God is found within beauty or, more importantly, harmony

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I've heard beauty is within the eye of the beholder, but if something harmonizes with their frequency, that's where beauty is found. What harmonizes with one person's frequency might not harmonize with another, but its still a harmony. It isn't any kind of dissonance when something clicks with someone, even if what is clicking with them might be a disharmony to someone else. If we can all find a common harmonization (universal love for our fellow man and the universe). I think that's where our greatest potential lay at.

Some people find Jesus Christ in a ham sandwich. Religion and God appears in various ways to all sorts of inspired and pitifully deformed minds and can result in benefits and horrible torture and vicious massacre. The eye of the beholder is nothing to be secure about.

god doesn't exist much like beauty and harmony.

Have you ever heard a melody that stirred up your inner being? That's beauty and harmony. When you say beauty doesn't exist, you're saying subjective experience doesn't exist or that its irrelevant, when in reality, subjective experience is the only thing that gives humanity any value. The fact there's a conscious observer seeing the world in their own way and that they're not just a mass of non-observant cogs and wheels is the only reason why morality, contemplation, or philosophy or the world has any meaning or purpose to the individual at all..

Last edited by JNathanK on 24 Nov 2010, 8:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

What about the holocaust or the holdolomore? Those were rooted in very materialistic ideologies that viewed people as non-free will entities completely enslaved to naturalistic, external laws. They had the same problems with Calvanism, which also dispassionately viewed people as non-free will objects. If someone is a humanitarian like Carl Sagan or a missionary that gives people medical attention, it really doesn't matter what their ideology or theory of the universe they hold. All that matters is that they have a love of other people.

Maybe it was a good ham sandwich and tasted fanf*ckingtastic. lol. If that's where they find God, I don't see that as being any less valid than finding God in some grand revelation where the heavens opened up and they were transmitted all the secrets of the universe. In fact, the ham sandwich is probably a more likely candidate to find God, because I think God is in some of the most mundane things and is highly accessible to everyone, whether people realize it or not. You don't need a guru to find God. God is consciousness itself.

Last edited by JNathanK on 25 Nov 2010, 2:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I am quite conscious without God. No doubt you would find my opinion of your beliefs totally insulting.

I don't listen to music. I must have some sensory issue with music. How about deaf people?



This is just appealing to wishful consequence.



Fact: the vast vast majority of the universe does not have a shed of consciousness.

Deaf people find harmony in other sensory forms. I'm just saying music is one variety. You could find harmony in a painting too.




Wishful consequence? I'm just saying that the subjective experience of happiness, harmony, whatever you wanna call it, is very real for the rational observer and gives credibility to it as a phenomenon.



How do you know this? As I said in another post, out brains are made of matter, were conscious, so matter has some sort of conscious aspect about it. Our consciousness functions off the properties of electrons, so electrons, at least, have some properties about them that are conscious., just as they have properties that allow for ionic or molecular bonding. There's plenty of evidence that shows that much more in the universe is conscious than our selves. Now self awareness is another issue. I see that as a feedback loop created by the complexity of brain that converts interactions between matter into mental symbolism, like language and memory that's consciously perceived by the individual.

Last edited by JNathanK on 24 Nov 2010, 11:23 pm, edited 2 times in total.

"God is found within beauty, or more importantly, within harmony"

God's absence is found within ugliness, or more importantly, disharmony.

Quip vs. quip!

That being said, disharmony is a threat to God, while harmony is not a proof of God. The reason being that harmony is possible by less than optimal beings. Disharmony is incompatible with the plans of an optimal being.

Actually, I really doubt that the Nazis held to such a view. The Soviets maybe, but not so much the Nazis.

That being said, those views are correct.


Does not work. By the same reasoning, electrons have some properties about them that are delicious, given that the flavor of steak functions "off of" the properties of electrons as well. In fact, all of reality functions off of the properties of electrons.


Unless we're talking about animals, I think some clarity is necessary.

