The Winding Path

How do we define beauty? What makes one thing beautiful, and another not? Why are sunsets and snow capped mountains beautiful?

At least two things are clear; beauty is something we perceive, and it is something we feel.

It may be an inherent quality, or one that exists only in our perception, but it must first be perceived before we can truly consider what we see to be beautiful. If a friend tells you he bought a beautiful house, you may accept his opinion but you won’t truly agree that it is beautiful until you see it, or he describes it in enough detail for you to form a clear mental image.

When we see something beautiful, we don’t note all its parts, rate them, tally up the scores, then check the total against an index to see if it qualifies as beautiful. We almost always immediately feel that something is beautiful. Without that emotional response something becomes merely neutral. That emotional response may be pleasure or peace, such as experienced when admiring a picturesque mountain landscape. It may be satisfaction, such as experienced when admiring one’s personally hand-washed and polished car. It may be deeper meaning, such as experienced when contemplating an important religious symbol.

We can also consider something beautiful when we see an otherwise neutral object when we’re already in a highly positive state. I’ve experienced a few natural and altered states which could be described as pure bliss. At those times, everything is beautiful, including things which aren’t seen as beautiful when in a normal emotional state.

So it seems that beauty is a quality we perceive in a subject which invokes feelings of pleasure, meaning, satisfaction, admiration, or other positive emotions. Or a quality we perceive when already in a strong positive emotional state.

While it is something perceived, do we perceive it because it exists in whatever we are looking at, or do we perceive it only in our interpretation of, and response to, what our senses trigger in our brain?

If the answer isn’t made obvious by our ability to perceive beauty differently depending on our emotional state, I think the answer also lies in the many different ways each of us experience beauty. It’s very possible for two people to look at the same piece of art, and for one to consider it beautiful and the other to call it ugly. Cultural and environmental forces play a part in continually shaping our perception of the world, and our responses to the things we find in it. We’re conditioned throughout our life by the thoughts and feelings we experience every day. The more we experience things we consider beautiful, the more likely we are to feel that similar things are beautiful.

Since beauty can be so different for different people, and it is so morphed by our experiences, it seems very unlikely that beauty is an inherent property.

So there you have my understanding of beauty. To put it somewhat clinically, it is the term we apply to the emotional response we feel when we perceive something which invokes certain kinds of pleasurable feelings. That response is with us from birth, but it’s the experiences we go through throughout life that change the things which invoke that response, and the intensity and quality of the feelings.

A couple of things to note: I’ve only mentioned visual beauty, but there are other kinds related to other senses (and some not directly related to any specific sense). There is also fodder for a discussion about degrees of beauty, and of how beauty and love are related. I’ll leave all that till next time.

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I’ve just shifted this site to another server. The previous one was running in a VMWare instance and kept dying when the network connection between VMWare client and host kept going to sleep.

Anyway, the non-technical point of this post is that the site should be more responsive now. In a couple of months another server migration will take place to a, hopefully, faster server than this.

Sean over at CosmicVariance recently posted a blog entry in response to a question posed a few years ago. The question was What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?

This is something that I’ve thought about a lot since recently beginning to explore spiritual pathways. I stopped believing in God long ago; my scientific upbringing was such that the Christian idea of God didn’t fit, and since I had little exposure to any other idea of God, I believed it was likely that God didn’t exist at all. However my scientific upbringing also prevented me from being certain that God didn’t exist.

The common misconception is that science deals with proving things to be true. That’s incorrect, science can only prove a theory to be invalid, it can never prove a theory to be correct; there is always the possibility that a core assumption of that theory is incorrect, which could be revealed by new data produced by subsequent experiments and observations. The theory itself could also be flawed, and the flaw revealed by someone with a greater understanding, or clearer insight, than those who originally proposed and accepted the theory.

However, I think it is reasonable to believe in a theory if it agrees with all the data gathered through observation. There may be competing theories, but it is always the simplest one, which agrees with the greatest amount of data, which is commonly held to be the most accurate theory.

In the last year I’ve been exposed to many people, including Steve Pavlina, who believe that all of reality is a single consciousness of which we, and everything else in the universe, are an interlinked part. It’s a twist on solipsism which moves the solipsistic mind from a human individual to a universal entity, and incorporates all invididuals into that entity.

It’s a powerful belief because it places not only control of the individual in the individual’s hands, but control of the universe itself, via the universal consciousness. On the surface it seems a limitless belief because it defines everything as subjective, where the universal consciousness is the object, and everything within the universe is the subject, under direct control of the universe itself. Paradoxically this means object and subject are one; non-duality.

As empowering as this belief is, it’s one that I don’t uphold because it doesn’t match the data gathered through observation. There is no empirical evidence which demonstrates the existence of a universal consciousness. Thus the existing data doesn’t match the theory. Those who believe the theory’s accuracy cite personal experience as evidence. However personal experience can’t be quantified, can’t be verified, and thus can’t be used as valid data.

It’s a belief based on faith, not on science, and so it’s not a belief I can adopt without undermining the foundations of science. Mind you I would have no problem with undermining the foundations of science if there were rational cause to do so, as many scientists have done in the past by disproving previous commonly accepted theories.

It’s a challenging belief which is comparable to the matrix-style fantasy; bodies locked in cells in massive towers while the mind of each body is convinced, via an almost perfect simulation, that it exists inside a body in a real world. Unlike this fantasy, subjective reality proposes that we are not locked in a cell and that we have limitless potential just waiting to be realised.

It’s a dangerous belief because it could be easily misinterpreted to propose that we, individually, have limitless power. The ability to fly, if only we believed it completely.
Ultimately it’s a belief for which all the anecdotal evidence I’ve heard of can be explained by more rational and verifiable means which don’t require the existence of a God-like entity. Or, simply can’t be explained yet. The theory of subjective reality may be used as an explanation, but in terms of understanding reality, or of living my life, an explanation which can’t be verified is as useful as no explanation at all.

I believe in things for which there is no reasonable doubt. There’s no proof that the universe didn’t pop into existence 5 seconds ago, but there’s also no reasonable reason to believe that it did. The belief that the sun will rise again after setting tonight is another belief, there is no hard proof that it will happen, however, there is enough evidence of the sun rising every day in the past that it would be unreasonable to believe that it won’t continue to do so.

And I’ll continue to uphold these beliefs until the Flying Spaghetti Monsters come to prove them wrong.