Beautiful Signals

I like to think that we, as humans, believe whatever will help us sleep soundly at night. The problem with that theory is that humans often spend time thinking anxious thoughts, the kind that do NOT help them sleep at night. It also appears I am saying that humans choose their own thoughts, which may turn out to be false. Let us contemplate this for a moment.

I would like to say that human beings love Beauty. They love things that are Beautiful, or thoughts, anything that is beautiful or exhibits beauty or makes them think of beauty or contemplate beauty. With that being said, we also spend some time thinking about things that are patently UGLY, i.e. when we think of Climate Change and existential threats that pose a risk to the very survival of our species, etc.

So who cares and what does all of this have to do with my Theory of Beautiful Signals? First of all, a beautiful signal could be seen as a kind of “fitness signal”, a Darwinian fitness signal, like a peacock’s tail to a peahen. That’s the simplest way to describe what a beautiful signal is. It’s more complicated than that, however. Beautiful signals in humans also imply that humans pay attention to beautiful signals at the expense of something else, some other signal that is perhaps more valuable or more important.

My argument is that paying too much attention to beautiful signals is a bad thing in humans. If all we do all the livelong day is choose our preferences over everything else, then we end up “filtering” our universe, leaving only that which fulfills our desires and so forth. I argue that there is a whole other world out there of things that may not suit your fancy, which may not be your “cup of tea”, but which may be just as important as those beautiful signals you’re focused on most of the time.

Line of beauty is a term and a theory in art or aesthetics used to describe an S-shaped curved line (a serpentine line) appearing within an object, as the boundary line of an object, or as a virtual boundary line formed by the composition of several objects. This theory originated with William Hogarth (18th-century English painter, satirist, and writer), and is an essential part of Hogarth’s theory of aesthetics as described in his Analysis of Beauty (1753). According to this theory, S-shaped curved lines signify liveliness and activity and excite the attention of the viewer as contrasted with straight lines, parallel lines, or right-angled intersecting lines, which signify stasis, death, or inanimate objects.

In contrast to grand compositional lines, which are regularly found in Baroque or Rococo art, the serpentine line is not primarily dictating the whole composition of a canvas. Instead, the line should be understood as being found in parts; a composition is created by employing various kinds of lines in various relations to each other without destroying its simplicity. — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_beauty

What is Beauty?

We speak of Beautiful Signals, but what is Beauty? We maybe need to know what the Beautiful is before deciding which signals are Beautiful, no?