290 - Nicholas Humphrey: Why Does Beauty Exist?

33:15And I think we all know that feeling. We look out at a beautiful landscape and we think that's perfect. That's just right. I don't want to change it. Nothing would improve this. Something has got this right. Just as when we look at a painting by Cézanne or we hear a Bach prelude, let's say. We say, gosh, yes, the artist got it right. But here's an interesting thing. Cezanne, the artist, gets it right. Bach, the artist, gets it right. Who's the artist behind the fields of flowers or the field of mountains or the starry sky? And that's a puzzle. because people who've written about aesthetics have foamed in on this idea of artistry as being absolutely central.

34:11Again and again, we find things beautiful, and they stir us. They produce an aesthetic emotion if and when we can feel connected to the artist who made them. In fact, Clive Bell says that that's the very nature of aesthetic emotion, is that we feel the emotion the artist felt in making that work. Now, that's all very well for human-made works of art, but it gets you into a fix if you then say, yeah, well, okay, but how can it also be true of natural-made art? And Clive Bell, he gets in a twist there. He really doesn't know what to say. And so he tries to say, well, OK, but there really is nothing as beautiful in nature as there is about a cathedral or a painting or a sculpture.

35:08It's secondary material beauty, but it's not aesthetic beauty. I think he's just wrong. If you look at the way people respond to nature, even the way they've written about it and the way they've admired and adored it, Again and again, they use the very same expressions of love and admiration and sense of being in the presence of something divine and special, which you could use about human-made art. And as a psychologist, of course, I look for what the explanation of that could be. and it's not me, of course, I'm not the first to say this because I think it's actually fairly obvious. It is that, well, Bell says that there's no artist behind nature.

36:01None of us believe that. All of us are naive creationists. We look out at the world and we can't but believe that there is in fact an artist behind it. That's the way we see the world. It's the way children see the world. It's the way adults see the world. It's been found across all cultures that people are natural-born creationists. They believe the world is there because somebody made it like that for us. and so that begins to complete this story at least I hope it does because we now see why aesthetic emotion could be present in our response to nature just as it is in response to music or painting or sculpture because we are feeling ourselves in the presence of a creator now you may be surprised that I mean I'm a totally non-religious person I don't believe for a moment that there is such a thing as God, the creator, but also an ordinary human being.

37:12And of course, I'm as seduced as anyone by this idea that where there's beauty and where there's design, there must be something lying behind it. And so whispering in my ear all the time, I think, is, okay, yes, that's right, because somebody made it right for me. I'm in the presence of perhaps the greatest artist the world has ever known, one which the human artists have tried to emulate, but none of which come near, and that is the artist who made the natural world, who made the universe. And so the story I'm developing is, yes, we love rhyme because it's evidence of design and artistry. It's what's created the way the world is.

38:05The world is full of things which rhyme because that's what nature has evolved and has come up with as a solution for how to make a stable world. and beyond that we think that we're so privileged as to be in the presence of somebody who made it for us and therefore we have a sense of gratitude of social connection thankfulness and I say in the end of this book that the response to beauty is in the end got a lot to do with society it's a social emotion we find things beautiful because we connect to an artist and to other people through them and so that goes part away to answering what it is beyond the mathematics of ryan which makes things stand out and matter so much to us and there's some evidence from science that's true I don't think too highly of neuroaesthetics, as it's called.

39:14It's the new science of brain imaging, brain science of beauty. But nonetheless, there is some rather tantalizing research, which shows that when you image the brains of human beings who are in the presence of things they find beautiful. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense?

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40:28The very same part of the brain lights up where there's presumably some kind of rhyme detector. And it lights up for beautiful faces. It lights up for beautiful ideas. It lights up for beautiful mathematics. And it's messy, this research. which I'm not entirely, I wouldn't put my money on it, being able to stand up in the way it's been presented in recent scientific papers. But one thing which has certainly piqued my interest is that the part of the brain which lights up is the part of the brain which we've identified as the social brain, the part of the brain we use when we think about fairness and relationships and our gratitude towards other people, empathy.

