laws of beauty

I have had a long-standing interest to understand if there is an underlying objective science behind beauty. The prevailing view on beauty is that beauty is subjective and its perception lies in the eyes of the beholder. However, there appears to be a universal language for beauty which is hard to codify and articulate but invokes a universal resonance among all minds. Beauty is a powerful differentiator in a world that is moving towards an era where it is becoming increasingly possible for algorithmic deconstruction and reconstruction of complexity. The physicist David Deutsch delves into this very topic in his book ‘The Beginning of Infinity’ using the example of flowers. Humans happen to find flowers aesthetically pleasing even though flowers did not structurally evolve to serve this specific purpose as they have existed for millions of years prior to the existence of human species. Flowers serve the biological function of reproduction as they attract insects to facilitate cross pollination. This presents a paradox as to what biologically causes the phenomenon of attraction as there is a huge biological gap between humans and insects in their evolutionary histories, sensory organs and nervous system. The fact that humans too find an insect-attracting mechanism like flowers attractive suggests that there is an objective order to beauty the same way there is an objective order to physical phenomenon as codified by the laws of physics. David Deutsch delves deeper into the cross-pollination mechanism of flowers via insects to understand the possible construction of beauty. Flowers and insects do not share any recent evolutionary heritage or have a shared cognitive language making communication across the species barrier very difficult due to their biological gap. The species of flowers thereby faces an engineering challenge of creating a hard-to-forge signal to facilitate ordered communication and ensure correct cross-pollination within the same species of flowers by the species of insects. The communication signal should therefore be hard-to-forge as cheap low-energy signals can easily be mimicked by weeds and non-rewarding plants disrupting the reproduction process. Hence, a hard-to-forge signal cannot be basic or random but instead requires high-precision engineering, precise symmetry, vibrant and stable color replication, and intricate geometric relationships which ultimately manifests physically as beauty. Construction of beauty requires high biological investment to correctly signal to insects that they are the right set of species to cross-pollinate to and from. Since, these signals need to be recognizable across species with immense biological gap as in the case of flowers and insects, the evolution mechanism used by flowers could not be species-specific, so it likely had to discover a new communication medium that is inherently robust and universally recognizable that would make it independent of the specific biology of individual species. The need to solve a narrow biological problem of efficient cross-pollination among flowers likely led evolution to discover a universal information standard in the form of beauty derived from the intrinsic laws of nature that can be universally recognized by any advanced biological information processing system. From an information theory standpoint, there exists certain fundamental truths about beauty the same way there exists certain fundamental truths as prescribed by physics that guides reality, where certain types of ordering of information can constitute beauty and certain other types of ordering of information cannot. The ordering of information which requires larger energy investment is more likely to be construed as beautiful. There are two branches of science which help understand the biological significance of beauty - evolutionary aesthetics and neuroaesthetics. Evolutionary aesthetics explains that beauty is an approximate and useful marker of estimating genetic health and superiority. Geometric symmetry is one of the measures of beauty where perfect symmetry ideally represents good genetic health and deviations from symmetry heuristically signifies genetic corruption via random mutation or toxins. Neuroaesthetics presents an energy-centric explanation of beauty where beauty which likely follows a certain universal order from an information theory standpoint as covered earlier, is more efficiently processed by the brain leading to reward signalling as a result of energy-conservation which ultimately manifests as attraction towards beauty. While scientists/engineers decode and experiment with the universal physical truths of nature, artists occupy a very different playing field where they decode and experiment with the universal aesthetic truths of nature. The highest form of quality within creation gets unlocked by producing sophistication not only in engineering utility but in artistic utility as well thereby capturing the essence of the two different universal truths of nature.