00:00:00.000 Thank you for coming this afternoon to the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
00:00:07.720 It's with great delight that we have here today by the modern technology David Deutsch,
00:00:15.480 the acclaimed quantum physicist from the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the
00:00:20.880 Centre of Quantum Computation at Oxford University and I will just kind of go through
00:00:26.760 the initial status of how we got David Deutsch kind of part of this exhibition really
00:00:33.160 and part of Philip Poderno's kind of ideology of when we were discussing the show.
00:00:38.600 All how I non-trayslina reggae, a mouthful of a title there, was a two-year discussion
00:00:44.360 with Philip Poderno when we were looking at notions of reality and notions of how to redo
00:00:50.080 the exhibition format and we particularly were looking at leading practitioners of thought
00:00:57.080 of artistic practice and of innovation and how this all got started really was Philip
00:01:04.080 and I were chatting through the night about different things and Philip had got this amazing
00:01:09.440 book by this brilliant writer, sorry not too much of a big standing ovation for you
00:01:14.320 there David in a minute, but he just said this is book called The Fabric of Reality,
00:01:18.960 you should read Rachel and there's a quote from Michael Faraday about the optics of
00:01:22.880 a candle and but really it's David Deutsch's notion of the fabric of reality and how
00:01:28.280 that interrelates to the universe and beyond because Philip feels as an artist it's really
00:01:33.600 important to be like a tenant of culture that you do interpret the universe, the surrounding
00:01:38.520 kind of stimulation by that, the notions of light and the notions of perception.
00:01:44.160 So really I must say David, it may be as this kind of silent co-curator of this exhibition
00:01:48.840 too and because we couldn't physically put David in the show would it be nice.
00:01:55.200 We actually thought it would be really kind of interesting to do your kind of a continuation
00:01:59.800 and organism which wants to show is up and running that it has a sense of energy that
00:02:04.600 we invite these leading practitioners in to kind of talk about their practice and then
00:02:10.040 that in its sense is part of the show so the show has an ongoing energy and its life
00:02:17.960 Now today David will be speaking with us today about this natural extension and he'll
00:02:25.040 be presenting his current research entitled Why Of Flowers Beautiful and this is from
00:02:30.560 his forthcoming book The Beginning of Infinity so if we could all give a great kind of warm
00:02:35.920 kind of clapped to David and welcome him here today and I'm sure his lecture will start.
00:02:43.640 Hi everybody and I want to thank the museum for inviting me.
00:02:51.880 It was totally unexpected and in fact you may be wondering how could a physicist like
00:03:00.360 me have anything possible to say about matters of aesthetics like Why Of Flowers Beautiful
00:03:07.320 other than something like well I know what I like and funnily enough the essence of what
00:03:16.000 I have to say today is more or less that I know what I like is not the essence of what
00:03:25.440 aesthetics or what aesthetic judgments are about that they are not or at least they need
00:03:31.640 not be expressions of someone's opinion someone's arbitrary tastes or some culturally determined
00:03:39.160 values or some genetic standards or biological standards I'm going to say that there is
00:03:45.760 such a thing as aesthetic value and that it is objective.
00:03:53.800 And of culture independent of our personal preferences and tastes and independent of our
00:03:59.080 biological makeup now why how have I come to that conclusion at well let me give an analogy
00:04:08.800 between science and art a scientist trying to understand the world a bit better does so
00:04:17.160 by creating theories which are ideas about how the world might actually be in reality and
00:04:28.520 then criticizes those theories and and tests them against reality and with luck might
00:04:34.840 eventually maybe after many errors come up with a theory that does meet the test of describing
00:04:42.040 reality better than the best ideas that were known before so the method is one of conjecture
00:04:50.520 and then of criticizing conjectures against the standard of being true to reality.
00:04:59.960 And also as the the physicist Richard Feynman once remarked the only equipment that a theoretical
00:05:08.800 scientist needs is a pencil a pad of paper and perhaps most important a waste paper basket
00:05:17.360 and on the face of it now many artists when they're at work closely resemble what I've
00:05:25.440 just described about science in almost every detail at a novelist for instance uses exactly
00:05:33.040 the same equipment the pencil the the pad of paper or nowadays word processor and for instance
00:05:39.360 in music composers like Beethoven were notorious for agonizing through change after change after
00:05:46.720 change seeking something that they knew was there to be found a standard that was there to be met
00:05:56.400 and which could be successfully met only with a great deal of creative effort and with a great deal
00:06:01.760 of error that is a great deal of stuff going into the waste basket of course in science and in art
00:06:11.840 there are also exceptions to this at least apparent exceptions the discoveries which are made
00:06:17.600 with a single flash of insight and and say composer like Mozart who allegedly just created
00:06:25.040 music by just writing it down we have to suspect though that in all such cases the the effort
00:06:34.800 and the successive improvements were actually there but concealed inside the brain of the creator
00:06:43.600 so really there was an internal waste basket now I'll just turn the sound down a little because
00:06:49.680 we're getting a bit of an echo here okay so scientific discovery and artistic creation
00:07:04.080 can look alike is this just a superficial resemblance is Beethoven fooling himself when he thinks
00:07:14.240 that he's reaching for something that's actually real something that's there for him to achieve
00:07:20.400 or to fail to achieve is he fooling himself when he thinks that the sheets that are in the
00:07:25.680 waste basket contain actual mistakes that they are actually worse than the sheets that he
00:07:34.960 ends up publishing and also he's he fooling himself when he thinks that by struggling to create
