- Here we are again, on an airplane, in a word processor. When I tune into my visual field, I'll sometimes feel like 'being there in that moment' feels just like it always has, that there's an indelible sameness between this experience right now and my walk around Lower Haight yesterday and dinner the night before when I brought this up to someone and so on.
- Reading what I've written, it feels more reified than I want it to. Things feel lighter inside. Ah, a recent tendency! I use 'things' as shorthand for a more cumbersome phrase like-but 'things' also smoothes over places where I don't understand things yet about an experience.
- When I notice myself using complex syntactic constructions – which, I'll say, feels kinetic like a complicated dance – and I try to simplify, I search around.
- Writing introspective pieces like this feels ironic in the wrong way because the whole vibe of my internal experience is moving towards looser conceptuality, less need to form words, so much more ease.
- Loose, airy, in a soft bed under a soft sheet. When I wiggle the sheet moves over me without any friction and I still feel every detail.
- Writing is an expression of angst?
- The drinks cart is coming in slow-motion and I've re-concluded four* times now (*estimated) that I should not drink caffeine because falling sleeping tonight without caffeine in my system will probably help me get back to eastern time more quickly.
- Damn it feels better to be Avery. Even when it's painful it's better – though don't get me wrong, it can be very intense. Intense like air hockey: clocking, slapping, stinging, thrashing, gliding soft no friction.
- Honest! It feels silly to write, you know? Hm not quite silly, more like – collapsing, more divergent from my 'real experience' than it used to be, and I think that's because these days my real experience has less internal dialogue and less semantic spasticity.
- I'm not ready to throw in the towel and declare ineffability. Maybe my communication hasn't caught up to my phenomenology.
- I'll try to point out how the previous sentence feels inauthentic to my experience.
- 'try to point out'
- 'inauthentic'... has negative connotation, in different way than I want it to have.
- Transmuting writing as an account of transmutation.
- I'm flying home from San Francisco and wanted to write. It's a good feeling, I've had a recent resurgence in 'will to expression', which is a phrase I made up just now to describe a subjective feeling that I semantically label with 'I want to represent internal experience' or 'I want to convey my internal experience' or 'I want to express something'. The feeling itself entails a) feeling 'in my body', and b) the physical sensation of something inside my chest 'wanting' to flow out and forward, and c) decreased conceptuality.
- I started writing introspective sentences, and it was hard! Before I investigate the challenge, here are some of the sentences.
- Here we are again, on an airplane, in a word processor. I told someone this week that sometimes I'll gaze out to whatever's in front of me and realize it feels just like it always has, that there's an indelible sameness between this experience right now and my walk around Lower Haight and dinner the night before and, I guess, every moment in my past.
- Reading what I've written, it feels more reified than I want it to. Things feel lighter inside. Ah, a recent tendency! I use 'things' as shorthand for a more cumbersome phrase like 'a variety of internal experiences now have the subjective qualia of 'lightness', or have that 'lightness' qualia to a greater degree than in the past'. But, 'things' also smoothes over places where I don't understand things yet about myself.
- When I notice myself using complex syntactic constructions – which, I'll say, feels kinetic like a complicated dance – and I try to simplify, I search around.
- Introspective pieces like this feel ironic in the wrong way because the whole vibe of my internal experience is moving towards looser conceptuality, less need to form words. I think it's funny that this complaint reads heady but actually it's... the opposite, experientially speaking.
- Loose, airy, in a soft bed under a soft sheet. When I wiggle the sheet moves over me without any friction and I feel details.
- Writing is an expression of angst. Writing used to be an expression of angst. What is it now? Is all my expression an expression of angst? Hope not!
- The drinks cart is moving towards me slowly and I've re-concluded four times now that I should not drink caffeine because sleeping tonight without caffeine in my system will probably help me get back to eastern time more quickly.
- It feels better to be Avery. Even when painful emotions are there it's better – though don't get me wrong, it can be very intense. Intense like air hockey: clocking, slapping, stinging, thrashing, gliding soft without friction.
- I'll be honest! It feels silly to write, you know? Hm not quite silly, more like – collapsing, more divergent from my 'real experience' than it used to be, and I think that's because these days my real experience has less internal dialogue and less semantic spasticity.
- I'm not ready to throw in the towel and declare ineffability. Maybe my communication hasn't caught up to my phenomenology.
- I'll try to point out how the previous sentence feels inauthentic to my experience.
- Writing, right now, is oddly disorienting!
- insight / hypothesis! stream sans caps except ego 'I's. when I engage in tonal commentary like 'oddly disorienting' vs. 'disorienting', I feel like I've written in the wrong tone. an example here, 'wrong tone' feels better than 'inauthentic tone', and 'feels better' feels more accurate than 'feels more authentic', and 'feels' feels better than 'is'. I'm inconclusive whether 'feels better' is better than 'feels more accurate', the former capturing subjective valence and the latter capturing a subjective sensation of alignment, i.e. it feels like two essences are 'aligned' spatially. 'spatially' feels more earnest than 'in a spatial way', more crisp-direct. what if I had italicized 'oddly'? 'this writing experience is oddly disorienting!' when I read the sentence to myself, I micro-smile when I read 'oddly', whereas I micro-frown or micro eyebrow-raise when I read 'oddly'. At first, I wrote, 'I micro-smile "around" oddly' but I have more clarity into the experience than 'around' conveys because 'around' feels pretty spatially diffuse and my experience is pretty spatially focal. 'when I read', on the other hand, at least to my own reading, says 'during the period when I'm visually and subsequently cognitively processing the word 'oddly' rather than surrounding context'. that might be closer to the mark, except that the micro-smile or micro-frown / micro-brow raise is there while reading 'disorienting' because 'oddly' modifies 'disorienting'. look, I know this can't be perfect. it sure can be better, though! meaning, some sentences will be more true-to-experience than others. please assure yourself, ('please' is tonal commentary, I'll spare you! ['I'll spare you' is tonal commentary]), this process does not unfold in realtime. in realtime, it feels authentic and true and direct, less mediated than ever before, and it feels really good! p.s. I made up the phrase 'tonal commentary' because it feels right. it means, 'commentary that imbues tone'.
- What is the phenomenology of 'feeling right'?
