I‘m currently watching episode 314 of the Lex Fridman podcast with Liv Boeree, and in it, Lex posed the question: What is beauty? Liv‘s answer was beautifully intelligent:
I’m paraphrasing her answer:
Something is beautiful when it can‘t be reduced down to easy metrics.
Think of a tree. What is it about a big ancient beautiful tree that we find so beautiful? It‘s not the sweetness of its fruit, or the value of its lumber. It‘s this entirety of it, these immesurable qualities.
It walks this fine line between order and chaos.
Its a very complex system evolving over time. Not a complicated system. A complicated system can be broken down into bits and put back together. A complex system is like a black box. It does all this crazy stuff, but if you take it apart you can‘t put it back together again, because there are all these intricacies, and the sum of the whole is much larger than the sum of its parts. And that‘s where the beauty lies.