# 2007-01-27 - Why Are Flowers Beautiful [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT7DFCF1Fn8) Duration: 01:06:32 ## Transcript ### Rachel Thomas 00:00:00 - 00:02:41 Thank you for coming this afternoon to the Irish Museum of Modern Art. It's with great delight that we have here today via the modern technology David Deutsch, the acclaimed quantum physicist from the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the Centre of Quantum Computation at Oxford University. And I will just kind of go through the initial stages of how we got David Deutsch kind of part of this exhibition really and part of Philippe Parreno's kind of ideology of when we were discussing the show. All Hawaii Entrees / Lunar Reggae, mouthful of a title there, was a two-year discussion with Philippe Parreno when we were looking at notions of reality and notions of how to redo the exhibition format. And we particularly were looking at leading practitioners of thought, of artistic practice and of innovation. And how this all got started really was Philippe and I were chatting through the night about different things. And Philippe said, God, I've got this amazing book by this brilliant writer. Sorry, not too much of a big standing ovation for you there, David, in a minute. But he just said there's this book called The Fabric of Reality. You should read, Rachel. And there's a quote from Michael Faraday about the optics of a candle. And but really it's David Deutsch's notion of the fabric of reality and how that interrelates to the universe and beyond. Because Philippe feels as an artist, it's really important to be like an antenna of culture, that you do interpret the universe, the surrounding kind of stimulation by that, the notions of light and the notions of perception. So really, I must say, David, maybe is this kind of silent co-curator of this exhibition, too. And because we couldn't physically put David in the show, would have been nice, we actually thought it would be really kind of interesting to do a kind of a continuation, an organism, which once the show is up and running, that it has a sense of energy that we invite these leading practitioners in to kind of talk about their practice. And then that, in its sense, is part of the show. So the show has an ongoing energy and its life is kind of kept stimulated by the exhibition. Now today, David will be speaking with us today about this natural extension. And he'll be presenting his current research entitled, Why Are Flowers Beautiful? And this is from his forthcoming book, The Beginning of Infinity. So if we could all give a great kind of warm kind of clap to David and welcome him here today and I'm sure his lecture will start. So thank you very much, David. ### David Deutsch 00:02:43 - 00:06:53 Thank you. Hi everybody. And I want to thank the museum for inviting me. It was totally unexpected. And in fact, you may be wondering, how could a physicist like me have anything possible to say about matters of aesthetics, like why are flowers beautiful, other than something like, well, I knows what I likes. And funnily enough, the essence of what I have to say today is more or less that I knows what I likes is not the essence of what aesthetics, what aesthetic judgments are about. They are not, or at least they need not be, expressions of someone's opinion, someone's arbitrary tastes or some culturally determined values or some genetic standards or biological standards. I'm going to say that there is such a thing as aesthetic value and that it is objective, independent of culture, independent of our personal preferences and tastes and independent of our biological makeup. Now why, how have I come to that conclusion? Well, let me give an analogy between science and art. A scientist trying to understand the world a bit better does so by creating theories, which are ideas about how the world might actually be in reality, and then criticizes those theories and tests them against reality and with luck might eventually, maybe after many errors, come up with a theory that does meet the test of describing reality better than the best ideas that were known before. So the method is one of conjecture and then of criticizing conjectures against the standard of being true to reality. And also, as the physicist Richard Feynman once remarked, the only equipment that a theoretical scientist needs is a pencil, a pad of paper and, perhaps most important, a waste paper basket. And on the face of it now, many artists, when they're at work, closely resemble what I've just described about science in almost every detail. A novelist, for instance, uses exactly the same equipment, the pencil, the pad of paper or nowadays word processor. And for instance, in music, composers like Beethoven were notorious for agonizing through change after change after change, seeking something that they knew was there to be found, a standard that was there to be met and which could be successfully met only with a great deal of creative effort and with a great deal of error. That is, a great deal of stuff going into the wastebasket. Of course, in science and in art, there are also exceptions to this, at least apparent exceptions, discoveries which are made with a single flash of insight. And say, a composer like Mozart, who allegedly just created music by just writing it down. We have to suspect, though, that in all such cases, the effort and the successive improvements were actually there, but concealed inside the brain of the creator. So really, there was an internal wastebasket. I'll just turn the sound down a little because we're getting a bit of an echo here. ### David Deutsch 00:06:55 - 00:11:27 Okay. So, scientific discovery and artistic creation can look alike. Is this just a superficial resemblance? Is Beethoven fooling himself when he thinks that he's reaching for something that's actually real, something that's there for him to achieve or to fail to achieve? Is he fooling himself when he thinks that the sheets that are in the wastebasket contain actual mistakes, that they are