Beautiful Ideas.

[Khandro]

Do you find the natural world beautiful?
Does this world embody beautiful ideas?

[gness]

The natural world is stunningly beautiful and amazing too, Khandro......

I belong to the Cloud Appreciation Society......spend an age looking at clouds and at the photos members post in their Newsletter......x

[woofgang]

yes and yes

[atalanta]

How can a world "embody" ideas ? Neither a world nor an idea is a "body". If you mean " can this world inspire ideas " - then the answer is of course it can, and it does, constantly.

[Khandro]

Atalanta; Yes, but what I ask, does the world embody ideas?

[woofgang]

Well the parts of the world altered or created by humans do.

[wildwood]

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. I find the evolution of so much diversity fascinating.

I have no idea what "Does this world embody beautiful ideas" actually means, sorry.

[tonyav]

Have you seen this one, gness.
http://www.msn.com/en-gb/travel/news/mysterious-figure-spotted-at-30000ft-on-easyjet-flight/ar-BBoiK5z?li=AA9SkIr

[woofgang]

i have seen inversion at sea. Sometimes you can see things that are still invisible because of the curvature of the earth so you see huge ships or islands floating upside down on the horizon. Sometimes you can see what is being reflected so you see the ghost ship or island floating over the real one. It can be a bit scary, the image is so real.

[Old_Geezer]

Some of the natural world is beautiful, some horrific.

It can not embody ideas as that would imply creation by an intelligence that had ideas. But the natural world can trigger ideas in us.

[beso]

I find it beautiful that something as incredible as life simply rose up out of the minerals.

[Khandro]

O.G.//It can not embody ideas as that would imply creation by an intelligence that had ideas.//

Consider, for example, the work of Pythagoras on the relationship between sound and mathematics, observing the length of a vibrating string and our perception of its tone. He discovered that two identical strings
(say, 2 guitars today) at similar tension make tones that sound 'good' together, exactly when the lengths of the strings are in ratios of small or whole numbers.

So. for example, when the ratio of lengths is 1:2, the tones form an octave. When the ratio is 2:3 we hear the dominant fifth; when the ratio is 3:4, the major fourth. In musical notation (in the key of C) these correspond to playing two Cs, one above the other, together a C-G or C-F, respectively.

These tones which sound good together we say are in 'harmony' and are the basic building blocks of classical music and of most folk, pop and rock. Why should we find these tone combinations, with their undoubted reliance on mathematics and the world of numbers, so appealing?

[woofgang]

Khandro, you have wandered off the subject there. The world may well be full of beautiful phenomena but you can’t have an idea without a conscious brain.

[Khandro]

woofgang; The suggestion is, that the idea was not Pythagoras's' (as he was the first to accept) but that it was something of beauty that was embodied within nature and defined by mathematics. Something we can perceive, but is not a human construct.

[Khandro]

PiedPiper,//most sounds are harmonious// I don't think so, our response to most sounds is subjective; you probably don't like the cuckoo because you frown on its domestic habits, and I don't think the victims of recent floods found the sound of the river flowing through their houses "like a symphony".
Most sounds are definitely not harmonious; dogs barking, babies crying, etc.
but that has nothing to do with the harmony based on mathematics, as revealed by Pythagoras.

[Patsy33]

Have you noticed a variety of coloured flowers together never seem to clash. Yet we have to be careful what colours we put together when dressing!

[woofgang]

So he was the first human that we know of to observe and document it....that still doesn’t mean that nature, which is not sentient (although parts of it are) can have ideas.

[jomifl]

Mathematics is just another language, it describes, it doesn't define...I think I can see where this is going...beauty & harmony = creator?

[Zacs-Master]

Think how beautiful it would be without mankind.

[jomifl]

PP, I used to work quite often around 'babbling brooks' I can't say I ever found them harmonious, just random noise that obliterates harmonious natural sounds. I think loudness may be the key issue here.