There are some interesting questions sort of lurking behind this whole conversation. Is beauty solely a perceived phenomenon? Sort of like relativistic light, where it doesn't exist in a definite state until observed? If so, I think that beauty does have a necessary fundamental quality. It has to grab the attention. Hence why novelty and visibility are often key components of a beautiful object. Both of these serve to increase how much attention the thing receives. Once observed, the thing can be beautiful or ugly, but a necessary precondition is that it is observed.
Leaning too heavily on this kind of muddies the conversation, though. Humans always have to notice something before we assess it, so it's a little too easy to say that stuff "doesn't exist" until we pay attention to it. It might be useful to temporarily remove attention grabbers from the conversation, when trying to diagnose any objective core behind beauty. Great songs don't have to be played on the radio in order to be great, but when they are, it makes their greatness much more obvious. So, what is beauty, pre-broadcast? What does it look like, when it doesn't catch the eye? Or does such a beauty exist?
These are fun questions! I do tend to think that beauty is meaningless without observation. The properties that (may or may not) cause beauty to eventually be perceived do exist regardless, but I doubt that what we mentally perceive as beauty fully match those properties; it depends on our internal state as well.
It's pretty easy to get rid of attention-grabbing when evaluating the beauty of something: simply look at (or listen to) it for more than a few moments, until the novelty is gone. But I'd say that any observed changes, then, are actual changes in how beautiful the thing is (to you), as opposed to uncovering the "true" or "objective" beauty of the thing.
Excellent! I like the pushback on the visual properties, and Deutsch's dismissal of each feels indeed fairly weak (in particular the spider argument). That said, re: Graham's concentric rings of taste theory, I think Deutsch's claim is that flowers are only beautiful to either bees or humans, not to any other species. To him, only *people* can access (be attracted to) the objective kind of beauty. And that is a testable prediction that would decide between Deutsch and Graham. In other words, bees' attraction to flowers is parochial; but humans' is not. The objective beauty of flowers is an accidental side effect of their need to signal across an interspecies gap. That, however, doesn't mean that Deutsch wasn't wrong to dismiss those properties you go over as being parochial.
I'll admit I didn't discuss this in part because I didn't quite understand what he was saying—why would only insects and people react to the aesthetic properties of the flower? I suppose his answer is that insects coevolved with flowers to recognize it:
> And therefore my guess is that the easiest way to signal across such a gap with hard-to-forge patterns designed to be recognized by hard-to-emulate pattern-matching algorithms is to use objective standards of beauty. So flowers have to create objective beauty, and insects have to recognize objective beauty. Consequently the only species that are attracted by flowers are the insect species that co-evolved to do so - and humans.
But this runs into problems. Why couldn't the flowering plant evolve something that isn't objective beauty? An example of a plant that did that is the Rafflesia, which evolved the smell of rotting flesh to attract carrion flies—almost certainly not an instance of objective beauty!
And why couldn't a cat or bird or something (assuming they have the necessary color perception) react to the flower in the same way? In fact some do; flowers are pollinated not only by insects, but also by bats, birds, even occasionally by monkeys and lizards; and among insects there's a large diversity as well beyond bees (flies, beetles, butterflies...). I think it's true that coevolution explains almost all of these individually (see again the Rafflesia), but the most elegant overall explanation is that flowers use basic cues that most animals are sensitive to, including humans, and that is enough to explain most of our attraction to flowers.
The fact that we're knowledge-creating people matters, I think, for instance because it allows us to notice our attraction and reflect about it. But I doubt it allows us to access some kind of secret objective beauty property.
Those are great points. I think you should add them to the post.
If I understand you correctly, your example of Rafflesia is a critique of the idea that a flower's beauty is purely objective. I guess Deutsch could in turn counter that he didn't say a flower *only* has objective beauty. It could combine both universal and parochial beauty. But maybe that brings us too close to an easy-to-vary explanation.