actually worse than the sheets that he ends up publishing? And also, is he fooling himself when he thinks that by struggling to create an entire new style of music, a whole new standard by which music is to be judged, that the standard he's creating is actually better than the old one? Is it all just self-referential? Is he just really exploring the randomness of his own DNA? Or is there a real meaning to saying that the music of a Beethoven or a Mozart is better than that of their Stone Age ancestors knocking together bits of mastodon bone? And also that the criteria that Mozart and Beethoven were trying to meet were better than those that the Stone Age people were trying to meet? Or is there no such thing as better? Is there only I knows what I likes or what tradition or genetics or authority designate as good? I'm going to argue that there is such a thing as better and worse in art, such a thing as objective beauty. The particular focus of my work in physics has been on the foundations of physics, and it's in the nature of foundations that the foundations of one field are also the foundations of others. That's where unifications between fields come from. I'm not talking about ultimate foundations here. I don't think there's an ultimate foundation to knowledge, something which everything that's true can be derived from. That's actually an irrational notion, because if that were true, then there'd be no answer to the problem why that foundation and not another. And I believe that problems are in fact soluble, that there's always a rational answer to be discovered and never a supernatural barrier to understanding, saying you can understand this far but no further in reaching the truth. And the way that we reach many truths is by understanding things more deeply and thereby more broadly. That's the nature of the concept of a foundation. So ultimately, understanding more and more necessarily entails unifications. For example, just as in architecture, all buildings ultimately stand on the same literal foundation, namely the earth, that is until the first moon base is built at any rate. So all buildings, even the moon base, stand on the same theoretical foundation, namely the laws of physics and the laws of engineering and architecture. And so architecture therefore ultimately shares the same foundations via physics with such apparently very distant fields as pharmacology, let's say, which is indirectly based on physics via biochemistry and chemistry. So these two very disparate, distant fields can share a common foundation. But then architecture also involves aesthetics. Does aesthetics similarly have a foundation that it shares with other fields? ### David Deutsch 00:11:27 - 00:15:44 Well, what is aesthetic? What is beauty? Certainly some things can seem to us to be beautiful and some to be ugly or boring. And one thing we can say immediately is that beauty is not a matter of content but of form. So for instance, here's a boring picture. And here is one with essentially the same content and yet this one has some non-zero aesthetic value. You can see that it's likely that someone thought about this one but not necessarily the previous one. Specifically, you can tell that someone thought about what it would take to improve this one aesthetically, to make it more beautiful. Now there are also subjective sensations associated with beauty. It's what philosophers call these subjective sensations qualia. So the qualia of beauty in this case. Fortunately, that need not concern us here today because it will be entirely unnecessary for me to define what beauty is. That's lucky because I don't know. But I'll only need to consider what is in a certain sense that I will explain. What is attractive? What experiences people might work to obtain more of? So if you see a work of art that you appreciate, what that means is that you're willing to work to dwell on it, to give it more of your attention in order to appreciate more in it. And what you're appreciating in it is what you think is beautiful. More centrally to this point, if you're an artist and halfway through the creative process you see something in your unfinished creation that you want to work to bring out more of, and if you're right, that's beauty. So beauty in this sense is a form of attractiveness. But that can't be all there is to it because not all attractiveness has anything to do with aesthetics at all. You lose your balance and you fall off a log, and that's just because we're all attracted to the planet Earth. Now that may just seem like a play on the word attraction because our attraction to the Earth isn't due to any kind of aesthetic appreciation of the Earth, it's just a physical force. It affects artists no more than it affects aardvarks. But bear with me because there are other ways in which the laws of physics can make us attracted to something. For example, an animal can be attracted to another animal in order to mate with it or to eat it, and once the predator has taken a bite, it's attracted to take another unless the bite tastes funny, in which case the animal will be repelled. So there is a matter of taste, but that matter of taste is caused by a physical force, not direct physical force, but nevertheless the laws of physics in the form of the laws of chemistry and biochemistry. And you can just trace how the presence of a particular chemical causes the behaviour of an animal being attracted or repelled by something. So there's still no aesthetic in that animal's behaviour, no objective beauty there being appreciated by anyone or anything. ### David Deutsch 00:15:44 - 00:19:26 It's just chemicals having chemical effects. And by the way, here's another form of attraction, a red traffic light. A red traffic light can induce us to stop and stare at it as long as it's red. But that's not artistic appreciation of the red light either, even though it's an attraction, because it's mechanical. But if we were to exclude all attractions caused by the laws of physics in any way from being counted as objectively aesthetic, then