Beauty, Horror, and Observers

It is often observed, in one form or another, that the universe contains a great deal of beauty and a great deal of horror. The statement does not, I believe, need much justification. The horror is apparent just about everywhere on this planet, and in this part of the world especially apparent after a week like this past one. It's not just in the human world, of course; that's the point of the whole "nature, red in tooth and claw" thing. The beauty, however, is equally apparent, from the brilliance of the stars to the serenity of a natural landscape to a gorgeous human being to the beauty of, say, a random act of kindness. This post is not about the balance between the two. No, it's about the relationship between the two.

Consider the following. Many thousands of light years away, in the heart of our galaxy, a supermassive black hole is sitting there eating. That's what it does: it eats other stars, other systems, other worlds. Is that horrible? It's certainly an awful lot of destruction. I contend, however, that it is not horrible. (Probably, that is.) As best we can tell, none of the worlds being eaten by that black hole, or any other for that matter, have any life on them, let alone sentient, complex life. We don't normally consider it a horror if we smash a rock, though it is certainly destructive. A black hole eating up stars and planets and asteroids is the same thing. And, given that it's not horrible, it can be cool, and interesting, and maybe even beautiful, in its own strange way. A universe that had no life, then, would be wholly free of horror, as might one devoid of complex, sentient life. Horror requires suffering, and suffering requires a sufferer.

Conversely, how about some particularly pleasant astronomical phenomenon? A nebula, for instance, or an aurora. Is that beautiful? Well, people might disagree, but an awful lot of people think an awful lot of such things are very beautiful indeed. But, hang on, that's an intrinsically subjective statement: a lot of people think such things are beautiful. But are they? Well, that's an absurd thing to ask. Beauty is subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You can't describe something as beautiful without a frame of reference, specifically without someone observing it. But consider the implications of that fact. If beauty can only exist in the context of observation, then the universe is not beautiful unless it has some observers in it. And observers must be life forms. Probably they even need to be complex, sentient life forms in order to actually impart beauty on the things their senses detect.

But, hang on. I just said that the presence of (complex, sentient) life forms is a necessary condition for the presence of horror in the universe. Now the very same thing is a necessary condition for the presence of beauty as well? Oops. In fact I think it may be true that complex, sentient life forms might sort of be sufficient conditions for both beauty and horror as well. Horror because, well, presumably these creatures aren't immortal, which means they'll die eventually, which makes a certain amount of pain and suffering inevitable. Beauty is probably more controversial a claim, and one I won't try too hard to justify, but I think it's likely that some sense of aesthetic pleasure will pretty naturally develop in any such creatures.

What we have, then, is an intimate connection between horror and beauty in the universe. If there are no living things, the universe has no value. No beauty or wonder or magnificence, but also no horror or terror or evil. The universe is just empty of anything except stuff. But the very thing we might try to do in order to allow the possibility of the positive values, creating some sentient beings, is precisely the thing that will, perhaps inevitably, bring all the negative values rushing in along with the good ones. You literally cannot have the good stuff without the bad stuff; whether it's possible to have pain and horror and misery without having there be anything beautiful in the universe is, I think, a fairly uninteresting question, since it's not like that's something we're trying hard to accomplish.

One final note is that value spreads through the universe in an interesting way once we do create some sentient life forms. (Where "we," of course, probably means impersonal forces over billions of years.) You're unlikely to have them from the beginning of the universe's existence, so for all the time that the universe exists lifeless, it is valueless as well. Right? Well, not really. Because beauty, in particular, is a quality of observation, and the curious thing about observation is that it comes at the end of the causal chain. It's an effect, not a cause (although it might then cause other things, of course). But that means that an observation event becomes beautiful at its end, while the signal that was observed as being beautiful was created and sent at the beginning of the event. Was that signal beautiful from the beginning? Perhaps it was, since after all it is the thing being observed that we consider beautiful and that thing only enters the picture at the very beginning of the process. But it can only have been beautiful in retrospect, or, if you like, it always was beautiful, but it didn't really become something that had been beautiful until the signal arrives at its destination. The result of which is that our lifeless universe was already beautiful, if there will ever be living things in the future who will observe the signals created by that universe while it was lifeless. That is, of course, what happens, since light (and all other information) takes time to travel through space. When we look at a star, we're looking at it some thousands or millions of years ago. When we look at a distant galaxy, we're looking at it billions of years ago, perhaps from back when the universe was lifeless. And if we think it looks beautiful, we can only think that it looked beautiful all those years ago. So once we have living beings observing our vast universe, they impart value on it even before they ever existed. Value cascades backwards through the causal chains of observation, retroactively giving life to the long-gone lifeless periods of the universe's history. Kinda neat, if you ask me.