- For introspection, try writing poetry instead of essays 😊
Same Scarf on My Quarter Centennial
Pt. 1, Time During Those Years
You know, time feels different to me now. It used to be that when I’d try to fathom some unfathomable span my chest would go tight right away. If I looked ten years back, wispy half-dreamt memories would lurch out of their burial plots dug somewhere in the timeline. Usually the bad ones, mad ones, sad ones, incompletely mourned. If I looked ten years forward, the same thing: ten years of the past would arise so I could feel what ten more years would be like. Beckoned and offended, the blessed part of me who protects from unsavory things would rage, drawing in my diaphragm nice and tight lest I know all that suffering gone by and, therefore, to come. This doesn’t happen anymore. Around the time of my last birthday in 2021, I noticed I could perceive the entire preceding year as one piece of time-stuff, like I might normally perceive the passage of an hour. There weren’t any outside events or changes of scenery to mark time, only the life in my head, because I had been hibernating at my parents’ house in Chicago. It took a year of stasis to feel what a year of time is actually like. What is a year like? Literally the same as a minute, an hour, twenty-five years.Pt. 2, This Year In Time
War is on my mind. A quarter century is long and short. Will to ___. It turns out ‘self-love’ is literal. I'd describe it like this: there are a wide variety of positive feelings I can feel toward something, such as an animal, person, trinket, memory, etc. Any of these feelings might be described as, or related to, love. Usually there’s a subtle conditionality that comes with the positive feeling: I only feel positively towards something if it deserves positive feelings. Is the dog aesthetically cute? Then I feel positively towards it. Is the person nice? Then I feel positively towards them. Self-love is when I feel one or more of these positive feelings towards myself. Furthermore those positive feelings can be unconditional, meaning that the positive feeling includes the felt-senes that nothing can make the feeling go away, or that it’s not dependent on anything – it’s just there, regardless, directed at myself. That’s unconditional self-love. It’s good. There is a way of seeing – literally, a way of processing things in my visual field – in which everything is inherently beautiful. It's actually more than everything feeling inherently beautiful: there's also the ontological conviction that everything is inherently beautiful, which has a distinct felt-sense. It’s happened a couple dozen times maybe, and it lasts for a few minutes. Usually I cry. Often it’s triggered by indie rock. Identifying less with my thoughts, more with my tastes. Identifying less with the idea of identification. Identifying less with ideas in general. The current frontier is my self, the next frontier is everyone else. Human nature is a thing, in that behaviors are statistically consistent across people and time. Human nature is not a thing in that it’s actually possible to durably modify the distribution of behaviors. I feel better when I believe phenomenology is a first-class citizen. The feeling of confidence doesn’t have to be well-calibrated to “truth”, that’s just an assumption. Treat confidence as an unconditional feeling and confidence will treat you well in return. It's less like a train rumbling down tracks, more like a long roll of paper gliding through a printer. Artist? Do I care? My cheeks blossom dry red circles when it’s cold outside. I have a moisturizer that helps, but it smells like sunscreen. It’s turtles and tradeoffs all the way down. Mental moves are a thing, too. I can mental move into creativity, mental move into affection, mental move into sex drive, mental move into sensory freshness, mental move into unwavering confidence, mental move into expanded sense of space, mental move into equanimity, mental move into capacity for symbolic manipulation, mental move into joy, mental move into poeticism. My success rate is low and it changes over time. The more I think about a mental move the less often it succeeds. Sometimes my posture changes in a certain way and people look at me in public. It’s happened enough times that I’m certain I’m not imagining it. It feels good to be looked at, but I start craving it quickly. I really miss feeling refreshed. Honestly, I'm still mourning it. When do people start saying “my parents’ house”? Doctors and patients are soldiers in the great war between signal and noise. Doctors distrust signal because noise exists, and patients distrust noise because signal exists. Call Me By Your Name is stunning. Before Sunset, Sunrise, Midnight are sublime. Should I move to Europe? Outside, I like it bright. Inside, I like it dim. The Last Question. Scared, I'm compelled to do grand things for the world. Easeful, I want to deliver beauty, seek beauty, and peacefully do nothing. Twitter is toxic and I owe it much. I’m so sensitive to curves, lines, edges. Explains a lot. Thanks, Mina. The indent in the bathroom floor where shower water pools surreptitiously – It Did Not Have To Be This Way. Ineffability happens when we experience something authentic but new. Symbolic manipulation tires me out. Performance, and equanimity thereof. Apparently, I have cold hands.
The Local-Global Idea
John Carmack recently Tweeted, “I remain easily optimistic in the face of everything happening. Consider the most amazing person you personally know, by any quality metric you choose. Odds are that there are literally millions of their caliber in the world, which is plenty to build a bright future.” (Double spaces sic.) Let’s be those high-caliber people: to deal with the many unfolding crises we’ve been handed, how can we have agency as local beings in a global system? Local-global shows up in many phenomena, such as the Us/Them distinction in social group dynamics, the topology of social networks, geopolitical hierarchies, biology, and so on.Us/Them: “We” are local, “They” are a separate locality, and together the localities compose a whole with global properties.
Social networks: My Facebook friends are my locality, your Facebook friends are your locality. One globality on Facebook is the set of all users residing in the United States. Without doubt, there are more ways to draw both “local” and “global” boundaries.
Geopolitics: Cities are local to states, states are local to countries, and countries are local to international geopolitics. Global relations hold in reverse.
Biology: Organelles are local to cells, cells are local to organs, and organs are local to organisms. Global relations hold in reverse.
Local-global is a basic property of the systems we are made of and the systems we partake in. There is, however, a problem! Until recently in evolutionary history, we did not interact with many people other than our hunter-gatherer group, so humans evolved for local contexts. For millions of years and many iterations of evolution, this worked swimmingly (so to speak). Internalizing local-global pays dividends specifically to that end. In this essay, I want to introduce you to the idea well enough for it to stew. First, I’ll define local and global. Then, I’ll explore how humans have evolved for the local but not the global, and finally and most extensively I’ll demonstrate the utility of local-global by analyzing two interacting local-global systems of intense relevance right now: the pandemic and social media.The Idea
Definitions
As a flexible concept, local-global can be defined in more than one way. The definitions I’ve chosen for this discussion are a) inspired by networks/graphs, b) not formal, c) not going to cover every quirky edge case, of which there are many, and therefore d) meant to be semi-specific heuristics rather than definitive definitions, because e) a definitive definition of local-global doesn’t exist due to its flexibility. I would argue that is a strength! Local: Regarding a network, "local" pertains to those nodes or collections of nodes which are "close" together, where we get to choose a definition of close. There are at least two kinds of closeness, connection closeness and coloring (or property) closeness. Connection closeness defines closeness in terms of connections in a network, whereas coloring (or property) closeness defines closeness in terms of nodes or collections of nodes that all satisfy some property—pictorially, all colored in some way. (I’ll use the phrase “coloring closeness” in this essay because I think the visual component helps its understandability, even though “property” is substantially more general.) Connection closeness can be defined relative to a reference node, or more nuanced techniques from graph theory can be used that define localities based on connections, but don’t output a result relative to any one node in particular; an example is a “component” in the graph theoretical sense. In an example setup, we can look at my Facebook locality. The nodes are Facebook users, and the connection closeness is defined as “is Facebook friends with [me].” My locality, then, is the set of all people who I’m friends with on Facebook.