we'd be on a very short slippery slope to excluding absolutely everything, because the laws of physics cause everything. If analysed in sufficient detail, everything is mechanical, so it could be said. So could one draw the conclusion that beauty can't possibly be objective because our attractions to anything at all are just caused by the laws of physics? No, not at all. That would be invalid because by the same argument, science itself wouldn't be objective. Mathematics and even pure logic wouldn't be objective, because nothing would, because what a scientist or a mathematician or a logician want to say is equally caused by the chemicals, the physical and chemical composition of their brain, or else the probabilities are determined. It makes no difference to the current argument. But it's a bad argument because it confuses prediction on the one hand, that's what the laws of physics do, with explanation, which is a deeper thing. So the laws of physics in principle predict what a mathematician would say if one could do the impossible calculation of working out how his brain will behave, but you can't explain what a good mathematician does without referring to the objective truths of mathematics, not just the physics of the mathematician's brain, but truths about abstract objects that a mathematician is studying, that the mathematician can end up saying the words, there is no largest prime number. And the real explanation of the mathematician saying that is that there really isn't a largest prime number. Some other mathematician may think that he's a beetroot, and because he's crazy, and he subjectively thinks that, but in his case, unlike the previous case, there is no objective explanation for his opinion other than the physical state of his brain. So the one that's discovering real mathematics, the explanation goes outside to something objective. So the difference between sane and crazy, and also the difference between objective and purely subjective, and the difference between creating something real and not is where the explanation for what's happening is located. Something's objective if it appears in true explanations of the world, not just explanations of the mind of the person who believes it. And the predictive power of the laws of physics is not at all relevant here, because the laws of physics can't predict what laws of physics are going to be discovered next year, because if you could, you'd have discovered them this year. That is because the discovery of genuine objective knowledge is invariably creative. ### David Deutsch 00:19:26 - 00:24:00 You can't predict new works of art either. A new work of art, like a newly discovered mathematical theorem or law of nature, brings something genuinely new into the world. It adds something. And in exactly the same way, a viewer of art has to create a new understanding in order to appreciate that art. People often wax lyrical about the alleged achievements of primitive cultures, like for instance that of ancient Easter Island with its 60-ton statues. But the philosopher Jacob Bronowski, who is one of my heroes by the way, dared to disagree with this consensus. He said, the critical question about these statues is, why were they all made alike? And he asked that question because repetition is not art. Merely copying a work of art is not a creative act. So these statues are not art. They are, as Bronowski said, like frames in a film that is running down. What he meant was that in the culture that made those statues, no progress was being made, artistic or any other kind. And successive statues of that dead culture were no more works of art than successive frames of a film of one statue would be works of art. Now, to say that art is not empty repetition, and of course nor is science, is to say that there is something inherently unpredictable about creativity. Because anything that's predictable is necessarily repeating some defining attribute of it. But I have to stress, because this is very often misunderstood, that the work of art is unpredictable doesn't mean random at all. In fact, in this case, it means almost exactly the opposite of random. There's nothing random about what we discover about the laws of physics, even though that discovery is unpredictable in advance. Likewise, the unpredictability and the creativity of art does not make it random or in any way arbitrary either. That creativity and that novelty are what is missing in all the examples I've given so far of what is not objective beauty. The attraction of falling to earth, or the fascination of watching a red traffic light, or the attraction of an animal to its prey, none of those are seeking objective beauty. Now, does anything seek objective beauty? Well, a big clue that there is genuine creativity and genuine novelty in some human tastes and some human activities, just as there is in scientific knowledge, the clue that we're not just obeying our genes is that we can act in ways which are manifestly contrary to any tastes and preferences that might have been built into our genes. We regularly eat and drink things in order to obtain tastes which have evolved, which evolved originally in order to repel us, for instance, and which our taste evolved to be repelled by, for instance, the taste of fermenting grains, and one can learn and decide to be attracted by those. A similar example is that spices, many of them, evolved for millions of years in order to have a taste that animals didn't like, and yet we learn to like to taste them. ### David Deutsch 00:24:01 - 00:28:16 Another example is we have an inborn aversion to heights, to falling off heights. Even babies, apparently, have this inborn aversion, and animals certainly do, and yet human beings regularly go parachuting for sport, not in spite of this inborn feeling of aversion, but precisely because of it. It's the very feeling of inborn fear and aversion to heights that a human being can interpret as part of a whole into a bigger picture, which to them is attractive, which to them is beautiful. They want