Your example of pollination by non-insects is a good criticism that either only bees or humans can appreciate the beauty of flowers. My understanding of Deutsch's point about why people are unique in their capacity to access objective beauty is that, if beauty is objective, it is subject to explanation, and it takes a universal computer to create explanations. That said, that doesn't necessarily mean that non-people cannot have an understanding of objective beauty; it just means that that knowledge would have to be encoded genetically (their only source of knowledge). So I actually think I was wrong to say that bees' appreciation of flowers is parochial: maybe it is that their genes, through coevolution, encoded appreciation of objective beauty. And that would allow other non-people species to be able to appreciate the objective beauty of flowers. That said, we then end up pretty much in the same place you end up.
After this update, I guess the correct test would be that only people can *systematically* eventually appreciate objective beauty, whereas for non-people it is accidental, and appreciating one instance of objective beauty is no guarantee of an ability to appreciate another instance of objective beauty.
The Rafflesia example is (possibly weak) evidence against Deutsch's guess that "the easiest way to signal across such a gap with hard-to-forge patterns designed to be recognized by hard-to-emulate pattern-matching algorithms is to use objective standards of beauty". Clearly plants are perfectly able to (co)evolve pollinator attractor properties that humans wouldn't recognize as beauty.
I said "possibly weak" because it might indeed be "easier" to use objective beauty standards; most flowers are not like the Rafflesia. Though then again there are plenty of examples of specialized coevolution, like flowers that evolved an elongated shape that only hummingbirds can feed on, which is not an objective beauty standard.
I guess I just don't see why we'd need to postulate objective beauty criteria that go beyond visual cues like symmetry and color. Those are perfectly valid explanations for why bees and other pollinators like flowers, and also for why we do. I agree that our ability to create explanations allows us to update our own aesthetic sensibilities in ways that bees cannot except through genetic evolution. That's how, for instance, we might find (extra) beauty in a rose given to us by a lover, which a bee wouldn't be able to care about. In a sense, our knowledge-creation abilities allow us to vastly expand the repertoire of "parochial" reasons to see beauty. But the reason that there's "a regularity in nature" with respect to the beauty of flowers is simply "parochial-yet-almost-universal" reasons like visual cues.
I feel I still need to think about your proposed test; I'm not sure I fully understand it.
On flowers: "Anyone imagining that just any sort of flowers can be presented in the front of a house without status jeopardy would be wrong. Upper-middle-class flowers are rhododendrons, tiger lilies, amaryllis, columbine, clematis, and roses, except for bright-red ones. One way to learn which flowers are vulgar is to notice the varieties favored on Sunday-morning TV religious programs like Rex Humbard's or Robert Schuller's. There you will see primarily geraniums (red are lower than pink), poinsettias, and chrysanthemums, and you will know instantly, without even attending to the quality of the discourse, that you are looking at a high-prole setup. Other prole flowers include anything too vividly red, like red tulips. Declassed also are phlox, zinnias, salvia, gladioli, begonias, dahlias, fuchsias, and petunias. Members of the middle class will sometimes hope to mitigate the vulgarity of bright-red flowers by planting them in a rotting wheelbarrow or rowboat displayed on the front lawn, but seldom with success." (Quoting Scott Alexander quoting so. whose link no longer works) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KheBaeW8Pi7LwewoF/what-is-signaling-really
Any research about ALL indigenous tribes paying MUCH attention to flowers? As in : I like cherry-blossoms. You do gardening. Japanese go bonkers.
I wonder what role colour palette plays in that — natural colour palettes are often recommended as an easy choice for artists — and if there are ugly flowers (not universally appealing to humans at least, something like Aristolochia or whatnot), or, as you said, “novelty” - such as if something is unusual and unique, in which case it’s rather “attractive” than “beautiful” in my opinion 🤷 Anyway, great essay sir
Rafflesia flowers are pretty ugly, though they're certainly *interesting*. They are parasitic and evolved to attract flies with the smell of rotting flesh... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafflesia
There's also lots of tree flowers that are pollinated by the wind, not animals, and are accordingly small, almost invisible, and wholly boring to look at.
