Earlier postings investigated aesthetics. Why does it happen that we set up aesthetic competitions to see who gets it best? I used custom bike shows and Cheltenham woodwork show. I suggested that pattern recognition can be faster than analytical or system 2 thinking, slow thinking. I posted a you tube clip about Einstein to show how his aesthetic sensibility delegated him from lesser thinkers. I spoke of the sense of beauty in mathematic formulae. How we are finding that our crucial knowledge of important things, gravity, relativity, evolution is not comped requiring whole libraries to explain.
This beauty is life changing beauty. It leaves everyone who studies these things with an overwhelming sense that the natural world operates according to the same beautiful rules and that we are fortunate to be able to appreciate them. We believe these are universal rules that would also be uncovered by sufficiently intelligent aliens on a distant planet. We are discovering something at the heart of things. The situation is extreme enough for Einstein and Stephen Hawkings to invoke god. But they were certainly using the word to express the intimate relationship between the human mind and the glorious intelligibility of the universe. It feels like a psonal thing, like we are relating to something very special. This is the sense in which Hawkings once spoke of knowing the mind of god, but it doesn't really have anything to say about the existence or not of a creator, and I'd be surprised if science will ever have anything to say about that. The nature of light, the working of the sun, atoms etc can be expressed with breath taking economy. The rich phenomena around us takes not whole libraries but books to explain. Why this simplicity? Why is our sense of beauty at the heart of our undetanding?
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