Beauty of the Unknown

In American Beauty, there's a famous scene (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu8_8TJC9E8) in which a character plays a tape of the "most beautiful thing he's ever seen." It's a plastic bag, blowing in the wind. As it blows, it seems (to the speaker and, at least, to me) to have emotion; it seems to be dancing.

In reality, of course, there's no such emotion. It's just random gusts of wind, moving it around. If we knew, exactly, the state of the world (namely, the air molecules and their velocity), we could predict, entirely, the motion the bag would take. Deep down it's all just the product of billions of chaotic collisions at the particle level. But that misses the point. The beauty isn't in the literal truth, but in the illusion -- what it feels like. Thought on the matter kills it.

The same is true for any art. Last post I said watching a movie on a pixel-by-pixel basis loses the meaning; it also ruins the beauty, by breaking the illusion that what we're seeing is real. Similarly, you can take any song and, with Fourier Transforms, analyze its frequency content and see it as the wavelike motion of air molecules. These things are true, but we'd prefer to not know them; they aren't at the heart of beauty, even though they alone seem to comprise it.

Science can tell us a lot of things. It offers us a deeper look at the world around us. But at the same time, it seems that with each new discovery something of beauty dies. Imagine the world as the ancient Greeks and Romans saw it. The stars were constellations, telling stories. The forces of nature were acts of warring gods. Heaven was in the sky, Hades underground. There's a reason their mythologies make for good literature; it was a beautiful picture. Our true, naturalistic explanations of celestial bodies and forces of nature seem dull and lifeless by comparison.

That may seem like a small price to pay for social progress, but now things are getting scarier. Science has turned us inward, looking at ourselves; how the body works and, more frighteningly, how the mind works. Some people (including me) don't believe there will ever be a fully naturalistic explanation for consciousness -- but even stopping short of that, so much about mood and psychological response seems to be explained by natural phenomena. It's easy to fall into the cold trap of intellectualism, and separate yourself from what you are studying; even when what you are studying is yourself.

There's nothing wrong with scientific progress. Despite what some preachers seem to suggest, we should never be afraid of the truth. We were created rational beings, and to ignore reason is to go against our nature. But we need to be able to put it on hold at the appropriate times. We know, in principle, that the bag isn't dancing, but we choose to limit our conscious knowledge, and feel instead. We know the stars are gaseous masses in the sky, but at night in the wilderness, the bright lights against the vacuum of space feel like pictures on a black canvas. And in a sense, what we're feeling is as true, if not truer, than the underlying cause; science can't account for this beauty, and yet it remains. To abandon our "mirror dimly" pictures of the world is to make it ugly and sterile.

Keats famously said "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." There's a sense in which I agree. In principle, I think our understanding only adds to the beauty of the universe; its complexity, its enormity, the way such grandeur can arise as the epiphenomenon of a few basic laws. The whole idea is beautiful, and knowledge and truth only deepen it. But in another sense, I think this limits the scope of our humanity. Beauty is often found in the abandonment of logic and reason, allowing ourselves to simply be, false perceptions and all. Without this temporary abandon, the truths of the world have nothing to offer. Truth informs beauty, and beauty breathes life into truth. We should never lose sight of either.