There are some interesting questions sort of lurking behind this whole conversation. Is beauty solely a perceived phenomenon? Sort of like relativistic light, where it doesn't exist in a definite state until observed? If so, I think that beauty does have a necessary fundamental quality. It has to grab the attention. Hence why novelty and visibility are often key components of a beautiful object. Both of these serve to increase how much attention the thing receives. Once observed, the thing can be beautiful or ugly, but a necessary precondition is that it is observed.
Leaning too heavily on this kind of muddies the conversation, though. Humans always have to notice something before we assess it, so it's a little too easy to say that stuff "doesn't exist" until we pay attention to it. It might be useful to temporarily remove attention grabbers from the conversation, when trying to diagnose any objective core behind beauty. Great songs don't have to be played on the radio in order to be great, but when they are, it makes their greatness much more obvious. So, what is beauty, pre-broadcast? What does it look like, when it doesn't catch the eye? Or does such a beauty exist?
These are fun questions! I do tend to think that beauty is meaningless without observation. The properties that (may or may not) cause beauty to eventually be perceived do exist regardless, but I doubt that what we mentally perceive as beauty fully match those properties; it depends on our internal state as well.
It's pretty easy to get rid of attention-grabbing when evaluating the beauty of something: simply look at (or listen to) it for more than a few moments, until the novelty is gone. But I'd say that any observed changes, then, are actual changes in how beautiful the thing is (to you), as opposed to uncovering the "true" or "objective" beauty of the thing.
Excellent! I like the pushback on the visual properties, and Deutsch's dismissal of each feels indeed fairly weak (in particular the spider argument). That said, re: Graham's concentric rings of taste theory, I think Deutsch's claim is that flowers are only beautiful to either bees or humans, not to any other species. To him, only *people* can access (be attracted to) the objective kind of beauty. And that is a testable prediction that would decide between Deutsch and Graham. In other words, bees' attraction to flowers is parochial; but humans' is not. The objective beauty of flowers is an accidental side effect of their need to signal across an interspecies gap. That, however, doesn't mean that Deutsch wasn't wrong to dismiss those properties you go over as being parochial.
I'll admit I didn't discuss this in part because I didn't quite understand what he was saying—why would only insects and people react to the aesthetic properties of the flower? I suppose his answer is that insects coevolved with flowers to recognize it:
> And therefore my guess is that the easiest way to signal across such a gap with hard-to-forge patterns designed to be recognized by hard-to-emulate pattern-matching algorithms is to use objective standards of beauty. So flowers have to create objective beauty, and insects have to recognize objective beauty. Consequently the only species that are attracted by flowers are the insect species that co-evolved to do so - and humans.
But this runs into problems. Why couldn't the flowering plant evolve something that isn't objective beauty? An example of a plant that did that is the Rafflesia, which evolved the smell of rotting flesh to attract carrion flies—almost certainly not an instance of objective beauty!
And why couldn't a cat or bird or something (assuming they have the necessary color perception) react to the flower in the same way? In fact some do; flowers are pollinated not only by insects, but also by bats, birds, even occasionally by monkeys and lizards; and among insects there's a large diversity as well beyond bees (flies, beetles, butterflies...). I think it's true that coevolution explains almost all of these individually (see again the Rafflesia), but the most elegant overall explanation is that flowers use basic cues that most animals are sensitive to, including humans, and that is enough to explain most of our attraction to flowers.
The fact that we're knowledge-creating people matters, I think, for instance because it allows us to notice our attraction and reflect about it. But I doubt it allows us to access some kind of secret objective beauty property.
Those are great points. I think you should add them to the post.
If I understand you correctly, your example of Rafflesia is a critique of the idea that a flower's beauty is purely objective. I guess Deutsch could in turn counter that he didn't say a flower *only* has objective beauty. It could combine both universal and parochial beauty. But maybe that brings us too close to an easy-to-vary explanation.
