260725: Notes on Truth & Beauty
Is beauty truth, and truth beauty? (As Keats claimed.)
Keats, like his poetic peers, was inspired by Platonist philosophy, which views beauty as an objective manifestation of the ideal, eternal, higher realm of forms.
This view was largely abandoned by the late 19th C, but thinkers such as Schmidhuber (compression progress) have resurrected a more robust version, where beauty is epitomized by geometric perfection, symmetry, and order.
Ian Stewart likewise emphasizes symmetry in Why Truth is Beauty: A History of Symmetry (2007), which makes a mathematical case for beauty, in which “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.”
Stewart concludes: “In physics, beauty does not automatically ensure truth, but it helps.” And “In mathematics, beauty must be true—because anything false is ugly.”
See also Feynman, “You can always recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity.” And yet obviously, many beautiful theories turn out to just be beautiful thoughts. Occam’s is a decent razor, as far as razor goes, elegance alone does not truth make.
There is an evolutionary case to be made, for beauty as a valuable proxy of the Good, but this case comes with several caveats.
Following Kevin Simler, the beauty of fruits and flowers is a two-player dance.
Fruits and flowers evolved to attract the attention of our visual systems, just as our visual systems evolved to preferentially pick out fruits and flowers.
- NB: Much of this targeting is quite selective. For instance, rodents are (1) dichromates (2) granivores, who eat fruits primarily for their’ seeds, thus destroying the genetic material and the tree’s reproduction gambit. Chili peppers therefore (1) are often red in color, and thus invisible to rodents, who are red-green colorblind, and (2) filled with capsaicin, which only triggers mammalian pain pathways. This elaborate, selectively targeted performance & attraction is designed so that chili peppers are exclusively eaten by birds, who digest the fruit but leave the pepper seeds intact inside their guts. This allows pepper seeds to be widely distributed to new niches.
Just as all parasites eventually become symbiotes (since it would be suicidal to wipe out their host population), these taste-based dances must be mutually beneficial if they are selected evolutionarily over the long-term. This is one way in which beauty is “true advertising.” There will be a correlation in the ancestral environment between the beauty of food and its nutritional value.
When we drift outside the assumptions of the ancestral environment, this relationship decouples. If calories are not scarce, our natural attraction to high-sugar and high-fat foods leads to unhealthy habits and increased mortality.
Moreover, when selection is not subject to long-term evolutionary pressures, a host of perverse, surrogative dynamics crop up.
In grocery stores, fruits are purchased primarily based on their visual appearance, since flavor cannot be directly sampled and compared while shopping. This has led to Goodharting as e.g. industrial farms breed apples for their increasingly glossy, colorful, unblemished surfaces. Such breeding necessarily comes at the cost of flavor and nutrition.