more of it in order to appreciate it more deeply. So the ingredients of that attraction are not inborn. They're not culturally imposed, just as the contents of a newly discovered law of physics are not culturally imposed. They are instead reaching towards something that seems to us subjectively, in a way, to be objective. That is to say, we see it as having an attribute of beauty. And I have to add, I suppose this is obvious, but even in physics and in mathematics, the attraction of doing those subjects, which is the reason that they're done, is ultimately aesthetic. We're pursuing truth. Our criterion is truth, but we wouldn't pursue it or even recognise it without its beauty. Now I think that Keats was being ironic or something in that poem where he said that truth actually is beauty. It certainly isn't any more than physics is mathematics or cats are dogs. But beauty and scientific truth have something vital in common, namely their objectivity. And what's more, they are related. A world without aesthetics wouldn't be comprehensible scientifically. And a world that wasn't explicable in the scientific sense couldn't provide the anchor in reality that objectively good art requires. So therefore, if beauty is objective, then it is indeed a form of truth, because it is then objectively true or false that something or other is or isn't beautiful or more beautiful than something else. It's objectively true or false that one page in the waste paper basket has less value or more value than the page that eventually gets published. So, okay, so we pursue truth and beauty, and they're connected in various ways, but we can be fooled. We might see a pretty face as beautiful because of the values and standards built into our genes and into our culture. And a praying mantis might see this as beautiful. So might some humans, entomologists, for instance. In fact, there's almost nothing that a human can't learn to see as beautiful. So you might take that as evidence that beauty can't be objective. But no, because humans can learn to see false scientific theories as true as well. They can learn to see false logic as true. Nevertheless, there is an objective truth accessible to science. However, what about this? Why is this flower the shape it is? ### David Deutsch 00:28:16 - 00:32:12 Well, the immediate answer is because its genes evolved over millions of years to make it attractive to insects. So insects find this attractive. Why do they find it attractive? Well, on the face of it, it's for exactly the same reason as they find insects of the opposite sex attractive. Flowers are the shape they are because they attract insects. And insects are attracted by flowers because that's how they get food, nectar. And the way this situation arose is that there was coevolution between genes in the flower and genes in the insect, just as there is coevolution between males and females of the same species. So there was a coevolution of genes in the flower criteria for what insects find attractive and means of meeting the criteria, which is how to make the shapes and patterns and the colors of flowers. So it's not surprising that flowers contain knowledge of how to attract insects and insects contain the desire to get closer to flowers with certain shapes and patterns, to experience more of a particular shape and pattern than of others. That's not surprising, but what is surprising is that these same flowers also attract humans. Now, this is a very familiar fact to us, so we don't see how amazing it is. Just look at this rather repulsive animal. And while you're at it, think of all the countless different repulsively ugly animals that there are in nature and think every one of them is naturally found attractive by members of the opposite sex in that species and also by their predators. And therefore, it's to be expected that we find most of them repulsive unless we're zoologists or something. By the way, with the predators and prey, there's a similar coevolution, but the other way around. It's a competitive coevolution with the predator's genes evolving to make the right prey look more attractive to it and with the prey's genes evolving to become less attractive to the predator. And that's how camouflage happens. And therefore, it seems plausible for that reason that the opposite of beautiful is not actually ugly, but rather boring, like the camouflaged animal, because ugly is distinctive and so is only a matter of a reinterpretation away from beauty, as any zoologists in the audience would no doubt tell us and probably any chefs as well. Anyway, it can happen, but the local internal criteria that evolved within the species happen to produce something that's attractive to us as well. For instance, the peacock's tail is an example. That's a rare anomaly produced by a runaway arms race in the coevolution between male and female peacocks. But in the overwhelming majority of species, we don't share any of that species' criteria for finding something attractive. But with flowers, most flowers, we do. ### David Deutsch 00:32:12 - 00:36:06 Sometimes a tree can be beautiful, even over and above the cultural connotations that trees have. Even a puddle of water can be beautiful, but only sometimes. Again, such cases are rare anomalies. With flowers, it's reliable. So why do we find flowers beautiful? That's the title of my talk. Well, perhaps the obvious answer which I'm going to oppose is that it's not that flowers are objectively beautiful, but that it's merely a cultural phenomenon. But I don't think that holds water because we find flowers beautiful that we've never seen before and which haven't been known to our culture before, and quite reliably, for most people, in most cultures. Just think that the same is not at all true of the roots of a flower, of a plant, nor the leaves. Just flowers. So I think there can be only one possible answer overall. Flowers are beautiful because the task that was faced in their coevolution with insects was essentially one of signalling complex information across a gap between the