of mathematical beauty, crystals and potatoes: a Darwinian explanation

της τε ταυτου φυςεως και της θατερον (the nature of the same and the different -- Plato, Timaeus)

Potatoes are not pretty. They are also not mathematically patterned, not even symmetric. You may have noticed, they grow in the earth unseen, as if hiding how ugly they are. 

Well, that'd be one just-so story of why they grow unseen. Maybe it's not so silly. More reasonable would be the just-so story of natural selection to conclude that they lack mathematical order and its beauty because they grow underground where you cannot see them. Natural selection for patterns would be wasted on potatoes. True of all the roots, btw.

This is, of course, the key to why patterns are perceived as beautiful. Randomness is mostly useless for communication since you can't control the signal -- randomness can only communicate randomness, of occasional communicative value, but quite limited to signaling itself, "random", regardless of context. Only patterns can communicate distinct, controlled signals. To the extent that communication benefits species, patterning should be found throughout the biological realm of visibility. Natural selection has happened upon a means by which to communicate and even attract organisms, a simple means of patterning with simple recursive math. (Language, the quintessential communicative means, itself is a highly recursive mathematical patterning.)

So natural selection, which "had no option" of using randomness for communication, leaves all of us visual organisms susceptible to patterning. It might even explain why we love theorizing to explain patterns. The regularities are the only option for effective communication, and theories are a form of communication. We want patterns because that's all that's worth understanding, as I think we'll see. 

Randomness is not only uncommunicative, it's not predictive, and as temporal survival organisms, we want to predict future threats most especially, so we can avoid them. Natural selection again. Patterns, we love 'em. Randomness, not so much. It's nice for a change or a challenge. A mystery novel starts with the random, but we read to the end to bring it all into pattern. Timaeus' alternation of the same with the different, the pattern of the random with the predictable, has a special charm. We seem to be driven for prediction's sake to understand or find patterns in what seems at first random, but once understood, it's boring and we take it for granted. That's why news media leans towards threats and dangers, bleeding ledes. Cognition is not stable, it's a driven process. The familiar knowns are stable, and are soon taken for granted and forgotten, the oblivious obvious (post on this upcoming). The well of distrust seems bottomless: conspiracy theories are more fun than facts. 

You object, "crystals are highly ordered and beautiful to our eyes, yet they are mostly in the earth". Ah, but that's the perfect exception that proves the theory. Crystals are not organisms.

They can't intend anything, much less communicate intentions outside themselves. Lacking reproductive DNA, they don't engage in generational natural selection. They're stuck with fixed forms that either survive (continue to exist in their local context) or don't, no chance of evolving better. 

That crystals abound in the earth tells us that they are not signaling (and that organisms can, and can use patterning to accomplish this), they don't know what they're doing -- not a clue, and this is important for the panpsychists -- and that we're selected for liking patterns, that we see them as beautiful, or, to use more scientific language, as attractive. It's a natural selection gimmick available only to reproductive generations. On this planet, that's the biological organisms. A distinguishing difference between the organic and inorganic is that inorganic patterns may be entirely unseen for their entire long duration; organic patterns are meant to be seen. 

To put it in the plainest terms, if crystals were organismic, they wouldn't be hiding underground, b****. :-)