41:21So I think the reason that this part of the brain is lighting up may well reflect that when we see beautiful things, we always have it in mind that somebody made them for us. So to come back to the question I just started at the very beginning, why do we deserve to live in a world which contains so much beauty? Well, it's a myth. It's a fantasy. But it comes back to the idea that there is, in fact, some divine force behind it, and one which, in fact, we depend on for our own presence and our own fortune to live in this world as we do. You said before we started that this is the first interview you've done on this book and you haven't even lectured on the topic, but that might win the award for the most comprehensive, spontaneous lecture ever given on this show so far.

42:25And that was an excellent overview of the book, of course. Something that comes to mind, though, is that you've mentioned already a number of times that you're an evolutionist, an evolutionary psychologist. The last few episodes that I've done of this show have been with evolutionary biologists, and we've been speaking about human evolution, and in particular about how we came to have the digestive apparatus that we possess. And the assumption is that we have our teeth, our digestive tracts, because evolution shaped them in that way. And this has to do with changing environments, changing other changing aspects of our biology, like our intelligence.

43:26and we're able to trace this and come up with conclusions through the fossil record, through experimentation, through just inference to the best explanation. Evolutionary psychology is related to evolutionary biology, but they're not the same field. And I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the methodology behind the sort of research that you're doing, because you can't go back to the fossil record of Australopithecus and see what was going on in their brains, because they didn't leave behind brains for us to look at, or we couldn't run experiments on them. Yeah, you're right.

44:10And of course, I'll confess immediately that a lot of what I've been saying is what Stephen Jay Gould would have called a just-so story. It often happens in trying to give evolutionary explanations. We don't, as you say, have evidence. All we can do is try and invent, but come up with a story which would work, something which would make sense about how it could have evolved. And people have done that continuously in the history of the development of evolutionary ideas. Charles Darwin, for example, tried to explain the evolution of the eye by a whole series of intermediate stages because he tried to show that, well, it could work if you started off with this little light-sensitive pit and then you covered it with skin and so on.

45:01He didn't have the evidence for it. It's only later that we found all these intermediate stages. He didn't have the fossil records, which we've later found in existence. So in a sense, Darwin's theory was a great act of faith. This theory, it works. It's a way in which life could have come into being. And as his brother said of Charles, that the theory is so beautiful, I'll use that word again, that it has to be true. And if facts go against it, well, damn the facts. Well, the facts don't go against it, thank goodness, although people have tried to show that they sometimes seem to in the case of Darwinian evolution.

45:49In the case of the ideas I've been putting forward, there's very little direct evidence. I've mentioned of neurosciences perhaps, finding some corroboration of it. Very largely, I've been trying to come up with a story which I think makes sense. But there are experiments which, I mean, there's experiments on how little children learn, what kind of things they find helpful in trying to learn how to classify the world and so on, what kind of training sets work, just as what we've had to discover, what kind of training sets work in developing large language models and so on. And I think it's a great convergence, in a way, between that AI, development of AI, and the development which was invented long ago for how our own minds learn what they have to.

46:39But I'd done some experiments. Back in, I'll tell you part of the story. I mean, back in 19, I moved from Cambridge, where I'd been doing experiments on monkeys' brains, to Oxford, where I decided to turn over a new leaf. And I thought, well, I'm not really happy with the work I've been doing with lab animals, particularly a work which was in many ways quite distressing to them and to me as an experiment. Doing experiments on ramifications and so on is very revealing, but nonetheless it's quite disturbing as well. And I thought, well, look, now I've got the chance, I've got a new job, I've got a research grant, I'm going to try and work on what monkeys like.