00:07:40.320 an entire new style of music a whole new standard by which music is to be judged that the standard
00:07:46.960 he's creating is actually better than the old one is it all just self referential is he just
00:07:54.320 really exploring the randomness of his own DNA or is there a real meaning to saying
00:08:04.880 that the music of a Beethoven or a Mozart is better than that of their stone age ancestors
00:08:14.560 knocking together bits of mustard and bone and also that the criteria that Mozart and Beethoven
00:08:24.160 were trying to meet were better than those that the stone age people were trying to meet
00:08:29.040 or is there no such thing as better is there only I know what I like or what tradition or genetics
00:08:37.760 or authority designate as good I'm going to argue that there is such a thing as better and worse
00:08:48.000 in art such a thing as objective beauty the particular focus of my work in physics has been
00:08:55.920 on the foundations of physics and it's in the nature of foundations that the foundations of one
00:09:01.680 field are also the foundations of others that's where unification between fields come from
00:09:09.760 I'm not talking about ultimate foundations here I don't think there's there's an ultimate
00:09:14.720 foundation to knowledge something which everything that's true can be derived from that's actually
00:09:20.400 an irrational notion because if that were true then there'd be no answer to the problem why
00:09:27.200 that foundation and not another and I believe that problems are in fact soluble that there's
00:09:34.000 always a rational answer to be discovered and never a supernatural barrier to understanding saying
00:09:42.400 you can understand this far but no further in reaching the truth and the way that we reach
00:09:49.760 many truths is by understanding things more deeply and thereby more broadly that that's the
00:09:58.240 nature of the concept of a foundation so ultimately understanding more and more necessarily entails
00:10:06.560 unifications for example just as in architecture all buildings all ultimately stand on the same
00:10:21.360 literal foundation only the earth that is until the first moon base is built at any rate
00:10:29.760 so all buildings even the moon base stand on the same theoretical foundation namely the
00:10:39.760 laws of physics and the laws of engineering and architecture and so architecture therefore
00:10:51.520 ultimately shares the same foundations via physics with such apparently very distant fields
00:10:58.560 as pharmacology let's say which is indirectly based on physics via biochemistry and chemistry
00:11:07.520 so these two very disparate distant fields can share a common foundation but then
00:11:14.640 architecture also involves aesthetics does aesthetics similarly have a foundation that it shares
00:11:25.280 with other fields well what is aesthetic what is beauty certainly some things can
00:11:36.800 seem to us to be beautiful and some to be ugly or boring and one thing we can say immediately
00:11:44.240 is that beauty is not a matter of content but of form so for instance here's a boring picture
00:11:59.120 and here is one with essentially the same content and yet this one has some non-zero aesthetic value
00:12:11.360 you can see that it's likely that someone thought about this one but not necessarily the previous one
00:12:21.760 specifically you can tell that someone thought about what it would take to improve this one
00:12:29.280 aesthetically to make it more beautiful now there are also subjective sensations
00:12:40.160 associated with beauty is what philosophers call these these subjective sensations
00:12:45.120 qualia so the qualia of beauty in this case fortunately that need not concern us here today
00:12:52.480 because it will be entirely unnecessary for me to define what beauty is that's lucky because I
00:12:59.360 don't know but I only need to consider what is in a certain sense that I will explain
00:13:07.360 what is attractive what experiences people might work to obtain more of
00:13:17.120 so if you see a work of art that you appreciate what that means is that
00:13:23.360 you're willing to work to to dwell on it to give it more of your attention in order to appreciate
00:13:29.760 more in it and what you're appreciating in it is what you think is beautiful
00:13:40.560 more centrally to this point if you're an artist and halfway through the creative process
00:13:45.600 you see something in your unfinished creation that you want to work to bring out more of
00:13:51.920 then if you're right that's beauty so beauty in this sense is a form of attractiveness but
00:14:02.000 that can't be all there is to it because not all attractiveness has anything to do with aesthetics at
00:14:06.560 all you lose your balance and you fall off a log and that's just because we're all attracted
00:14:14.160 to the planet earth now that that may just seem like a play on the word attraction
00:14:19.840 because our attraction to the earth isn't due to any kind of aesthetic appreciation of the earth
00:14:25.920 it's just a physical force it affects our tists no more than it affects our dvarks
00:14:33.280 but that bear with me because there are other ways in which the laws of physics can make us
00:14:41.040 attracted to something for example an animal can be attracted to another animal in order to
00:14:49.360 mate with it or to eat it and once the predator has taken a bite it's attracted to take another
00:14:56.800 unless the bite tastes funny in which case the animal will be repelled so there is a matter of
00:15:07.840 taste but that matter of taste is caused by a physical force not direct physical force but nevertheless
00:15:16.720 the laws of physics in the in the form of the laws of chemistry and biochemistry
00:15:24.000 and you can just trace how the presence of a particular chemical causes the behavior of an animal
00:15:32.000 being attracted or repelled by something so there's still no aesthetic in that animal's behavior
00:15:39.040 no objective beauty there being appreciated by anyone or anything it's just
00:15:44.000 chemicals having chemical effects and by the way here's here's another form of attraction
00:15:50.080 a red traffic light a red traffic light can induce us to stop and stare at it as long as it's red
00:15:58.080 but that's not artistic appreciation of the red light either even though it's an attraction
00:16:04.080 because it's mechanical but if we were to exclude all attractions caused by the laws of physics
