Exit Music (notes)

Adrian Bejan’s Constructal Law is something I keep thinking about. It states:

For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the currents that flow through it.

Much of Bejan’s investigations have been about documenting instances of the Constructal Law in natural processes; it’s an elegant theoretical basis for predicting the allowed evolutionary pathways that ultimately produce the natural and organic structures that we find beautiful.

Now, not to take too enormous a logical leap, but, as I have started to argue elsewhere (and would like someday to finish that argument), I believe that beauty is more than an aesthetic experience of highly-intelligent beings. Rather, it’s a relational encounter between parts of a system that is evolving, as the Constructal Law states, towards more ease-of-flow. The experience of beauty is a retrospective signal that the system is evolving in such a way that allows it to persist in time; that is, to live.

This interpretation implies a profound truth—that when we perceive beauty, we are recognizing the conditions of our flourishing. If we pay attention, we can understand how to nurture and tend to those conditions and add to the sum total of aliveness of our world.

Many of my friends, being in the world of software development, are very aware of the architect Christopher Alexander, from his development of the idea of pattern languages. Most of them have not encountered his later work, The Nature of Order—a four-volume magnum opus that laid out a theoretical framework for what he called “aliveness” or just “life” in designed structures. In this work, he described 15 properties of living structure. Until I read about the Constructal Law, I found myself unable to relate to Alexander’s use of the word “life”—I knew that he meant it as more than just hyperbole, but I couldn’t quite grasp why these properties in particular were seen in so-called “living structure”.

I now understand it as follows: Alexander was throughout his career describing design processes that were iterative and evolutionary, where the resulting structure was to belong harmoniously, and to “help” its local environment. Because he was an architect, he mostly addresses the design processes leading up to the creation of a building or a campus. But he also always talks about how a building or an object evolves in use, and evolves the functions of the space it inhabits. These processes, to me, are analogous to what Bejan describes in the Constructal Law: the building evolves, in use, always to provide “easier access to the flows”.

To Alexander, beauty was also a sign of this aliveness. I now understand that his 15 properties of living structure can be seen as the results of Constructal evolutionary processes, and that he and Bejan were barking up the same tree.

Connecting these dots has given me a lot of hope and peace; moreover, it has given me an aesthetic heuristic to understand if things are going well for a system, whether that be a process in my workplace, a relationship, or the broader arc of my life. Do I perceive beauty and ease unfolding? If yes, what conditions are supporting the unfolding of that beauty? If no, what would be beautiful that could evolve from here? What conditions would support that?

[God] made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.  — Eric Liddell

Life is supposed to be full of beauty; that is what it seeks. Be a vessel for that beauty to come into the world.

This is just a quick post to say I've turned on email subscriptions to this little journal. It's there in case you want my ramblings in your inbox, obviously. The signup form is at the bottom of every page.

Cheers!

I keep re-learning about conditions versus consequences. In a conditions-first model, we create the conditions that make the next step possible. The next step unfolds out of the first step. This is the recursive model of momentum – we are continually creating the conditions for the natural unfolding of the next thing.

The standard model of productive/creative momentum is the iterative model, which is the opposite of the recursive model. In the iterative model, we do one thing on the list, then we do the next thing. Stringing together done-things-on-the-list is the game. This is fine unless you are one of those strange people who needs access to a deep pool of motivation for every single stupid task you are trying to get your stupid brain to do. Then, the iterative model can break, as it assumes that motivation is either intrinsic to each task, or comes from somewhere outside of the task.

At the moment, I seem to be one of those people to a sometimes pretty pathological level. So I need this task to be energised by a powerful motivation, and I need this task to naturally create the powerful motivation for the next one.

I just want to be able to think clearly and express what I’m thinking. It seems I’m great at finding relevant wisdom when I have something to react to — a foil for my spirit? — but without that, the mother of all blank canvases.

Perhaps some good generative pretexts:

1. Imagine someone coming to me for advice. What do they ask? What are they really asking? How would I help them to think about their problem? What advice would I give them?
2. Create something just good enough to react to. Then recurse – create a reaction to that thing, which in turns spawns another reaction. Recursive momentum rather than iterative momentum.

1. Tendency to over-capture and auto-capture. Less likely to ever revisit, less likely to even remember that you captured something.
2. Tendency for things to get lost – easy to proliferate repositories of stuff.
3. Tendency to use tools like AI to over-produce and under-think.
4. Tendency towards text (as that’s what keyboards do) – analog systems make it really easy to break out into sketching. Lack of photos/videos in analog systems forces description rather than mere replication. A poorer attempt at description (written or sketched) nevertheless cements our memory of the thing (see e.g. Sönke Ahrens) and our reaction to it, better than simply pasting or embedding the thing.
5. Tendency towards distraction – easy to go down a research rabbit hole, which becomes a YouTube rabbit hole.

Unfinished sketch

1. Beauty is an encounter between a subject and an object
2. The beauty of the object is completely dependent on the subject encountering it

Objective beauty is an illusion sustained by some shared context between different subjects leading to somewhat similar encounters (and broad agreement on what is beautiful)

Subjects bring all kinds of contexts to the encounter, everything from the common conditions of survival of the species to a highly-trained intellectual perspective on the object. Thus there are some things that are almost universally held to be beautiful (the shade of a tree by a body of water on a sunny day), and there are some things whose beauty requires advanced expertise to appreciate.

In her book On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry states as the first indication of beauty that it demands replication  —  that is, that it prompts a copy of itself. It is strange, then, that she describes the process of replication mostly in terms of fixation  —  that is, the desire of the subject to fix the beautiful object in their experience. She gives examples of Proust and Leonardo being fixated on beautiful people and having, or exercising, the desire to follow them around.

Scarry then moves on to justify the case that objects such a the Mona Lisa and The Divine Comedy are acts of replication of some prior beauty simply by asserting that “something, or someone, gave rise to their creation and remains silently present in the new-born object”.

This is probably just one of many examples in Western philosophy where a convoluted or absurd argument is required because of the lack of a sufficiently animist metaphysics.

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I think, when Scarry talks about justice, she may actually be referring to a concept I would more comfortably call goodness, or rightness. The goodness or rightness I'm thinking of is a category of conditions that lead to the flourishing of a system of which the subject and object are both participants.

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On apparent beauty: an object can produce encounters with beauty when the subject is unaffected by or unaware of harmful things that are done in order to support the existence of the object. For example...