自然之美
自然之美
透过飞机舷窗向外望去，自然结构与人工结构的区别一目了然。自然结构呈曲线状、混沌无序，却又具有递归性。它们将极其复杂的模式以极其简单的方式呈现在我们面前。人造结构则恰恰相反——它们采用简单的基本形状（正方形、直线、完美的圆形），并以随意、不可预测且难以编码的方式组合在一起。观察它们就像在看有序元素的混乱堆砌。
顺便说一句，这也是数学家所说的”优雅”解——一个能够编码大量复杂性和变化的简单公式。
当然，美是相对的，因为我们存储着不同的模式可供匹配。因此，一个在中东艺术领域造诣深厚的人看来优雅简约的模式，在主要接触西方艺术的人眼中可能显得过于复杂且缺乏递归性。
大脑喜欢完成模式。我们为了生存价值而不断这样做，以预测周围环境。但大脑也会为了娱乐而完成模式（我怀疑我们无法关闭这种能力）。以轻松随意的方式完成模式具有某种美学价值。这就是为什么我们喜欢听音乐——我们能在下一个音符出现之前就预测到它，感觉恰到好处。一旦我们对歌曲过于熟悉，完成的兴奋感消失，音乐就变得”陈旧”，我们必须继续寻找新的。一些最优秀的音乐在多个层面上都具有递归性，因此这些模式在时间、振幅/音量、跨乐器、跨声部等方面延伸。调动多种感官能增强体验——对于懂得如何随特定节拍跳舞的人来说，他们的大脑可以同时在听觉和身体感官上完成模式。而对于我们这些不会跳舞的人来说，一个无法完成的模式带来的挫败感压倒了其他模式带来的愉悦。
不过我仍然不太理解很多现代艺术。似乎在摄影术发明之后，绘画失去了其客观衡量标准（写实主义），并退化为几代艺术家之间的近亲对话和连续回应（就像哲学几个世纪以来所做的那样）。
Natural Beauty
Looking out of an airplane window, it’s quite obvious what structures are natural and what structures are manmade. The natural structures are curvy, chaotic, yet recursive. They take very, very complex patterns and project them to us in a very simple way. The man-made structures are the opposite – they take simple underlying shapes (squares, straight lines, perfect circles) and combine them in haphazard, unpredictable, and hard-to-encode ways. Looking at them is to look at a chaotic jumble of ordered elements.
By the way, this is also what mathematicians mean by an “elegant” solution – a simple formula that encodes much complexity and variance underneath.
Of course, beauty is relative because we have different patterns stored that we can match against. Therefore it’s possible for a pattern that seems elegant and simple to one versed in Middle-Eastern art to appear overly complex and non-recursive to one who is mostly used to Western Art.
The brain loves to complete patterns. We do it for survival value all the time to predict the environment around us. But it also completes patterns for play (I suspect that we can’t turn this ability off). There is something aesthetic in completing a pattern in a casual, easy way. That’s why we enjoy listening to music – we can predict the next note, which seems just right, before it occurs. Once we know the song too well and the thrill of completion goes away, the music is “stale,” and we have to move on. Some of the best music is recursive on many levels, so that the patterns extend in time, amplitude / volume, across instruments, across sections, etc.. Engaging multiple senses heightens the experience – for people who know how to dance to a given beat, their brain can complete the patterns across the aural and corporal senses simultaneously. For those of us who can’t dance, the frustration of one pattern which cannot be completed overwhelms the joy from the other.
I still don’t get a lot of modern art though. It seems that after the invention of photography, painting lost its objective measure (realism) and devolved into inbred conversations between generations of artists and successive responses (as philosophy has been doing for centuries).