RIDDLE BEHIND BEAUTY

What is beauty ? What is the defination of beauty ? Why we feel something is beautiful or ugly ? What is the essense of beauty ? Why nature creates things that appears catchy and wonderful to us ? Why an object appears beautiful to a person but hideous to another person ? Why a lush green mountain covered with clouds appears magnificent to us ? Is nature really wonderful or its just an illusion ? And most importantly why nature created women attractive and beautiful ? Why cherry blossom is one of the most beautiful flower in the world compared to other flowers ? These are some of the intriguing questions that I am highly concerned about.

Okay lets start with the fundamentals, what beauty is ? In my opinion beauty is just a word in english vocabulary added probably by ROBERT COWDREY, the man who wrote the first English Dictionary. For those who do not know, English is a West Germanic language that originated from Anglo-Frisian language brought to Britain in mid 5th to 7th century AD by Anglo-Saxon migrants. But the ground reality is, inherently beauty has no meaning , we gave meaning to it. We know nature is beautiful, but why ? Is it because it is pleasing for our eyes or because of some kind of pattern or may be there is something else that we are not aware of. I mean seriously its a great question, how do we know nature is beautiful, objectively ? I mean how nature connects with our mind and make sense of our surrounding ? I think the real beauty in nature lies in its patterns. There are patterns ubiquitously in nature. Everything including you and me all are some kind of pattern resulting from millions of years of evolution. Everything in this universe demonstrate some kind of pattern or organisation that had originated from an unknown source. When we perceive a leaf under a microscope, we are able to see each and every cell in an arrangement or organisation arising naturally. We all had seen zebra right ? Very beautiful and a wonder of nature, but why it is beautiful ? The answer lies in the pattern of stripes in the body of zebra. Look, if we compare a donkey with zebra, there is no significant physiological or anatomical difference between those two, the only difference lies in the presence of stripe in zebra. And thus normally we conclude that zebra is more captivating than donkey. The existence of living beings dignify an order in the universe.

First English Dictionary

In this blog, I will specifically address the whereabouts of beauty of nature as a whole without going deep into the details of pattern and symmetries sort of things. The idea of symmetry in the equation of beauty is really a complicated one and highly abstract mathematical tools are required to fathom it. To understand symmetry in the physical realm, we first have to understand the fundamentals of Yang Mills Theory, and also obviously the fundamentals of Quantum mechanics. Mathematics like Linear Algebra, Lagrange and Hamiltonian Mechanics and many more abstract tools. There are three types of symmetry in the physical world Charge, Parity and Time. As I told earlier these are complex theories which requires great deal of core mathematics to make sense of it. All these theories are counterintuitive and have strong mathematical frame work. The concept of beauty had confused and indulged many scholar and scientist of the past.

In 1878, Sir Francis Galton gives a remarkable talk. He is speaking to the anthropologic institute in Great Britain and Ireland. Known for his pioneering work in human intelligence, Galton is a brilliant polymath. He’s an explorer, an anthropologist, a sociologist, a psychologist and a statistician. He is also a Eugenist. In this talk he presents a new technique by which he can combine photographs and produce composite portraits. This technique could be used to characterize different types of people. Galton thinks that if he combines photographs of violent criminals, he will discover the face of criminality. But to his surprise, the composite portrait that he produces is beautiful. Galtons surprising findings raises deep questions, What is beauty ? For most of human history these question have been approached using logic and speculation but in the last few decades scientist have addressed the question of beauty using ideas from evolutionary psychology and tools of neuroscience. We are beginning to glimpse the why and the how of beauty, atleast in terms of human face and form. There is a term called Handicapped principle invoked by scientist. The most commonly cited example of a handicap is the peacocks tail. This beautiful but cumbersome tail doesn’t exactly help peacock to avoid predators but approach peahens. Why should such an extravagant appendage evolve ? Even Charles Darwin, in an 1860 letter to Esa Gary wrote that the sight of the peacocks tail made him physically ill. He couldn’t explain it with his theory of natural selection, and out of this frustration, he developed the theory of sexual selection. On this account the display of the peacocks tail is about sexual enticement, and this enticement means its more likely the peacock will mate and have offspring. Now the modern twist on this display argument is that the peacocks tails is also advertising its health to the peahen.