Importantly, we can generalize the idea of locality to apply to collections of nodes instead of individual nodes. We could talk about the locality of families who have children in 2nd grade at an elementary school (coloring closeness, via “has a 2nd grader at elementary school X”).
We could describe the locality of all employees of a company (coloring closeness, via “employed by company Y”)
Another example is the locality of all donors who donated to a given non-profit (coloring closeness, via “donates to nonprofit Z”), and so on.
The most reduced localities are individual nodes. We can think of “generalized localities” as collections of those nodes which can themselves be thought of as localities relative to other collections—this can be done either by having connections between collections of nodes (c.f. hypergraphs), or by having properties defined on collections of nodes rather than individual nodes. Each student in elementary school A is their own locality because they are an individual node, but the group of all students is a (color-connected) locality relative to elementary schools B and C.
Global: There are two kinds of global phenomena, descriptive ones and causative ones. A descriptive global phenomenon is a state that occurs across many localities, and arises when many nodes could be colored the same way (i.e., share a value assigned to a property, particularly values that can and/or will change) or when many nodes colored the same way are connected together.
A causative global phenomenon is something—anything—that causes state changes in many localities.
“Many” in “many localities” is loosely defined, and its instantiations in specific scenarios depend on what kind of locality you’re describing, and what closeness metric you’re using. If only four humans out of 7.8B are presently experiencing a state of enlightenment (“present” pun intended)—one wouldn’t say enlightenment is a descriptive global phenomenon. However, if 690M people in the world are undernourished, that’s a distressing descriptive global phenomenon. How many people would need to be enlightened for it to be a descriptive global phenomenon? There is no single principled way to say; in that sense, globality is vague (as a term of art in philosophy). Note that the set of localities from which we pick a subset big enough to be called “many” can be either the entire network (like all of Facebook) or a sub-network (like one Facebook group). Similarly, we can also choose to describe globality relative to fully-reduced node localities (like individual Facebook users), or generalized localities (like Facebook groups). Making a crucial insight explicit, something that is local in one setting can be global in another. Technically, given the above definitions, the coloring that describes one set of nodes or generalized localities as a locality can similarly be used to define a descriptive global phenomenon. The easy way to think about this insight is through an example; Facebook works well. A left-leaning Facebook group has a natural locality—its members are part of the locality—but it can also itself be a local member of the set of all left-leaning Facebook groups. The set of all left-leaning Facebook groups is a descriptive global phenomenon, based on the property of being left-leaning and being on Facebook.Evolution
It's clear that we evolved for the local and not for the global. As an insightful Aeon essay from February of this year puts it, "Global-scale interaction clashes with human biology. We evolved as members of small tribes, in hunter-gatherer societies of fewer than a thousand people. Our methods of communicating and self-organising into social groups evolved for interactions on this scale. We smile and respond to smiles, and we are experts at reading each other’s facial expressions. We follow social norms and, when others don’t follow those norms, we exert pressure on them to conform by being morally outraged at their transgressions. We are motivated to show our moral outrage because it signals our own virtue to the tribe, which raises our value in it. These mechanisms are beneficial for tribal social cohesion, and encourage cooperation in a small tribe." Robert Sapolsky's Behave talks at length about humans’ penchant for thinking about the world in terms of “Us” and “Them.” He writes, “the strength of Us/Them-ing is shown by: (a) the speed and minimal sensory stimuli required for the brain to process group differences; (b) the unconscious automaticity of such processes; (c) its presence in other primates and very young humans; and (d) the tendency to group according to arbitrary differences, and to then imbue those markers with power” (p.392, Kindle edition). The “Us” refers to my locality; the “Them” is out there in the global arena. Sapolsky provides evidence to support a basic intuition, namely that we perceive ourselves to be part of many such Us’s. “Crucially, which Us is most important to me constantly shifts—if some octopus moved in next door, I would feel hostile superiority because I have a spine and it didn’t, but that animosity might melt into a sense of kinship when I discovered that the octopus, like me, loved playing Twister as a kid” (p.405, Kindle edition). We have faculties for quickly assessing the localities to which we belong, but not for descriptive or causative global phenomena—states of large systems, and the causes that influence them.Applying The Idea
Let’s take a look at two interacting local-global systems, the pandemic and social media.Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic is a global phenomenon, a bona fide clusterfuck. It spread through globalized travel (the descriptive global phenomenon of having connections between many localities), and has caused chaos for economies and politics around the world (hence, a causative global phenomenon). The basic "local" units in this context are individual people, and people are part of families and organizations; organizations operate in accordance with laws established by the government; each city operates within the context of a state, each state within the nation, each nation within the international geopolitical-economic milieu. In other words, every element of the hierarchy is local with respect to some global, and every element (except the individual, in this analysis) is global with respect to some local. All the way up and all the way down, the pandemic is local-meets-global. To intervene with the biological disease itself we must intervene locally at the level of individual people, such as by wearing masks, maintaining physical distance, air ventilation, vaccination, participation in contact tracing, administering treatment, and generally responsible decision-making (if I had three wishes, I'd use all three on responsible decision-making...). Of course, to design, produce, and distribute vaccines, we need organizations with causative globality to coordinate with one another (organizations like pharmaceutical companies and Congress are generalized localities with causative globality over lower localities; the state of coordination between pharma, government, and all of healthcare is a descriptive globality).
