A. Health

1. related to interactions - not the absence of disease

Costanza 1992

six points 1) homeostasis, 2) absence of disease, 3) diversity or complexity, 4) stability of resilience, 5) vigor or scope for growth, and 6) balance between system components

proposed an overall system Health Index = Vigor + Organization_index + Resilience_index

Haskell et al. 1992

"An ecological system is healthy and free from "distress syndrome" if it is stable and sustainable - that is, if it is active and maintains its organization and autonomy over time and is resilient to stress."

Jorgensen 2002

"Remote components in a network co-operate through the network to the benefit of all components. We may therefore also call it the Gaia effect, because it can explain why the entire ecosphere is working as a cooperative unit in spite of only a few direct linkages."

Kay 1991 (from Jorgensen (2002) page 266)

integrity - system's ability to maintain itself

"exergy stored in the ecosystem could be a reasonable indicator of its structure"

2. health as an aesthetic characteristic

Berry 1972

"there is only one value: the life and health of the world."

"Esthetic value is always associated with sound values of other kinds"

3. Health as a metaphor

Lakoff and Johnson 1980.

pg 15 - health and life are up; sickness and death are down

Lakoff and Johnson 1999

pg 292 - human well-being is wealth

pg 299 - moral strength metaphor - moral strength equals uprightness, "when one is healthy and in control of things, one is typically upright and balanced"

pg 308 - "Morality as Health" - basic metaphor of "well-being is health" and extended to morality. immorality is a moral disease, impurities cause illness

pg 361 - "The Pythagorean Metaphor: The essence of being is number"

"The Pythagoreans saw ample confirmation for their metaphorical hypothesis when they found numerical relations everywhere they looked in nature. Numbers could be used to measure the earth (geometrics). Music seemed to operate according to numerical relations (scales, chords, meter, rhythm, pitch). The heavens were believed to move in numerically describable paths. Health was a matter of proper balance and proportion of elements."

Beauty

1. Beauty as integrity and stability

Leopold **** A Sand County Almanac.

"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

Berry, W. 1972

"Beauty is wholeness; it is health in the ecological sense of amplitude and balance. And ecology is long-term economics. "

"Esthetic value is always associated with sound values of other kinds"

Schumacher 1973

pg 10 - .. "a life-style designed for permanence. to give only three preliminary examples: in agriculture and horticulture, we can interest ourselves in the perfection of production methods which are biologically sound, build up soil fertility, and produce health, beauty, and permanence."

pg 20 - "Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful."

pg 22 - "There is wisdom in smallness if only on account of the smallness and patchiness of human knowledge, which relies on experiment far more than on understanding.

pg 61 - to help ordinary people to deal with science and technology. "To do so, the task of education would be, first and foremost, the transmission of ideas of value, of what to do with our lives."

Bateson 2002 page 5

"seems to be a law of cultural evolution according to which the oversimplified ideas will always displace the sophisticated and the vulgar and hateful will always displace the beautiful. Any yet the beautiful persists."

Rene Dubos - discussed on page 88 of Orr 1992. Quoting Orr - not Dubos

"Rene Dubos once state that our greatest disservice to our children was to give them the belief that ugliness was somehow normal. But disordered landscapes are not just an aesthetic problem. Ugliness signifies a more fundamental disharmony between people and between people and the land. Ugliness is the, I think, the surest sign of disease, or what is now being called "unsustainability."

2. Beauty as something that needs our protection

Scarry 1999

beauty begs to be replicated

"Beauty prompts a copy of itself."

pg 28 - "So far error has been talked about as a cognitive event that just happens to have beauty -- like anything else -- as one of its objects. But that description, which makes error independent of beauty, may itself be wrong. The experience of "being in error" so inevitably accompanies the perception of beauty that it begins to seem one of its abiding structure features."

pg 31 - "What is beautiful is in league with what is true because truth abides in the immortal sphere."

pg 64 - "Aquina's famous setting forth of the threefold division of beauty into integrity, proportion, and claritas --"

<!-- see the three part description of health by Ulanowicz -->

pg 80 - "We saw the fact that something is perceived as beautiful is bound up with an urge to protect it, .."

pg 84 - discussing Kant's ideas, "The sublime is great; the beautiful "can also be small". The sublime is simple, the beautiful is multiple.The sublime is principled, noble, righteous; the beautiful is compassionate and good hearted."

beauty is related to fairness, fairness is related to symmetry, fairness is the symmetry of everybody's relation to each other.

