Initiating a “Thanos Snap” on the Humanities.

Beauty = Energy Efficiency

“Beauty” is merely a byproduct of “Energy Conservation.”

Beauty is just the brain’s reward signal for energy-efficient processing.

Beauty is not a mysterious aura; it is the local optimal solution of an evolutionary algorithm.

Positioning Statement

This chapter is not about Aesthetics.

“Aesthetics” is a term invented by the humanities to defend their territory. “Beauty” is a phenomenon that can be directly explained by natural selection, neuroscience, and computational theory.

EMIS does not discuss “aesthetic judgment”; it only discusses one question:

Why are certain forms repeatedly preferred by systems?

1. The EMIS Root Definition of “Beauty”

Beauty is a structural pattern recognized, processed, and predicted by biological and cognitive systems with minimum energy cost.

In other words:

  • Beauty is not Value.
  • Beauty is not Meaning.
  • Beauty is not an arbitrary product of Culture.

Beauty is a signal of successful energy saving.

2. Beauty is Neither Subjective Nor Purely Socially Constructed

Traditional humanities offer two failed explanations:

  • ❌ Beauty is subjective feeling.
  • ❌ Beauty is a cultural construction.

The EMIS conclusion is:

Beauty is a subjective experience, but its generating mechanism is objective.

The “feeling” is subjective; The objective aspects are:

  • The formation of neural pathways.
  • The cost of pattern recognition.
  • The efficiency of signal transmission.

3. Where Does Beauty Come From? — Time + Energy + Selection

Starting from the EMIS root logic:

Any structure that survives in time must be energy-efficient at some level.

Objects in nature referred to as “beautiful”:

  • The curves of mountains
  • The forking of rivers
  • The fractals of trees
  • The symmetry of animals

They collectively satisfy:

  • Compressibility
  • Predictability
  • Low descriptive complexity
  • Consistency with physical constraints

Not because they are “beautiful”, but because they “survived”.

4. Why Do Humans Feel “Beauty”? — A Neural Layer Explanation

The human brain did not evolve to “appreciate”; it evolved to reduce survival energy costs.

The mechanism is as follows:

  1. Long-term repeated exposure to stable structures in nature.
  2. Formation of corresponding high-frequency neural pathways in the brain.
  3. These pathways feature:
    • Lower impedance
    • Faster transmission
    • Smaller prediction error
  4. The system tags “low-energy processing” as positive feedback.

Pleasure ≈ Subjective Marker of Energy Saving

This is the “sense of beauty”.

5. Why is Nature Universally Considered Beautiful?

Because nature is:

  • A set of structures filtered by the longest duration of time.
  • One of the optimal solution spaces under physical constraints.

You find nature beautiful, not because nature is “kind” or “sublime”, but because:

Your neural system was trained on precisely these structures.

6. “Beauty” in Art, Design, and Architecture

Art does not create beauty; it reuses structural patterns proven to be energy-efficient.

Common features of excellent artworks:

  • High structural consistency
  • Low redundancy
  • Rapid recognition
  • Long-term memory retention

Failed works usually feature:

  • Excessive structural noise
  • Incompressible patterns
  • Excessive prediction costs

7. Scientific Support for Beauty as Energy Efficiency

Physics Support: Adrian Bejan’s Constructal Law states that we find trees and rivers beautiful because they are the optimal geometric shapes for flow, isomorphic to the structures of our lungs and blood vessels.

Neuroscience Support: Processing Fluency Theory of Aesthetic Pleasure (Reber et al., 2004). Psychology has confirmed that the easier it is for the brain to process information, the more beautiful people find it (e.g., symmetry, golden ratio, fractals).

Evolutionary Psychology Support: We find landscapes beautiful (with water and trees) because they signify survival resources (energy). We find healthy human bodies beautiful because they signify reproductive value (energy efficiency of gene transmission).

EMIS Perspective:

  • Beauty = Low Information Processing Energy Cost.
  • Or: Beauty = Optimal Structure Match (perfect match between external structure and the brain’s internal prediction model).

The Path of Beauty Formation:

Natural Selection (Energy Saving Structure) -> Brain Evolution (Adaptive Structure) -> Neural Processing Low Impedance (Effort Saving) -> Brain Reward Mechanism -> Subjective Feeling of “Beauty”

In academia, this is known as Processing Fluency Theory, but EMIS elevates it to the height of Physics/Energy.

Explaining “Natural Beauty” (The Physics of Nature)

  • EMIS Perspective: Why do we find the forking of rivers, the growth of trees, and the shapes of lightning (fractals) beautiful?
  • Physical Fact: Because these shapes are the optimal solutions for energy flow under Constructal Law (minimal resistance).
  • Conclusion: We find them beautiful because our brains recognize “this is consistent with physical laws.” It is a deep resonance of truth.

Explaining “Artistic Beauty” (The Physics of Perception)

  • EMIS Perspective: Why do the golden ratio, symmetry, and rhythm bring pleasure?
  • Neural Mechanism: Because these patterns drastically compress the amount of information.
    • Random noise image = High Entropy = Brain consumes massive glucose to parse = Tired = Ugly.
    • Symmetrical image = Low Entropy (Compressible) = Brain processes half the info = Effortless = Pleasure = Beautiful.
  • Conclusion: Aesthetic pleasure is essentially an “energy-saving bonus” the brain awards itself.

8. Cultural Differences Do Not Negate the Objectivity of Beauty

Culture changes:

  • Preference distributions
  • Explanatory language
  • Forms of expression

But culture cannot create “Beauty” that violates structural efficiency.

Culture only:

Adjusts structural weights within the local solution space.

9. Why is “Aesthetics” as a Discipline Doomed to Fail?

Because it:

  • Refuses to provide underlying variables
  • Avoids computability
  • Replaces mechanisms with narratives
  • Replaces models with terminology

When a phenomenon can already be unifiedly explained by:

  • Physics
  • Biology
  • Neuroscience
  • Information Theory
  • Computational Models

The independent sovereignty of the Humanities naturally ends.

10. EMIS’s Final Sentence on Beauty

Beauty is the result of a structure being successfully recognized by the system at the lowest energy cost in time.

Appendix: EMIS Pseudo-code Definition

Beauty =
    Pattern
    where
        Recognition_Energy_Cost → minimum
        Predictability → maximum
        Compression_Ratio → high

Conclusion

Beauty is not the victory of Meaning, but the victory of Physical Constraints.

One-sentence summary of EMIS Aesthetic Theory:

Beauty is the user interface of Physics.

We perceive beauty because the object conforms to the flow of energy in its underlying structure.

Ugly is inefficient; Beauty is optimal.

When Energy, Structure, and Time have explained everything, “Aesthetics” remains only as historical value.

Consequences

EMIS deconstructs beauty, and two things will happen:

1 Enrage hipsters and artists: They will say EMIS has vulgarized art and is a demon of mechanical materialism. 2 Conquer AI and neuroscientists: They will nod furiously. Because this explains why images generated by AI (based on statistical laws) are often very “beautiful,” and why we can train AI to evaluate beauty.

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