The Beauty of Animals and Plants: The Final Chapter of Yunnan Tour No. 3
People's memory is always biased. On the second day of going to Yunnan, we set off at 7:00 in the morning, but we still visited Pu'er. The first scenic spot in Yunnan is not to leave Pu'er and go straight to Xishuangbanna, but to visit the Sun Lake National Forest Park in Pu'er City. This seems to be in contrast to the botanical garden I visited later in Xishuangbanna. In addition to the dense jungle, this forest park also has various animals inhabiting it. The Xishuangbanna Botanical Garden that I went to later was a scenic spot 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 grow in it. These two attractions, with their fauna and flora, form a perfect contrast.
Trail map of Pu'er Sun Lake National Forest Park
Xishuangbanna Botanical Garden
This gave me the opportunity to merge time and space, and put the animals and plants of these two attractions together to play with words. This is probably the function of the so-called human thinking. Linear time moves forward indefinitely, and only human memory and thinking can make some changes in its linearity. The three-dimensional space is three-dimensional, it does not flow linearly like time, but it can also glue its three-dimensional characteristics and time together through people's memory and thinking. In this way, the thinking of time-space bonding and human behavior after thinking may turn our feelings about time and space into readable text, visible pictures, visible and audible videos, and so on.
These words, pictures or videos record our aesthetic feelings, moral feelings, and deeper life feelings. Moral feelings are complex, and life feelings are even more complicated. But people's feelings about beauty, although there are many differences, seem to be easier to find common ground. At least the Dai people, the Jinuo people, and other ethnic minorities in Yunnan probably have the same aesthetic feeling for the animals and plants that nature gives life to them as the Han people.
Nature and human beings, through their own activities, place countless tangible objects in time and space, including of course the animals and plants that nature gives life to. This trip to Yunnan, these tangible objects of nature, it gives people a sense of beauty. It is so beautiful that people always want to keep that momentary feeling in the memory of the brain forever, so they use the camera to record these natural states of matter into electronic storage one by one.
Animals of Sun Lake National Forest Park:
rhino
elephant
owl
beetle
red panda
bird shadow
Pictures of plants in Xishuangbanna Botanical Garden
water lily
Wang Lian
Zhu Yinghua
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 projection of the target object into the subject's brain? Now I really have time to think about this inexplicable, but mysterious metaphysical problem.
In the Year of Gengzi, when the new crown epidemic is raging, there are always countless fears and melancholy to attack your state of mind from time to time. You worry about yourself, and often, your children overseas. These worries are actually what the Chinese idiom calls unfounded worries, which are useless. But if the state of mind is not cultivated, these worries often come uninvited and cannot be driven away. In addition to the pursuit of knowledge to dispel fear and worry, nature is the best panacea. Those animals and plants full of vitality and spirituality, the beauty they bring to people, at least at the moment when you feel the beauty, fear and worry will naturally leave you obediently.
In this regard, to obtain the feeling of beauty, there must be a projection of the target object to you. Or 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 bit of self-feeling words about visual beauty.
The elements of visual beauty may be the symmetry, balance and coordination of tangible objects. The physical structures of all animals and plants are almost without exception, all of which are symmetrical structures. The frangipani, owl and ladybug in the picture above are particularly evident. Many people like to shoot reflections. Isn't this reflection a typical example of symmetry? The image of the real world is reflected under the water surface, becoming a mirror image symmetrical with the real image, which is naturally a deformed symmetry, but it is indeed beautiful.
The so-called symmetrical and abnormal beauty of mirror images is probably a gift from nature to human beings. Symmetrical metamorphosis is also manifested in living bodies. There is a key to the beauty of living bodies, which is dynamic. The dynamics of animals and plants will produce the so-called beauty of broken symmetry in their behavior changes, which brings the discussion of aesthetics to another level. The further abstraction of the beauty of symmetry has become an origin of the transcendental propositions of the philosophy of physics in physics. Therefore, Weyl, a famous physicist and a German expert who studies symmetry, has a famous saying:
"All a priori statements in physics originate from symmetries."
(Reprinted from the title page of "Symmetry" edited by Wang Yiran and Wang Mingqiu)
Symmetry, a priori statement from aesthetics to physics, seems to leave aesthetics. But the most abstract symmetry research 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 be abstracted away in this discipline and become a purely relational characteristic. Our human thinking requires us to examine various relationships.
Well, that’s the end of Yunnan Tour. I should continue to pay attention to Lewis’s modal logic. The relational semantics of modal logic is to study various relationships, including this symmetry.