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What are examples of things about existence that are truly beautiful?


Not the person who you replied to, however:

I'm not sure exactly how to explain this, but the seemingly infinite level of "detail" or "texture" or "complexity" to our universe. No matter how small or large you go, there's always some patterns, some structures, some details to be seen. There's always some other perspective or way of grouping and organizing to reveal new information. The complexity is infinitely deep, wide and layered. Some of that I think is inherent, and some of it is what we create as living entities - which is a great privilege we enjoy.

Take a white painted wall made of drywall. Relatively uninteresting most of the time. But the potential amount of information about it is almost infinite:

* What are all the layers of construction needed to make it?

* What did it cost? For every cent of that money, where did it eventually go? All of them can be tracked from its creation until the end of the currency.

* What people designed the methods to construct it? What were their lives like, what led to them doing so?

* What does the surface look like if you were to look at it at 10x, 100x, 10,000x, etc. scale? How does all of that structure change when it's under pressure? Or wet? Or on fire? Or crushed? Or at different temperatures?

* What does it look like as molecules of air bounce off of it and it insulates the room?

* What are its physical properties? What does it look like in all the different wavelengths of light?

* What is it history, from the retrieval of the materials to its final destruction some time in the future? What is its eventual fate? Will it be destroyed to make room for a newer building? Or in a war? A natural disaster?

* What people were near it? What were they doing and why? Office workers? Secretaries? Programmers? Nurses? Was it separating people who were friends or hated each other?

* What's the history of the design of the pigment used on the wall? What previous pigments did it replace and why?

* If you look at the pattern of bumps and valleys on the surface, does it match some existing pattern? What mathematical formula would most closely re-create the surface variations? What's the closest match to that pattern anywhere in the universe, at any scale? Maybe there's some sand on a beach or a cluster of stars that when viewed from just the right angle matches the pits and valleys on the wall.

* What does the surface feel like? Not just for one person, but for all humans? If you were to take every single human who has ever lived and let them feel the wall, what would happen? Which ones would tell jokes? Which ones would remember something from their past? Which would have some interesting specialist perspective on it? Which ones would like it? Hate it? How would they all describe it?

We only have access to a tiny fraction of that information. But it's all there! You could spend an eternity studying a single blade of grass and it's relation to everything else and all of the history. There's always some new abstraction or perspective or way to look at everything.




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