[online version, edited Nov. '96]
We all know how beauty delights our senses and stimulates our intellects, how we long to possess it and become beautiful ourselves. But what is beauty? That's a question for aesthetics, the study of the nature of beauty. Clearly, if we are to enjoy our future lives to the fullest potential, we must master the principles of aesthetics. After all, we don't just want to live long--we want to live well, too! By revealing beauty's underlying principles, aesthetics will allow us to reproduce it at will.
Aesthetics is a particularly relevant subject for Extropy because beauty is a property particular to transmissions of information. Art--be it painted, sung, danced or otherwise--serves as a means of communication from artist to spectator. Some artists succeed in imparting their messages with something we particularly value: beauty. Could this be efficiency of information transmission, or memetic survivability? Extropy will investigate these and other possible definitions of beauty as it both discusses aesthetics and serves as a lab for art experiments.