Untangling meaning, mystery, and beauty

Mystery, meaning, and beauty are entangled concepts. The perception of great beauty tends to induce a sense of meaning; so does the presence of a great mystery. Why is that?

I believe, once we achieve two things, the pieces will fall into place on their own. First, we must understand what beauty is. Second, we must look at meaning from the right angle. So let’s do this, starting with beauty.

I described my hypothesis of what I believe beauty fundamentally is in this piece.1 Rather than rehashing that post, let me give you an alternative and self-contained presentation of the information we need: a description of what I believe to be the essence of an object of great beauty.

To succeed at producing beauty, I claim you must do the following: you must create an object that emits sensory signals that, upon entering the beholder’s brain, is fine-tuned to provide a large amount of detectable and efficiently organizable information. Preferably maximally so. At this point you might be shaking your head. What’s up with this grotesque maximalism? Maybe you like minimalist music or something. But don’t fly off in a fit of rage just yet. I am going to make the case that all good minimalist art is secretly maximalist in the relevant way. Bad minimalist art is precisely that which fails this.

Now, to understand my claim, let us for concreteness consider a piece of music. To a brain, a piece of music communicates tremendously many distinct pieces of information. First and most obviously, it communicates a basic timescale: the tempo. It also communicates other basic numbers that can be detected by the brain, such as simple ratios produced by the various percussive elements. As an example, in many cases it can readily perceive that there is a, say, 1:2 ratio between the intervals of your snare and your kick drum.

Next, the brain picks up on a discrete list of instruments. Or equivalently, a discrete list of distinct timbres, each constituting a list of characteristic frequency ratios produced by certain resonating objects, materials, and digital oscillators. You might recognize: “ahh, that sounds like wood”. So the brain clearly has some of these tables of frequencies memorized. And it is clearly looking to detect them.

Music also communicates body movement. The kick might trigger associations to a heartbeat. The snare drum can communicate a step (it does for me). A soft blow to the triangle hints of a gentle motion. The clap communicates, well, a clap. There is of course no objective answer to these associations. The point is that these associations frequently tend to get made by human brains.

A piece of music also communicates properties of very high complexity, existing over much larger scales. It communicates whole brain states—intricate yet highly structured currents of electrical signals that take place over length scales comparable to that gargantuan cavern that is your brain, and which can last for the effective eons of minutes, seconds, and hours. Specific states of dancing electrons and photons that we might refer to as joy, sadness, or excitement. Or alternatively, brain states associated to the world of abstract ideas. The marching drum might trigger thoughts of war, while the confident trumpets might conjure ideas of glory and victory. And so on and so on.

And I truly can go on. But you get the point. A piece of great beauty gives the brain a chance to do a whole lot of subconscious computation and pattern matching on a sensory signal, in turn extracting a whole slew of higher order concepts, relationships, and regularities. It discovers structures in the music that it pattern matches onto your existing web of knowledge and experience. This web provides an existing structure for efficient organization of the incoming information. The brain probably does all this arduous computation because it fundamentally wants to be able to predict incoming sensory signals (a well known idea in neurosciences known as predictive processing). Prediction is good for survival. Modeling is good for prediction. Drawing on existing webs of knowledge and ideas is good for efficient and effective modeling.2

Of course, all of this requires extremely sophisticated subconscious computations acting on the raw input signal. But your brain is clearly eager and willing. So to make great beauty, give the brain what it wants. Give the brain the maximal amount of information that it can absorb, distill, and effectively organize over the duration of the artwork. But be cautious. Distinct pieces of information are in mutual competition. Try to pack information too densely, and the brain will not be able to extract anything at all, rendering the information unreadable or corrupt. Pack too many unrelated concepts and types of patterns, and the brain might not find an efficient way to organize it. In a single painting, painters settle on one particular style for a reason.

So, to create a masterpiece of beauty, you need to bring into existence a microcosm of patterns that harmonize together across many scales. A delicate dense-but-not-too-dense stacking of patterns, with exquisite care given to make this stack of patterns feasible to unstack for someone who wasn’t around during assembly—detectable, digestible, and organizable for the remarkable but parochial computing structures that reside in this patch of the universe.