47:28What would monkeys ideally, how would they like to live if they had the chance? And so I decided to study monkey aesthetics. And I set up a situation in which monkeys could choose between different pictures on a screen or different sounds coming from a large speaker. And initially, of course, I thought, well, let's see if monkeys like paintings. And so I showed them Cezannes and Mondrianes and things. And I played them Bach. and I tried all the other conventional examples that humans find beauty, the monkeys didn't give a fig for them. They really weren't interested. I couldn't immediately find any evidence that monkeys liked Rhine in the sense that I'd expected to.

48:20And I'd been reading Hopkins' essay, and I thought, well, that's a shame. I mean, all beauty may be, by a metaphor, be called Rhine, but it doesn't seem monkeys have heard about that. Nobody told them. But then I honed in on some experiments which in fact were quite revealing. I found that there are examples of where monkeys quite clearly respond to variations on a theme. And they seem to do so when they need to learn about new events or new things which are appearing on the screen in front of them. So I talked about how a zoologist might want to classify animals by looking for rhyming examples.

49:06So that was just a kind of story. But I thought, well, let's give my monkeys a chance to classify animals and see whether they can learn from rhyming examples. Now, these monkeys had been brood bred in captivity. They had very limited experience of any other animals at all. They'd seen humans and they'd seen other monkeys. So I gave them the chance to see pigs and horses and ducks and cats and other examples that are very familiar to us, the kind of thing little children learn about from the first moment. They open their picture books. And the very surprising but very strong results came out. If you show a monkey, one example of a dog, it's very interested in another example so there's a dog and then you give it the chance to look at a cat it finds the cat quite different and its interest revives if you give it a picture of a monkey and then give it a chance to look at another monkey it also revives but you give it a chance to look at one cat or one pig and give another cat or a pig it doesn't.

50:24So to begin with, monkeys don't seem to care about the difference between different animals of the same species, that they do care about differences between different monkeys of the same species. And then I gave the monkeys, I'd worked with them a good many months and showed them a lot more about the world, all down through pictures, and found that the monkeys were beginning to get her eye in. The monkeys were beginning to be interested in things they hadn't been interested in to begin with. And by the time I'd finished, they now found every new example of a dog interesting and worth looking at, every new example of a horse interesting and worth looking at, as well as every interesting new example of another monkey.

51:13So they'd formed, they'd taken an interest in kinds of things. They wanted to know about kinds of animals. And there's some more experiments, some of them quite amusing to do, which I describe in the book, in which I got monkeys to see themselves or examples of their own species in even new ways by giving them a chance to look at monkeys doing very strange things. If a monkey's left alone, with no one to watch it. It'll get up to all sorts of odd behaviors, which it thinks no one can see, which it might, quotes, find embarrassing. But give another monkey a chance to watch a monkey in private, picking his nose, standing on his head, doing circles and tombs, and somersaults.

52:03The other monkey watching it finds it absolutely fascinating. Now, it's a question which I asked, well, okay, when they've seen one monkey in private, and then they see another monkey showing private behavior, does that lead them to ask questions about what monkeys do in private, which they wouldn't have asked otherwise? And yes, the answer was the experience turned out that, yes, you could teach monkeys to look for new kinds of events and to find new ways of classifying the behavior they were looking at. But to go back to something I said in our earlier discussion, I think monkeys do like evidence of things which belong together, which help them build cognitive models to find out what kind of things there are in the world.

52:55But I don't think they have any aesthetic emotion attached to it. And that comes back to this question which people have asked. It's a new question asked in the New Scientist magazine last week do dogs find sunsets beautiful well they may like to look at them but they don't find them beautiful they don't show any aesthetic emotion and the monkeys don't show aesthetic emotion there's no case I think and no reason to believe that this is an emotion which is felt other than by human beings and I've told you where I think that is we find things aesthetically beautiful they give us this emotion when we see the hand of an artist behind them.

53:42Monkeys don't see the hand of an artist behind the design of other animals or sunsets or whatever it may be. And so they have a purely cognitive attitude towards classifying things. They need to do it, but just like an AI classifying plants or classifying melanomas of the skin or whatever it may be, asked to do by the tech experts. They learn to do it. They could even, in a sense, be pleased to get the answer right. But they don't feel any emotion because it wouldn't occur to an AI to think, well, why do these things exist? Who made them? What's behind it? Why does it seem right that these kind of things belong together?

