Term: Beautiful
Typical definition example: pleasing the senses or mind aesthetically.
Wikipedia example: Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure or satisfaction.
Justification: This is definitely a new definition for “beautiful” and while I don’t have the research to back up the claim, I believe there is some evidence to suggest that this is a useful definition. This attempt differs from traditional definitions not only in that it focuses on processing information, but also that it doesn’t just claim that beauty is “in the eye of the beholder” but that it’s an actual physical sensation. I’ll look at the 2nd claim first.
What is a physical sensation? I’m including everything that falls under the traditional senses - all tastes, colors, sounds, etc. and clearly I’m not limiting it to just six. For example, it seems like there are a lot of senses related to physical positioning in the world that usually just get lumped in to “touch.” There’s our sense of balance, the sense of the position of our own body, and different types of sensation on the skin, pressure, heat, etc. Even once we’ve tallied up all the possible physical sensations from our various sensory organs it seems we also have some other sensations to account for. In particular I’m thinking of pleasure and pain. These seem to overlap with other senses. We can have pleasure from tasting delicious food, or listening to a nice sound, or a touch, etc. Pleasure seems to be a sensation that can be associated with other sensory input, in a similar way that the smell of strawberries can be associated with the sweet & tangy tastes of strawberries. Or how the viscosity of water can be associated with its temperature (cold water seems denser, or is that just me?). So, we have some sensations, pain and pleasure in particular, that don’t have to be only created by a particular type of external source (the way heat always triggers a sensation of warmth, and salt always triggers a sensation of saltiness), but that can be associated with with many other types of sensations.
This is where beauty usually comes in, it’s usually defined as a characteristic of an object, that causes pleasure. But if the feeling or sensation of beauty was just the same as feeling pleasure, than how are we able to distinguish between things that cause pleasure, but aren’t beautiful. A hot bath feels good, but I wouldn’t call it beautiful. It seems at least possible then that beauty is a distinct sensation, and that we usually associate with pleasure or enjoyment. Even if the physical science of our nervous system doesn’t back up this interpretation though, this is still a useful perspective because it avoids the key problem in the traditional definition. Where it would seem to force us to call everything with any pleasurable characteristic beautiful.
If we accept that beauty can be a sensation, then the next step is to try and define what kind of characteristic would cause this sensation. And it has to be something very general, something that can be applied to people and flower and stars and buildings and even mathematical proofs (if you believe the mathematicians). A good starting point is studies on what makes a human face appear beautiful, and two findings stand out. One, that symmetry is strongly associated with beauty. And two, that if you take facial characteristics from a large population, and generate an average face from those measurements, the average will often be judged to be beautiful. Sometimes, even more beautiful than the highest rated member of the group that was the source of the composite image. These two could suggest that we find average things beautiful, but that clearly isn’t correct. But another characteristic that an average face and symmetric face is that they would be easy to recognize. Symmetry makes for patterns that are much simpler to match, store and process, as does values that are well within an expected range. And it seems like this could extended beyond just faces or people. Take artwork for example, it’s very rare to find very simple art that is widely considered beautiful. Which, given this definition would make sense, if there’s not much information to process, then no piece has the chance to stand out. It’s like having a race over a distance of 1ft. Usain Bolt would probably still beat me, but the difference is too small to notice. And on the other end of the complexity spectrum, many people are put off by very conceptual or complex works of art. But with study, or the realization that there’s an underlying order to the piece, it becomes beautiful. And we can extend this to everything else that someone’s found beautiful. A mathematical proof, or a line of code in a computer program can both be beautiful. And even if only an expert can experience the beauty of the proof or code, everyone has an expectation of what kind of characteristics that solution would have. It would be clear, and simple (relative to the complexity of the problem it’s solving), and we would probably expect it to be associated with an “ah ha” moment, a sudden realization that this solution would allow them to see the problem in a new light, a way that’s cleaner and more elegant and much easier to process.
Again, I don’t have any evidence that this definition is supported by our biology, but in every example I can think of, it appears to work. It may not be an accurate description of the actual underlying process, but it seems to be an accurate way to describe what characteristics an object (or idea) need to have for someone to find them beautiful.