Ameliorated Future VI - Rationales of Beauty

The question of identifying a possible link between beauty, simplicity and empirical studies has always been eluding. The evolution of aesthetic perception and their acceptance depends on inexplicable inspirations or epiphanies, and not entirely on a prescribed agenda of thoughts. This abstract sense of identifying patterns is one of the few quiet roles a mind plays, lashing together the unthinkable complexities of miscellaneous global bricolage to give definition and meaning to one of the important aspects of human life. This paper explores how the human mind formulates, conceptualizes beauty and projects its intelligent aspects.

“I cannot tell by what logic we call a toad ugly”

- Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

Dated back to early works of Greek philosophers like Pythagoras from the pre-Socratic period, the platonic art of beauty still makes our world denser, more real and value-added. A world where somehow the sunshine is sunnier, the rain rainier, smiles more joyous and tears more poignantly tearful. It always turns like a forgotten wealth in our tin-tacky present-day world that can only be found in the contemplation of nature, or in man's conscious, creative intervention into nature.

It would be completely naļve to issue comment on implications and theological aspects of beauty without knowing the deeper aspects of the abstract ontology supporting it. All philosophical discussions from Descartes, Socrates to McAllister [4] and Gian Rota [5] as an attempt to formulate postulates for beauty resulted in sempiternal conclusions covering everything from physical to psychological aspects oscillating between thin lines of definitions. We know which face is charismatic, and how to program our body language, our developed aesthetic sense help us in enjoying the silent incongruous nature in a more ardent manner and our euphonic judgment seems to be almost perfect. But the mysticism that covers almost every aspect of our life and existence is surprisingly unknown and our self-acclaimed rating system of beauty seems to be vague, abstract, and have no basis when applied to aspects like how and why we appreciate and applaud beauty.

Such rating systems are supposedly based on subjective experience and have non-linear patterns of acceptance. There seems to be no scale on which aspects like beauty and feelings can be rated and golden rule conclusion that selected aspect ratios of faces makes them more attractive [2] seems to be missing some important ingredient of the overall recipe for perfect beauty. The abstract generalization has gifted us the ability to think and enjoy even random patterns as intelligent and attractive as against the golden ratio. For no definite reasons, irregular patterns are always interesting because of their low probability of existence and such abstract generalization always challenges our ability to identify, judge and define the finer aspects of beauty.

Patterns above are the graphical representation of noise generated in an audio system. Interestingly though, such irregular patterns always open new doors of controversies and debate for philosophers and mathematicians alike.

Such experiments of abstract generalization create perfect ground for addressing the issue in a column focused on identifying and revealing the hidden mysteries of human mind. A cursory exploration of concept establishes strong connectivity between mathematics and beauty supported by the fact that such links were identified by earlier attempts of Pythagorean School. The presence of mathematics opens new door of investigations into the role of human mind in displaying the natural brilliance of higher realms of thoughts and consciousness while defining and unleashing the creativity in its most native form.

The definition of beauty coagulates major argumentation with little agreement as to what they mean or how they are to be employed; they are explanations that on deeper elaboration can lead rapidly to vicious definitional circles. Exploring what makes the entire process so exciting could well pave the infinite paths to the strange dimensions of the mind and could well explain how and why human mind evaluates this phantasmagoric world?

The golden rule seems to play an important role in defining aesthesis, but nature's incongruous artwork is still a de facto standard.

In studies conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers Itzhak Aharon, Nancy Etcoff, Dan Ariely, Christopher F. Chabris, Ethan O'Connor, and Hans C. Breiter have used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology to look at the activity in men's brains when they were shown pictures of beautiful women's faces. Breiter and his colleagues found that the same part of the brain lights up as when a hungry person sees food, or a gambler eyes cash, or a drug addict sees a fix. Essentially, beauty and addiction trigger the same areas in the brain. [3]

While analyzing the object, its various aspects are broken down by senses and fed as inputs to the brain. This process not only isolates brain from direct interaction with object but also the senses from affecting the analyzing process except providing the input. The domination of such relative deviation in the definition process affects the mental representation and its reaction thereafter while analyzing the finer aspects of the object.

