Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
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From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: Millihelen? Whitehead?
Message-ID: <1995May16.135913.4773@media.mit.edu>
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Cc: minsky
Organization: MIT Media Laboratory
References: <3p85hj$lh0@news.duke.edu> <800626465snz@longley.demon.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 16 May 1995 13:59:13 GMT
Lines: 36

In article <800626465snz@longley.demon.co.uk> David@longley.demon.co.uk writes:
>In article <3p85hj$lh0@news.duke.edu>
>           lnonn@soc.duke.edu "Lynn Nonnemaker" writes:
>> 
>> I'm looking for the origin of a term, millihelen, milihelen, or millehelen,
>> that I think was used by Alfred North Whitehead to refer to a unit of
>> beauty, the amount of beauty needed to launch 1 ship (hence, 1,000th of
>> Helen's beauty).  If anyone can point me to a source to verify
>> that he used the term, or knows where it came from, I would
>> appreciate the information. Please email me directly.

>I skimmed Whitehead's  Concept of Nature, and have glanced  at some  of  his 
>other works, so  my judgment is based on a very shallow reading of the man's
>work, but compared to Russell, he seems as daft as a brush. Can someone help
>enlighten me as to the core of his philsophy, its influence etc. I know that

Well, ANW wrote a handsome book called Esthetic Measure, in which he
rates (for example) Greek Vases and Musical Tunes for various
properties such as symmetry, proportion, and I forget the several
other features.  Then he also rates how beautiful he finds each object
to be and does some sort of linear regression on this data.  He ends
up with a sort of Perceptron-without-threshold rating scheme, having
determined the coefficients to be assigned to each feature.  In the
music application, this results in Beethoven's Ode to Joy having the
highest possible rating.

I certainly do not remember him telling the millihelen joke, which
probably dates from Roman times.

Daft, no doubt, but courageous for sure, to buck public opinion by
measuring beauty. The rest of his philosophy left me with
the impression of a vast, undifferentiated muddle, and I'm sure I got
more good ideas from the writings of A.E.Van Vogt.  But that was
when I was a young student, unable to understand anything that wasn't
perfectly clear.  I'd be afraid to read ANW now, for fear that I might
understand him now.