00:16:12.880 in any way from being counted as as objectively aesthetic then we'd be on a very short slippery
00:16:19.200 slope to excluding absolutely everything because the laws of physics cause everything if
00:16:24.960 analyzed in sufficient detail everything is mechanical so it could be said so could one draw the
00:16:33.840 conclusion that beauty can't possibly be objective because our attractions to anything at all
00:16:40.080 are just called by the laws of physics no not at all that that would be invalid because
00:16:46.880 by the same argument science itself wouldn't be objective mathematics and even pure logic
00:16:52.880 wouldn't be objective because nothing would because what a scientist or a mathematician or a
00:16:58.480 logician want to say is equally caused by the chemicals that the physical and chemical
00:17:06.240 composition of their brain or else the probabilities are determined that makes no difference the
00:17:11.360 current argument but it's a bad argument because it confuses prediction on the one hand that's
00:17:20.320 what the laws of physics do with explanation which is a deeper thing although the physics
00:17:26.240 the laws of physics in principle predict what a mathematician would save if one could do the
00:17:31.680 impossible calculation of working out what how his brain will behave but you can't explain
00:17:38.400 what a good mathematician does without referring to the objective truths of mathematics
00:17:44.240 not just the physics of the mathematicians brain but truths about abstract objects that the
00:17:49.920 mathematician is studying that the mathematician can end up saying the words there is no largest
00:17:54.640 prime number and the real explanation of of the mathematician saying that is that there really isn't
00:18:01.120 a largest prime number some other mathematician may think that he's a beetroot and because he's
00:18:08.880 crazy and he's subjectively thinks that but in his case unlike the previous case there is no
00:18:18.720 objective explanation for his opinion other than the physical state of his brain
00:18:25.920 so the one that's discovering real mathematics the explanation goes outside to something objective
00:18:34.880 so the difference between sane and crazy and also the difference between objective and purely
00:18:44.960 subjective and the difference between creating something real and not is where the explanation
00:18:51.760 for what's happening is located something's objective if it appears in true explanations
00:18:58.160 of the world not just explanations of the mind of the person who believes it and the predictive
00:19:04.480 power of physical the laws of physics is not at all relevant here because you can't the laws of
00:19:10.880 physics can't predict what laws of physics are going to be discovered next year because if you
00:19:15.520 could you'd have discovered than this year that is because the discovery of genuine objective
00:19:22.560 knowledge is invariably creative you can't predict new works of art either a new work of art
00:19:31.600 like a newly discovered mathematical theorem or law of nature brings something genuinely
00:19:39.840 new into the world it adds something and in exactly the same way a viewer of art has to create
00:19:51.440 a new understanding in order to appreciate that art people often wax lyrical about the alleged
00:20:02.720 achievements of primitive cultures like for instance that of ancient east island with its 60 ton
00:20:12.640 statues but the philosopher Jacob Bernofsky who is one of my heroes by the way
00:20:21.840 dead to disagree with this consensus he said the critical question about these statues is
00:20:29.440 why were they all made alike and he asked that question because repetition is not art merely
00:20:44.000 copying a work of art is not a creative act so these statues are not art they are
00:20:51.840 as Bernofsky said like frames in a film that is running down what he meant was that
00:21:03.040 in the culture that made those statues no progress was being made artistic or any other kind
00:21:09.440 and successive statues of that dead culture where no more works of art than successive frames
00:21:17.120 of a film of one statue would be works of art now to say that art is not empty repetition
00:21:28.160 and of course nor a science is to say that there is something inherently unpredictable
00:21:35.680 about creativity because anything that's predictable is necessarily repeating some defining attribute
00:21:44.320 of it but I have to stress because this is very often misunderstood that unpredictable doesn't
00:21:50.400 mean random at all in fact in this case it means almost exactly the opposite of random there's
00:21:56.880 nothing random about what we discover about the laws of physics even though that discovery is
00:22:01.760 unpredictable in advance likewise the unpredictability and the creativity of art does not make it
00:22:10.720 random or in any way arbitrary either that creativity and that novelty are what is missing
00:22:21.120 in all the examples I've given so far of what is not objective beauty the attraction of a
00:22:28.560 falling to earth or the fascination of watching a red traffic light or the attraction of an animal
00:22:35.440 to its prey none of those are objective it's a seeking objective beauty now does anything seek
00:22:43.360 objective beauty well a big clue that there is genuine creativity and and genuine novelty in
00:22:51.280 some human tastes and some human activities just as there is in scientific knowledge
00:22:57.280 the clue that we're not just obeying our genes is that we can act in ways which are manifestly
00:23:08.720 contrary to any tastes and preferences that might have been built into our genes we regularly
00:23:17.760 eat and drink things in order to obtain tastes which have evolved which evolved originally
00:23:28.240 in order to repel us for instance and which our taste evolved to be repelled by for instance the
00:23:36.080 taste of of fermenting grains and one can learn and decide to be attracted by those
00:23:43.520 a similar example is that spices many of them evolved for millions of years in order to have a
00:23:53.680 taste that animals didn't like and yet we learn to like to taste them another example is we have
00:24:02.720 an inborn aversion to heights to to to to filling up heights even babies apparently have this
00:24:10.160 inborn aversion and animal certainly do and yet human beings regularly go parachuting