Galtons composite portrait of criminality

I will address about facial beauty after a while, but first lets shed some light on a particular question, What is the purpose of beauty ? Why there is beauty in nature and why it is necessary ? Well, in my opinion, in all likelihood, beauty exists because there is consciousness to perceive it. What I am saying is, self conscious intelligent beings can apprehend the idea of beauty. And obviously, there is only one kind on earth that are self aware or self conscious about their existence, which is human beings. Fundamentally there is nothing like beauty, the sole reason for presence of beauty in english vocabulary is to express our feeling or a sense of excitement or pleasure towards an entity that we perceive through our senses. Let me take you back in time to the Neanderthals, can we say that neanderthals had similar consciousness as of modern humans. I am not sure, but in my opinion, they dont perceive things as we modern human do. We know for sure that the emergence of homo sapiens lead to the extinction of Neanderthals. This fact point towards an emergence of intelligence in homo sapiens that helped us overtake the Neanderthals. I am not sure wheather Neanderthals can discern the beauty of a mountain or a flower or a bird. Neanderthals had relatively advanced language abilities, but evidence suggested that they may have had a limited vocal range compared to modern humans. If this were the case, then their ability to produce complex sounds and sentences would be affected. They communicated with each other thats for sure but what language or words thats yet to get elucidate. Are they able to recognise the beauty of the mountain in the cold winter morning when they come out of their cave ? Certainly not. Because to recognise the nature of beauty, presence of intelligence is required. Its really intriguing, how few thousand years of evolution led to disclosure of intelligence. Rose flower is very beautiful and captivating, but why ? Ask your self. Why it is beautiful ? There might be two reasons : Pattern and Colour. We love the arrangement and orientation of petals in rose or lets say sunflower ? But why, its hard to answer this question. And next the colour of the petal, red colour of rose and yellow of sunflower and I swear the whole idea of colour is astoundingly confusing. Lets say 75% of people like red colour and 25% like yellow, but why a certain section of people prefer yellow over red ? Answer can be psychological and subjective based on personal preferences but the scientific reason behind is what I am searching for. Really a brain storming question and to understand the very base of this question I think we first have to elucidate the riddle of consciousness.

Now lets come to the most interesting part of this blog, facial beauty. We all know that beauty is subjective and is based on ones own distinctive preferences. In my opinion, nature had an innate purpose behind making us aware or able to recognise the facial beauty. As I mentioned above there is nothing like beauty in nature and facial beauty is no different. Human brain can recognise minor twiks and disalignments in an individuals based on which we decide wheather we like that particular face or not. Across human history beauty is connected with particularly women of our society. Well let me tell you no women in this world ever born and will born are beautiful, it is completely my opinion so if you have any opinion about it you can comment below. Being attractive is different from beauty. Attractiveness towards female relies on different factors such as structure, facial alignments, health and many more. Beauty is certainly subjective and varies according to the circumstances and experiences in life the person had. And also the whole idea of choices. Choices are something that we make very second in our everyday life. I always wonder why some girls like me but some don’t, how ? My facial configuration doesn’t change with subsequent girls that I interact in my daily life, so why some girls are on me but some don’t ? These questions sounds weird but its really intriguing for me. I think beauty is just an illusion created by mental processes. If you really think about beauty in an objective way, you will find out that its only existence is because we are here to manifest it. Tell me if a dog sees a kingfisher, does he really feel that it is beautiful, I don’t think so. Dog cannot manifest the sense of beauty in his brain because the dog doesn’t have the type of consciousness we humans have, to make sense of beauty in that kingfisher. So we can conclude that consciousness is the key ingredient for the existence of beauty. All the females who thinks they are beautiful or good looking, remember you are beautiful because we males are here to manifest your beauty in our mind.

The whole conundrum of beauty lies in pattern and symmetries in nature and produces a sense of amusement in our mind that makes us utter a word called BEAUTY.

Let me know your thoughts on beauty. Comment below.

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