species. Species that have nothing else in common. So there's no shared genetic propensity existing before the evolution began. Nothing like, for instance, even being able to recognise a fellow member of the same species, which is needed for other reasons, before determining their attractiveness. And perhaps the most important, in the case of the flowers and insects, there are no shared existing genes for appearance and for criteria of attractiveness that were inherited from the ancestor species from which that species evolved. And such genes would only need to be modified a little in order to work in the new species. But across the gap between distant, unrelated species, they're starting from scratch. And therefore, my guess is, and this is my central thesis today, that the easiest way to signal across such a gap is to use objective standards of beauty. Not the species specific subjective standards that are usually sufficient in the evolution of species. And so flowers have to be appealing by objective standards and insects have to be able to recognise some objective standards. Insects recognise no other objective standards of anything. Very few other species are attracted by flowers. Only the species that evolved to do it and human beings. And why just humans? Why do they do it? There's a very important reason. It's because signaling across the gap between two humans is analogous to signaling across the gap between two entire species. A human being in terms of knowledge content and creative individuality is rather like an entire species of any other animal. It's an entire world unto itself, unlike other animals where all the animals of a particular species have the same programming and therefore use the same criteria for what to be attracted by. ### David Deutsch 00:36:06 - 00:40:03 Humans are quite unlike that. The amount of information in one human mind is greater than that in the entire genome of any animal. And overwhelmingly more than the genetic information that's unique to one person. So that means that human artists and scientists are trying to signal across the same scale of gap as there exists between the flowers and the insects. Now another possible objection to this theory is to say, yes, okay, some of what humans find attractive in flowers or in art is indeed objective, but it is not objective beauty. It's something more mundane. There's something like a liking for bright colors or for strong contrasts or symmetrical shapes. And that's the reason maybe humans have an inborn liking for symmetry because it helps us to classify and order things and so organize our environment physically and conceptually, which is what we evolved to do. Yes, we almost certainly do have that sort of genetic trait, but I think it's got nothing to do with why flowers are beautiful because for instance some flowers are white for a start. At least they may be colored in colors that some insects can see, but we can't, but they're white to us and we still find them beautiful. As for the contrast with the background, well yes, all flowers contrast with their background. They couldn't possibly perform their signaling function if they didn't do that. But a big hairy spider in the bath contrasts with its background even more, and yet there's no general consensus that that is beautiful. As for symmetry, well yes, again we like symmetry, but spiders are quite symmetrical and some flowers are very unsymmetrical and we don't find them any less attractive for that. Now the mirror image of that set of objections is another objection, namely that we also find certain other things in nature beautiful, things which are not the results of any artistic creativity or coevolution across a gap. So we have a set of things which are not the results of any artistic creativity or coevolution across a gap, things like the night sky or waterfalls or sunsets, but I think that that objection doesn't bear much closer inspection. Not every sunset is beautiful. They're not all as beautiful as this. In fact, not every photograph of even this sunset was as beautiful. If you were to look at the other photographs taken of this sunset by this photographer, you would find maybe dozens of others and all of them less good than this one because this is the one that the photographer chose to show. And even this one could easily be improved aesthetically. What's more, the photographer didn't take a picture of a sunset at random or the sky at random, nor with a random foreground, not randomly framed and composed and so on. So many creative decisions went into this photograph. Without them, the image would have been far less beautiful if at all. ### David Deutsch 00:40:03 - 00:43:57 Now that's far less true of any other kind of picture. Its attractiveness doesn't depend on a foreground. It depends far less on composition and so on. And so with the sunset, it's really the point of view, the photograph that's beautiful. With the flowers, it's each flower, though undoubtedly they can be made more beautiful by the creativity of an artist such as a photographer or a flower arranger. So I think that the only possible explanation of all these different instances that I've given of X finding Y beautiful or X not finding Y beautiful or being attracted or not being attracted and so on, at least the most plausible explanation of all the examples taken together, I think, is that first of all, there do exist subjective standards of beauty, which are essentially dumb animal species specific standards of attractiveness. Or in the case of humans, there's also culture specific and individual specific standards, but subjective. And second, there are also objective standards that have nothing to do with species, nothing to do with biology, nothing to do with culture or individual preferences. They are as objective as the laws of physics or the laws of mathematics. So aesthetics is objective and that tells us that when an artist creates a work of art, they really are engaging in the kind of thinking that goes into creating new knowledge in science and