00:24:18.960 the sport not in spite of this inborn feeling of aversion but precisely because of it it's
00:24:26.080 the very feeling of inborn fear and aversion to heights that a human being can interpret as part
00:24:33.520 of a whole into a bigger picture which to them is attractive which which to them is beautiful
00:24:42.800 they want more of it in order to appreciate it more deeply so the ingredients of that attraction
00:24:53.920 are not inborn they're not culturally imposed just as the contents of a newly discovered law of
00:25:01.040 law of physics are not culturally imposed they are instead reaching towards something
00:25:11.680 that seems to us subjectively to be objective that is to say we see it as having an attribute
00:25:21.360 of beauty and have to add I suppose this is obvious but but even in physics and in mathematics
00:25:29.280 the attraction of doing those subjects which is the reason that they're done is ultimately
00:25:38.320 aesthetic we're pursuing truth our criterion is truth but we wouldn't pursue it or even recognize
00:25:48.800 it without its beauty now I think that that keeps was was being ironic or something in that poem
00:25:58.000 where he said the truth actually is beauty it certainly isn't any more than physics is mathematics
00:26:04.800 or cats are dogs but beauty and scientific truth have something vital in common namely their
00:26:15.440 objectivity and what's more they are related a world without aesthetics wouldn't be comprehensible
00:26:22.320 scientifically and a world that wasn't explicable in the scientific sense couldn't provide the anchor
00:26:31.120 in reality that objectively good art requires so therefore if if beauty is objective then it is
00:26:44.080 indeed a form of truth because it is then objectively true or false that something or other
00:26:49.120 is or isn't beautiful or more beautiful than something else it's objectively true or false that
00:26:59.120 one page in the waste paper basket has less value or more value than the page that eventually gets
00:27:06.080 published so okay so we pursue truth and beauty and they're connected in various ways but
00:27:16.480 we can be fooled we might see a pretty face as beautiful because of the values and standards built
00:27:25.280 into our genes and into our culture and a praying mantis might see this as beautiful
00:27:33.680 so might some humans entomologist for instance in fact there's almost nothing that a human
00:27:41.360 can't learn to see as beautiful so you might take that as evidence that beauty can't be objective
00:27:50.560 but no because humans can learn to see false scientific theories as true as well they can learn to
00:27:57.120 see false logic as true nevertheless there is an objective truth accessible to science
00:28:03.760 however what about this why is this flower the shape it is well the immediate answer is because
00:28:18.800 its genes evolved over millions of years to make it attractive to insects so insects find this
00:28:26.960 attractive why do they find it attractive well on the face of it it's for exactly the same reason
00:28:35.440 as they find insects of the opposite sex attractive flowers are the shape they are because
00:28:42.320 they attract insects and insects are attracted by flowers because that's how they get food nectar
00:28:49.520 and the the way this situation arose is that there was co-evolution between genes in the flower
00:28:57.680 and genes in the insect just as there is co-evolution between males and females of the same species
00:29:06.160 so there was a co-evolution of criteria for what insects find attractive
00:29:13.520 and means of meeting the criteria which is how to make the shapes and patterns and the colours
00:29:22.640 of flowers so it's not surprising that flowers contain knowledge of how to attract insects
00:29:32.880 and insects contain the desire to get closer to flowers with certain shapes and patterns
00:29:40.400 to experience more of a particular shape and pattern than of others that's not surprising but what
00:29:47.440 is surprising is that these same flowers also attract humans now this is a very familiar fact to us
00:29:59.360 so we don't see how amazing it is just look at this where the repulsive animal
00:30:05.440 and while you're at it think of all the countless different repulsively ugly animals that they are
00:30:14.720 in nature and think every one of them is naturally found attractive by members of the opposite
00:30:25.040 sex in that species and also by their predators and therefore it's to be expected that we
00:30:32.320 find most of them repulsive unless we're zoologists or something
00:30:39.280 by the way with with predators and prey that there's a similar co-evolution but the other way
00:30:44.560 around it's a competitive co-evolution with the predators genes evolving to make the right prey
00:30:52.560 look more attractive to it and with the prey's genes evolving to make that to become less
00:30:58.080 attractive to the predator and that's how camouflage happens and therefore it seems plausible
00:31:04.720 for that reason that the opposite of beautiful is not actually ugly but rather boring
00:31:11.440 like the camouflage animal because ugly is distinctive and so is only a matter of a reinterpretation
00:31:19.680 away from beauty as any zoologists in the audience would know it out tell us and probably any
00:31:28.160 chefs as well anyway it can happen but the local internal criteria that evolve within the species
00:31:38.400 happen to be produced something that's attractive to us as well for instance the peacock's tail
00:31:44.960 is an example that's a rare anomaly produced by a runaway arms race in the
00:31:54.640 co-evolution between male and female peacocks but in the overwhelming majority of species
00:32:02.480 we don't share any of that species criteria for finding something attractive but with flowers
00:32:09.440 most flowers we do sometimes a tree can be beautiful even over and above the cultural
00:32:19.200 connotations that trees have even a puddle of water can be beautiful but only sometimes again
00:32:26.560 such cases are rare anomalies with flowers it's reliable so why do we find flowers beautiful
00:32:36.560 it's the title of my talk well perhaps the obvious answer which I'm going to oppose is that
00:32:44.560 it's not that flowers are objectively beautiful but that it's merely a cultural phenomenon
00:32:51.280 but I don't think that holds water because we find flowers beautiful that we've never seen before
00:32:58.000 and which haven't been known to our culture before and quite reliably most people most cultures