For the economy, we have causative global interventions. Take interest rates, for example: a causative global intervention is necessary because of the structure of the system—only the Federal Reserve can set interest rates. Another causative global intervention is the passing of a stimulus package by Congress (well, hypothetically). Trillions of dollars distributed into the American economy impacts many localities, and therefore it is a global causative phenomenon. A notable difference between the disease and the economy, considered in local-global terms, is that certain disease interventions like mask-wearing are ultimately up to the base locality, individual people, whereas economic interventions (and the state of the economy in general) are out of any individual’s control. Unfortunately, people cannot simply will money into existence; a global causative intervention is required. All of these interventions rest on people, who as we established above, do not count global decision-making as a strength because we evolved for small groups. In a situation not unlike the Tragedy of the Commons, our local decision-making leads to local choices—”let’s have a small dinner party, we haven’t seen our friends in months”—that may be optimal for this locality in the present, but may turn out suboptimal for this and other localities in the future when one of the dinner attendees is unwittingly infectious. Compounded across a country, this promotes the descriptive global phenomena of more disease and a slower economic recovery. That so many people make local decisions like this is just a fact of our evolution: we care deeply about the people immediately around us, and less about people far away. We make decisions weighted more by present reward than future reward. We simply struggle to apprehend how small local choices unfold in complex systems with many interacting localities and globalities: a small decision to attend a dinner party might ultimately spiral into 1000s of infections and likely some deaths.Social Media
Social media is the theatre of our times: on these platforms we watch our comedies and tragedies unfold. Structurally, social media platforms are networks ("social networks"), so they lend themselves well to local-global analysis. In social networks, local users see information shared by other local users, either about their own lives (local updates) or about something bigger (descriptive global updates). A "global" media organization like the New York Times disseminates global information down to the local users (an act of causative globality), who then share this information to other local users. Above, we covered the nested structure of social networks; as with the pandemic, all the way up and all the way down, social media is local-meets-global. An interesting property of systems whose nodes are cognitive—humans, non-human primates, birds, and so on—is that the nodes can directly perceive descriptive global variables of the system as expressed in a condensed way. Social media is of course one such system. For example, a descriptive globality in America right now is the presence of intense and conflicting political belief. This descriptive globality can be summarized by the title of a New York Times article, such as this one from the halcyon days of 2014. The title, “Polarization is Dividing American Society, Not Just Politics,” can be displayed on a Facebook news feed. The users of Facebook, nodes of the system, see the article’s titles, and therefore receive information about a (summarized) descriptive global state of the system. In this manner, the descriptive global state becomes a causative global state and influences the system, since individual people’s behavior might change due to their ability to observe this descriptive global characteristic. This leads to the formation of tight local-global interaction cycles in social media because most social media now aggregates global descriptions and feeds them to users. In essence, participating in social media is the process of 1) creating content that often contains your belief about a global description, 2) sharing that content with other people and thereby being a local influence on them, and 3) the lion’s share of social media interactions, looking at the content other people have created, which often captures global descriptions. Of course, this is muddied by the fact that content rarely, if ever, gives “accurate” or “good faith” summaries of descriptive global phenomena, and all sorts of cognitive biases will lead the recipient to acquire that summarized information imperfectly and mix it in with their own views, thus creating localities everywhere with distorted perceptions of the global phenomena. No wonder social media is messy. And then there was a pandemic!Social Pandemedia
The pandemic and social media, two local-global systems, interact with one another. Social media provides the information infrastructure upon which knowledge about the pandemic is shared (knowledge about a descriptive global phenomenon like case counts, or knowledge about a local phenomenon like an individual's battle with illness). Social media is also the infrastructure for spreading beliefs and behaviors. Beliefs can represent local perception of a descriptive and/or causative global phenomenon, and behaviors can represent how the localities react to descriptive and/or causative global phenomena, given their beliefs. (Not to over-apply, one can certainly believe things and exercise behaviors that have nothing to do with globalities.) It’s interesting to note how large a portion of people’s beliefs and behaviors these days, as observed and enacted on social media, do pertain to the global. Though I have no evidence per se, the truism that focusing on the present leads to calm probably holds for the social media scenario as well: the more the social network’s activity pertains to local beliefs/behaviors about the global, the more tumultuous the social network activity will be. If we regard accurate summaries of descriptive and/or causative global phenomena as (compressed) truth, then ideally truth should inform belief which in turn informs behavior. Because belief influences behavior, problems arise when truth and belief diverge. For a complex system to function well, its components (localities) have to be constrained to some patterns of interacting. We see it with cells: when cells become runaway proliferators because their interaction patterns are no longer constrained, a cancer forms, spreads to become a descriptive global presence, and the organism dies at the hand of the cancer’s global causation. Likewise with the complex system of civilization: when people's behaviors are no longer constrained, bad things happen. Whether by definition or by empiricism—whichever you prefer—truth (as compressed information about the environment, including global phenomena) has provided the necessary constraints to flourish, vis-à-vis determining the beliefs that constrain behavior. When truth doesn't constrain belief, belief doesn't constrain behavior. Why is this relevant to flourishing? Look at the pandemic. Flourishing means the maintenance of health and economic productivity (health is definitional flourishing, and economic productivity is a contingent fact of capitalism). The impact of the pandemic on biological health is tautological, and economic health has clearly been impacted by the pandemic as well. All of epidemiology, all of biology, all of medicine, all of economics have been developed in the pursuit of compressed truth (with major missteps and some screwy incentives, but on average tending towards truthful understandings of global phenomena and other things). Our flourishing to date is therefore the result of a pursuit of truth. If truth, a characterization of descriptive global phenomena, is either thrown out the window or manipulated in pursuit of nefarious goals, it spells trouble. The pandemic provides examples, like mask-wearing. It’s clear