A tree that falls in the woods with no one around to hear it does not make a sound.
For the exact same reason, a sunset is not beautiful. Roses do not smell sweet.
All that is beautiful in the world is the result of random physical inputs being assembled like a glorious symphony by the incredible machine that is your mind.
The smell of a rose is just bits of rose particles drifting against your olfactory nerve. A sunset is just photons emitted by the sun, bouncing around against particles in the air and curving around the gravitational horizon of the Earth. A symphony is just the rattling of strings and reeds, ricocheting off the air around it.
“Just.”
Of course, all of those things can be sublimely beautiful. But that beauty is in you. We imagine that if we were to vanish, the sunset would still be there – but it wouldn’t be. Not in that way.
A platypus can sense electrical impulses from a distance. Migratory birds can sense magnetic fields. If you had either of those senses, then sometimes you would sense an electrical impulse or a magnetic field that was gorgeous. That would touch you in the way that the most transcendent mountain view or soaring symphony could.
If that’s difficult for you to picture (and I imagine it might be!), then remember – if you can’t imagine a magnetic field being heart-wrenching, then a creature who could detect magnetic fields but who didn’t have a sense of sight would probably have an equally hard time imagining how a sunset could be beautiful.
Imagine a migratory bird became sentient and could talk to you. It has this extra sense you don’t have, the ability to actually perceive magnetic fields. It doesn’t “see” them or “hear” them – those words describe other senses. Human language doesn’t have a word for that sense, because humans don’t have the sense itself. So the bird coins the term “kleet” for the sense. Then the bird says to you one day:
“If a magnetic field shifts and there are no birds to kleet it, does it make a kloot?”
Does it make a what? “A kloot.” Well, I don’t know. What’s a kloot? “A kloot is the word for something you kleet, the way a ‘sound’ is the word for something you hear.” Okay, then that answers your own question – if a kloot is just the word for when a bird kleets a magnetic field, then of course it doesn’t make a kloot without a bird around. The kloot is in the bird, not the magnetic field. I can’t kleet a magnetic field, after all.
Of all the phenomena in the universe, a tiny percentage is perceivable by humans. Within that tiny percentage, our brains make incredible beauty and bestow it upon our hearts. What a fortune it is to be a human, to be alive.
The Opportunity Machine 