There are many ways to fail. Fail to make the patterns unstackable, and it sounds like noise. Make it too easy, and it sounds banal. Pack too many completely unrelated patterns, and the brain finds no neat organizational principle, leading to a sense of disharmony and being jolted back and forth. Have too many similar patterns, and the brain will file them away as one, leading it to boredom. Have all the patterns reveal themselves too quickly, and the beholder quickly loses interest despite initial excitement. After all, if all patterns can immediately be established and understood—and if no new information is extracted by your subconscious upon prolonged exposure—then why should the brain keep paying attention? It already has a model to predict the incoming sensory signals with high fidelity. Now it could instead be scheming how to impress that hottie/hunk you’ve been eyeing, increasing your chance of gene propagation.

Before turning to meaning, I have to close the one door I opened earlier on minimalist art. For concreteness, consider ambient music. Maybe you have one big synth pad just hanging around, at first listen not doing very much. But if you listen closely, and if the music is actually good, you will hear that the synth pad has but subtle dynamics in the timbre itself. Dynamics you could never zoom in on and perceive clearly if the soundscape was busy with other instruments. In some sense I believe that there is no beautiful art that is fundamentally minimalist. When we say it is minimalist, what is really happening is that the art is minimalist along a particular dimension that we are used to being more complex. But instead, the artist has decided to not make things complicated along this dimension, freeing the brain to detect and appreciate subtle patterns along some new dimension. But rich patterns must always be stacked somewhere. While I dislike a lot of tape-a-banana-to-a-wall-and-call-it-a-day-type art, perhaps some modern ‘‘ugly’’ art like this work at creating beauty by hooking strongly into spaces of abstract ideas that are particularly salient for certain beholders at that moment of history?

Now let’s turn to meaning. Let me give you a subjective description of how my life feels during those times where it feels meaningful. When my life is imbued with meaning, it feels like my life has a sort of coherence and momentum at the same time. My actions work mutually together and with the environment towards something bigger. This implies several things. Both that my actions have some sort of impact, and that the impacts point in a similar direction, so that they do not average out to nothing. It feels like my life is weaving a… pattern. When life is meaningful, it feels like my world line is embedded inside a structure with regularities to uncover. In fact, this seems to be coherent with what some scientists of meaning are saying. From the abstract of [Martela, Steger 2015]:

Researchers seem to have two main ways to understand what meaning in life means: coherence and purpose, with a third way, significance, gaining increasing attention. Coherence means a sense of comprehensibility and one’s life making sense. Purpose means a sense of core goals, aims, and direction in life. Significance is about a sense of life’s inherent value and having a life worth living.

And in fact, there is at least one empirical study (consisting of four experiments) showing that people rate their meaning in life higher after being exposed to objectively coherent patterns. From [Heintzelman, Trent, King 2013]

The experience of meaning is often conceptualized as involving reliable pattern or coherence. However, research has not addressed whether exposure to pattern or coherence influences the phenomenological experience of meaning in life. Four studies tested the prediction that exposure to objective coherence (vs. incoherence) would lead to higher reports of meaning in life. In Studies 1 and 2 (combined N = 214), adults rated photographs of trees presented in patterns (organized around their seasonal content) or randomly. Participants in the pattern conditions reported higher meaning in life than those in the random conditions. Studies 3 and 4 (combined N = 229) yielded similar results when participants read coherent, as opposed to incoherent, linguistic triads. The manipulations did not influence explicit or implicit affect.

I would love to know whether this has replicated (ahem, and actually read the paper), but I really want to go back to making music, so I will leave checking this for another day. Either way, at this point the connection to beauty is staring us in the face. A sense of meaning seems to be, at least in part, a sort of satisfaction over the intelligibility of the overall patterns in one’s life seen from a grand scale, and a satisfaction that one’s actions further the unfolding of this pattern, building it out to be bigger while preserving its coherence. Now, a sense of beauty was also argued to be a pleasure over the intelligibility of patterns. In fact, I wouldn’t even dare to bet that beauty and meaning are fundamentally distinct categories. It could be that meaning is a particular form of beauty — the sense of beauty triggered by the particular patterns that form one’s life story. I described beauty mostly as a property of sensory signals, but this suggests that perhaps beauty is also the relevant description for pleasure felt when the brain is doing processing that reveals deep coherence? All I know is that, in my life, meaning and beauty feel suspiciously similar.

Now for the final piece, which falls into its place on its own. Mystery is the promise of great patterns that are there to be discovered. Sensation of mystery is hunger for coherence. Hunger for beauty, perhaps in the shade of meaning.