The beauty of animals and plants give people: Yunnan Tour III The Final Chapter

People's memories are always biased. On the second day after going to Yunnan, we set off at 7 a.m., but we were actually still visiting Pu 'er. The first attraction in Yunnan is not to leave Pu 'er and go straight to Xishuangbanna, but to visit the Taiyang Lake National Forest Park located in Pu' er City. This seems to be in contrast to the Botanical Garden I later visited in Xishuangbanna. In addition to the dense jungle, this forest park is home to various animals. Later, the Xishuangbanna Botanical Garden I visited was a tourist attraction in Xishuangbanna, another area of Yunnan. Although this botanical garden is a national-level scientific research institution, because it studies tropical plants, various tropical plants also grow in it. The animals and plants in these two attractions form a contrast.

Trail Map of Pu 'er Sun Lake National Forest Park

Xishuangbanna Botanical Garden

This gave me the opportunity to merge time and space, put the animals and plants of these two attractions together to play with some words, which is probably the so-called function of human thinking. Linear time moves forward, and only human memory and thinking can make its linearity vary a little. Three-dimensional space is three-dimensional. It does not flow linearly like time, but its three-dimensional characteristics can also be bonded to time through human memory and thinking. In this way, thinking about the bonding of time and space and the human behavior after thinking may turn our feelings about time and space into readable words, visible pictures, visible and audible videos, etc.

These words, pictures or videos record our aesthetic feelings, moral feelings, and deeper feelings in life. Moral feelings are complex, but life feelings are even more complex. But although people's feelings about beauty are different, it seems easier to find common ground. At least, the Dai people, Jino people, and other ethnic minorities in Yunnan probably have the same aesthetic feelings as the Han people about the animals and plants that nature gives them life.

Nature and humans, through their own activities, place countless tangible objects in time and space, including of course the animals and plants that nature gives them life. During this trip to Yunnan, these tangible objects of nature give people a beautiful feeling. It is so beautiful that people always want to keep that moment feeling forever in the memory of the brain, so they use a camera to collect these natural states one by one into electronic storage.

Animals in Sun Lake National Forest Park:

Rhino

elephant

owl

beetle

little panda

bird figure

Pictures of plants from Xishuangbanna Botanical Garden

water lily

monarch Lotus

Camellia japonica

Buttercup

frangipani

Is the beauty of natural objects determined by the subject's state of mind? Or is it the pleasant feeling generated by the target object projected into the subject's brain? Now I really have time to think about this inexplicable but mysterious metaphysical problem.

In the 19th year of the COVID-19 epidemic, there are always countless fears and melancholy that attack your state of mind from time to time. You worry about yourself, and often worry about your children far away. These worries are actually what the Chinese idiom calls alarmist worries and are useless. However, if you have not cultivated your state of mind, these worries often come uninvited and cannot be chased away. In addition to using the pursuit of knowledge to dispel fear and worry, nature is the best medicine. Those animals and plants that are full of vitality and spirituality, the beauty they bring to people, at least when you feel beautiful, fear and worry naturally leave you obediently.

In this regard, to gain a feeling of beauty, there must be a projection from the target object on you. Either it is a rhythmic sound, or a picture with a wonderful figure, or a delicious fragrance, or... The beauty of music, the beauty of taste, etc., are more mysterious and mysterious. Let me just resort to a little self-feeling words about visual aesthetics.

The elements of visual beauty may be the symmetry, balance and coordination of tangible objects. The physical structure of all animals and plants is without exception, and all are symmetrical structures. Frangipani, owls and large ladybugs in the above pictures are particularly obvious. Many people like to take photos of reflections. Isn't this reflection a model expression of symmetry? The image of the real world is reflected under the water and becomes a mirror image symmetrical to the real image. It is naturally a deformed symmetry, but it is indeed beautiful.

The so-called symmetrical and abnormal beauty of mirror images is probably a gift given to mankind by nature. Symmetric metamorphosis is also manifested in living things. There is a key to the beauty of living things, they are dynamic. The dynamics of animals and plants will produce the so-called symmetry breaking beauty in the changes in their behaviors, which brings the discussion of aesthetic beauty to a new level. Further abstraction of the aesthetic feeling of symmetry has become an origin of a priori proposition in physics philosophy. Therefore, Weir, a famous physicist and German expert on symmetry, has a famous saying:

"All transcendental statements in physics originate from symmetry."

(Transferred from the title page of "Symmetry" edited by Wang Yiran and Wang Mingqiu)

Symmetry, a transcendental statement from aesthetics to physics, seems to have left aesthetics. But the most abstract study of symmetry is not aesthetics, physics or biology. This "most abstract" should belong to logic. Since Pierce in the United States began to pay attention to relational logic, the most important relationship in relational logic is symmetry. The physical, aesthetic and other characteristics of symmetry seem to have all been abstracted in this discipline and become a pure relational characteristic. Our human thinking requires examining a variety of different relationships.

Okay, that's all for my Yunnan tour. I should continue to care about Lewis's modal logic. The relational semantics of modal logic study various relationships, naturally including this symmetry.