Kevin's Watch

Avatar wrote:Haha, then we don't, since I'm pretty much in the subjective camp. I think though that my point is that the universe itself, devoid of perception or reason, cannot recognise anything as beautiful, nor "intends" to produce beauty.

The universe is obviously not devoid of perception. Do you live somewhere else besides the universe?

We're not the only ones deciding what is beautiful. Why do you think two species so alien to each other--bees and humans--would both be attracted to flowers? There were no flowers before insects. Bees and flowers coevolved so that the genes to seek flowers developed along with the genes to attract bees. It makes sense: flowers need pollinators and bees need food. But how does this explain how we're attracted to them? We're not part of that evolutionary loop.

Here's the summary of Deutsch's chapter on the subject, "Why are flowers beautiful?"

David Deutsch wrote: There are objective truths in aesthetics. The standard argument that there cannot be is a relic of empiricism. Aesthetic truths are linked to factual ones by explanations, and also because artistic problems can emerge from physical facts and situations. The fact that flowers reliably seem beautiful to humans when their designs evolved for an apparently unrelated purpose is evidence that beauty is objective. Those convergent criteria of beauty solve the problem of creating hard-to-forge signals where prior shared knowledge is insufficient to provide them.

The entire chapter is a must-read for this subject.

Will do Wos.

I watch the roses bloom and blow in my garden, and their perfume is divine! Boring - V! How could you!

+JMJ+

peter wrote:Will do Wos.

With what seems to be your interests, I very highly recommend this book: The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe's Way of Science by Henri Bortoft.

I also super-highly recommend the long out-of-print and rare Man and Mammals: Toward a Biology of Form by Wolfgang Schad.

They sound up my street Wos. Goethe in particular is an individual I'd like to know more about. His achievements across many fields were apparently monumental. Occasionally my library lets me range freely in their back store where many treasures have been gathered in the last hundred or so years and so I might be able to access the rare title there.

Not all plants are beautiful to humans, but they all attract whatever pollinates them.

Zarathustra wrote:We're not the only ones deciding what is beautiful.

The flower attracts the bee for, as you said, a specifically evolved for purpose. That doesn't mean that it is beautiful to it. To me, the two do not correlate. A rotting carcass attracts vultures.

How are we defining beauty?

--A

Avatar wrote:

Zarathustra wrote:I'm not so sure we agree. I'm starting to come around to the idea that beauty is objective, not merely subjective. Maybe I didn't make that clear.

Haha, then we don't, since I'm pretty much in the subjective camp. I think though that my point is that the universe itself, devoid of perception or reason, cannot recognise anything as beautiful, nor "intends" to produce beauty.

That is not to say that something cannot be inherently beautiful, but it is so by our standards.

After all, who decided that things could even be beautiful in the first place?

--A

How do you know what the universe perceives? And in point of fact, aren't humans -- who have continual perceptions -- part of the universe?

Part of, but not the whole. Perception implies consciousness, and I've never seen any evidence that the universe is.

Of course, that's not to say it isn't, but I think it highly unlikely.

--A

Yes Av, but only part of us is conscious as well, but it's enough for us to consider ourselves as conscious entities. It all depends how you see the universe. Is it just a big room with lots (or not much) going on in it, where we happen to live - or is the quantum reality of a continuous frothing grainy bubble of interconnected force and matter fields the case, in which case our conciousness [or conciuosness's] can be seen as a more intigrated property of the whole.

I have now finished reading the book A Beautiful Question by Frank Wilczek. Wilczek, a Nobel Lauriate for his work in the field of quantum theory [specifically in the area of supersymmetry I believe], began his work with the simply phrased question "Does the world embody beautiful ideas?". Ho observed immediately after posing the question, it's close relationship to the question "Is the world a work of art?".

After a deep forray into the twin theories of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics/Electrodynamics, he has come to the final conclusion that the answer to the question [or in it's first form at least] is a resounding "Yes!" [By implication though he does not overtly state it as so, the answer to the second question would be yes also]. He concludes with a chapter entitled A Beautiful Answer?, the question mark of which I find slightly incongruous in relation to the certainty he has expressed on multiple occasions within the text [perhaps it refers more to the next observations I'm about to relate]. He, like Nils Bohr, feels that the concept of 'complementarity' should be used with a much broader brush in it's power to engage apparent contradictions, and in his final chapter he uses examples to illustrate the liberating value of this approach. Here are some of them.