for those folks focused on truth that mask-wearing is a necessary route to flourishing, i.e. widespread mask-wearing is a causative global phenomenon that will yield a desirable descriptive global phenomenon. The truth informs beliefs held by localities, which constrain behaviors of the localities—e.g., I wear a mask every time I walk out of my house. But with the pandemic, bad information (non-truths) about mask-wearing means that beliefs are being formed based on non-truths, which therefore induce local behaviors that do not produce global flourishing. How does this truth, belief, behavior chain happen right now? Largely on social media. Social media spreads bad information (dis-information and mis-information) about global phenomena. Because people can forward expressions of their beliefs/behaviors to so many people simultaneously either via direct messages or via posting to a feed, the "belief points" can build up rapidly within localities of people (c.f. complex contagion theory). Of course, the echo chamber phenomenon then prevents the penetration of information (truth) inwards through those walls, which leaves the within-locality super-synchronization unchecked (a widespread descriptive global phenomenon occurs without causative intervention to dissipate it). Lastly comes the addictiveness. Humans have short attention spans—especially nowadays. If we weren't hooked on social media, we would spend less time observing the information and belief/behavior expression, which would not only slow the spread of bad information-belief-behaviors, but simply put—we would care about it less.The Human in the Pandemedia Machine
What are the specific failure modes where motivations/incentives/cognitive architectures designed for small groups fail us when our information/beliefs/behaviors come from participation in large groups? The aforementioned Aeon piece argues that social media creates uncapped outrage expression because we don't see the pain of the accused, which would act as a dampener on our rage expression and moral signaling, and subsequently prevent runaway rage. Beyond that, "cognitive social locality" comes into play: as per the often-cited Dunbar's number, we have bounds on the capacity to hold social graphs in memory. Speculating, I suspect this creates a new category of "just-in-time" social entities which, speaking in terms of how our brains respond, are sort of like people but don't elicit the same type of response as real bona fide people. The differences are that we don't have typical signals to assess power and trustworthiness. We can assess power and trustworthiness for local people in our local social graphs, but not people out there in the non-local other. I'd also wager we have weaker theory of mind for someone whose existence to us is restricted to our Twitter feed, for example. Not only do we not have information about people on social media like we would if we knew them locally (either in person or closely connected through in-person relationships with other members of an in-group), but even if we did we couldn't hold all of our 100s-1000s of social media follows in memory as true participants of our social graph—because we didn't evolve for that kind of global memory. Because it's so easy to share information and therefore signal a belief, people do so with minimal filtering (and again, as per the above, without the inhibition coming from real human interaction)—and since people's beliefs are influenced by multiple other in-group members expressing a belief, beliefs can catch on rapidly. Other people signal thoughtlessly, and you thoughtlessly relay the signal once you see enough signals firing. Local regions ignite rapidly and eject their pillars of flame off into the non-localities without any inhibitory feedback, and all the sudden one piece of local mis- or dis-information becomes a causative global phenomenon. Because adjacent localities are closely connected through social media, it doesn't take much flame to ignite part of the adjacent localities, which are susceptible for the same reasons, and so everything continues without inhibition and with local actors participating in causative global dynamics well beyond their cognitive capacity to truly apprehend. This is the story of undamped virality.Your Turn
It turns out that the local-global concept can yield results: in a September 3rd Facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg wrote that “We're reducing the risk of misinformation and harmful content going viral by limiting forwarding on Messenger. You'll still be able to share information about the election, but we'll limit the number of chats you can forward a message to at one time. We've already implemented this in WhatsApp during sensitive periods and have found it to be an effective method of preventing misinformation from spreading in many countries.” What can you do with this idea?
A Pop Star is Normal
Two hours ago, if you’d asked me to predict the subject I’d keyboard-scrawl into a Ulysses document, I literally would never have guessed it would be Taylor Swift. I finished Miss Americana, Lana Wilson’s documentary about Taylor Swift, half an hour ago. After finishing the film, I texted a friend who told me a few days ago I should watch it, and the following thoughts spawned in the text thread, now recapitulated and slightly elaborated here: 1) I’ve never loved Taylor’s music, which is entirely okay. As an equalizing disclaimer, I write music, and I don’t love most of it either. That’s creativity for you, and the unpredictability of the audience’s response to art is precisely what makes art something distinct and of neurological consequence. (For more on that, I’d read Eric Kandel’s The Age of Insight.) 2) I’m no stranger to the occasional fanboy-ish celebrity fascination, but I definitely don’t feel that way about Taylor Swift. She doesn’t grab my attention in any nonstandard way—and this I mean not as a denigration, but as a humanization. And yet, I enjoyed the documentary. What I appreciate about it is that I closed the Netflix tab filled with a bellyful of visceral pride, personal-level pride, real pride, at Taylor’s growth over her 15-year career. Here she is, a musician I don't listen to, in a genre I don't care for, with 127M Instagram followers as of this writing, and I’m proud of her? It’s perplexing! Her fame is blasé to me. She’s a human, who’s done things, and changed, and my brain’s treating her like any other human, and that’s why Miss Americana is pretty brilliant, I’d say. It’s a story about a person who I feel normally about, but who’s had an absolutely abnormal life.
Love Letter to Sex Education
Here begins a love letter, warmly penned to an unusual lover: the British Netflix show, Sex Education. In proceeding forward, this feels familiar and high-school-ish: your illustrious crush laughs or smiles or asks a small question or yawns or ties her shoe or something trivial, unwitting to her own illustriousness and to the fact you’re paying rapt attention and basically ready to step forward onto one knee and propose, but of course you don’t since it would be so, so strange (I use “her” to accord with my romantic preferences). And yet… (*Slightly audible gulp*) listen up, ‘cus I’ve got love to profess.The Preamble