in mathematics and in philosophy, namely conjectures and criticisms against improving standards, where by improving we mean objectively improving. Artists have authentically artistic problems, authentically aesthetic problems and they try to solve them by conjecture and by improving both the works of art and the criteria. Just like Beethoven, an artist, the painting isn't right, you try to improve it and you also change the criteria by which you're judging it. And then you try to meet those criteria and you find that you meet them imperfectly. And so you improve your guess as to what will meet them and also what they really should be. And eventually, if you're an artist and if you're right, then you end up with a work of art of objective value. Now I said authentically artistic problems, but there are two kinds of those. They're pure and applied, rather like in mathematics or in science, there's pure science such as physics and an applied related science such as engineering. Same is true in art. There's the applied kind of artistic problem that's the one that's faced by the flowers and insects where they have what's actually just a practical problem, but it happens to be best solved because of the logic of the situation. It's best solved by creating objective beauty rather than just subjective standards of attractiveness. And humans have those kinds of problems too. ### David Deutsch 00:43:57 - 00:47:58 The beauty of, for instance, the Macintosh user interface was created essentially to promote design efficiency. And the purpose of the beauty of a poem or a song may in some cases be practical, to give cohesiveness to a culture or to advance a certain political agenda or even to sell washing up liquid. Purposes of that kind can be served either by creating objective beauty or just by creating subjective beauty that appeals to the relatively immutable dumb standards of genetic predisposition and the static non-creative parts of culture. And then there's the other kind of problem, the pure kind which doesn't have any analog in biological evolution. That is of creating beauty for its own sake and of advancing cultural standards, cultural aesthetic standards accordingly. That is the analog of pure scientific research, of blue-sky research. And as I've explained, the state of mind involved in this sort of science and this sort of art is fundamentally the same. Both are seeking what can perfectly justly be called objective truth. By the way, one amusing corollary of this theory is I think that it's very likely that human appearance as selected for by human sexual selection or at least the things about human faces and bodies that we find beautiful or attractive in the sense of wanting to look at them, at least in part must satisfy standards of objective beauty as well as species specific and cultural ones. It's just that we're not very far along that path yet because we only diverged from apes a few hundred thousand years ago. So our appearance isn't yet all that different from apes. But I would predict that once we understand better what objective aesthetics actually is, we will find that the differences in appearance between us and apes are all in the direction of making humans objectively more beautiful than apes. We can't tell just by looking. The same is true in science. We can't tell the difference subjectively between the motion of an aeroplane that we see going across the sky, which is objective motion, and the motion of the sun across the sky, which is purely subjective, purely subjective illusion caused by our own motion. And then there are things halfway between, like the motion of the moon, which is a little bit of each. So we can't tell just by appreciating a bit of beauty whether it is subjective or objective any more than we can in science. But the future objective study of aesthetics might give us ways of telling the difference. Well, why should we bother to do that? Why not just go by we knows what we likes and never mind the underlying reason, because after all, I've just said, they feel exactly the same? ### David Deutsch 00:47:58 - 00:52:10 Because the reason we should bother is that the objective direction, the direction of objective improvement, is the only one in which we can expect to make unlimited progress as we can in science and mathematics and philosophy. All the other directions, the subjective ones, are inherently finite because they are circumscribed by the finite knowledge inherent in our genes and in existing traditions. That tells us something about various theories that are going around or have gone around about what art really is. Ancient art that's subjectively valuable, such as that of say ancient Greece and its revival in the Renaissance, first concerned themselves with things like the skill of reproducing the exact appearance of a face or a human body or of a perspective. But that kind of skill, though it is an objective skill and although it facilitates real objective art, is not in itself artistic precisely because it is perfectable. Real art is not a perfect skill. It is a skill that is capable of going on from there and doing something beyond the perfection of any given skill. And that's what the great artists of the Renaissance actually did. Also, this idea of objective beauty that I've been explaining, also I think explains the conventional wisdom, which I think is true, that artistic appreciation can be more or less refined. That is to say, there exists a sophisticated appreciation which is better than a crude appreciation. That a gourmet has a better life than someone who just appreciates steak and chips. It also tells us that the theory that art is there to improve humankind, well, it does have a grain of truth in that now we see that improving artistic values and artistic achievement is itself an objective improvement. And art, like science, can contribute to improving humankind also in non-aesthetic ways, like morally and politically and whatever. But that is not what art and science actually are. And that's not what artistic and