S8, E1: The Emergence of Beauty
S8, E1: The Emergence of Beauty
Series 8: Information Arising
So seamless is our reality that the concept of emergence is not something we are obliged to think about.
‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts’, is a commonplace phrase. It can be used to inspire unity, teamwork or a concerted effort. The deeper truth that this crudely expresses is that of emergence; the behaviour of complex systems be they of crowds, markets or the weather.
However the effects of the aggregate are not always beneficial and never deterministic (otherwise the whole would be equal to the sum) which implies there are chaotic elements in play.
Life is also emergent and lifeforms depend on processes that use energy and information to sustain and replicate. As for consciousness, the safest assumption is that it emerges from brains and nervous systems, because that’s where most of the evidence for any kind of sentience seems to be.
I have two questions for you to think about.
Is beauty an emergent property of consciousness?
Can beauty exist if there is nothing conscious to witness it?
If the answer to #1 is ‘no’ then beauty must be objectively real with no dependency on consciousness. In which case the answer to #2 must be ‘yes’.
If the answer to #1 is ‘yes’ then that is consistent with the idea of beauty being subjective, and therefore, without consciousness there is no beauty. Therefore #2 would be ‘no’.
The assumption I make from here is that the answers to those questions are ‘yes’ and ‘no’ respectively. My justification for this follows.
The Survival Value of Beauty
It was a special kind of insight that enabled early humans to thrive in different climates, first by adapting to the environment and then increasingly, by modifying it, for example, by clearing ground for crops. Humans invented stories to explain the surroundings; saw patterns in everything; imagined what humans could not know to link up with what they did. Our species made bargains with nature and became enthralled.
Beauty has been a constant polestar for human progress and an a inspiration for science, but can we be sure that beauty itself is truly reliable? After all, we can see beauty everywhere according to individual tastes, or find a face in a cloud.
The ability to see patterns has to be a strength and a flaw. They sit on opposite sides of a boundary that also separates knowledge from superstition. It can show us deeper connections in science and nature but it can also lead to apophenia and the confusion between cause and effect. The models that we build to interpret our reality have frequently been a placeholder for something better to come.
Hossenfelder asserts that beauty and naturalness are neither metrics nor indicators of good science. In the book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, she makes the persuasive case that the allure of beauty has led scientists astray, resulting in a 50-year plateau in theoretical physics. In her second book, Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions or Mehr Als Nur Atome (‘More than Atoms’ translated from German) one of her main themes is emergence.There is an obvious danger in believing that science must be beautiful to be true - although I hadn’t fully appreciated it before reading Dr Hossenfelder’s first book. If the expectation of beauty is embedded into science can that aesthetic bias fail to contaminate it? I think the answer is probably no.
Does this all mean that the seductive beauty of mathematics misleads us when we see it as a causal agent rather than an emergent property? Max Tegmark’s mathematical hypothesis is that the universe is constructed from mathematics and he means it literally. From his book, ‘Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality’ I got the impression that some readers might just feel that it was too beautiful to be wrong, although I’m not one of them.
Encoding Beauty
The shell in the image below can be explained mathematically, in terms of the Fibonacci sequence, a pattern commonplace in nature. You might take this as an example of something that is intrinsically beautiful, but my question is, was this phenomena and its effects beautiful before humans were around to appreciate it?
It seems obvious to me that the mathematics represents the information encoded in the shell. I see mathematics as the language of information, providing descriptors for all aspects of reality. Like the words ‘shell’ or ‘muschelschale’ (in the German I had to look up) the Fibonacci sequence tells us something about the embedded information.
I also suggest that a piece of created art like a painting or a sculpture has the human sense of beauty encoded by the artist - and by ‘encoded’ I really do mean information. That is what makes it recognisable to many other humans with similar cultural tastes. As far as we know this is not something any other species can encode or decode ( i.e. perceive).
Perceiving Beauty
It is useful to assume that all sentient beings (by definition conscious) examine reality via a fusion of sensory information. That neatly sets aside the unhelpful diversion over who or what is sentient whilst acknowledging it’s still an open question.
Humans have taken the exploration of reality further, by detailed study of our environment, via measurement, experiment, indirect observation, theoretical constructs and calculation. In the process we may derive a sense of wonder but it’s easy to forget that this is an internal state.
The aphorism that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder ’ points to the subjective nature of beauty. Taken literally it implies that beauty only emerges in consciousness, and it is not that surprising, given even our reality is there too. Of course, I am not suggesting we take our lead from pithy one-liners, but perhaps sometimes these folksy sayings belie a deeper insight.
Therefore, despite appearing to be coming at us, beauty comes from within us. This is data post-processing albeit run on extremely quick biodegradable hardware.
If our consciousness manufactures beauty from the inputs then the passive detection of beauty is an illusion. How might that limit us? Would it be fair to say that the sentience of the observer makes them a part of what is being observed?
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) sends pictures from it’s unique position in space-time. Yet it is a detector rather than an observer.
We see the images and marvel at the intimidating scale of pattern and beauty, but the beauty is not something out there occupying space, it’s in us.
This is similar to the question …
If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s nobody is there, does it make a sound?
I find this useful:
If I say, ‘of course it does - it’s just a sound that has not been heard ’, I have fallen for tautology. By definition a sound is a collection of pressure waves that are heard by something sentient and therein lies the trick.
I could say that it is a sound because if there was a recording device in the forest it could pick it up. There is no profit in that because it still would not be a sound until it is played back and heard by a sentient being.
So this not just about detection of pressure waves but the perception of it as sound, i.e. it requires a consciousness. Similarly, although electromagnetic waves don’t require sentient detection to exist, sight does.
I go further to suggest that there is no beauty without a special type of consciousness to emerge from. This is more than sensory fusion and decoding signals, although, I sense your discomfort. Isn’t that the same as the ability of sentient creatures to convert light to vision or pressure to sound or visualised sound map? I would say ‘yes’ but only as an initial step.
Let me attempt an analogy for the second step.
Consider a battery, a switch and lamp in a simple circuit. You might say that the lamp is a detector of current; if you see it light up you know there is current flowing (in the conventional sense) - the conscious knowledge of the system state is within you.
If you unscrew the lamp there is an open circuit and no current to detect. You might plausibly argue that the lamp is still a detector of zero current for as long as we can see it. Note that this does not change if the lamp fails because no current can pass through a blown lamp.
The JWST is in space indifferent to the view. It is not until it communicates what has been detected that all the wonderment happens remotely, on a speck of distant rock, within the imaginings of one species.
How can the beauty of ‘The Cosmic Cliffs of Carina ’ exist anywhere in the absence of such sentience? Perhaps beauty can only exist sentient creatures with our talent for abstraction are ‘in the circuit’.
This brings me to an article I read on this platform by Daniel Sharp that was republished on the Substack of
- .
I will review Mr Sharp’s article in Episodes 2 and 3 of this series as a vehicle for exploring some themes around the influence of beauty on consciousness, our evolution and future survivability.