An evolutionary/chaotic theory of beauty and meaning

Abstract

This essay presents an aesthetic theory based on the coevolution of the biological and cultural elements of the human nervous system. If the evolution of our sense of beauty is a nonlinear feedback between cultural and biological determinants, recent developments in the theory of chaos, nonlinear processes, and self-organizing systems can point the way to a better understanding of aesthetics. The experience of beauty is redescribed as a reward analogous to the neurochemical rewards for other adaptive activities such as eating and sex. Beauty itself is broadly redefined as an objective property of the fundamental generative processes of the universe—thus as possessing a real, not just a subjective, existence. Like our eyes, our aesthetic sense is designed to perceive objects that are actually out there: systems which show promise for emergent forms of order. The ability to recognize such systems would have adaptive significance. The “natural classical” genres or “neurocharms” of the arts, such as poetic meter and visual pattern, are techniques for controlling and creating such emergence-promising systems, and are culturally universal. A new theory of meaning is proposed, using recent developments in the theory of chaotically-oscillating neural circuits in the brain. Words do not indicate the absence of their referents, as in poststructuralist theory; instead, as emergent strange attractors in the brain, they participate in complex nonlinear physical feedback relationships with their referents.