Beauty and Novelty

Apart from letting you, the reader, know that I like the mountain, the phrase “The mountain is beautiful” really contains no additional information. The word beautiful is just a placeholder for a type of personal value, i.e. “The mountain has personal value [to me]“. This implies a couple of things, not least of which that

1. Beauty is not inherent.

This one is easy. Most everyone is familiar with the proverb Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I’ll elaborate: to a blind man, a mountain can never be beautiful. Nor a crevasse, cirque, pretty kitty, & c. At least in a visual way. This doesn’t mean that beauty exists independent of the blind man. (It’s not that he can’t see the beauty; the beauty isn’t actually there. More on this in a second.) It additionally does not mean that a blind man can never perceive beauty. The way that the blind man’s 1920s blanket feels, with its warm woolen folds and worn tattered corners, is beautiful to him. Likewise the softness of the cat’s fur, the way it purrs, the way he can hear it padding across the soft shag carpet in the living room. Not that he can explain it to us, the non-blind. The blind brain is necessarily wired in a qualitatively different way than a seeing brain, so the perceptions he assigns personal value to (i.e. beauty) are of course totally unique and novel. Everyone has perception, so I’m going to go ahead and start using the word qualia, of which Wikipedia has this to say: “Qualia” is “an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us”. They can be defined as qualities or feelings, like redness or pain, as considered independently of their effects on behavior and from whatever physical circumstances give rise to them. In more philosophical terms, qualia are properties of sensory experiences.

In what might be an intuitively easier definition to process, qualia is sensory information; information that can only be described accurately if the person reading/listening to the description has experienced it before. There is no way to describe the color red to John if John has never seen the color red. The experience of seeing red is qualia. (Granted Ted’s blog[1]; even though you are not blind and I am not blind, our brains interpret qualia in a different way. My red is a little different than your red, or maybe even completely different; however, we are in definite agreement that society’s name for [the qualia that is red] is in fact red, so we can still talk about it in a meaningful way. It’s the experience of seeing red that can’t be explained in a meaningful way to someone who’s never seen it; that’s my point.)

2. Beauty doesn’t exist apart from our perception of it.

There is an unnamed mountain on the planet Pluto which no one has ever seen. It is composed of iron and granite and layered with frozen methane and carbon dioxide, which gives it a traditional snow-capped appearance. It is, in all respects, a perfect visual copy of Mount Rainier, which resides in Washington State. Go look at a professionally-taken picture of Rainier real quick here. Isn’t it beautiful? Maybe you don’t find it beautiful, but you can at least agree that someone living on the planet Earth, probably quite a lot of people actually, find Mount Rainier’s icy and foreboding visage nothing less than breathtakingly, awe-inspiringly beautiful. Face it. People like mountains.

Anyway, let’s call Pluto’s faux Rainier by the name of Rainier-P. Is Rainier-P beautiful? I would argue NO. It isn’t beautiful because no one has ever perceived it. The qualia for Rainier-P simply doesn’t exist in anyone’s mind. It is the qualia, the conscious perception of qualia, that makes a thing have beauty. Beauty is by definition a type of judgment placed on qualia. And the qualia doesn’t exist apart from perception, which reveals what I feel to be the thrust of this whole article. Beauty doesn’t exist apart from perception. So we aren’t actually judging a mountain to be beautiful at all. We’re the ones that are beautiful. It is our perception – something completely non-differentiable from our ego – that creates that wonderful awe-struck feeling that people call beauty.

3. Unless [the qualia of a perception that is beautiful] has been experienced by person B, person A can never explain [what it is like] directly to them.