You misunderstand my point, and I should have made it more clear. God, to me, is mainly a potential that humanity can find to bring itself to its fullest potential. All matter follows the same rules and comes from the same singularity. The reason why there's a sense of so much isolation from the rest of the universe in the individual is that the singularity has become folded and entangled on itself. The matter itself is very homogeneous, but the interaction between matter is very heterogeneous, and the heterogeneous nature is why we have existence as we do today. Its not a bad thing, and part of why the universe is interesting. Its all fine and good until things like ego make us lose touch with our commonality with the universe. Inflated sense of ego is a lot of the reason why people do bad things to other people. When someone kills another person and doesn't think anything of it, there's a serious dissonance to it, because you're ultimately harming yourself, being that you came from the same singularity as the other person. To me, beauty is proof that you can find harmony with things external to yourself like nature. Agape love is probably the greatest force of all, because it puts you in connection with your fellow man, Its a harmonization unlike no other. Its realizing you're made of the same stuff, that your commonalities are greater than your differences, and that we should not fight each other. The only way I can put love in logical terms is in the form of a kind of consonance.



No, the Nazi view was very materialistic. They felt that the Jews were genetically inferior and that their perceived criminality was due to genetics that nobody could change. Being the cultural egoists they were, they assumed the Germans to be the most advanced race and that they were catalyzing the progress of human evolution by sterilizing the population of impurities.

Deliciousness is a state of consonant awareness, so I have no objection to that. Human evolution has taken advantage of consonant states of awareness inherent in matter and re-routed it to purposes for survival, like experiencing a deliciousness when you eat something with lots of nutrients in it.


Unless we're talking about animals, I think some clarity is necessary.[/quote]

Yah, animals are one state of awareness, but what are the elemental building blocks of experience? Why do we experience at all? Why do we experience colors, emotions, flavors, heat, cold? Staunch materialists will say that colors are labels for the signals produced in the brain that correlate to rods and cones in the eye that react to certain wave lengths of visible light. However, why is there a label at all? More importantly, why is this label experiential and not pure process? I think its that the activity of electrons actually experience what we experience in a very elemental, basic form. Maybe when an electron in a close orbit to the nucleus, it experiences pure blue, or when its in an outer orbit it experiences pure red, and when its a free electron it experiences pure sadness or pure saltiness or whatever. ...and the experience by a human is ultimately a tapestry formed by the elemental experiences from the individual electrons that make up all the activity in the brain. This is where I'm coming from. The idea that consciousness is something that just spontaneously comes out of nowhere when a bunch of computer processes happen at one time doesn't really explain anything. It has to be built up from something. That's like saying gravitational fields just happen when a lot of mass occupies space. It doesn't explain anything. There has to be baser components to gravity.

I don't know where you get your ideas about electrons and somehow leave out photons, quarks, positrons and all those other busy little consciousnesses who are so compassionate. The Higgs boson is getting a bit pissed off.

Last edited by Sand on 25 Nov 2010, 12:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

There is no "sense of commonality with the universe" other than that which is manufactured. There is no deep connection between human nature and ontology, simply because people are just neural programs.

No, there is no dissonance to it. You've simply created a theology, and then have re-rationalized things around it. Prove the theology though in the first place. I may have the same origin as person X, but X and I may have very different interests. Harming X to achieve my interests is straightforwardly promoting those interests. There is no necessary connection between my interests and those of the universe.

Beauty = Harmony is an assumption. I don't accept your assumption. Prove it.

Frankly, I think you've simply created a theology. Perhaps an interesting one, but one that "ought to be killed".


Ok? But the problem with this is that they weren't deriving this from material facts about Jews. Instead, the entire notion of purity arrived at is very "essentialist", and essentialism is very non-materialist.


Deliciousness is an interaction between taste-buds and certain chemicals. Saying that it is contained by electrons is just ridiculous.

