Since I'm still sorting out all the new and unimproved changes in my new Win7 system, and I didn't get a guest-host for this week, I thought today I'd make a more text-based diary, one wherein I shall wax philosophical rather than entertain with music clips. Well... I might post some music, too. We'll talk about bower birds, the distinction between science and art, and ask ourselves some goofy questions about the nature of beauty. And, oh yes, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.
Have you ever heard of bower birds? They are interesting little birds of Australia and New Guinea, most interesting perhaps for the bowers they build, enormous and complicated nests designed to compete for the attention of females.
The best video of the bower birds and their constructions is a six minute video clip here. There are other embeddable videos about the bower birds, but I'm not going to bother embedding one because I so much prefer this non-embeddable clip, a very cool video by David Attenborough and the BBC. If your connection is fast enough, you can change the fineness of the detail by clicking on the gearwheel icon and choosing up to 1080p-HD.
I strongly recommend you do so because it is amazing stuff, the little Sistine Chapels that these birds spend their lives building, each one personalized in distinct ways in a competition of colors and patterns and media. For instance, in the clip above, two bower birds within hailing distance of each other have built very different bowers.
I've seen other nature videos about these birds. They spend years building these nests -- up to twelve years, I think I heard. In the BBC clip linked to above, I timed the actual sex act, at 5:11, at about five seconds. Five mind-blowing seconds, I dearly hope. I suppose we can be grateful that bower birds, birds with brains that really are no bigger than peas, aren't bright enough to experience post-coital regrets. "All that for five seconds of sex? What am I supposed to do with my life now?"
In other videos I've seen, you can watch what seems like agonizing aesthetic decision-making. A bird will place a daisy on one side of the bower, hop back, cock its head this way, that way, then hop back over, pick up the daisy and move it to the other side of the bower. It backs away again, cocks its head, looks at the daisy, goes, "Hmmm..." Then hops over, picks up the daisy, moves it to THE OTHER SIDE of the bower, backs away, examines... and repeats the process. Years and years of that.
What's going on inside that litte pea brain? And what does this have to do with music?
I love Google's autocomplete feature. It tells you when like minds are thinking alike. For instance, when I type in "bower birds a...", before I type any further, it's already suggesting an autocomplete of "bower birds aesthetics."
From a Science Daily article that discusses the bower birds deliberate use of perspective in their building decisions:
... It's also not clear how mentally challenging it really is for the birds to manage this feat. The males might get things placed just right through trial and error. But they may actually have a direct sense of perspective and "know" to put small objects close and larger objects further away, Endler says. That's something else the researchers intend to tease out through further investigation.
And that brings Endler to one last big question, whose answer is problematic even when one is talking about humans: Is it art?
For Endler, the answer is yes. "Visual art can be defined as the creation of an external visual pattern by one individual in order to influence the behavior of others, and an artistic sense is the ability to create art," he says. "Influencing behavior can range from attraction to and voluntary viewing of the art by others to viewers mating with the artist; this is what bowerbirds do. Our definition equates art with conventional signals that are not part of the artist's body. In this sense, bowerbirds are artists and their viewers judge the art, implying an aesthetic sense in birds."
Science Versus Art
I quibble, like a bower bird with a daisy, over the word Versus. I think we all know there is a distinction between the two. What is it, though? Other than the two letters that go in front of your degree, whether it's a B.A. (Bachelor of Arts) in Mathematics, which for obscure legacy reasons is classified as an Art by universities, or an M.S. (Master of Science) in Computer Science, which is more of a rapidly-changing craft than a search for eternal truths.
Four Pieces by Anatoly Liadov
(I'm posting this just to have some background music for my ramblings. I've never heard this before, but I have liked almost everything I've heard by Liadov, one of the best of the B-list Russian composers. So I'm deliberately rolling the dice, guessing in advance that this will be beautiful.)
A Philosophical Question About Art
I asked a philosophical question in a previous diary. "If Beethoven's Ninth were playing on an Ipod in the forest, and nobody was there to hear it, would it still be beautiful?" Notice how different that question is from its normal form, "If a tree fell in a forest, and nobody was there to hear it, would it make a sound?" From a scientist's perspective, of course a tree falling would make a sound, since a sound can be defined as motion wave-patterns in a medium, like air. Whether we are there to hear it or not, it's still a sound. The assumption here is that there is a real material world, that we all interact with it as equals to one another, that its existence is apart and separate from us, that it was here before we lived, that it will be here after we die, that it has a level of consistency in how it operates.
It's because of these foundations that science is objective. You and I may not see the world together the same way, but if we are scientific, we admit that it's the same world we are seeing.
Ah, but art! "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." That says a lot. Art is subjective. We can try to find universal truths in art, but any investigations we make in that direction eventually run into this stubborn wall. The beauty, the importance, and the meaning that we ascribe to works like Beethoven's Ninth, or a bower bird's nest, can't be resolved in an agreeable manner by definitions, the way we can simply define sound and be done with it.
I tend to think it would be beautiful whether anybody was there to hear it or not. But that's a very tough argument to make, whichever side you take.
Science tells us that, by their best current calculations, the universe is about fourteen billion years old. Assuming that our lifespan as a whole species will be microscopic in cosmic terms, after we are gone, it will continue to exist for a very long and cold eternity, as the universal temperature approaches absolute zero.
Given that, let's play around a little and refine our question. "If Beethoven's Ninth played on an Ipod somewhere in the universe, and no sentient creatures existed or ever would again to hear it, would it still be beautiful?"