Nb. He starts the section with these fine words of Walt Whitman in order to set the tone,

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
I am large. I contain multitudes.

Once recognised, complentarity is a wisdom we rediscover and confirm, both in the physical world and beyond. It is a wisdom I embrace and recomend to you. Here are some examples.

Reduction and Abundance

The basic building blocks of nature are few and profoundly simple, their properties fully specified by equations of high-symmetry. The world of objects is vast, infinitely various and inexhaustable.

One World, and Many

Individual brains are the ultimate repositories of human thought, and they fit comfortably within individual skulls, within individual bodies here on Earth. Most people, most of the time are concerned with events that occur in a small region around the surface of Earth. It is where great wars, great art, great lives, all of human history is played out. Viewed from even near-afar, Earth is merely a tiny spec of reflected light.

Object and Person

I am, and you are, a collection of quarks, gluons, electrons and photons. I am, and you are, a thinking person.

Determined and Free

We are material objects subject to the laws of physics. We are capable of making choices and we are responsible for them.

Transient and eternal

The state of the world is in flux and every object within it is subject to change. Concepts live outside of time and, because All Things Are Number [sic], liberate us from it.

He then says that the "great and fruitful principle of symmetry, 'Change without Change'" can be fully embodied "as Parmenides paradoxically insisted",

One story, one road, now
is left; that it is. And on this there are signs
in plenty, that being, it is ungenerated and indestructible,
whole, of one kind, and unwavering, and complete.


Wilczek is listed in his Wikipedia entry as agnostic.

+JMJ+

peter wrote:Yes Av, but only part of us is conscious as well, but it's enough for us to consider ourselves as conscious entities. It all depends how you see the universe. Is it just a big room with lots (or not much) going on in it, where we happen to live - or is the quantum reality of a continuous frothing grainy bubble of interconnected force and matter fields the case, in which case our conciousness [or conciuosness's] can be seen as a more intigrated property of the whole.

I have now finished reading the book A Beautiful Question by Frank Wilczek. Wilczek, a Nobel Lauriate for his work in the field of quantum theory [specifically in the area of supersymmetry I believe], began his work with the simply phrased question "Does the world embody beautiful ideas?". Ho observed immediately after posing the question, it's close relationship to the question "Is the world a work of art?".

After a deep forray into the twin theories of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics/Electrodynamics, he has come to the final conclusion that the answer to the question [or in it's first form at least] is a resounding "Yes!" [By implication though he does not overtly state it as so, the answer to the second question would be yes also]. He concludes with a chapter entitled A Beautiful Answer?, the question mark of which I find slightly incongruous in relation to the certainty he has expressed on multiple occasions within the text [perhaps it refers more to the next observations I'm about to relate]. He, like Nils Bohr, feels that the concept of 'complementarity' should be used with a much broader brush in it's power to engage apparent contradictions, and in his final chapter he uses examples to illustrate the liberating value of this approach. Here are some of them.

Nb. He starts the section with these fine words of Walt Whitman in order to set the tone,

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
I am large. I contain multitudes.

Once recognised, complentarity is a wisdom we rediscover and confirm, both in the physical world and beyond. It is a wisdom I embrace and recomend to you. Here are some examples.

Reduction and Abundance

The basic building blocks of nature are few and profoundly simple, their properties fully specified by equations of high-symmetry. The world of objects is vast, infinitely various and inexhaustable.

One World, and Many

Individual brains are the ultimate repositories of human thought, and they fit comfortably within individual skulls, within individual bodies here on Earth. Most people, most of the time are concerned with events that occur in a small region around the surface of Earth. It is where great wars, great art, great lives, all of human history is played out. Viewed from even near-afar, Earth is merely a tiny spec of reflected light.

Object and Person

I am, and you are, a collection of quarks, gluons, electrons and photons. I am, and you are, a thinking person.

Determined and Free

We are material objects subject to the laws of physics. We are capable of making choices and we are responsible for them.

Transient and eternal

The state of the world is in flux and every object within it is subject to change. Concepts live outside of time and, because All Things Are Number [sic], liberate us from it.

He then says that the "great and fruitful principle of symmetry, 'Change without Change'" can be fully embodied "as Parmenides paradoxically insisted",

One story, one road, now
is left; that it is. And on this there are signs
in plenty, that being, it is ungenerated and indestructible,
whole, of one kind, and unwavering, and complete.