Either you're saying that "evolution has taken advantage of things that can help it survive", or you are making the much more bizarre claim that deliciousness is an inherent part of reality, and evolution has just DISCOVERED deliciousness. The latter makes little sense.


Why not the atoms themselves? Hell, why not the molecules? Maybe even let's push it back to quarks or quantum packets. I think your reasoning "it goes back to electrons" is ad hoc. You're outright making stuff up about "electron experiences". Especially since those qualities are only experienced by certain neural structures. If the issue were just pure electrons, then I hardly see the reason why damaging specific parts of the brain would cause such damage to our conscious processes.

I think you're using ad hoc regresses to justify a latent essentialism for no reason. Basically, I don't think that your need for something "more basic" really makes sense, as there is really no proper end to the right regression, as each law you could propose simply goes back to an earlier law, so... I don't see why one terminus is better than another. Even further, I think that what you call a "baser component" is really not a more analytically satisfying answer, but rather, I think you require that reality has "essences" working as part of its underlying nature, and so you claim the essence is satisfactory, even though the notion of the essence is ad hoc, and even obscures a lot of other truths we recognize. For instance, "electrons as consciousness", just begs the question of why particular arrangement is so important, as human consciousness and experiences are so deeply contingent on neural processes, but why this would occur is really really really unclear if "electrons are consciousness", but makes a LOT of sense under the computer processes position.

Sorry to nitpick, but I'm a composer and synth programmer.

The concept of "beauty" in music is a learned response. The harmonic ratio or series is a mathematical relationship of overtones to a principal frequency or fundamental. That's all there is to it.

Now, as to how to USE the harmonic series: In theory, a tone or timbre can be DESCRIBED as combination of a number of harmonic coefficients (overtones) relative to its fundamental frequency. The characteristic sound of any instrument can be reproduced by analyzing the relative amplitudes of sine waves that are harmonic coefficients of any given fundamental and representing them proportionally. String and brass timbres tend to resemble sawtooth waveforms, which can roughly be recreated by combining all harmonic coefficients and emphasizing certain coefficients as needed. A flute timbre roughly resembles a triangle wave mixed with a saw wave--a triangle wave being approximated by using all odd-numbered coefficients and inverting the phase of the coefficients but not the phase of the fundamental. A clarinet tone is somewhere between a saw and a square/pulse, so using all odd-numbered coefficients is a good way to get started. Bell-like and metallic tones can be made by starting with a filtered saw or triangle wave and adding harmonic coefficients that have been detuned in order to produce a characteristic inharmonic timbre.

Subtractive synthesis is accomplished by taking pre-made timbres (with a full range of harmonic coefficients) and filtering/emphasizing certain bands of harmonics in order to fine-tune the timbre into what the sound designer/synthesist wants.

That's the basics on the components of sounds, but it does not describe beauty.

As a composer, I'm well aware of certain aesthetic tricks musicians can use for effect. Something I use regularly and will sometimes teach to my piano students is basic chord voicing, especially when learning to play by ear and/or improvise. A commonly used trick is the I-V-I voicing in the left hand on the piano. This approximates the harmonic series for lower notes, bringing more upper coefficients closer in line with harmonic coefficients and gives an impression of "space." This works because the I-V-I ratio is 2:3:4, and all harmonics above fall neatly within that ratio as though the three notes (like C-G-C, a perfect 5th+perfect octave) sound as one. This is also the reason why power chords on distorted electric guitars sound so cool. Any other combination of imperfect intervals just sound like mud.

As fundamental frequencies increase, the harmonic intervals between fundamentals decrease, which is why clusters of high-pitched notes on the piano don't sound terribly ugly together. There is a high level of inharmonicity, but the fundamentals are so close together that it goes relatively unnoticed and any clashes among harmonic coefficients are pushed beyond the limits of human hearing.

