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From: eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Submission for sci.philosophy.tech (Re: Scientific Epistemology)
Message-ID: <120@snark.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 30-Jul-87 19:27:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: snark.120
Posted: Thu Jul 30 19:27:54 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 9-Aug-87 11:58:58 EDT
Organization: Thyrsus Enterprises, Malvern PA 19355
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In article <2399@hoptoad.uucp>, laura@hoptoad.uucp (Laura Creighton) writes:
> Isn't that begging the question?

What question? Beauty tends to be a good heuristic for what's *interesting* in
pure mathematics, but it doesn't tell you what's true. In other fields the
connection is even more tenuous.

**PERSONAL OPINION BEGINS**

What's really going on here is that we have a cultural prejudice that beautiful
things are 'true' and vv. which we inherited from a particular school of
Greek philosophers that was dominant in the city that happened to win the
Aegean wars, so we edit our experience to conform to it. If the Ionians had
won, this nonsense would have been in the dustbin of history for 2000 years.

The cognitive experience from which these guys were overgeneralizing is that
when you have an intuitive grasp on a complex system (like, say, the workings
of a clepsydra in their day or a computer in ours), thinking about it is
pleasurable (hence 'beautiful'). So the tendency to think "what's beautiful
is more likely to be true" is a typical-for-philosophically-naive-Westerners
misprojection of "I'm more likely to be able to solve problems with complexity
I can grasp". Most other cultures don't make this mistake as much (but they've
got characteristic blind spots of their own).

**OPINION ENDS**

>>we throw away a lot of information in making the exceedingly complex mapping
>>from, say, falling cannonballs to F=ma.
> 
>But why is the exceedingly complex mapping so beautiful?  F=ma is not complex;
>on the contrary it is very simple. awe inspiringly, beautifully, simple.

See above. It's the confirmation-by-experience that *simple* F=ma can be used
to predict the *complex* behavior of the falling rock that's the real
"knowledge" here; F=ma is just marks on paper. Mathematics by itself is a
zero-content system, both literally and figuratively meaningless (but fun!).
The mapping is 'beautiful' only because it's now part of your intuition; was
it 'beautiful' to you while you were struggling to understand dx/dt?

No? I didn't think so...and it remains un-`beautiful' to people who don't
grok elementary physics at least in Newtonian approximation.
-- 
      Eric S. Raymond
      UUCP:  {{seismo,ihnp4,rutgers}!cbmvax,sdcrdcf!burdvax,vu-vlsi}!snark!eric
      Post:  22 South Warren Avenue, Malvern, PA 19355    Phone: (215)-296-5718