I’ll begin with a preamble, as I imagine a love letter ought to do, building tension. Bear with me as I begin on a slightly esoteric digression about myself1. In this digression, I paint myself as the character in distress for whom the lovely Sex Education comes as savior; I’m a damsel, as it were? And if you think the entrance is masturbatory...well, maybe it is, but if that’s the case I suppose I have no shame about it—I can assure you, after all: Otis and I don’t share the same problem. In summer of 2018, I read a book called Sapiens, written by historian Yuval Noah Harari. This is a canonical Silicon Valley read with 4.4 stars on GoodReads and 4.6 on Amazon, and the recommendations from friends and various authors sculpted a halo of (sometimes skeptical or jaded) lore around this work of Harari's. Sapiens reasons in terms of biology and sociology to explain how and why civilization has come to be what it is—in a metaphorical sense, how Homo sapiens became aware it was on a canvas, reached out to grab the paint brush, and then worked tirelessly on each subsequent stroke to slowly compose itself into a complex painting we title, "The Present." Sapiens walks through much of humanity’s history and many of its belief systems. I’ve heard folks challenge the veracity and academic rigor of some of Harari’s claims, and while I’ll admit I wasn't so detective-ish myself, I never intended to be. I didn’t read it as an academic, and won’t herein treat the material as such. What's more, I read this book more than a year ago, and most of its details have been lost from my distressingly imperfect memory. Rather, I was impacted by Harari’s methodology, which roughly accords to the following two-step prescription: (1) Observe a belief in modern society. Then, (2) understand how and why it came about. When we perform this methodology, we implicitly acknowledge that the many things we believe in—morals, definitions of success, etc.—are constructed. I’ve always thought this as fact, but until reading Sapiens never felt this as reality; there is a profound difference between knowing something as semantic knowledge, and feeling that thing as intuitive knowledge. As someone who actively searches for fundamental, immutable, capital-T Truths, suddenly feeling the constructed nature of my world was an experience that left me untethered from my life, the people in it, and my responsibilities. A hard and unwavering emotion crept up inside, shrieking loudly that none of the things I believed in were fundamental, nothing immutable. My defining beliefs could have been otherwise—each belief simply was as history, upbringing, and some biology caused it to be, for particular and—in principle—identifiable reasons. There’s nothing even remotely capital-T about my truths. That’s what Sapiens taught me. Summer 2018 turned into fall, and the sensation of becoming untethered grew in stride with the months as they strolled by. As I tend to do when I’m overwhelmed, I even wrote a poem about the untethering, which I figure I’ll include here because what’s a love letter without a poem?I hope prose and poetry are sufficient in combination to convey a sense of what I was feeling: profound detachment, debased from the grounding beliefs that gave existence any sense of justification. My schedule lightened in late 2018 and I wound up couch-borne, watching TV with a regularity I hadn't for many years prior. The lethargy dripped in at first, then flowed like a river of paralysis, locking me onto the couch and into a trap of cyclic thought, recursing ad infinitum. Stationary, something hit a tipping point and my psyche underwent a sad transformation: what had previously been a sensation of detachment, wrought by Sapiens, transmogrified into a fiery metropolis of meaninglessness. Abstractly, and in present tense for effect, here's how it went down:A sapiens with loose skin I read a history of the world and I’m obliged to report that it’s loosened my skin from the underlying muscle and bone. I used to revel in the stretch, love the predictable deformation each time I’d incidentally waltz through a moment and joy would bend an excited joint. This history incised somewhere, snuck in and slid right underneath, cut all the fibrous, connective tissue. My bridge had its supports blown up, out, now dust in cloudy crying skies. When I'm still, my skin flaps in the wind and pulls me sideways. When I walk, soft reverberations thrum and remind me. In a sprint, the loose skin is slung so hard I risk deforming my character; I will never recover my form. This is what it feels like to be corporeal but meaningless. My sense of strict adhesion to principles, predictabilities, assumptions is no more. I think we tend to think the knowledge we seek will bring pearl skin, gleaming and desirable and certainly beautiful. Maybe there’s some Truth to the idea that with sagging-skin age comes “wisdom.”In case you’ve never dealt with this sort of meaninglessness—which I really hope you haven’t—let me briefly explain what it’s like. Suppose you’re drinking a cup of steaming breakfast tea, perhaps with some milk. Ordinarily, the tea is fragrant and the flavors explode like fireworks, entertaining a gracious tongue. Ordinarily, you appreciate this, and think it's beautiful. But this time, a feeling undercuts it all: of course, this flavor is just the output of a set of material interactions, and your predisposition towards it is perfectly explainable given sufficient scientific instrumentation and analytical decomposition—and what's more, your contemplation of this whole thing is itself the product of material interactions which accord simply to the laws of the universe and nothing but. And this creeping feeling insidiously strips the tea of its fragrance and its flavor, until you’re just swallowing down something stifling, the heat deadening, now fixated on the fact that swallowing, too, requires analytically decomposable neuromuscular control. And so this flavor is false, in no sense beautiful whatsoever because your perception of its beauty is mechanical—arises for a particular reason based on the laws of physics—and even your original desire for the flavor is itself a material thing... This sort of crisis eviscerates your sense of purpose in anything and everything you do: playing piano, chatting with friends, sending emails, attending work meetings, learning. It’s the demolition of purpose that makes so paralyzing the materialism which leads to non-beauty which leads to meaninglessness: if everything is explainable, then there’s no purpose, so why bother moving to another place, another thought, another feeling? And by the way, your sensation of purposelessness is material, and therefore purposeless. What a mind-fuck. Before this crisis of meaning it was easy and natural, even reflexive, to see beauty in the world. In fact, the fact itself that I could perceive beauty felt like it gave an “ought” to humanity: humanity ought to exist because the subjective experience of beauty ought to be felt—it’s just that lovely. It’s almost beyond words to describe how powerful it is to feel that life is self-justified. Like, smiles-and-flowers, blue-skied euphoria. That powerful. My crisis of meaning, through the stewing process of the aforementioned psychological clusterfuck, eviscerated my sense of beauty, and that destroyed me because not only did I now have no purpose, but humanity didn’t either. My consciousness felt sick, ill at ease, with the distinct and unshakeable feeling that without beauty, nothing was worth it and, therefore, everything was unbearable. It was a depressed territory into which I initially and unwittingly followed discursive thought by way of Sapiens, and subsequently the emotion of this territory solidified in a pathological way, the apex and summary of which was my inability to see anything as beautiful. I even stopped wanting to see beauty in the first place.1. I feel a sense of awe, which is intellectually manifested as the experience of beauty; in particular, I believe beauty is a universal, capital-F Fundamental capital-T Truth; something that exists outside of me, which bears metaphysical significance. 2. I consider this universal beauty to be the source of meaning in my life. 3. I fixate on the fact that our beliefs are constructed through history, culture, and biology. Ouch. 4. I fixate on the fact that our beliefs and experiences are implented in matter, and therefore constructed by some physical mechanism. Ouch. 5. Everything can be explained, in principle, because everything has a mechanism and a causal chain of events behind it (i.e., materialism and determinism). 6. My sense of awe disappears because awe probably arises from surprise and disbelief. With full explainability dies surprise. 7. I don't feel awe anymore, so I no longer intellectually perceive a sense of universal beauty. 8. Because there's no universal beauty, there's no meaning in my life.A Sketch of My Love