scientific values actually are. Because you don't have a choice as to what is or isn't an artistic improvement any more than you have a choice as to what's true and false in mathematics. And if you do try to tune your theorems or your scientific theories or your philosophical positions to meet a predetermined political agenda, say, or a predetermined personal preference, then you will automatically be at cross purposes with yourself. Even if you achieve it, you may have advanced your cause, but you won't have advanced science, philosophy, or in the case of art, you won't have advanced art. Again, the same critique also tells us that the theories of art that say that art is about self-expression must be wrong too, because expression is about how to convey something that is already there. And objectively valuable art is about creating something new that was not there before. ### David Deutsch 00:52:10 - 00:55:20 Also, self-expression is by definition expressing something subjective, while art is inherently objective. Similarly, any kind of art that is subject to a certain set of ideas, that consists of spontaneous acts, like throwing paint onto canvas or pickling sheep and so on, is unlikely to constitute artistic progress objectively. Now, if I'm right in this whole picture of the relationship of art to knowledge, the reality of artistic standards, the relationship of art and science and all, then one nice implication is that the future of art is absolutely mind-boggling. Art of the future, it follows, can create unlimited increases in beauty. This may seem fantastical, but we've got quite used to assuming the same thing is true about technology, which would have seemed impossible during most of human history. I can only speculate, but we can also presumably expect new kinds of unification. For instance, I've said that elegance, which is a kind of beauty, is implicated in scientific and mathematical discovery. Well, when we better understand what elegance actually is, then perhaps we will find new and better ways to seek truth using elegance and beauty. Quite likely also, we'll be able to design, after all, our senses are subjective and parochial. They all evolved for subjective, local reasons to do with the history of our species. Quite likely, once we understand better what beauty really is, we can design new senses, new qualia that can encompass beauty of new kinds, which are literally inconceivable to us now. What is it like to be a bat? That's to be a bat which has echolocation instead of sight as its main sense. Well, that's a famous question in the philosophy of consciousness. Perhaps in future, that will not so much be the task of philosophy to discover, but the task of art, new technological art, to give us the experience of. So that's it. Thank you very much. ### Rachel Thomas 00:55:25 - 00:55:56 Thank you very much, David. Gosh, that was absolutely brilliant. I have one quick question myself before we open to the floor. This is just on a personal note. You talked about the notions of beauty with regards to the flowers, like why are flowers beautiful? I was thinking that notion of beauty, linking back to someone like Chopin, how lucretious, is that to do with notions of cruelty, so why flowers are beautiful, actually quite cruel concept, the notion of survival with nature? ### David Deutsch 00:55:56 - 00:56:49 Yes, there's some truth in that because I said that beauty and ugliness are only a matter of interpretation away from each other, whereas beauty and boredom are not. There is a much bigger gap there. However, I don't think it's true that evolution is inherently savage or ugly. That is true of biological evolution of animals, and it's certainly true of the flowers and the insects, which don't necessarily benefit each other with this signaling. But humans have a choice to create beauty in other ways, which aren't cruel. And so our progress, and progress presumably is always, human progress is always more creative than destructive. So we can eventually hope that the objective standards of beauty will not be destructive. ### Rachel Thomas 00:56:55 - 00:57:07 Thank you. Now I'm going to open out to the floor. Does anybody have any questions? Don't be shy. ### Audience questioner 00:57:07 - 00:57:34 The idea of objective beauty in flowers, it seems to me that nature sometimes gets it wrong and flowers can be very, very kitsch, not so beautiful, they're over the top. And I would imagine that you couldn't get anyone to agree on the beauty value across the spectrum of flowers. So I don't see. ### David Deutsch 00:57:34 - 00:59:00 I agree, but I don't think that's an objection to this view, because exactly the same thing is true in science. You know, there's the famous poem which the philosopher Karl Popper quotes, two plus two is four, it is true, but too empty and too trite. I would rather seek a clue to some matters not so light. And that is saying that although, I don't know, there's no dispute about whether two plus two is four is true or not, there is a dispute about what kinds of truth we ought to be seeking. And the difference between kitsch and deeply beautiful is something that we can't expect to always agree on. When we're making a lot of progress, we can create more agreement about this. And again, exactly the same thing happens in science and in mathematics and philosophy. So, you know, the difference between a kitsch flower and a beautiful flower is perhaps not that great by the standards of what humans can achieve in terms of beauty. But then I'm not saying that the flowers are that great by human standards. The mystery is, why do we appreciate flowers at all when we don't appreciate almost anything else in nature that has evolved to be attractive? ### Rachel Thomas 00:59:00 - 00:59:05 I answered your question, Peter, didn't I? No, do you want more? ### Audience questioner 00:59:05 - 00:59:09 You're saying we don't appreciate anything else? ### David Deutsch 00:59:09 - 00:59:59 Well, yes, I'm saying that the other things that we appreciate in nature are either