Natural Beauty自然之美

Looking out of an airplane window, it’s quite obvious what structures are natural and what structures are manmade. The natural structures are curvy, chaotic, yet recursive. They take very, very complex patterns and project them to us in a very simple way. The man-made structures are the opposite – they take simple underlying shapes (squares, straight lines, perfect circles) and combine them in haphazard, unpredictable, and hard-to-encode ways. Looking at them is to look at a chaotic jumble of ordered elements.

By the way, this is also what mathematicians mean by an “elegant” solution – a simple formula that encodes much complexity and variance underneath.

Of course, beauty is relative because we have different patterns stored that we can match against. Therefore it’s possible for a pattern that seems elegant and simple to one versed in Middle-Eastern art to appear overly complex and non-recursive to one who is mostly used to Western Art.

The brain loves to complete patterns. We do it for survival value all the time to predict the environment around us. But it also completes patterns for play (I suspect that we can’t turn this ability off). There is something aesthetic in completing a pattern in a casual, easy way. That’s why we enjoy listening to music – we can predict the next note, which seems just right, before it occurs. Once we know the song too well and the thrill of completion goes away, the music is “stale,” and we have to move on. Some of the best music is recursive on many levels, so that the patterns extend in time, amplitude / volume, across instruments, across sections, etc.. Engaging multiple senses heightens the experience – for people who know how to dance to a given beat, their brain can complete the patterns across the aural and corporal senses simultaneously. For those of us who can’t dance, the frustration of one pattern which cannot be completed overwhelms the joy from the other.

I still don’t get a lot of modern art though. It seems that after the invention of photography, painting lost its objective measure (realism) and devolved into inbred conversations between generations of artists and successive responses (as philosophy has been doing for centuries).

从飞机窗户往外看，很明显哪些结构是天然的，哪些结构是人造的。自然结构是弯曲的、混乱的，但又是递归的。他们采用非常非常复杂的模式，并以非常简单的方式将它们投射给我们。人造结构则相反——它们采用简单的基本形状（正方形、直线、完美的圆形），并以随意、不可预测且难以编码的方式组合它们。看着它们就是看着一堆混乱的有序元素。

顺便说一句，这也是数学家所说的“优雅”解决方案的意思——一个简单的公式，在其下编码了很多复杂性和差异。

当然，美是相对的，因为我们存储了不同的模式，我们可以与之匹配。因此，对于精通中东艺术的人来说，一种看似优雅和简单的模式对于最习惯西方艺术的人来说可能显得过于复杂和非递归。

大脑喜欢完成模式。我们一直为了生存价值而这样做，以预测我们周围的环境。但它也完成了游戏模式（我怀疑我们无法关闭此功能）。以一种随意、简单的方式完成一个图案是有美感的。这就是我们喜欢听音乐的原因——我们可以在下一个音符出现之前预测它，它看起来恰到好处。一旦我们对这首歌太了解并且完成的快感消失了，音乐就会“陈旧”，我们必须继续前进。一些最好的音乐在许多层面上都是递归的，因此模式在时间、振幅/音量、跨乐器、跨部分等方面延伸。参与多种感官可以增强体验——对于知道如何根据给定节拍跳舞的人来说，他们的大脑可以同时完成听觉和肉体感官的模式。

我仍然没有得到很多现代艺术。似乎在摄影术发明之后，绘画失去了它的客观尺度（写实主义），转变成几代艺术家之间的近亲对话和连续的反应（就像几个世纪以来哲学一直在做的那样）。