And now, post existential crisis exposé, I begin the “love” portion of this letter, at long last! Sex Education is so beautiful that it taught me how to see beauty2 again. I watched it once through and beautiful things came back into sight. Then, I watched a second time (and third, and fourth) and now I don’t just see those beautiful things, but want to create more of them. I remember what it’s like to feel the magnetism in art and elegance. "Now, hold on," you hopefully say. "You just belabored the idea that beauty doesn't exist," you say. Yes, yes I did! Keep reading! There are three interacting faces to the beauty of Sex Education: the sensory aspects, the acting, and the social situations in the story that fluctuate rapidly between feather-light and anvil-heavy. Like a prism, it’s the conjunction of all three faces that feels so beautiful: turn on the TV, shine the light, and watch for the rainbow. Behind most moments in Sex Education is rich sensory experience: the vibrant colors reminiscent of the 1980s, the wonderful and well-timed music selection, the masterful camerawork. This sensory array, coming together with stellar and humanizing acting performances, forms a deep and dynamic substrate for the social situations. In other words, the sensory aspects and the acting in Sex Education were, themselves, beautiful; adding in the actual content of the show is what makes it a masterpiece. What, though, are these “social situations” to which I’m referring? Well, they’re many things! They’re Otis’s struggle with Jean’s helicoptering, and conversely Jean’s struggle to let go of the most important person in her life. They’re Maeve’s tough skin and soft heart. They’re Eric’s positivity. In each of these, there’s a persistent dynamic whereby the show rapidly alternates between humorous and serious, the transitions delivered by the acting, the highs and the lows plainly visible on the characters’ faces.A Close Reading
To better understand how this works, I’ll indulge and close-read my favorite scene in the season: Maeve and Otis, ft. Swimming Pool. To help, let me define a little axis for us here, from the serious/heavy (-10) to the light/humorous (+10). Zero is neutral. For each section of the scene I analyze, I’ll rate it with a sentiment score based on my subjective assessment. Not scientific, but perhaps insightful. Circa 29:30 or so in Episode 4, after a failed attempt at facilitating a sexual interaction between new lesbian lovers Ruthie and Tanya, we see a well-composed shot of Otis’s legs entering the water: visual elegance at work. [Sentiment score: 0]
The scene transitions and Maeve receives a text from Jackson. Asa cleverly uses an ear-grab to tell us how viscerally displeased Otis is that Maeve and Jackson are texting. [Sentiment score: -3 ]
Visceral displeasure doesn’t squash curiosity, so Otis asks Maeve how things are going with Jackson. Emma abruptly snaps, as Maeve’s character does when someone hits one of her unsheathed nerves. Note Asa’s body language following Maeve’s snap: head down and torso slumped, showing us textbook dejection. [Sentiment score: -4]
Note, also, the aesthetic composition of this shot. It’s dominated by aquatic blue and white, the only burst of color being Maeve’s hair—I’d be surprised if this weren’t intentionally symbolic. My non-expertise in cinematic composition tells me this whole shot looks really, really good. Maeve continues on to explain that she has loads of sex. [Sentiment score: +3] Immediately, Otis’s face reflects his effort to, as it were, keep his shit together. [Sentiment score: -5 (Have you ever listened to an active crush discuss how much sex they’re having? No fun, I assure you.)] Asa’s acting, again, is top notch: I couldn’t catch it in my screenshot, but he garnishes the look below with a very quick and telling eyebrow raise.
Maeve now comments that she doesn’t “do boyfriends.” Brilliant acting ensues:
In the course of a second or so, Asa brings Otis’s face through a range of emotion, essentially processing Maeve’s comment in realtime with the viewer. Otis asks why Maeve doesn’t “do boyfriends,” and Maeve then bashes rom-coms (to further compose for you a portrait of my romanticism in case it wasn’t already obvious, I'm a big fan of rom-coms), and follows it up with the sort of smile that makes many of Sex Education’s viewers fall slightly in love with Emma Mackey (pleading the 5th). [Sentiment score: +6]
Otis asks, “But seriously, what’s wrong with a boyfriend?” To which Maeve responds, giving dark insight into her character and implicating a heavily relatable reality of romance, “Just someone else to let you down, isn’t it?” And, at this moment, guitar kicks in. I failed to successfully screenshot it, but after saying this, Emma very briefly flicks her eyes downwards and it’s powerful—stellar acting. [Sentiment score: -6] Then, Otis laughs, and it’s light again. Next thing we know, Maeve’s pushed Otis into the water, jumped in herself, and the camera is now bobbing with water droplets on the lens, drawing the viewer strongly into the scene. To cap it off, loud music is playing in the background. [Sentiment score: +7] Maeve and Otis water-flirt for a few seconds against background music until they separate and Otis starts directing his now-infamous sex therapy towards Maeve. The music ceases. [Sentiment score: -2] “We don’t do that therapy thing,” she says. “Save that for the clientele.” Otis makes a face, and she decides to offer a real explanation for why she doesn’t want to date Jackson. At this point, my only qualm about the scene comes to bear: some overly sappy music plays which I think detracts from the warm tension. On the other hand, Maeve’s arguments against a relationship with Jackson are high-school-y in nature, so maybe sap was meant similarly to reflect young romance. [Sentiment score: -2] They exchange a few jokes about scrotum-biting, and suddenly Maeve is touching Otis’s eyebrows. We have something both light and heavy here: light because it’s so thrilling, and heavy because it’s so thrilling. As a side note, I wager I was almost as excited about this development as Otis was, given my emotional investment in Otis and Maeve’s yet-to-materialize relationship. Here, we see Otis’s “Holy fucking shit she just touched my eyebrows” face. [Sentiment score: -8, +8]
And then, we’re onto his, “Oh my god, that’s an erection” face.
It’s probably pointing out the obvious to comment on the quality of Asa and Emma’s acting here, but it’s worth rehashing just to demonstrate how their performances maximize the power of the scene. Otis tells Maeve they should get going, but decides to stay in the water. Deeply, deeply relatable—that’s all. Otis looks down with consternation, another solid detail from Asa. [Sentiment score: -6 , +6]
As Maeve walks away, her smile melts the viewer (still pleading the 5th). [Sentiment score: +8]
We have a shot of Maeve walking through the hallway and incurring a blowjob comment. Then Eric walks down the bleacher steps to the swimming pool, and Otis tells Eric what the savvy viewer knows already, and about which I’m still delighting with laughter: “She touched my eyebrows, and now I have an erection.” [Sentiment score: -3 , +9] To conclude the close read, I want to make a note on the impact of this whole scene: I’d watched this episode three times through before spending ~45 minutes stepping through the three-minute-long swimming pool scene for research. The absurd thing is that I’d watched the scene three times already and I still smiled for almost 45 continuous minutes. As articulated above, the sentiment in this scene oscillates (and the rest of the show follows the same pattern). I graphed the sentiment scores from the swimming pool scene to visualize the point.