54:33Why do other things belong to other categories? That wouldn't occur to an LLM or an artificial intelligence. And so that's, I think, we asked questions about what kind of evidence we've got. Well, it's negative evidence. We've got evidence that monkeys or birds' work's been done on even little babies are probably only interested in classifying at a relatively simple mechanical level. They don't have any sense of beauty of the kind which matters so much to us when we see the hand of an artist behind it. I know I'm going to be misunderstood about this because people are going to say, well, look, what's Humphrey going on about this idea of the God behind everything?

55:25Well, I want to have it both ways. As I say, I'm not religious. I don't believe for a moment that there is a God who designed the universe. But I think it's crucial to our appreciation of nature that we believe it nonetheless, that we find beauty there because somebody put it there for us. In my book, I begin with this argument from beauty and compare it with the argument from design. In the end, I think they come down to the same thing because we believe that the design of nature, which we find beautiful, does have a divine artist behind it.

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57:07Hearing about your work with monkeys is so funny. The idea of showing monkeys that haven't seen pigs or horses or cats or dogs before. And I can understand how working on the monkeys with giving them brain lesions could have been very disturbing. but these other studies seem a lot more, I don't know, good natured. Well, they were. They were fun. And of course, in my own history, I went on from that to not being a laboratory scientist at all. I went on to do fieldwork, and I went to study gorillas with Diane Fossey in Rwanda. and then I moved from that field work and questions about the evolution of consciousness and intelligence in the wild into becoming more of a philosopher of mind, which I suppose is what I really am now.

58:04But I'm glad you liked the experiments. People didn't at the time. I mean, nobody paid any attention to the most disappointing episodes in my life. I thought, look, now I've got the chance to do something no one else has done before, to study aesthetics and see what kinds of rhymes would interest monkeys, how they'll respond to things they haven't seen before. They now have the chance to understand and work out how they relate to each other. I published a series of papers on it. They went down like a lead balloon. Nobody paid any attention. I think it's one of my most interesting work, but it's the fate of it happens in science.

58:49If it's not fashionable, if other people aren't doing related work, it doesn't have any payoff for practical value in terms of developing new gadgets or whatever it may be. Then people quickly forget it. And so that research, I was glad in this book to be able to bring it to light again because it's almost entirely been ignored, although it's i think i think if i read it i would think think you know what a great piece of research um but uh so i hope readers of the book will enjoy it and perhaps it'll even come back into circulation again i mean this work is out there it was published 50 years ago um but science has moved on and science psychology tends to be very single track people are interested in the same problems.

59:37They all work on the same things. And if you're an outlier, if you do research which is eccentric and is answering questions which you think people would find fascinating, but they haven't yet thought to ask, and they're not interested in the answers. I'm wondering if there have been any aspects or instances of beauty that you've found most difficult to explain from the evolutionary psychology framework that you've adopted? Yes, are there things which people say, yes, I mean, I'll, you know, that's, I'm not going to explain why, but I just find that beautiful. Yes, of course, there are examples of it.

1:00:25And I don't pretend for a moment that the hypothesis that is all down to rhyme and classification and sense of an artist behind it, that that'll explain everything. And I wouldn't even suggest that a single theory is going to do that. But there aren't many theories out there, so we can start off with some. No doubt there are examples which don't work. When I was putting forward, I'll give you an example. When I was developing what I called the social intelligence hypothesis, the idea that human brains have evolved very largely to deal with social problems, I picked up on that having spent my time watching gorillas in the forests of Rwanda and then looked at my own kin and thought human beings have the same kinds of problems but with knobs on.

