5.4 How beauty can be quantified  (Page 2/6)

There is more than just lines that makes something beautiful and ugly, however like color and brightness and texture. Crystal is usually more pretty than glass, it is because it is shinier and brighter so it catches your eye, you don't have to try hard to focus on it, so it’s easier to think about and therefore more beautiful. If you could only see in black and white you would probably think the world is uglier than it is with color because with color you can more easily separate objects because they are more different from each other with all the colors. You could also compare it to seeing in just say green and blue. Black and white are also less bright than the rest of the colors, so it would be harder to see things because they wouldn't stand out as much and it would be harder to see. Therefore it would be harder to think about the objects causing less pleasure and cause you to name them as uglier. That's probably why the color gold is usually prettier because it is very shiny and attractive, it draws the eye and is easy to notice (hence think about). So there are different factors in beauty one is color/brightness the other is its structure and what shape the object takes and how big it is.

Start with what you have there (above) and try to come up with more examples to explore quantitatively figuring out beauty more.

Like when you look at a book, you see a flat plain on one side, and sharp edges. Looking at the edges doesn’t cause pleasure because they are sharp, but because they are lines, it further causes pleasure because they are nice, straight, even lines. Looking at the face of the book, (the large flat area) causes a more peaceful type of pleasure that you get when looking at any wide open large flat area/plain, like a peaceful, calm lake. That’s because there aren’t any lines in the space to distract your mind, so it’s peaceful.

Take that idea further, what feeling now do you get when you look at a line that curves? As your eye travels over it, you have to pause mentally to see it curve, your mind stops and pauses at the curve, which means you need to put more mental effort to see it, and since being active causes pleasure, this causes you more pleasure by causing more neurons to fire from the effort. You get that feeling when you look at a curving line too, not just one that curves suddenly, because your mind can’t just go from one point to the next, it has to slow down and follow the curve.

Now put everything I said about lines and curves together, and try to get the larger picture of how it all works together, so you can sense the feeling of how beautiful each thing is.

Anything in life is made up of lines and curves. Since you know how much pleasure each line gives you, just add up the pleasure from all the lines in a certain object, (like a person, or a box) and subtract all the annoyance trying to look at that object causes you (sometimes an object has too many lines, unlike a lake, and it would cause head pain if you look at it too closely), so subtract the negative feelings from the positive ones to get the total pleasure looking at the object causes you. Just add up each line, each curve, each time your mind pauses (unconsciously and consciously) how each one of those unconscious pauses causes pleasure or pain and how much pleasure or pain. I showed you what an unconscious pause was when I showed a sharp curve or an angle with two lines meeting at a point, it would be a bigger pause to stop at the point, and a slower pause to see a curve, and slower and slower of a pause until that curve becomes a line, which has no mental pauses (conscious or unconscious) because you just look at the line, your mind doesn’t have to consciously or unconsciously follow it around corners or up or down along the curve, it just goes from one point to the next. So when you’re stopped and looking at something for a long time, your eye follows its lines, that’s what happens when you look at it for a short time as well, only it happens mostly unconsciously and is what causes pleasure or pain to look at the object, and in differing amounts.