V. A Quick Summary of Beauty

This entire work has dealt and will continue to deal with the issue of beauty. I have dealt in great detail in this chapter with two main aspects of beauty and its relation to humans, but now I would like to give a quick summary in one location of the elements of beauty as I have dealt with them through this work. I have argued that beauty is or contains the following features:

Complexity within Simplicity
Digital-Analog
Emergent from Conflict
Evolutionary (changes over time)
Generative and Creative
Hierarchical Organization
Play
Reflexivity or Feedback
Rhythmicity
Rule-Based
Scalar Self-Similarity
Time-Bound
Unity in Multiplicity

These are also features of the universe as a whole – and thus describe a (meta)physics. These also describe a way to come to know the world – and thus describe an epistemology. Fuchs lists the following features as aspects of self-organization:

Emergence
Complexity
Cohesion (digital-analog)
Openness
Bottom-up-Emergence
Downward Causation
Non-linearity
Feedback loops, Circular causality
Information
Relative Chance
Hierarchy
Globalisation and localisation
Unity in Plurality (Generality and Specificity)

And for Emergence, he lists the following aspects:

Synergism (productive interaction between parts)
Novelty
Irreduceability
Unpredictability
Coherence/Correlation
Historicity

If we compare the lists, we can see there is a correlation between self-organizing complex systems and beauty. Each have the same attributes. “Cognition, co-operation and communication are phenomena that can be found in different forms in all self-organizing systems. All self-organizing systems are information-generating systems. Information is a relationship that exists as a relationship between specific organisational units of matter” (Fuchs). All beautiful objects are information-generating systems. And to the extent that something is a self-organizing system, it is beautiful – which means, beauty is scalarly found from strings all the way up through art, literature, philosophy, and religion.