Okay... Dumbo will suggest that, consistent with his previous answer, yes, that its beauty is something that I think doesn't depend on any single human ever hearing it. I guess I think it would be beautiful because it is beautiful to me. Although I am a temporal creature in this universe with a finite amount of time to actually live and listen to it, I have categorized it among those things that simply are beautiful to me. I know it's not beautiful to everybody and I accept that. Art is subjective. By placing Beethoven's Ninth in a category, I have removed it from the world of temporal phenomena! That's quite an achievement, eh? I suppose David Letterman does the same thing every weeknight with his Top Ten List. His Top Ten List continues to be The Top Ten List even if nobody ever watches his show or laughs at it.
Let's refine the question a little more, then. "If nobody had ever composed the Ninth Symphony, and if you had never heard it, would it still be beautiful?"
Now this gets more interesting! We have removed Beethoven. We have removed the listener. Hmmm... Let's consider. Would Beethoven's Ninth even EXIST if Beethoven had never composed it? I would say yes, it does, just as the numbers two and three exist even if no people existed to learn arithmetic and add them together. As a conceptual entity, Beethoven's Ninth CAN be defined objectively, just as sound can. It's a series of notes to be played in a certain order at different sound frequencies. By the same thinking, we can say that David Copperfield would exist even if Charles Dickens never wrote it, because it consists of a series of words in a certain order. In this very cold and objective definition, Beethoven's Ninth would exist, even if Beethoven never existed.
Is this kind of abstract ideological existence of The Ninth sufficient for me to say that I still think it would be beautiful? At this point, we run into a huge problem, a kind of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem of Art! By asking myself the question, would it still be beautiful even if I could never have the opportunity to judge it, I seem to be removing myself, but I'm not. I'm the one asking, or answering this question.
Intermission: A Dummy's Guide to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem for People Who Hate Mathematics.
Just a primer. If I say, "Every statement I make is false," that statement can't be proven either false or true, because if it's true, then that means it must be false. Godel was a mathematician who showed that any useful system of logic is going to have questions like that that screw everything up.
Another example would be the following statement: "Zenbassoon cannot agree with this statement without being inconsistent." That's a true statement! Everybody reading this, except Zenbassoon, can read that and agree with that and see that it's absolutely true. The minute Zen starts to agree with us, he becomes inconsistent. And if he disagrees, then the statement is proven true; his disagreement with a true statment proves he was wrong. The funny thing about this statement is that all of us on the outside looking in can see the dilemma this puts Zen in, without being in the same dilemma ourselves.
All these GIT puzzles, in one way or another, involve self-reflection: they are questions and statements that circle back to foul the person asking the question.
Now back to our Mental Masturbation about Art. . .
If The Ninth only existed somewhere out there in the abstract idealist woowoo as a theoretical construct, like the number pi, and nobody had ever composed it, would I still call it beautiful? Do you see the problem now? I'm involved in my own question. You, on the outside, watching me baffle over this, can all agree with yourselves that, of course Dumbo would not call it beautiful because he would never be able to hear it to pass judgment on it. I, on the other hand, can't ask myself the question without assuming that I don't know something that the question depends on. I do know what Beethoven's Ninth sounds like! Even when I try to imagine a world without Beethoven having ever composed it, I can still hear it in my head.
Fine, fine. Let's try another tack then, since the subject of the Ninth is now contaminated. What about Beethoven's Twelfth Symphony! What, you say? Beethoven never composed a Twelfth Symphony! True. He left rough drafts for a Tenth and Eleventh, but nothing for a Twelfth. There never was a Twelfth Symphony, and neither you nor I have ever heard it. We can imagine it being as good or as bad as we want.
What this comes down to is: Can there exist things out there that are beautiful that we have never known? Sure! We run into them every day, don't we? I suppose many of you have never seen a bower bird's nest before today.
Not a tough enough question. Let's reformulate it again: Can there exist things out there that are beautiful that we will never get to appreciate?
That seems likely to me. For instance, I know that I like just about all of Stephen King's books. It seems very likely that there are some Stephen King books I haven't read that I would think were beautiful if I ever read them. But since I don't have time to read all of Stephen King's books, all I can do is appreciate their potential beauty from afar.
By considering the possible beauty of things that I will never see or hear or otherwise experience, I'm turning my own capacity to evaluate beauty into an abstract theoretical construct. It's like there's some formula, F(X), where F is the function that evaluates the beauty of object X according to the shifting standards of Dumbo.
Finally, we have achieved something that seems OBJECTIVE rather than SUBJECTIVE! There probably is some convoluted formula F(X) capable of deciding whether or not something is beautiful to Dumbo even if he hasn't experienced it. Just like a scientist can describe the sound of a tree falling in a forest. But that formula, whatever it is, is A PART OF ME, an abstraction of me. Thus it invalidates the whole premise of things being beautiful IF I NEVER HEAR THEM. I don't see a clear way of asking this without Godelizing it into nonsense.
I am F(X)!
Oh no, you say. Dumbo, you've snapped! You're part of the real world. You're more than just a function out there in the woowoo evaluating musical objects and spitting out a categorization.
Yes, yes, yes... I know, I agree. But as science gropes for a single formula that will describe the universe and all of history, I think that formula has to encompass all the spin-off meta-phenomena that emerge from it, including bower birds and people. Even a Dumbo who evaluates Beethoven's Ninth.
Hey. I DID like that Liadov piece I posted at the top. Here's another one just to wrap up. This one is more Chopin-esque.
Barcarolle in F# Major by Liadov
Next Week: Finally, we'll do the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the Ode to Joy! After that, we're going to have no more Beethoven for quite a long while. Probably some lighter fare for the several weeks afterward. And anybody who wants to guest host their own Thursday diary, please feel free to step forward and lighten my load.