00:33:04.720 just think that the same is not at all true of the roots of a flower of a plant
00:33:14.080 nor the leaves just flowers so I think there can be only one possible answer overall
00:33:23.440 that flowers are beautiful because the task that was faced in their co-evolution within
00:33:32.560 sex was essentially one of signaling complex information across a gap between the species
00:33:46.480 species that have nothing else in common so there's no shared genetic propensity existing before
00:33:52.160 the evolution began nothing like for instance even being able to recognize a fellow member of the
00:33:57.120 same species which is needed for other reasons before determining their attractiveness
00:34:03.920 and perhaps most important there are in the case of the flowers and insects there are no
00:34:10.000 shared existing genes for appearance and for criteria to of attractiveness that were inherited
00:34:18.000 from the ancestor species from which that species evolved and that such genes would only need
00:34:24.320 to be modified a little in order to work in the new species but across the gap between
00:34:33.920 distant unrelated species they're starting from scratch and therefore my guess is and this is my
00:34:42.240 central thesis today that the easiest way to signal across such a gap is to use objective
00:34:49.440 standards of beauty not the species specific subjective standards that are usually sufficient
00:34:58.080 in the evolution of species and so flowers have to be appealing by objective standards and
00:35:04.640 insects have to be able to recognize some objective standards insects recognize no other
00:35:11.600 objective standards of anything very few other species are attracted by flowers only the species
00:35:20.240 that evolved to do it and human beings and why just humans there's a very important reason
00:35:31.760 it's because signaling across the gap between two humans is analogous to signaling across
00:35:39.840 the gap between two entire species a human being in terms of knowledge content and creative
00:35:47.520 individuality is rather like an entire species of any other animal it's an entire world
00:35:56.480 unto itself unlike other animals where all the animals of a particular species have the same
00:36:02.080 programming and therefore use the same criteria for what to be attracted by humans are quite
00:36:09.120 unlike that the amount of information in one human mind is greater than that in the entire
00:36:16.320 genome of any animal and overwhelmingly more than the genetic information that's unique to one person
00:36:24.720 so that means that human artists and scientists are trying to signal across the same scale
00:36:33.520 of gap as there exists between the flowers and the insects now another possible objection to
00:36:43.200 this theory is is to say yes okay some some of what humans find attractive in flowers or in art
00:36:54.240 is indeed objective but it is not objective beauty it's something more mundane
00:37:00.400 there's something like a liking for bright colors or for strong contrasts or symmetrical shapes
00:37:10.640 maybe humans have an inborn liking for symmetry because it helps us to classify and order things
00:37:16.400 and so organize our environment physically and conceptually which is what we evolved to do
00:37:21.920 yes we we almost certainly do have that sort of genetic trait but I think it's got nothing
00:37:30.560 to do with why flowers are beautiful because for instance some flowers are white for a start
00:37:36.960 at least they may be colored in colors that some insects can see but we can't but they're white
00:37:42.800 to us and we still find them beautiful as for the contrast with the background well yes
00:37:49.600 all flowers contrast with their background they couldn't possibly perform
00:37:54.000 as their signaling function if they didn't do that but a big hairy spider in the bath
00:38:01.520 contrasts with its background even more and yet there's no general consensus that that is beautiful
00:38:10.000 as for symmetry well yes again we like symmetry but spiders are quite symmetrical
00:38:16.320 and some flowers are very unsymmetrical and we don't find them any less attractive for that
00:38:30.640 now the mirror image of that set of objections is another objection namely that we also find
00:38:39.120 certain other things in nature beautiful things which are not the results of any artistic
00:38:47.840 creativity or co-evolution across a gap things like the night sky or waterfalls or sunsets
00:38:58.400 but I think that that objection doesn't bear much closer inspection not every sunset is beautiful
00:39:06.240 they're not always beautiful as say this in fact not every photograph of even this sunset was
00:39:14.720 as beautiful if you were to look at the other photographs taken of this sunset by this photographer
00:39:22.880 you would find maybe dozens of others and all of them less good than this one because this is
00:39:29.040 the one that the photographer chose to show and even this one could easily be improved aesthetically
00:39:39.280 what's more the photographer didn't take a picture of a sunset at random or the sky at random
00:39:46.640 nor with a random foreground not randomly framed and composed and so on so many creative decisions
00:39:54.480 went into this photograph without them the image would have been far less beautiful if at all
00:40:12.480 its attractiveness doesn't depend on a foreground it depends far less on composition and so on
00:40:20.240 and so with the sunset it's really the point of view the photograph that's beautiful with the
00:40:28.000 flowers it's each flower though undoubtedly they can be made more beautiful by the creativity of
00:40:37.040 an artist such as a photographer or a flower arranger so I think that the only possible explanation
00:40:46.800 of all these different instances that I've given of x finding y beautiful or x not finding
00:40:54.000 y beautiful or being attracted or not being attracted and so on at least the most plausible explanation
00:40:59.680 of all the examples taken together I think is that first of all they do exist subjective standards
00:41:09.680 of beauty which are essentially dumb animal species specific standards of attractiveness
00:41:19.920 or in the case of humans there's also culture specific and individual specific standards but subjective
00:41:27.760 and second there are also objective standards that have nothing to do with species nothing to
