• Different people differ in their attribution of "beauty" to particular "things out there".
  
  
• The differing attributions are not totally random. To differing degrees particular different "things out there" evoke in different groups of people similar attributions of "beauty".
  
  
• "Beauty" must have to do with an interaction between "things out there" and "things in here". And "things in here" must have some similarities as well as some differences among individuals.
  
  
• There are no obvious commonalities among the "things out there" to which either individuals or groups attribute "beauty".
  
  
• "Beauty" overlaps with, but can usually be distinguished from other attributions, both among individuals and within individuals.
  
  
• If there is a there there, "beauty" must be a single something "in here" that can be produced by different "things out there".
  
  
• People in general have great difficulty in accounting for their personal attributions of "beauty", but are in general quite comfortable (even happier?) making them without "thinking about it".
  
  
• "Beauty" must have to do with something "in here" other than "thinking".

Additional Threads (from this symposium)

	Koggel - "Beauty" has substantial political/social and personal significance ... and some relation to "power"
Lord - The power, personal, and political/social significance of "beauty" is not invariant. It differs for different people, at different times in history, and at different times in individual lives.
	Levine - "Beauty" relates to the "unconscious" ... and to mystery/tension?
Albano - One's sense of what is beautiful, and one's sense of its significance, can be affected by thinking and by experience/culture
	Burgmayer - Beauty relates to a creative force

Relevance of the brain?

If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it it does NOT produce a "sound"

• Different inputs can produce the same "state"
  
  
• The same input produces different states in different people
  
  
• The state produced may be influenced by experience, culture, and thinking but does not depend on thinking (and may not depend on specifics of experience or culture)
  
  
• "Beauty", like "sound" or "color" is a creation of the brain

"Beauty" can be "localized" within the brain

• "Beauty" is the result of an unconscious analysis and is reported to the I-function as the resultant of that analysis without any information about how the analysis was carried out.
  
  
• The only way to determine how the analysis is done for any given brain is to observe the outcomes of the analysis for a series of inputs (in others and/or in oneself).
  
  
• The analysis itself can reasonably be expected to be somewhat the same and somewhat different in different brains, and to reflect genetic information as well as individual experiences, cultural factors, and activities of the I-function. It is likely not to be predictable from any of those factors operating alone, and hence to be "surprising" to the individual doing the analysis (more so in the case of oneself than of others). Hence data collection (see above) is worthwhile for at least two reasons (personal and social/cultural)
  
  
• Some hints for further neurobiological inquiry:
  • Visual and auditory inputs access the esthetics processor more readily than do somatosensory and gustatory inputs?
  • There may be population differences in the esthetics processor between different groups of humans as well as in the relation of the esthetics processor to other boxes.

Social/political and personal considerations ...

Maybe if we can all learn to enjoy the richness of diversity, we can all keep and enjoy "beauty" too ... each in our own way