As the scene progresses, the magnitude of the score increase as well, but the heaviness and lightness continuously flip-flop.Rocking the Chair
Let me recap so far. I had an existential crisis that left me unable to see or believe in beauty because materialism and causality absolutely demolished my sense of awe. Sex Education is a beautiful show and extracted me from that crisis. How, though, did this giggly-named TV show do that? (And what does it even mean for the show to be "beautiful"?) What made Sex Education beautiful were the fluctuations between the light and the serious, spanning all eight episodes, supported and made radiant by music, colors, and above all else acting. (I still haven't defined what it means for the show to be "beautiful", aside from the obvious sensory aspects like sounds, colors, etc...) Sex Education’s acting, narrative, and visuals are so powerful that they induced a sense of awe through the very biological route whose materialistic nature fucked me up in the first place. In particular, the oscillations in the story brought me—through material mechanisms, like my eyes observing and visual cortex processing Maeve and Otis’s facial expressions—to a point of awe. That awe is a material state. I then reflected on the awe intellectually, and it yielded a sense of beauty—but, the critical difference is that this wasn’t exogenous beauty, wasn’t capital-T Truthful. It was endogenous beauty, something that lived and lives purely in the realm of subjective experience, and I had such a profound sense of awe that this subjective internal beauty feels very real and significant. To add the opus-making cherry on top, since the show is about so many aspects of the human condition, it induced many kinds of awe at many different points, each translating to different experiences of newfound intrinsic beauty. All of these taken together, contrasting happy and sad, light and heavy, dull and bright, a world of unity and opposities—this gave me a sense of intrinsic beauty about being human. In other words, I found beauty in the fact of humanity again, except this time it felt (still feels) like the truth of it comes from the realness of my own conscious experience, rather than the universe or something outside of me. When I call Sex Education "beautiful," it's shorthand for writing "capable of inducing a sense of awe which, upon intellectual reflection, becomes the sense that being human is beautiful." Any serious show is ostensibly supposed to create a sense of awe or some kind of large-magnitude emotional impact; Sex Education does it particularly well due to the acting, the oscillation, and the scope of human experience conveyed in the narrative. I started Sex Education rather despondent and lost in a sticky, stinging, dark web of thought. Like a wise grandmother in a rocking chair, Sex Education oscillated between seriousness and humor; back and forth it went, back and forth. Every moment of pure focus on the ups and downs moved me a little further away from despondency. As I became attached to the characters—to Otis’s incredible and well-meaning awkwardness, to Maeve’s “complex female character”-ness, to Eric’s bouncy optimism, to Jean’s inability to let go, and so on—the oscillations impacted me more and more and more. Each time humor transitioned to seriousness and back, I was given emotional exercise needed desperately after months of stasis. And that’s how Sex Education worked its magic: its power was the strength it used to grip the rocking chair and get me moving back and forth, back and forth, until I was shaken far enough out of despondency to once again feel the quintessentially human sense of emotional engagement, and to not admonish myself for doing so. It got me up off the couch, out of my head, and moving, moving, moved by something fundamentally compelling. My present view on meaning and beautiful things can be summarized as follows: there’s no inherent meaning. Morals aren’t fundamental; they used to provide the sense of inherent meaning for me, and now they don’t. As a sociological phenomenon, the presence of morals make the most sense as a convenient way to keep our civilizations together. Before, I felt despondency at these facts. Gratefully, having been reintroduced to beauty by Sex Education and simultaneously acknowledging the reality of non-meaning, I now recognize a choice: in the face of meaninglessness, where there’s no metaphysical reason to feel one way or another, do I choose to feel the despondency? Or, do I choose to see the beauty, which I’m equally entitled to do under the doctrine of non-meaning? Do I choose to feel elation, thrill, awe, impact? I choose the latter. I choose to see beauty, and I feel beauty in the fact that I can choose to see beauty, and so I’m now back on my psychic feet.Adieu, à la Prochaine
The defining cause of my crisis was that, as described wonderfully in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, analyzing an object or an idea often co-occurs with a reduction in the perception of that object/idea’s beauty. As the narrator explains,“When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts. Mark Twain’s experience comes to mind, in which, after he had mastered the analytic knowledge needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its beauty. Something is always killed.” (p.81)I consider myself lucky, and consider it a testament to the power of Sex Education, and consider it necessary to the mechanism by which Sex Education recovered me from my crisis of beauty and meaning, that I can simultaneously think about the show at an analytical level and perceive the (endogenous) beauty in it. I’ve always wondered what it’s like to work on a TV show or a film: do the producers, the actors, the writers, the crew, the directors see the show through the same lens I do? Or do the details of the creation, as with Twain, kill something? My hope for you—the producers, actors, writers, crew, directors of Sex Education—is that insofar as this wonderful show is concerned, you’ve been blessed with the same stroke of luck I have: the rare opportunity to both understand the details of its form and to appreciate, be moved by, and to feel alive on account of its beauty. At the end of the day, what this show has done for me is given me power over where and when I see beauty. I can take what’s around me and tell its story in a way that highlights the beautiful. I’m owning my narrative, I’m owning my narrative. And for that, I love you.
Footnotes:
1 “Esoteric,” not “erotic.” I figure the subject matter and/or essay title might have primed the reader incorrectly, as it did for me while editing…
2 I owe a quick aside on what I mean by “beauty.” There are multiple fields of philosophy and neuroscience devoted to this, and I'm neither an expert nor well-read in any of them. Here's my take as an introspective layperson who occasionally reads various things: the term "beauty" has so very many meanings. It's used most casually to describe things with simple sensory appeal, like a sunset. It's also used more abstractly to describe more complex things, like film. It gets used philosophically to describe, for example, an act of "beautiful" altruism. From the standpoint of linguistic determinism, all of the usages are valid, so I want to suss out a definition of beauty that encompasses all of them. My current version of this definition is that "beauty" is the experience and intellectual idea we arrive at when we contemplate the emotional experience of awe. Put otherwise, we have an emotional/physiological response of awe (which has a phenomneological quality and neurophysiological correlates), and then we think about this experience of awe, at which point the contemplated fact of the experience in conjunction with its subjective qualities turns into the concept-experience of beauty. When we experience something beautiful, we've experienced a sense of awe, and then thought about it.