Your example of pollination by non-insects is a good criticism that either only bees or humans can appreciate the beauty of flowers. My understanding of Deutsch's point about why people are unique in their capacity to access objective beauty is that, if beauty is objective, it is subject to explanation, and it takes a universal computer to create explanations. That said, that doesn't necessarily mean that non-people cannot have an understanding of objective beauty; it just means that that knowledge would have to be encoded genetically (their only source of knowledge). So I actually think I was wrong to say that bees' appreciation of flowers is parochial: maybe it is that their genes, through coevolution, encoded appreciation of objective beauty. And that would allow other non-people species to be able to appreciate the objective beauty of flowers. That said, we then end up pretty much in the same place you end up.
After this update, I guess the correct test would be that only people can *systematically* eventually appreciate objective beauty, whereas for non-people it is accidental, and appreciating one instance of objective beauty is no guarantee of an ability to appreciate another instance of objective beauty.
The Rafflesia example is (possibly weak) evidence against Deutsch's guess that "the easiest way to signal across such a gap with hard-to-forge patterns designed to be recognized by hard-to-emulate pattern-matching algorithms is to use objective standards of beauty". Clearly plants are perfectly able to (co)evolve pollinator attractor properties that humans wouldn't recognize as beauty.
I said "possibly weak" because it might indeed be "easier" to use objective beauty standards; most flowers are not like the Rafflesia. Though then again there are plenty of examples of specialized coevolution, like flowers that evolved an elongated shape that only hummingbirds can feed on, which is not an objective beauty standard.
I guess I just don't see why we'd need to postulate objective beauty criteria that go beyond visual cues like symmetry and color. Those are perfectly valid explanations for why bees and other pollinators like flowers, and also for why we do. I agree that our ability to create explanations allows us to update our own aesthetic sensibilities in ways that bees cannot except through genetic evolution. That's how, for instance, we might find (extra) beauty in a rose given to us by a lover, which a bee wouldn't be able to care about. In a sense, our knowledge-creation abilities allow us to vastly expand the repertoire of "parochial" reasons to see beauty. But the reason that there's "a regularity in nature" with respect to the beauty of flowers is simply "parochial-yet-almost-universal" reasons like visual cues.
I feel I still need to think about your proposed test; I'm not sure I fully understand it.
On flowers: "Anyone imagining that just any sort of flowers can be presented in the front of a house without status jeopardy would be wrong. Upper-middle-class flowers are rhododendrons, tiger lilies, amaryllis, columbine, clematis, and roses, except for bright-red ones. One way to learn which flowers are vulgar is to notice the varieties favored on Sunday-morning TV religious programs like Rex Humbard's or Robert Schuller's. There you will see primarily geraniums (red are lower than pink), poinsettias, and chrysanthemums, and you will know instantly, without even attending to the quality of the discourse, that you are looking at a high-prole setup. Other prole flowers include anything too vividly red, like red tulips. Declassed also are phlox, zinnias, salvia, gladioli, begonias, dahlias, fuchsias, and petunias. Members of the middle class will sometimes hope to mitigate the vulgarity of bright-red flowers by planting them in a rotting wheelbarrow or rowboat displayed on the front lawn, but seldom with success." (Quoting Scott Alexander quoting so. whose link no longer works) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KheBaeW8Pi7LwewoF/what-is-signaling-really
Any research about ALL indigenous tribes paying MUCH attention to flowers? As in : I like cherry-blossoms. You do gardening. Japanese go bonkers.
I wonder what role colour palette plays in that — natural colour palettes are often recommended as an easy choice for artists — and if there are ugly flowers (not universally appealing to humans at least, something like Aristolochia or whatnot), or, as you said, “novelty” - such as if something is unusual and unique, in which case it’s rather “attractive” than “beautiful” in my opinion 🤷 Anyway, great essay sir
Rafflesia flowers are pretty ugly, though they're certainly *interesting*. They are parasitic and evolved to attract flies with the smell of rotting flesh... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafflesia
There's also lots of tree flowers that are pollinated by the wind, not animals, and are accordingly small, almost invisible, and wholly boring to look at.
Extremely interesting. This is one of those things that I have never thought of and is revelatory
Wow this is so fascinating. I’ve learnt to much and I’ve only just woken up. Keep up the most excellent work.