00:41:34.800 do with biology nothing to do with culture or individual preferences they are as objective
00:41:41.600 as the laws of physics or the laws of mathematics so aesthetics is objective and that tells us
00:41:51.840 that when an artist creates a work of art they really are engaging in the kind of thinking that
00:41:58.800 goes into creating new knowledge in science and in mathematics and in philosophy namely
00:42:05.760 conjectures and criticisms against improving standards where by improving we mean objectively
00:42:13.840 improving artists have authentically artistic problems or authentically aesthetic problems
00:42:24.800 and they try to solve them by conjecture and by improving both the works of art and the criteria
00:42:35.440 just like they told an artist the painting isn't right you try to change it you improve it and
00:42:44.320 you also change the criteria by which you're judging it and then you try to meet those criteria
00:42:51.040 and you find that you meet them imperfectly and so you improve your guess as to what will meet them
00:42:59.200 and also what they really should be and eventually if you're an artist and if you're right
00:43:06.480 then you end up with a work of art of objective value now I said authentically artistic problems
00:43:15.760 but there are two kinds of those that they're pure and applied rather like in mathematics or in
00:43:22.000 science there's pure as pure science such as physics and an applied related science such as
00:43:28.240 engineering same is true in art there's the applied kind of artistic problem that's the one
00:43:35.760 that's faced by the flowers and insects where they have what's actually just a practical problem
00:43:41.680 but it happens to be best solve because of the logic of the situation it's best solved by creating
00:43:48.800 objective beauty rather than just subjective standards of attractiveness and humans have those kind
00:43:55.920 of problems too the the beauty of for instance the Macintosh user interface was created essentially
00:44:05.280 to promote design efficiency and the purpose the the beauty of a poem or a song may in some cases
00:44:16.720 be a practical the purpose may be practical to to give cohesiveness to a culture or to advance a
00:44:24.800 certain political agenda or even to sell washing up liquid this purpose purposes of that kind
00:44:33.920 can be served either by creating objective beauty or just by creating subjective beauty that
00:44:41.840 appeals to the relatively immutable dumb standards of genetic predisposition and the static
00:44:50.480 non-creative parts of culture and then there's the other kind of problem the pure kind which
00:44:58.640 doesn't have any analog in a biological evolution that is of creating beauty for its own sake
00:45:05.600 and of advancing cultural standards cultural aesthetic standards accordingly
00:45:11.440 that is the analog of pure scientific research of blue sky research
00:45:17.600 and as I've explained the state of mind involved in this sort of science and this sort of art
00:45:24.560 is fundamentally the same both are seeking what can perfectly justly be called objective truth
00:45:36.160 by the way one amusing corollary of of this theory is I think that it's very likely
00:45:44.880 that human appearance as selected for by human sexual selection or at least at least the
00:45:54.080 things about human faces and bodies that we find beautiful or attractive in the sense of wanting
00:46:01.520 to look at them at least in part satisfy standards of objective beauty as well as species
00:46:11.840 specific and cultural ones it's just that we're not very far along that path yet because we only
00:46:19.040 diverged from apes a few hundred thousand years ago so our appearance isn't yet all that
00:46:25.520 different from apes but I would predict that once we understand better what objective aesthetics
00:46:33.040 actually is we will find that the differences in appearance between us and apes are all in the
00:46:41.520 direction of making humans objectively more beautiful than apes we can't tell just by looking
00:46:55.440 the same is true in science we can't tell the difference subjectively between
00:47:01.600 the motion of an airplane that we see going across the sky which is objective motion
00:47:07.520 and the motion of the sun across the sky which is purely subjective purely subjective illusion
00:47:14.960 caused by our own motion and then the things halfway between like the motion of the moon which
00:47:21.920 is a little bit of each so we can't tell just by appreciating a bit of beauty whether it is subjective
00:47:29.360 or objective anymore than we can in science but the future objective study of aesthetics
00:47:37.760 might give us ways of telling the difference well why should we bother to do that why not just go
00:47:47.360 by we know is what we like and and and never mind the underlying reason because after all I've
00:47:54.080 just said they feel exactly the same because the reason the reason we should bother is that
00:48:04.240 the objective direction the direction of objective improvement is the only one in which we
00:48:10.880 can expect to make unlimited progress as we can in science and mathematics and philosophy
00:48:17.200 all the other directions the subjective ones are inherently finite because they are
00:48:26.400 circumscribed by the finite knowledge inherent in our genes and in existing traditions
00:48:36.400 that tells us something about various theories that are going around have gone around about what
00:48:44.800 art really is ancient art that's objectively valuable such as that of say ancient Greece
00:48:54.560 and its revival in the Renaissance first concern themselves with things like the skill of
00:49:02.800 reproducing the exact appearance of a face or a human body or of a perspective but that kind of skill
00:49:12.960 though it is an objective skill and load facilitates real objective art is not in itself artistic
00:49:21.840 precisely because it is perfectable real art is capable of going on from there and doing something
00:49:33.360 beyond the perfection of any given skill and and that's what the great artists of the Renaissance
00:49:40.160 actually did also this idea of objective beauty that I mean that I've been explaining also I
00:49:50.480 think explains the conventional wisdom which I think is true that artistic appreciation
00:49:57.600 can be more or less refined that is to say there exists a sophisticated appreciation which is
00:50:05.760 better than a crude appreciation that a gourmet has a better life than someone who just