Wilczek is listed in his Wikipedia entry as agnostic.

It seems to me that what he's basically saying is that the Universe, all "sides" or "aspects" of Reality, all lines or streams of thought — point beyond themselves to an "ever-greater totality" — a totality "greater-than-which nothing can be thought".

One can think and think and think, and one will never "get there". The convergence is always "just beyond", always just out of reach. The "lines" point beyond themselves, converge at infinity. This allure of this "ever-more", "ever-greater", is Beautiful.

Welcome to the Ontological Argument for God.

Wosbald wrote:Welcome to the Ontological Argument for God.

We've met. Logical necessity does not necessitate existence. Being is not a predicate.

+JMJ+

Zarathustra wrote:

Wosbald wrote:Welcome to the Ontological Argument for God.

We've met. Logical necessity does not necessitate existence. Being is not a predicate.

If you've been reading what Peter and I have posted, how can you even bring Logic into it? You're making the same mistake that Aquinas, Kant, et al made. The Ontological Argument is an intuitive argument, not a logical one.

Anselm uses the form-structure of Logic in order to orchestrate an intuitive convergence toward the radical No-Thing at the heart of every thing.

Wosbald wrote:If you've been reading what Peter and I have posted, how can you even bring Logic into it?

You brought logic into it by bringing in a logical (fallacious) argument.

Wosbald wrote:You're making the same mistake that Aquinas, Kant, et al made. The Ontological Argument is an intuitive argument, not a logical one.

That's like saying that a mathematical "proof," which doesn't prove what it purports to prove, is merely an intuitive argument for whatever wacky concept you personally find cool. What worth does that have? If it is not a logical argument, it has no worth whatsoever, since that's exactly what it purports to be.

Ontological arguments are arguments, for the conclusion that God exists, from premises which are supposed to derive from some source other than observation of the world—e.g., from reason alone. In other words, ontological arguments are arguments from nothing but analytic, a priori and necessary premises to the conclusion that God exists.

plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/

There's nothing about intuition in the entire encyclopedia article linked above. You can't rewrite 1000 years of the history of philosophy like this, simply because the argument you've cited doesn't prove what it's supposed to prove.

peter wrote: I watch the roses bloom and blow in my garden, and their perfume is divine! Boring - V! How could you!

Well...I got bored with porn pretty damn quick, too---and what are roses, besides porn to titillate and manipulate bugs for the plants own selfish needs?





Z: Just a comment/note---I've always had a problem with the whole idea of "intuitive argument."
The words always seem to contradict each other, despite the explications/usages of it.
Intuition seems to me always more akin to Deutsch's "theory-laden" and "conjecture"...and to heuristics...and to the subconscious network of frames, evidence, suppositions...to creativity...a-rational [or at least non-verbal] ways of knowing/assessing/sensing. Many things, but NOT argument.
Argument is one of the things you do AFTER---to try and show whether your intuition is correct/explanatory or not.

Vraith wrote:Argument is one of the things you do AFTER---to try and show whether your intuition is correct/explanatory or not.

Agreed.

peter wrote:...these fine words of Walt Whitman in order to set the tone,

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
I am large. I contain multitudes.

Perhaps my favourite Whitman quote.

--A

Wilczek is carefull in the text of this book, not to stray into the area of what the implications are of his ascertation that the world embodies beautiful ideas. Wos above has made the observation that his final words seem to indicate a point of unity beyond all streams of thought, all lines of investigation, and interprets this as an alternative iteration of what is essentially the ontological argument - like viewing a diamond from a different face in a manner of speaking. Wilczek himself stresses this approach in physics and uses it [IIRC] as an example of 'change without change'; how the demands of both a dynamic and unchanging fundamental nature of 'being' can be met in the symmetry of the equations of quantum physics.

As a working proffesional at MIT I'm guessing there are at least some constraints in the way he is presenting his ideas - ideas that get perilously close [for a man in his position] to stepping outside the established scientific dogma into an area over which the spectre of 'proffessional suicide' looms large. As such, the work is quite possibly a very 'brave' one for him to have published and I applaud his courage. I've often wondered how science would deal with the situation if evidence were to accumulate that did stray into the world generally considered 'of the spiritual' and it heartens me to see that there are practicioners like Wilczek out there who will 'follow the road' even should it lead to places they may not find comfortable. Science will only be enriched by such openness of thinking.