<!-- symmetry breaking and aesthetics -->

pg 115 - "Beauty may be either natural or artifactual; justice is always artifactual and is there assisted by any perceptual event that so effortlessly incites in us the wish to create. Because beauty repeatedly brings us face-to-face with our own powers to create, we know where and how to locate those posers when a situation of injustice calls on use to create ...."

 

Kant ????

differentiates between the beautiful and the sublime

3. Beauty as a concept or solution that is elegant and simple

Levin 1999.

page 98. " pg. 98. The power of simple models is that they isolate the essential truths, stripping away details that obscure the relevant dynamic features. there is beauty in the diversity of nature; indeed that is the subject of this book. But there is elegance and and basic understanding to be found in the general patterns that emerge from consideration of that diversity, and it is the illumination of those patterns that turns anecdotal reporting into science."

Flake 2001

Title of the book is "The computational beauty of nature: Computer explorations of fractals, chaos, complex systems and adaptation"

pg 3 - the answer to many questions about similarity of structures is that "Nature is frugal", which would seem to be Flake's link to beauty, in the sense that it is "elegant" to solve problems simply, frugally.

 

Henri Poincare' (quoted at the beginning of Flake's book)-

"If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living. Of course I do not here speak of that beauty that strikes the senses, the beauty of qualities and appearances; not that I undervalue such beauty, far from it, but it has nothing to do with science; I mean that profounder beauty which comes from the harmonious order of the parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp."

Koren 1994

Wabi-Sabi - deceptively simple, showing the wear of careful, respectful use, never finished

4. Beauty has some relationship to the spiritual

Berry, Thomas 1999

pg 178 "In America the pervasive spirit presences was experienced as essentially benign. This sense of a benign universe found expression in the Navaho expression to "go into beauty." Beauty is a way of expressing that numinous presence that is pervasive throughout the universe. "

numinous \NOO-min-us; NYOO-\, adjective:
1. Of or pertaining to a numen; supernatural.
2. Indicating or suggesting the presence of a god; divine; holy.
3. Inspiring awe and reverence; spiritual.

http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/archive/2002/08/23.html

5. Measurement of beauty

from Klinger and Salingaros (????)

propose to independent descriptors -T, a measure of information and H, a measure of harmony or symmetry

Stiny and Gips (1978) - algorithmically-based aesthetic measures

Birkoff (1933) - tried to quantify beauty mathematically

Kaandrop, Jaap A. and Janet E. Kubler, 2001

title of the book is "The algorithmic beauty of seaweeds, sponges, and corals"

but, I couldn't find any explicit description of why these algorithms are beautiful

Lars (sys sci)

algorithms that generate beautiful patterns

Dora Raymaker

edge of complexity - patterns generated by CAs

Rivers Cuomo (Weezer) tried to discover the algorithm that Kurt Cobain used

Ruth Hines 1991

"Accounting quantifies. But can I meaningfully put a money equivalent on the Rubber Tree, my friend?"

if she cut the tree down - " And I would be friendless and alone. Out of touch with my roots in nature, I would be adrift, alienated and separated, and I would experience the apparent meaningless of life so widely felt in this age of technological and material progress."

"Nature can be given a prominence in accounting reports without reducing it to a number. Quantifying our environment must inevitably further alienate people from nature."

"the best thing I can do for nature... to make an issue of refusing to speak of nature in the language of number."

Ruth Hines 1988

real-izing objects in order to account for them

told as a story similar to the Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda

6. Perception of beauty

Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia

need to check this - I got if from Roger Wightman's paper

"the most intense aesthetic experiences of nature are likely to catch one by surprise. Beauty is felt as the sudden contact with an aspect of reality that one has not known before."

Life

Rosen -

life is what evolves - patterns of continuity

Alexander

strong centers - symmetry that indicates movement from a point, not perfect

 

Value of these