00:50:16.320 appreciates stake and chips it also tells us that the theory that art is there to improve
00:50:26.320 humankind well it does have a grain of truth in that now we see that improving artistic values and
00:50:34.000 artistic achievement is itself an objective improvement and art like science can contribute to
00:50:43.600 improving humankind also in non aesthetic ways like like morally and politically and whatever but
00:50:51.520 that is not what art and science actually are and that's not what artistic and scientific values
00:50:58.960 actually are because you don't have a choice as to what is or isn't an artistic improvement
00:51:04.720 any more than you have a choice as to what's true and false in mathematics and if you do
00:51:10.000 try to tune your your theorems or your scientific theories or your philosophical positions
00:51:17.120 to meet a predetermined political agenda say or a predetermined personal preference
00:51:22.640 then you will automatically be at cross purposes with yourself even if you achieve it
00:51:30.000 you may have advanced your cause but you won't have advanced science philosophy or in the
00:51:37.200 case of art you won't have advanced art again the same critique also tells us
00:51:45.920 that the theories of art that say that art is about self-expression must be wrong too because
00:51:57.760 expression is about how to convey something that is already there and objectively valuable art
00:52:07.120 is about creating something new that was not there before also self-expression is by
00:52:15.680 definition expressing something subjective while art is inherently objective
00:52:25.920 similarly any kind of art that consists of spontaneous acts like throwing paint onto
00:52:34.560 canvas or pickling sheep or and so on is unlikely to constitute artistic progress objectively
00:52:47.120 now if I'm right in this whole picture of the relationship of art to knowledge the
00:52:54.320 the reality of artistic standards the relationship of art and science and all if I'm right about all that
00:53:00.000 then one nice implication is that the future of art is absolutely mind-boggling
00:53:08.800 art of the future it follows can create unlimited increases in beauty this may seem fantastical but
00:53:20.320 we've got quite used to assuming the same thing is true about technology which would have
00:53:25.920 seemed impossible during most of human history I can only speculate but we can also presumably
00:53:35.440 expect new kinds of unification for instance I've said that elegance which is a kind of beauty
00:53:45.280 is implicated in scientific and mathematical discovery well when we understand one day when we
00:53:53.520 better understand what elegance actually is then perhaps we will find new and better ways
00:54:00.720 to seek truth using elegance and beauty and quite likely also we'll be able to design
00:54:11.680 after all our senses are subjective and and parochial in that they they all evolved for
00:54:18.400 subjective local reasons to do without the the history of our species quite likely we can once
00:54:26.000 we understand better what beauty really is we can design new senses new qualia that can encompass
00:54:35.920 beauty of new kinds which are literally inconceivable to us now what is it like to be a bat
00:54:44.320 that that's to be a bat which has which has echo location instead of sight as its main sense
00:54:51.600 well that's a famous question in the philosophy of consciousness perhaps in future
00:54:58.080 that will not so much be the task of philosophy to discover but the task of art new technological
00:55:07.280 art to give us the experience of so that that's it thank you very much
00:55:24.800 thank you very much David gosh that was absolutely brilliant I have one quiz thank you question
00:55:29.920 myself before we open to the floor this is just on a personal note you you talked about the
00:55:36.800 notions of beauty with regards to the flowers like wire flowers beautiful and I was thinking
00:55:44.080 that notion of beauty linking back to someone like shop and how it was curious is that to do
00:55:48.800 with notions of cruelty so why flowers are beautiful actually quite cruel no concept the notion of
00:55:53.680 survival with nature yes that there's some truth in that because um I said that beauty and
00:56:01.600 ugliness are only a matter of interpretation away from each other whereas beauty and boredom are
00:56:08.320 not there there is a much bigger gap there however I don't think it's true that evolution is
00:56:16.960 inherently savage or ugly I mean that that is true of biological evolution of animals and it's
00:56:23.920 certainly true of the of the flowers and the insects which don't necessarily benefit each other
00:56:28.720 with this signaling that humans have a choice to to create beauty in other ways which aren't cruel
00:56:35.760 and so our progress and and progress presumably is always human progress is always more
00:56:42.240 creative than destructive so we can eventually hope to make to to find we well we can eventually hope
00:56:49.920 that the objective standards of beauty will not be destructive thank you no gonna open out to the
00:56:57.040 floor does anybody have any questions don't be shy the idea of objective beauty in flowers
00:57:10.400 it seems to me that nature sometimes gets it wrong and flowers can be very very kitsch
00:57:16.160 not so beautiful they're over the top so that I would imagine that that you couldn't get anyone
00:57:23.600 to agree on the the the beauty value across the spectrum of flowers so I don't see yes it
00:57:34.320 I agree but I don't think that's an objection to this view because exactly the same thing
00:57:39.600 is true in in science you know there's there's there's the famous poem which which the philosopher
00:57:46.320 Karl Popper quotes two plus two is four it is true but too empty and too trite I would rather
00:57:55.200 seek a clue to some matters not so light and that is saying that although there's no dispute about
00:58:06.000 whether two plus two is four is true or not there is a dispute about what kinds of truth we ought
00:58:12.240 to be seeking and the difference between kitch and deeply beautiful is something that we can't
00:58:20.000 expect to always agree on when we're making a lot of progress we can create more agreement
00:58:26.640 about this and again exactly the same thing happens in science and in mathematics and philosophy
00:58:31.760 so you know the difference between a kitch flower and a beautiful flower is perhaps not that
