Beauty is in the blind spot of the beholder

The paper addresses the time-old question of what is beauty. A rather ambitious, if not to say presumptuous, endeavour. But I do not aim high – I do not claim to get anywhere near unearthing the secret. Rather, I will use examples from mathematics, poetry, music and chess to substantiate one thesis: that the elusory character of beauty is not incidental. Its defiance of definition is part of its essence. The aesthetic sensation requires unawareness of its precise origin. Beauty is felt when some order is perceived, that is not fully comprehended. The order is too complex, or well hidden, or too novel, to surface in its entirety. This is the reason for our ability to enjoy a piece of art for the hundredth time – we never fully fathom its inner order. This is also the reason for the feeling of awe that the beauty inspires: mystery and magic are at its heart. I will compare mathematical techniques and features with those of poetry - like compression, summoning patterns from one field to solve problems in another, or self-reference, and show how beauty is generated in the two domains in a similar way. I will also comment on the beauty-generating effect of unexpectedness in both domains. That novelty generates beauty is a trite observation (“the most expected feature of a poem is its unexpectedness”, as somebody put it), but the question why this is so is not often addressed – I will connect it with the “blind spot” idea. In a final section I try to answer the question that is at least as difficult as “what is beauty” – “why beauty?”. The fact that it pervades our lives indicates that it has an important role – what is it? To arouse the reader’s curiosity, let me summarize the attempted answer in one word – ‘change’. That aim that is so coveted and so hard to achieve – a change in the pattern of our actions, aims and perceptions. The style of the paper is non-scientific, and non-erudite, reflecting my belief that scientific pretensions in the humanities deflect from “softer”, more genuine, understanding

Contextual emergence of intentionality

By means of an intriguing physical example, magnetic surface swimmers, that can be described in terms of Dennett's intentional stance, I reconstruct a hierarchy of necessary and sufficient conditions for the applicability of the intentional strategy. It turns out that the different levels of the intentional hierarchy are contextually emergent from their respective subjacent levels by imposing stability constraints upon them. At the lowest level of the hierarchy, phenomenal physical laws emerge for the coarse-grained description of open, nonlinear, and dissipative nonequilibrium systems in critical states. One level higher, dynamic patterns, such as, e.g., magnetic surface swimmers, are contextually emergent as they are invariant under certain symmetry operations. Again one level up, these patterns behave apparently rational by selecting optimal pathways for the dissipation of energy that is delivered by external gradients. This is in accordance with the restated Second Law of thermodynamics as a stability criterion. At the highest level, true believers are intentional systems that are stable under exchanging their observation conditions.Comment: 27 pages; 4 figures (Fig 1. Copyright by American Physical Society); submitted to Journal of Consciousness Studie

Minds, Brains and Programs

This article can be viewed as an attempt to explore the consequences of two propositions. (1) Intentionality in human beings (and animals) is a product of causal features of the brain I assume this is an empirical fact about the actual causal relations between mental processes and brains It says simply that certain brain processes are sufficient for intentionality. (2) Instantiating a computer program is never by itself a sufficient condition of intentionality The main argument of this paper is directed at establishing this claim The form of the argument is to show how a human agent could instantiate the program and still not have the relevant intentionality. These two propositions have the following consequences (3) The explanation of how the brain produces intentionality cannot be that it does it by instantiating a computer program. This is a strict logical consequence of 1 and 2. (4) Any mechanism capable of producing intentionality must have causal powers equal to those of the brain. This is meant to be a trivial consequence of 1. (5) Any attempt literally to create intentionality artificially (strong AI) could not succeed just by designing programs but would have to duplicate the causal powers of the human brain. This follows from 2 and 4

Distributed Information Management with Mobile Agents

With more users taking advantage of publicly accessible networks, such as corporate intranets and the Internet, larger amounts of information is becoming electronically distributed and disseminated. Distributed information management is an emerging technology for dealing with the problems of managing information that is spread across networks, users and applications. We present four categories that we consider being necessary to developing tools to undertake distributed information management tasks. To help model the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of a user's distributed information, we advocate the use of agents and agent technologies when building distributed information management applications. We present an agent-oriented architecture which is based around a concept of mobile agents, since they provide a convenient abstraction for modelling distributed applications

Intuitions about mathematical beauty:A case study in the aesthetic experience of ideas

Can an idea be beautiful? Mathematicians often describe arguments as “beautiful” or “dull,” and famous scientists have claimed that mathematical beauty is a guide toward the truth. Do laypeople, like mathematicians and scientists, experience mathematics aesthetically? Three studies suggest that they do. When people rated the similarity of simple mathematical arguments to landscape paintings (Study 1) or pieces of classical piano music (Study 2), their similarity rankings were internally consistent across participants. Moreover, when participants rated beauty and various other potentially aesthetic dimensions for artworks and mathematical arguments, they relied mainly on the same three dimensions for judging beauty—elegance, profundity, and clarity (Study 3). These aesthetic judgments, made separately for artworks and arguments, could be used to predict similarity judgments out-of-sample. These studies also suggest a role for expertise in sharpening aesthetic intuitions about mathematics. We argue that these results shed light on broader issues in how and why humans have aesthetic experiences of abstract ideas.</p

Computation in Physical Systems: A Normative Mapping Account

The relationship between abstract formal procedures and the activities of actual physical systems has proved to be surprisingly subtle and controversial, and there are a number of competing accounts of when a physical system can be properly said to implement a mathematical formalism and hence perform a computation. I defend an account wherein computational descriptions of physical systems are high-level normative interpretations motivated by our pragmatic concerns. Furthermore, the criteria of utility and success vary according to our diverse purposes and pragmatic goals. Hence there is no independent or uniform fact to the matter, and I advance the ‘anti-realist’ conclusion that computational descriptions of physical systems are not founded upon deep ontological distinctions, but rather upon interest-relative human conventions. Hence physical computation is a ‘conventional’ rather than a ‘natural’ kind

Infant Physical Attractiveness, Affect, Temperament, and Gender in Relation to Tester Behavior

Easily observable infant characteristics have been shown to influence others; perceptions of infant competence. This study examined the relation between infant characteristics and a tester\u27s willingness to repeat opportunities for the infant to pass items during administration of a cognitive test. Results showed that infant physical attractiveness was related to lower elicited infant performance (the ratio of items initially failed). Positive affect was related to higher test scores. Because first impressions are likely to contribute to future relationships, it may be important to educate adults who interact with infants about the effects of stereotyping infants based on first impressions

Dialogue with computers: dialogue games in action

With the advent of digital personal assistants for mobile devices, systems that are marketed as engaging in (spoken) dialogue have reached a wider public than ever before. For a student of dialogue, this raises the question to what extent such systems are genuine dialogue partners. In order to address this question, this study proposes to use the concept of a dialogue game as an analytical tool. Thus, we reframe the question as asking for the dialogue games that such systems play. Our analysis, as applied to a number of landmark systems and illustrated with dialogue extracts, leads to a fine-grained classification of such systems. Drawing on this analysis, we propose that the uptake of future generations of more powerful dialogue systems will depend on whether they are self-validating. A self-validating dialogue system can not only talk and do things, but also discuss the why of what it says and does, and learn from such discussions

In Search of Intuition

What are intuitions? Stereotypical examples may suggest that they are the results of common intellectual reflexes. But some intuitions defy the stereotype: there are hard-won intuitions that take d..