aesthetics? *nice*

well, i think there's definitely something behind the 'mortality / immotality' thing. my physics prof and i discussed why some systems appear to be 'ordered' and others are 'chaotic'... how it had to do with how random or unlikely something seemed, that the more unlikely the arrangement the more 'beautiful' it became. as humans, and more importantly members of the universe, we admire order (or unlikeliness) because the universe is tending towards likeliness via entropy... which would, under this theory, indicate that beauty might be sort of a xenophilia. lol

i'd like to take it a step further by looking at how i react to art. i, personally, have a certain image that i derive some measure of pleasure in maintaining. when i see things that reflect on that image, i really DO like them, both because i want to like them and because i've actually fooled myself into liking them. well, maybe fooled isn't the right word. a better word would be taught. i've taught myself to like certain things because liking them makes me happy. music is a good example. i think you can tell a lot about a person by the kind of music they listen to, even how they dress, without being fickle. what a person 'wants to be' is more important than how that person 'is', because the person can only really 'control' the first.

i also agree that a large part of art is seeing ourselves reflected in it, holding on to emotions that might otherwise be gone forever. i remember feeling things that don't have a word associated with them, emotions similar to love and hate and envy and pride that aren't exactly the same. art is romantic because it can remind you of those feelings and take you back to your best and worst moments, letting you experience those emotions in a way that you were unable to while actually experiencing it. so we like or dislike art for the same reason we can like or dislike talking to an old friend, visiting your old house, or using the same kind of shampoo. it jogs our memory, in whatever unpredictable way, and we remember.

hmmm... i think the state of being thing is linked to what i was saying about 'bottling emotions' that you might forget about otherwise. we want to keep everything in a sort of experience closet so that we can look inside the closet and, in the most self-gratifying way possible, point at everything and say 'that's good, that's bad, i like that, i hate that'. it sounds like you're almost trying to prove yourself by doing it, so maybe we like art because it makes us remember experience hence giving some sort of subconcious proof of our own existence? maybe that's what consciousness is: seeing things, remembering experience, and hence knowing who you are. art makes us self aware because it's personal. that's what we all really want.