1:01:22Humans find social life to be by far the most interesting and problematical and difficult challenge which they ever have to face. And their brains have developed in order to understand and to solve how to relate to other human beings. Now, I said this works very nicely. It works, for example, it works for wolves and it works not only for humans, it works for monkeys, it works for gorillas. it doesn't seem to work for dolphins or whales. And the reason is that living in groups for whales or dolphins, I thought, didn't have any very obvious payoff. They don't have a technical culture, technological culture, of the kind that humans depend on society to learn.

1:02:11And of course, and so I said in a paper I read a long time ago called Social Function of Intellect, cetaceans, dolphins and whales, with their huge brains and their very clear intelligence, seem to be an exception to the rule. They don't seem to get this idea of why social intelligence would evolve. Well, it's taken 40 years, 50 years, for people to completely wrong-foot me about that and to demonstrate that these wonderful marine mammals have an extremely complex social life and a culture and a technological culture. They teach each other things. They have ways of learning about the environment and of hunting and learning geography and everything else, which depends on social life.

1:02:58So as an example, my theory said, well, intelligence has evolved in order to promote social understanding. It's not clear why whales need it. Well, luckily for the theory, it turns out whales do need it. you know if you're asking is there things which don't fit the theory well yes of course there will be um and it wouldn't it wouldn't be much of a theory if there weren't um i mean it would you know one would be very suspicious if if it turned out that you crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's um and i have to say i rather suspect that when this book lands on desks of scholars as these statisticians, philosophers, other evolutionary psychologists, they're going to find lots of holes to pick in it.

1:03:46Everybody has very strong views about beauty. They can know what's right about it, and they don't take kindly to explanations which don't jibe with what they already believe. And this is the one book which I'm expecting to get quite a bad press for, but that's all right. you know take risks sometimes as i say i needed to write this book why do you expect that you'll get a lot of bad press for it because it's going to tread on a lot of people's toes i mean philosophers who have their own theories of beauty the very idea of there being an aesthetic emotion for example was famously dismissed by the philosopher nelson Goodman has aesthetic phlogiston, phlogiston being a non-existent gas which was postulated by early chemists.

1:04:43Well, he says these statisticians talk about phlogiston and talk about aesthetic emotion as if it was a real thing but it's not. Well, I think it is. I think they're wrong. But, you know, they won't take kinder to me by criticism of it, at least by saying that it's right that they were wrong to deny its importance and you know there's also people who don't like to use a bit of a cliche ideas which unweave the rainbow you know Keats famously said Newton unweaved the rainbow and took the romance out of the world by explaining why so much design and beauty exists in nature lots of people would prefer that it remained weaved that mysteries remained and I say well good luck to them my role and my love as a scientist has always been trying to get deeper and to understand things and that's what we've been doing and I've done it in a lot of different areas this one is to some extent I agree I'm flying a kite but it's a kite, I think, which will look quite nice up there in the sky.

1:06:10How would you characterize this aesthetic emotion? I was going to ask why people often think of beauty as transcendent or spiritual, and maybe this connects to the aesthetic emotion you have in mind in some way. Well, I think, yes, of course it does. when you think of it as spiritual, yes, because we want to believe that there's an artist responsible for it. And so it evokes that sense of gratitude and connection and human belief in the wonderful possibilities of what humans or gods can create. so it pulls away from the idea of a purely mechanical universe but there's one issue which I talk about briefly in the book and which I don't have so much time for there's been a lot of concentration in recent writing about nature and the beauties of nature on the phenomenon of awe A-W-E, this sense of being in the presence of something rather scary, bigger than ourselves, which puts us in our place and makes us feel small and insignificant compared with the forces which have made the world.

1:07:39I think that's a very different kind of emotion from a sense of admiration and love for the creator of the universe. I think it's a kind of surrender to unknowing, whereas what drives our sense of beauty is rather the pleasures of knowing. And I discuss in the book ugliness and how ugliness arises when beauty fails. when we try as hard as we may to make connections, and it defeats us, when things seem out of place, when they're not right, when they don't belong together. And there's been quite a lot written about this by anthropologists, about what people find alarming and scaring in the world.

