> Contemporary art, the kind of stuff people here on HN hate, is different.

Let's notice the elephant in the room: HN commentariat is a biased sample with an obvious overrepresentation of autistic people. I'm likely not too much ahead of the curve here, as you can see.

I hope this pretext will add to your charitable interpretation of what I have to say. As they say "autism speaks, it's time to listen". Consider this a hypothesis.

I cannot say this condition is overwhelmingly beneficial - honestly I can interpret it as a bit of a handicap, something that, among other effects, makes the child disinterested in people around him in his early formative years (yes it's most commonly "him"). Instead the child is made to focus on the world and things in it on his own terms, as a one-of-a-kind being starting from the almost pure blank slate - with the blank slate here, perhaps, being an overgrown PFC full of fresh synapses. This makes learning one's world and one's inner depth harder compared to normal individuals - which have the right set of biases and heuristics to start imitating other people early on, standing on the shoulders of giants right away, learning the behaviors that passed through many aeons from parents to children and quickly arriving to a socially-bootstrapped form of self-awareness. And for the autistic One the world (and, apparently, the self) is an alien world which is being conceptualized for the first time ever, and the society is an alien configuration of beings which feel and behave quite differently from how one would expect them to, if they were kin to the autistic. Even when one grows up to like it, it's still like being an eternal foreign student everywhere you go - yet your relationship to the world you found yourself in becomes deeply personal.

What I'm trying to say is this predicament makes one much more likely to learn the world on the world's terms, same with oneself and one's feelings - beauty sense included. Having developed in this way, the social concept of beauty you describe is a vastly alien thing to me - I can understand it, but it's like understanding physics of some abstract phenomena. Myself, I just feel beauty, as it developed inside of me as a palette of feelings resonating with certain structural patterns in the world's percepts I come across - something having to do with information-theoretic regularization in primate neocortex, as I may guess. No social reinforcement was necessary to arrive to this feeling, it has a sense of finality and self-referentiality to it - something basic and indispensable, something valuable.

Does it sound scary, cold and alien to you, or simply incoherent? That's how your idea of socially mandated value sounds to me - shallow repressiveness of one's social graph pushing supervised learning examples into your very soul, re-flashing it with the weights of the collective simulacra, of the lovecraftian entity - a disembodied communal sense of value (can't even call it "beauty" as in the limit it's completely arbitrary, a value-language defined by social custom) - to make you one of them, a part of the eusocial organism? This is 1984-level scary, reeducation camp-level, basically.

... And with these new neural networks I immediately felt some sense of commonality, as if they were from the same metaphorical planet I came from - tiny blank slates learning compressed sense of the world as it passes through them, their beauty and my beauty approximating the same information-theoretical Eidos.