that the act was wrong no matter the result. I think such a position would be absurd to hold and find the argument unacceptable as a result. We can even make it further absurd by considering a possible world where you are offered a choice: a) commit the act resulting in avoiding infinite suffering and death to occur within the universe or, b) refuse to commit the act resulting in infinite suffering and death to occur within the universe. In this scenario, on your view, you would have to say the person performing the act did a bad thing in order to retain a logically consistent position (to avoid a contradiction).

Sorry if this is too technical. I’ll conclude with a counter argument to my interpretation of your position:

P1) If the act of exposing yourself on the internet is wrong (simpliciter), then there can be no logically possible scenario (one that commits no contradiction) where the act is good.

P2) There is at least one logically possible scenario in which the act is good.

C) Therefore, the act of exposing yourself on the internet cannot be wrong (simpliciter).

First of all, thank you for responding me with such technical arguments. But I did not wanted to search for valid or correct arguments. I just wanted to share my opinion that Internet could be a dangerous place. You complained that my arguments were so simplistic. I only can say that yes it is true, because my main goal was just to express all the negative sides of the web. I wanted tl be simplistic since the beginning.
When I put youth in the previous text, It wasn't a premise but just an example of what I do consider as ignorant. This is why we start gaining knowledge through the years. We need to be mature and thanks to the experience we can take the right choices whenever we act. But, a 15 or 16 years old tend to not do the right choices. Even, when we see a young person being responsable of their own acts, we quickly think: wow he/she is so mature. It looks like older than he or she is!

Furthermore if it is good or bad exposing ourselves in internet, I think that is even unnecessary unless we are public figures. I do not think my life is so interesting to exposing it. But... If I do so, probably in the future I would have some negative issues. I pretend to defend in my side that sometimes is better to be unknown.

As you thought previously I would see it ALWAYS that bad because my perspective of the world is pessimistic. According to own circumstances we would see it in one side or the other.

I meant no offense and do not think your arguments were simplistic. What i wanted to do was explore your opinions because opinions are beliefs and I wondered why you held a belief that i don’t. It could very well be that i am wrong and there are good arguments for that view but i will never be exposed to them if i don’t investigate and look for them. You don’t have to be technical or well spoken in the language of philosophy and logic to point out something I may have missed. My four-year-old does it constantly. I was only trying to aid you in articulating your thoughts and expressing your ideas in ways more common to philosophy—not because you are simple or wrong but because such ways are the only ones that I understand. Its my conditioning to a philosophical framework which I require in order to develop any concept of which you speak. Your thoughts are what im interested in and you can express them any way you like but i need to translate your language into philosophical concepts in order to form any idea or understanding of your thoughts.

It is likely that i interpreted you as if you were using a strict precision of language when in truth you were speaking casually. Which is fine. Neither is better than the other. You said in your latest response that

that Internet could be a dangerous place.

which is much more reasonable and practically expresses your original meaning well enough for you until I pedanticized it by over analyzing speech which was not intended to be a dialectic but rather to make practical sense of the topic.

I have only read the first paragraph of your response and felt compelled to reveal my actual intentions and better communicate in a way which is not so easily interpreted as coming across so negatively. I apologize for my neglect. I just try to communicate with as little words as possible as you can see i am prone to lengthy comments nonetheless. I just want to clarify that for you before I read your entire response.