1:08:30And Mary Douglas, the anthropologist, in a famous book called Purity and Danger, suggested that what we find difficult to deal with are things which undermine our model of the world, which don't belong, which challenge our sense of how the world fits together and what things belong together and what things don't. She gives many examples, but of course there are some pretty obvious ones. People have very strong ideas about sexuality, for example, and the idea that there ought to be just two genders find it very threatening when human beings challenge that and seem to exist in an in-between state.

1:09:19They find it disgusting. They find it frightening. It's a love which doesn't have a name. And there are many examples, I think, where people have found things which don't have a name which we can't fit into our categories as something which they don't know how to deal with and they have to find solutions to that. They can just look away and they can not want anything to do with it. Or there's been another strategy which has been emphasized by anthropologists. They can recategorize them as going to a world which isn't our world. In other words, they can belong to a world of the holy, a world which exists, the paranormal world, outside of nature, where things don't have to obey the rules.

1:10:12And that's why we find in religions that so many strange anomalies exist. Things happen which oughtn't to be allowed. Things cross barriers. The dead come alive again. things transform magically from one kind to another, all of which wouldn't work in the world we live in and would be very threatening if it did. And we couldn't make sense of a world in which lots of religious miracles and a similar occur. So we call, we say, okay, we're going to push those aside and say those belong to the sacred or the holy. There's another way we can deal with it. We can say, okay, these don't belong to the world of real things.

1:11:01They belong to the world of art. That's another of these places where we can place, we can put things which don't seem to fit the world as we know it. Example after example in the history of art where great inventors like Picasso inventing the style of Cubism created consternation because he made pictures of things which didn't work, which challenged the boundaries, faces with eyes in the wrong place, which morphed into each other, and so on and so on. When people first looked at those paintings, they couldn't classify them. They couldn't make sense of them. They didn't rhyme. They just seemed to break the rules, and therefore there was a challenge to their world model.

1:11:48How did they solve the problem? They invented a new term. This is art. This is modern art. And modernism became a new kind of form of life or form of painting in its own right. And then so we could deal with it. It had been put aside. And therefore, we now expect modern art not to conform to the rules, just as we expect the world of supernatural not to conform to the rules. But that is on the border. If we don't have that way of dealing with it, we find it ugly. We find it frightening. And I'll come back to some experiments with monkeys. I mean, I did experiments with my monkeys to find out not only other things they like to look at because they find it fun to see how they fit together and to make sense of them.

1:12:43But there are some things which they can't make sense of at all. So I created, for example, a really ugly humanoid-looking face. It was made of a mop head with a pair of pliers for a nose and some goggles on it and so on. And I danced around on the screen. And to the monkey looking at it, to a child, it was both human and not human. It was breaking the boundaries. And the monkeys were terrified. Interestingly, they looked and looked at it while crying out in fear and peeing in the box they were setting in unless they kept their finger pressed down on the button, keep this thing on the screen, in an effort to try and make sense of it.

1:13:32But they couldn't. and it's been found that with famous experiments by Donald Hebb a long time ago with chimpanzees he found that very simple things where you break the rules can scare chimpanzees there were two very familiar lab assistants in his lab and they each had their distinct lab coats and the chimps knew each of them very well and we're very friendly and happy to be with him. He had got the lab assistants to change their coats so that David was wearing Paul's coat and Paul was wearing David. The chimpanzees were terrified. They cried out in fear and hid in the back of the cage and they didn't know what happened.

1:14:23Their world was falling apart because of this very simple thing that two things which they thought they understood It turned out not the rules they were using for class of England didn't work anymore. Now, that's a whole other area of aesthetics or negative aesthetics, ugliness, which I think is very interesting to explore because although we don't find it beautiful, we certainly find it fascinating. And it's what makes the whole world of human art so complicated and something which we can't talk about just in terms of beauty or liking or anything else because some artists set out to create alarming, ugly works of art.

