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7:51

(In »Intensities and phenomena in a relationalist universe«)

Eternalist hypotheses are characterised by simplicity and purity, and it is for this reason that they are aesthetically pleasing to a constantly eternalising mind that is continuously wrestling with the complexity of existence. In the best case, that this is so can indicate intuition, but in the worst case it is more likely an example of autistic wishful thinking. A clear example of the physicists’ unfortunate attraction to Platonism is the constantly recurring idea that the discovery of the simple, the pure, and the aesthetically pleasing is a sign that physics is getting closer to the truth. The aesthetic eye is attracted to symmetries and, to take one example, the most efficient routes between the different nodes in complex systems. The banal reason that aesthetics leads us to arrive at precisely this fixation is that it is based what the human eye desires, but this eye is not some metaphysical truth agent per se, merely the constructionally dubious by-product of millions of years of Darwinian struggle for limited resources. In complex systems characterised by scarcity, efficiency is something extremely valuable. Thus the human eye appreciates and prefers what seems efficient. And what is more efficient in complex systems than the simple and pure, what takes the shortest route between the nodes, what keeps to the straight and clear without any tiring and time-consuming convolutions?