Beauty

[ 15/March/23 ]

A lot in what Susana wrote.

For me, being an autistic spectrum, science geek interested in the depths of evolutionary strategy and all levels of the complexity of existence; then science usually wins out; and everything is part biological, part sorted by the differential survival of variants over the deep times of biology and culture.

I glance at my wife walking past and in the depths of my brain neurons fire and I feel a warmth that has diminished little in over 30 years, that I suspect is far older than language or culture or science.

I watch the morphing colours of the sun rising out of the Pacific ocean and I feel a very different yet very powerful set of sensations that culturally seems to share the label beauty.

I look at patterns in biochemistry and evolution and my brain translates them into pictures of multidimensional topologies, kind of like walking through doors in a TARDIS, but without the doors, just selecting dimensions to map to axes and watching the topologies morph as I do so, but so many more than 3 dimensions available (adding colour, texture, etc to the picture).

The Greeks wrote of the virtue of the mean between the vices of excess and deficiency; the Buddhists of tuning an instrument, with the tension “just so”, neither too high nor too low. Everything depending on context.

It doesn’t seem to be the sort of question that can be reasonably answered, except by having the experience, for without the experience there is nothing present to reference with the words. And once you have the experience, words are always inadequate.

We each have the experiences we have; and who can possibly say what it is that another experiences, for all we have is our own experience. All of our words reference relationships from our own experience. And often that experience is sufficiently similar that there can be some reasonable correlation between the words of one individual and another, and not always (and in some, not often).