Carlo M. Croce: Seeking Truth and Beauty

Rational action and truth-seeking

Beauty, A Road To The Truth

In this article I give a naturalistic-cum-formal analysis of the relation between beauty, empirical success, and truth. The analysis is based on the one hand on a hypothetical variant of the so-called ‘mere-exposure effect’ which has been more or less established in experimental psychology regarding exposure-affect relationships in general and aesthetic appreciation in particular (Zajonc, 1968,...

Morphogenesis: Eternal truth or ephemeral beauty.

The construction and destruction of the sand mandala (A) in Tibetan Buddhism symbolizes both the beauty of form and the fleeting nature of its existence. D’Arcy Thompson, in the second edition of his seminal 1917 book “On Growth and Form”, used the analogy of a milk splash (B) to illustrate such contrasting perfection and impermanence in biology. According to Thompson, morphology and morphogene...

Truth Is Beauty: Researching Embodied Conversational Agents

(1941) argues that the sole criterion for excellent research is that the researcher produces " beauty. " While seemingly ineffable and frustratingly imprecise, Hardy instead suggests that creating beauty is straightforward. First, the work must be accurate: erroneous results are useless. Second, one's peers must recognize the work to be interesting, exciting, elegant, and " cool. " While this s...

Seeking truth using different methods

Mathematics and physics are entirely different subjects, both in their methodology and results. The differences are illustrated with how they view randomness, enumeration, and truth. In physics, randomness can be an unknown, an observational error, an unpredictable event, or a quantum mystery. In math it is just part of probability theory. Mathematics has subtle properties of infinities that ph...