00:58:38.720 great by the standards of what humans can achieve in terms of beauty but then I'm not saying that
00:58:46.400 the flowers are that great by human standards the mystery is why do we appreciate flowers at all
00:58:54.720 when we don't appreciate or almost anything else in nature that has evolved to be attractive
00:59:00.240 I answered your question piece didn't I don't know what you want more
00:59:04.560 we don't appreciate anything else well yes I'm saying that the other things that we appreciate
00:59:11.840 in nature are either a coincidence like the peacock's tail where we can see that the vast
00:59:19.840 majority of things that evolved for those kinds of reasons are not attractive to us or things
00:59:26.480 like the night sky and that sort of thing that they are beautiful because of their cultural
00:59:30.880 connotations if you were to take a take just a piece of paper and put dots on it in the places
00:59:37.280 where stars are then people wouldn't be very old by looking at that picture that they are all
00:59:43.200 by the night sky for cultural reasons so that there are all sorts of reasons that we
00:59:47.440 subjectively find things including things in nature beautiful but some of them are cultural
00:59:53.200 some of them are in our genes but you can't explain the flowers that way thank you any more
1:00:00.800 questions how about crystal structures which if I think all of us find I'm extremely attractive
1:00:14.960 and can also in fact and in all of those structures kind of in fact a crystal structures all across
1:00:24.960 in fact the possibility of yes I did mention that we almost certainly have an inborn appreciation
1:00:33.520 of symmetry and crystals explore all the different kinds of symmetry that can exist in three
1:00:40.480 dimensional shapes and if you have a crystal though if you have a rock that doesn't display
1:00:52.080 symmetry then it is very rare for it to be beautiful at least not by consensus
1:00:59.760 I should also add that a crystal garden or something like that is more beautiful than an individual
1:01:06.800 crystal unless the crystal has cultural connotations like a famous diamond or whatever
1:01:12.800 in that case those may help us to find it to find it beautiful but again the with the flowers it's
1:01:20.080 different the unsymmetrical ones are no less beautiful than the symmetrical ones to the
1:01:26.160 gen our general appreciation unlike crystals I'm interested in in what you've been saying
1:01:39.280 you the whole talk has been fascinating and cool thank you and in general I'm wondering because
1:01:47.120 of the way the world is changing because of technology because of I suppose our collective
1:01:52.960 consciousness and individual consciousness will our notions of beauty change do you think
1:02:00.160 does that is that something that you consider or think about it if I'm right at all then that is
1:02:06.000 bound to happen I not only our notions of beauty I think our notions of beauty probably have changed
1:02:13.760 over a period of centuries anyway I mean if you look at let's say how how which people
1:02:20.560 are regarded as beautiful in say the Renaissance they're not quite the same features as we would
1:02:26.720 regard as beautiful today and it's also different in different cultures even even currently but
1:02:35.360 I one would expect if this whole picture is true one would expect standards of beauty and also
1:02:43.280 different kinds of beauty to change rapidly once art has the same attitude towards creating knowledge
1:02:50.720 as science mathematics and philosophy do and I suppose that's what I'm calling for can I ask you
1:02:55.600 something in relation to that the role of art especially in line with artists such as Diotto
1:03:01.200 was to support religion and therefore can religion was there but art was a kind of
1:03:06.160 justification of the word of God do you feel that maybe in the future that art replaces
1:03:11.360 relation that doesn't support religion actually has its own concept within that well like I said
1:03:16.800 anything that art supports I mean this is a legitimate role for art like for science to support things
1:03:23.760 physics is used to build bridges but that's not what physics is physics is an understanding of
1:03:30.800 the objective world and similarly art can be used to support all sorts of things and I think it's
1:03:36.000 great that art is used to support washing up liquid sales but that's not what art is either
1:03:45.760 so Diotto and and and the conception of art as supporting religion is inherently finite
1:03:53.920 and therefore inherently not objectively artistic a thing like that runs out and has to eventually
1:04:01.200 be replaced by pursuing art for its own sake and yes art could replace religion I mean science
1:04:08.080 could replace in general open-ended creation can replace religion and other closed systems
1:04:18.560 Thank you very much anymore questions one more
1:04:21.680 do you think that a new standard of objective beauty would be like a signpost to consciousness
1:04:34.080 or do you think that you need to be a conscious observer to see objective beauty which you think
1:04:40.240 comes first oh that's a that's a great question I don't know is the answer I said at the beginning
1:04:47.760 today that I won't have to actually say what beauty is the the the quality of beauty it could be
1:04:56.080 that understanding how beauty works and understanding how to create it and so on better would help us
1:05:03.200 to understand the quality of beauty in which case it would definitely tell us something about
1:05:10.560 consciousness but just because you have to be conscious to appreciate beauty doesn't mean that once
1:05:16.960 we understand beauty we understand consciousness you have to be you have to be conscious to create
1:05:22.320 knowledge and yet we created a vast amount of knowledge in science and mathematics and so on
1:05:29.680 without ever understanding what consciousness is so it may help or it may not
1:05:37.040 well David thank you very very much on behalf of the Irish Museum of Modern Arts the brilliant talk
1:05:42.800 today so thank you very very much thank you
1:05:55.520 I'm just to tell everybody that Luna reggae continues until the 18th and we also have two
1:06:02.480 shows opening Alex Katz and Thomas demand and that's coming so do look at our program for that
1:06:08.560 thank you very much thank you David thanks thank you bye everyone hi David will be in touch
