Beauty. Top-Down or Bottom-Up?

This is the fifteenth post in the series The Case Against Physicalism.

Grecian urn image: wikimedia commons. The poet John Keats, moved by the beauty of a grecian urn he was contemplating captured in words what humans have experienced since the beginning of experience itself: “‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.’ — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”.

Beauty, or the aesthetic experience, is one of the most powerful, universal and mysterious uniquely human experiences. But, where does this come from? There are two different answers for the origin of the experience of beauty. The physicalist answer is that this arises as part of the evolutionary process of natural selection and therefore is related in some way to survival of our selfish genes and fitness for our environment. The non-physicalist answer is that these experiences are among the greatest indications of a transcendent reality — a world beyond this veil. Many see that the ability to sense something beyond human limits through our senses, minds and souls and connect with whatever it is in a profound and life-altering way is one of the greatest gifts of the creator. Experiencing beauty provides one of our strongest indications that we were made for something more.

Is that indication valid or are we simply duped by the purposeless laws of nature into thinking our response to beauty is more than it really is?

We’ve already discussed that consciousness, rationality and the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics provide some significant challenges for the evolutionary explanation of life’s history through micro-change through natural selection. If fitness for survival in a specific environment is what natural selection is all about, how can our ability to arrive at truth through logical reasoning and mathematical expressions be explained? Indeed, many have seen that when minds are seen as nothing more than random collections of particles obeying purposeless laws and accidental processes then rationality itself is irrational. Nothing produced by such minds can be trusted. That was Darwin’s “horrid doubt,” and even dogmatic physicalists like Brian Greene agree with that.

But, if rationality and mathematics fail the “fitness” explanation, what about beauty? If beauty or the aesthetic experience is the sometimes overwhelming experience of deep connection between something very deep inside of us and something taken in by our senses, how can that be explained as essential for fitness? For physicalists, are such sublime moments explained away by brain chemicals, by the happy circumstance of endorphins and serotonin releases…