Thus it has become fashionable in popular music, ESPECIALLY contemporary Christian music, to rely almost entirely on unresolved dissonances to make music interesting. A hundred years ago, these kinds of sounds would have been outrageous because they sound "ugly." But on the other hand, any kind of present-day music driven by pure, triadic harmonies sounds contrived to our ears.

Perception of beauty is the product of learned responses to the culture around us. Triadic harmony is fairly unwelcome to our ears in THIS day and age whereas at one time dissonances were to either be avoided altogether or resolved by VERY strict procedures. Pop music has always tended to be conservative (aesthetically speaking) because of commercial demands. So if an aesthetically conservative media (radio, MTV, etc.) has become comfortable with unresolved dissonances, then our cultural definition of beauty has changed

So applying harmonic relationships to human behavior doesn't work because of the total degree of sympathy (vibrating together at harmonic coefficient frequencies) that it requires. However, what makes human interaction "interesting" is the presence of so much dissonance--the ability to dare to be different and non-conforming. It's like my composition teacher's description of augmented 6th chords, what he called the "wiener schnitzel, pepperoni, and escargot" lesson (any musicians/music theory buffs on here who don't get it please PM me and I'll explain). Everyone is different, and the differences--the dissonances--make up a grander picture or experience of beauty that can't be discerned by simply peering carefully at microscopic points or listening for individual notes from one instrument or voice.

The only way a harmonic model for human relationships can work is if all mankind is on the same string.

Now, as to whether God is found within beauty or harmony--I'm sure that anything that strikes a person as beautiful hints of God's desire for a perfect creation. I also think that the inherent value of formant proportions of pressure waves in specific ways in creating beautiful timbres (or ugly ugly) is a sign of God's intelligence in designing the underlying building blocks of sound. I think perhaps an even better way of finding God is in the way in which He allows us to perceive these relationships and the gift of creative potential He gave us in putting those things to work for us.

Your whole 'argument' is nothing but making the baseless assertion that humans are conscious (without even defining what conscious means). Then you assert that everything are conscious.
Ironically that in turn defeats your whole argument. Namely, how the 'basic consciousness' explains 'human consciousness' as we know? How does your theory explain any more than strict law of physics, which does not assume any mysterious consciousness? Your whole idea of consciousness is empty.

Well, what I'm getting at is that just as two wave forms can harmonize with one another when they both meet a proper proportion (like how a wave form of half the size of another(one octave bellow the other) harmonizes, the sensual information of a song or a painting that interfaces the mental makeup of an observer can harmonize with them. Really, explaining aspects of of consciousness in terms of harmony and disharmony is the only thing that makes sense. Its sort of like a good meal. There's 5 primary tastes (salty, sweet, sour, bitterness, and umami) When they are arranged in different ratios, people will have different reactions based on what type of food they were raised on in their culture. However, some things, nobody or almost nobody will like. Like nobody will eat dirt, no more than anyone will like the sound of chaotic scratching on a chalk board. I think pretty much everyone likes the taste of pizza, just as everyone likes the sound of Mozart. They might not eat or listen to both all the time, but I'd be hard pressed to find someone who thinks either are terrible.

While there is a lot of individual preference, there is also a lot of universalities in sensual appeal. Certain compositions invoke the same emotions from everyone from any culture, no matter how remote. Like, everyone can tell, from Urdu to Canadian, that the Moonlight Sonatta conveys sadness, that Helter Skelter conveys anger, and that Jingle Bells conveys happiness. It might not invoke any of those emotions in people depending on what mood they're in, but the fact they can recognize the intent shows there's a common thread. I couldn't agree with you more on that last sentence. That's a better way of looking at it. I might PM so I can get a better glimpse of music theory.

Web Page Name

Here's one of the studies that explain what I'm talking about.

Could this be based in some instinct that developed in human ancestors a million years ago? maybe. ....but the fact that something can invoke the same feelings, and that we feel at all shows there is a

The variation in musical as well as food taste across various cultures is immense. You are searching for genetic similarities and that calls for experiment, not conjecture.