1:15:05Damien Hirst with his shark suspended or his bull suspended in a tank of formalin. They're trying to shock us because we can't make sense of it. So there's this kind of play going on all the time. And it's why when an early reader of my book said, yeah, but you really must say something more about uglyness. I don't say much about it, but I know it's there, and it's certainly a challenge all the time. A theory of beauty ought to be able to explain the theory of what's ugly as well. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks.

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1:16:39Well, Nick, the last thing I'll ask for today that I'm curious about is, at the outset of the conversation, I mentioned that you've done a lot of research and it's come up throughout the conversation on consciousness and intelligence. And I asked you how beauty was connected to those things. And you said it was more, you just went back to aesthetics, which you'd been working on earlier. What I'm curious about, though, is in this evolutionary story of humans developing from much smaller, more or less sophisticated animals, Is there a way or are there ways in which our appreciation of or ability to sense beauty dovetailed with our developments of increased intelligence or the sophistication of our consciousness?

1:17:33Certainly. I mean, I think the world has become a more and more beautiful place for us because our intelligence has become more and more discerning. We find beautiful patterns which we can understand and make sense of. And the more we learn, the more deeper we can go and the more there is in the world which we can make sense of. interestingly I mentioned the philosopher Thomas Reed he himself back in the 18th century suggested and he said this what's remarkable is that God he thought and God is the God behind it all the time God has given us the powers of increasing discernment in order we shall discover more and more of the beauty which he has created in the world but yes intelligence has made the world a more beautiful place.

1:18:28We find things beautiful, which Plato couldn't have found more beautiful, because culture has enriched us in ways which wasn't available 3 ,000 years ago. Go back 50 ,000 years ago, the same. And there's more to come. I think one of the...

1:18:50There was a question on the website, the EDGE website, every year. And what the question one year was, what are you optimistic about? And I wrote, one thing I was optimistic about was that there are works of art going to be created, which will surpass anything we have yet even imagined. The great thing about art is that it goes on and on evolving, finding ways of getting to us and touching on, triggering our centre beauty, which we couldn't have imagined until we've seen or heard or touched them. So yes, that fits in with that evolutionary story. But when it comes to consciousness, most of my work on consciousness has been about what I've called phenomenal consciousness, about sensations and the very peculiar, strange, immaterial quality of sensations.

1:19:49Now, I don't talk much about qualia and sensations and phenomenal consciousness in this book. For some reasons for doing that, one was that, for example, the publishers wouldn't let me use color illustrations, and I'm not going to start talking about phenomenal consciousness without being allowed to bring color into it. And I thought, well, I'm not going to get the opportunity to do this book. But I'll tell you another, perhaps more interesting. I don't think we need that level of phenomenal consciousness in order to appreciate the kind of rhymes and beauty which I discuss in the book. Helen Keller was deaf and dumb and blind, and yet she had an extraordinary aesthetic sense.

1:20:34She found patterns in lecture of the very kind and in words and in things she got to learn about, very, very parallel to the things which we, with all our faculties, possess. I've been very impressed by talking and reading about people who are colorblind. They don't find the world less beautiful. They know they're missing something, but they never complain that going out into the trees and into the woods or the fields or the mountains doesn't do it for them. They don't need that level of phenomenal consciousness in order to appreciate these kinds of rhyming structures. And so, in a way, I thought, well, I'm going to not try and take on phenomenal consciousness here.

1:21:23I'm going to go back to the very much simpler ideas, which I was thinking about when I started out on this quest. And there's enough to say about them. So that's where it gets. But of course, if I was going to talk about why is experience so wonderful right across the board, of course, we'd have to get into issues of consciousness, which I don't discuss in the book. But I've written other books about that. Well, Nick, this has been hugely enjoyable for me. I really hope that our listeners, depending on when they listen to this episode, they pre-order or buy Why is the World So Beautiful? Because you've given a really good taste of what's contained in it.

1:22:11Thank you, Romans. It's a pleasure to talk to you.

1:22:18Thank you.