a coincidence like the peacock's tail, where we can see that the vast majority of things that evolved for those kinds of reasons are not attractive to us, or things like the night sky and that sort of thing. They are beautiful because of their cultural connotations. If you were to take just a piece of paper and put dots on it in the places where stars are, then people wouldn't be very awed by looking at that picture. They are awed by the night sky for cultural reasons. So there are all sorts of reasons that we subjectively find things, including things in nature, beautiful. But some of them are cultural, some of them are in our genes. But you can't explain the flowers that way. ### Rachel Thomas 00:59:59 - 01:00:05 Thank you. Any more questions? I've got one there. ### Audience questioner 01:00:05 - 01:00:19 In fact, how about crystal structures, which I think all of us find extremely attractive and in all of those structures, crystal structures all across the possibility of? ### David Deutsch 01:00:26 - 01:01:29 Yes. I did mention that we almost certainly have an inborn appreciation of symmetry. And crystals explore all the different kinds of symmetry that can exist in three-dimensional shapes. And if you have a crystal, though, if you have a rock that doesn't display symmetry, then it is very rare for it to be beautiful, at least not by consensus. I should also add that a crystal garden or something like that is more beautiful than an individual crystal, unless the crystal has cultural connotations like a famous diamond or whatever. In that case, those may help us to find it beautiful. But again, with the flowers, it's different. The unsymmetrical ones are no less beautiful than the symmetrical ones to our general appreciation, unlike crystals. ### Rachel Thomas 01:01:29 - 01:01:35 Okay, so one last question, please. I think we had one up there. ### Audience questioner 01:01:35 - 01:01:39 I'm interested in what you've been saying. Your whole talk has been fascinating. ### David Deutsch 01:01:39 - 01:01:44 Cool, thank you. ### Audience questioner 01:01:44 - 01:02:04 And in general, I'm wondering, because of the way the world is changing, because of technology, because of, I suppose, our collective consciousness and individual consciousness, will our notions of beauty change, do you think? Is that something that you consider or think about? ### David Deutsch 01:02:04 - 01:02:55 If I'm right at all, then that is bound to happen. Not only our notions of beauty, I think our notions of beauty probably have changed over a period of centuries anyway. If you look at, let's say, how people are regarded as beautiful in, say, the Renaissance, they're not quite the same features as we would regard as beautiful today. And it's also different in different cultures even currently. But one would expect, if this whole picture is true, one would expect standards of beauty and also different kinds of beauty to change rapidly once art has the same attitude towards creating knowledge as science, mathematics, and philosophy do. And I suppose that's what I'm calling for. ### Audience questioner 01:02:55 - 01:03:15 Can I ask you something in relation to that? The role of art, especially in line with artists such as Giotto, was to support religion and therefore religion was there, but art was a kind of gesticulation of the word of God. Do you feel that maybe in the future that art replaces religion, that doesn't support religion, actually has its own concept within that? ### David Deutsch 01:03:15 - 01:04:16 Well, like I said, anything that art supports, I mean, this is a legitimate role for art, like for science, to support things. Physics is used to build bridges, but that's not what physics is. Physics is an understanding of the objective world. And similarly, art can be used to support all sorts of things. And I think it's great that art is used to support washing up liquid sales. But that's not what art is either. So Giotto and the conception of art as supporting religion is inherently finite and therefore inherently not objectively artistic. A thing like that runs out and has to eventually be replaced by pursuing art for its own sake. And yes, art could replace religion. I mean, science could replace religion. In general, open-ended creation can replace religion and other closed systems. ### Rachel Thomas 01:04:17 - 01:04:24 Thank you very much. Any more questions? One more. ### Audience questioner 01:04:25 - 01:04:43 I just wanted to ask you, do you think that a new standard of objective beauty would be like a signpost to consciousness, or do you think that you need to be a conscious observer to see objective beauty, which you think comes first? ### David Deutsch 01:04:43 - 01:05:36 That's a great question. I don't know is the answer. I said at the beginning today that I won't have to actually say what beauty is, the qualia of beauty. It could be that understanding how beauty works and understanding how to create it and so on, better, would help us to understand the qualia of beauty, in which case it would definitely tell us something about consciousness. But just because you have to be conscious to appreciate beauty doesn't mean that once we understand beauty we understand consciousness. You have to be conscious to create knowledge. And yet we've created a vast amount of knowledge in science and mathematics and so on without ever understanding what consciousness is. So it may help or it may not. ### Rachel Thomas 01:05:37 - 01:06:14 Well David, thank you very, very much on behalf of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. It's a brilliant talk today, so thank you very, very much. Thank you. Great audience, thanks for coming. Just to tell everybody that Lunar Reggae continues until the 18th and we also have two shows opening, Alex Katz and Thomas Demand, and that's coming, so do look to our programme for that. Thank you very much. David, thanks. ### David Deutsch 01:06:15 - 01:06:18 Thank you. Bye everyone. ### Rachel Thomas 01:06:19 - 01:06:21 Hi David, we'll be in touch as well.