The process of how mind becomes conscious about the object and its related definitions is equally interesting. The inputs to brain travels as electronic signal to the respective activity center of the brain where this information is classified, collected and synchronized. Technically, the visual signals goes from the retina to thalamus where it is translated into the brain’s language. Most of the message then reaches the visual cortex, where it is analyzed and forwarded to the amygdala, triggering emotional response. The interaction of these signals with other existing signal in the conscious pool gives birth to disturbances and other patterns [1] and generates an ‘conscious event or activity’ in the brain time frame. The theta rhythm, with between 4 and 8 waves a second, and the gamma rhythm, which oscillates up to 10 times faster- might even interact, and in so doing help the brain to package information into coherent images, thoughts and memories [2]. These brain waves are for real and allow detection, linking and organizing processes in different regions of the brain.

The mind has perfected the art of isolating the resonating signals arising out of the mental object interactions, but the whole process makes a big change in the ‘existing’ and ‘would be chain of thoughts’ on mental planes. The object no longer exists after this transformation leaving the mind to play around with the newly formed mental waves corresponding to it. The interaction of these newly introduced waves with already existing signals will give rise to chain reactions of disturbances [1]. The results of the activity will be subjective to the state and conditions of patterns available in the conscious pool and not on the state of the object at the time inputs were taken. Thus, the same object creates different impressions giving rise to entirely different physiological and emotional experiences.

This reduces the concepts of beauty to random patterns affecting particular activity centers of the brain initiating electrochemical reaction. Does it mean that mind actually learns how to appreciate beauty and other such aspects? What could be the reason behind the mystical randomness and its attractive nature? What are rules, if any, that governs how such aspects will be handled and how to assign priority to them? Can such aspects be absolute and how their exploration is going to affect ideologies behind it? Even though the process seems to be uniform the rationales behind the process are challenging enough to cast a shadow on its success.

Music does not follow the rule of randomness rather it follows a systematic rules for differentiating notes and syllable. Mathematics and beauty played a prominent role in Pythagoras' philosophy in the way that musical tones can be arranged in mathematical sequences repeating at regular intervals called octaves.

While the eyes captures the beauty of color and motion, music captures sound vibration and affects the organ which are well trained to accepts and responds to such vibrations. Brain can easily distinguished between sound and visual vibration by technically tagging the information. Every time you see an object, for example, the brain processes the visual inputs by immediately splitting it into its component features. Some neurons in the brain react to particular color, other to specific angles, and some even to a particular configuration of a face. Once we perceive the object as a whole, which means that once the brain has analyzed all of the individual features, it must somehow bring all these disparate bits of information back together again. [2] Since the learning process is always the first step to experience, the concept of having trained army of neurons for specific tasks seems to be a plausible reason behind the uniqueness one enjoys from inherited biological designs. But most of the time it is the training and environment provided to these specialized groups that contributes to the concept of apprehending the finer details of human consciousness.

Such training can help more neurons in learning the ideology and aspects of analyzing the object characteristics and as their number and size increases, the changes in perceptive behavior and their impact on decision making is bound to occur. Thus, as people's skills develops, their sense of beauty changes. Carpenters may view an out-of-true building as ugly, and many master carpenters can see out-of-true angles as small as half a degree. Many musicians can likewise hear as dissonant a tone that's high or low by as little as two percent of the distance to the next note. Most people have similar aesthetics about the work or hobbies they've mastered.

This clearly points that human mind is epiphenomenal, meaning that the mind is greater than the sum of its parts. Presumably, the mechanisms that cause the mind to arise from the brain are not limited to chemical and neural processes and gives perfect reason to link beauty with the intelligence. Each neural activity is an automatic response to inputs according to some fixed laws. However, these mechanisms do not provide any clue to experiencing happiness, love or irrational behaviors. Perhaps, in few couple of years we may be able to find out more about this chemical reaction and synthesis it to design artificial feelings for ourselves and for our dumb machines. It seems that in terms of biological designs for the basic and neural circuitry of emotion, what we are born with is what has worked best for the last 50,000 generations and not the last five. The slow, deliberate forces of evolution that have shaped our emotions have done their work over a million years; the last 10,000 years have left little imprints on our biological templates for emotional life.

Beauty deserve more than silent adoration and awe and it seems that those who desperately want to dispel and trivialize the ultimate mystery are slated to create mysteries of their own. Whether we can ever solve this puzzle like other mysteries of mind is yet to be seen. Whatever be the situation, the indefatigable chimera of beauty will continue to disport us with its innocence.

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