The two phrases in brackets are effectively identical, which I’ll call X. Unless X has been experienced by person B, person A can never explain X directly to them. This is where novelty comes into play. Suppose that there was a genetic mutation in one of your chromosomes which allowed you to see infrared light in addition to visible light. How would you go about explaining this novel visual perception to the world? “It’s redder than red?” There is literally no way to do it. No matter what is said, no one will ever be able to understand what infrared light looks like unless they see it themselves. Likewise a host of effectively identical questions can be posed, unanswerable all: What is it like to be blind? What is it like to be a cat? What is it like to see Mount Rainier-P? What is it like to be channeling this idea about beauty and novelty into a blog post? [2]

4. You can only explain personal beauty with metaphor.

Obviously things can be beautiful in different ways, all unexplainable because it’s a value judgment on qualia. My girlfriend is beautiful in a different way than Glacier National Park is beautiful. Many of you have seen my girlfriend so in some small way you can understand the first four words in the preceding sentence. Plus, even if you haven’t seen her before, you can analyze that statement with metaphor: surely sometime during your life you’ve seen someone that is beautiful. So you can just map that feeling of personal value that you had onto the feeling of personal value that I have. It’s probably a bit more accurate if the beautiful person you have in mind is someone that you know personally; better still if it’s a girlfriend of your own. You can see what I’m getting at. There’s no way to directly know what I really mean by the statement “my girlfriend is beautiful” unless you’re me; you have to parse it by comparing my experience with an experience of your own. And of course I wasn’t specific in my statement; is she just visually beautiful or is the beauty part of the whole personality package? You could ask and create better and better metaphors; maybe through some stroke of luck your comparison is so close that you can actually understand what I mean on some deeper, pre-linguistic, intuitive level. But that’s besides the point.

The second half of that statement is a little harder: Glacier National Park is beautiful. Most of you have never been to Glacier, which is why I picked this statement. If you’ve seen GNP before that’s a pretty big help. The next best thing is having been to a mountain range in the West before; you can just roughly map the awe that you felt when you saw that mountain onto my statement, and siphon some meaning out of it. If you’ve never seen Western mountains before, and thus lack the qualia for that experience, it’s a lot harder. You could look at a picture on the internet and try to imagine yourself actually seeing what’s in the picture instead of just looking at the picture, but that’s like looking at a picture of a banana to try to approximate what someone means when they say “Bananas sure are tasty.”

What I do know, however, is that the feeling of seeing Glacier can be explained without specifically talking about Glacier. [The experience of being to Glacier] feels complete, like part of me was always living there and I never knew it until now, and I’ve finally been rejoined. Now you can get at it, make something of it. Perhaps a first kiss made you feel complete. Perhaps finally finishing Nanowrimo and knowing that you did a damn good job made you feel complete. Perhaps buying your first car and going somewhere on your own did it for you. The point is, by generalizing to an emotional state [3], I can phrase my value judgments in a way that you can parse, by then comparing my emotional state to a similar state that you’ve experienced.

You can’t ever know what it’s like to be me in the places I’ve been, but you do know what it’s like to be you in the places you’ve been. And with metaphor, we can talk about it. No author ever says “The mountain was beautiful.” No one would understand.

The mountain is a girl with red hair whose short skirts tantalize and promise an unending era of sleepless nights. Now we’re talking.

G

[1] Ted states: “But I digressed from the main point that there is black. It exists as a concept or a descriptor of a certain state of events rather than a physical thing—in fact, describing the lack of a physical thing (photons). It’s really a matter of perception. Some people are going to see less photons, and so their version of “black” might be different from someone else’s version of “black”. Besides all that, there’s no way to know what colors anyone else sees. Everyone calls the sky “blue”, but how do you know that someone else’s blue isn’t what you call red? You know the sky is blue because that’s what everyone else calls that particular color, but you can’t ever be sure that you’re not the odd man out.”

[2] I have a bunch of these. What is it like to eat an orange? What is it like to eat an orange with your eyes closed? What is it like to eat an orange if you’re also blind? What is it like to eat an orange if you have a cold? If you’re high? If you’re tired? If you’re retired?

[3] This whole thought process was brought on by the endless questioning of family and friends: “What’s Montana like?” Sure, it’s beautiful and there are tall mountains, but what does that mean? Montana is sleeping in after the alarm’s gone off. Montana is a burger that is so tasty that you’re willing to take another bite even though you’re quite full. Montana is a brand new computer before you’ve even personalized the fonts and the desktop pattern. Enough!