Can Beauty be Considered an Attractor State of Embodiment?

Over the past few weeks, our Deliberately Developmental Spaces Project has encouraged us to have more in depth discussions on moral development and moral agency, and to try and get a more clear sense of what these things mean. Like many conversations around such broad topics, though, it can be difficult to get a concrete sense of what these things refer to, and how they can be conceptualized or measured across different contexts.

Challenges in considering moral agency

One of the biggest challenges in considering moral agency, in our own view, is that moral agency is fundamentally related to ‘embodiment’, and not merely decision making, as is sometimes suggested. Decision making itself is not merely a calculated process of figuring out ‘the right thing to do’; instead, our decisions are deeply related to our ‘sense of embodiment’, especially as it relates to our intuition and what we feel from moment to moment and in different contexts. Additionally, if ‘morals’ are concerned with ‘the good life’, the ‘good life’ can hardly be viewed as a mere decision making mechanism, but also should be viewed as the capacity to feel and experience the good life, however one might conceptualize ‘the good life.’

The second challenge we consider with moral agency-consistent with the idea that moral agency is not merely a capacity for an individual to make isolated decisions- is that this embodied capacity is a relational one, and one that is particularly sensitive to and dependent on place and community. Indeed, when we consider ‘moral agency’ here, it is not so far off from this notion of relational well being, or interbeing, or the notion that one's own well being is highly dependent on the well being of others in their surroundings. Such a focus has also been explored in detail from one of our partners in the project, ILALI , who’s approach to embodiment as it relates to place and development has been particularly insightful. Additionally, some of our current and upcoming residencies, like building a citizen science of contemplation, and our residency on interbeing, aim to consider some of these questions more deeply. By experiencing how relationships and place contribute to building knowledge, we are currently aiming to explore, among other things, techniques that make sense in bridging contemplative practice with more scientific ones.

Given these two challenges, we want to raise a question as it relates to moral agency and moral development more broadly, which, as the title suggests, is: does it make sense to consider beauty as a potential attractor state of human embodiment? 

Attractor states 

Attractor states are the stable tendencies, or outcomes, of complex adaptive systems.  If a system continually returns to some kind of individuated pattern, like, for example, the temperature of the human body at 37 degrees celsius, this can be conceptualized as an attractor. Examples of attractor states are found in all different kinds of systems, and part of the reason we introduce this concept into the conversation on moral agency is due to its interdisciplinary capacity. 

Beauty 

By beauty, we mean the sense of embodiment, or the moment to moment experience of one's daily life, which might be meaningful and mystifying enough so that it might be considered as being beautiful.  The emphasis here is not on beautiful looking things, or contemplating beautiful things, but instead embodied experiences of the present moment which are subtle enough whereby the mundane seems both uniquely and consistently beautiful. And so, we are much more interested in the human body's capacity to create a deep and lasting sense of embodiment which might be considered beautiful, calm, or peaceful, and how this might be viewed as an attractor.

Beauty then in this sense is concerned with not only the subtle experience of beauty in the present moment, but also how this relates to decision making capacities which maintain this potential attractor, and exploring how this dynamic might also work on the social level.

Does it make sense to consider beauty a potential attractor state of human embodiment? 

We think that this question might be interesting for a few reasons. First, fields like neuroaesthetics have emerged as ways to explore how the brain responds in relationship to beauty, and other research in neuroscience has used the language of attractor networks to consider how cognitive processes like memory can be considered in these terms.  

Second, maintaining such a feeling of beauty requires certain boundaries, whether those are understood as decision making efforts or ways of directing our attention. Attractor states necessarily involve boundaries, since the attractor is a particular state or processes, which is separate from a different potential state or process. Although the point might seem obvious, the similarities here might be interesting to explore.

Third, processes like embodiment are inherently difficult to translate into words, especially scientific concepts, and we think it might be useful to incorporate more transdisciplinary language into some of these more contemplative states.

Whatever the case, the questions, concepts, and language around ‘morals’ and ‘the good life’ have always been inherently difficult to wrap one's head around, particularly because it deals with the nature of embodiment and lends to larger and more mystifying questions. A consideration such as this one is more of an open ended suggestion as a way to help illuminate our conversations around some of our projects and residencies, and as is often the case in research, asking new questions can be just as meaningful as finding new answers.

If you would like to contribute to the project or read more about our conversations on moral agency, you can do so here.