This is my first time coming across this theory of beauty. It rhymes with my world model, yet has the flavor of gluing siloed ideas in a novel way. Hence I find it beautiful! I must have received a strong prediction reward :)
Jokes aside, I think there’s something subtle here that can be glimpsed by considering the example of the expert musician. As you mentioned, they have honed their predictive world model in a specific slice of the sensory realm. But this moved their sense of beauty. A simple song that a musical novice will find catchy and easy to sing along to, the expert musician might find monotonous and boring.
Therefore beauty is at this edge of novelty and predictability because it’s an incentive to increase our predictive power. Not just over generations through evolution as you suggest, but also within a lifetime. We get a strong reward signal when we tackle increasingly complex patterns and successfully predict them. Climbing the ladder of predictable complexity in whichever subjects we choose to become expert in.
This kind of bootstrap to complexity through the ever receding mirage of beauty may be a good explanation for the development of language, human specialization, and complex social structures.
I very much agree with everything you propose here. There is indeed this incentive to climb the ladder of complexity. I wrote more detailed about this, from the perspective of the refinement of ones taste in "Taste is like physics, porn, and grammar". And indeed, I think the pursuit of beauty is more fundamental to what characterizes humans than it sometimes is given credit for by people with hard science perspectives.
thank you for writing this article. I've always joked that American Common churches lost the Baroque flair & replaced it with DROP CEILINGS & culture has noticeably suffered.
Allow me to recommend the sublime beauty in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, here he is talking about Beauty:
Beauty is momentary in the mind—
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden's choral.
Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death's ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.
This is my first time coming across this theory of beauty. It rhymes with my world model, yet has the flavor of gluing siloed ideas in a novel way. Hence I find it beautiful! I must have received a strong prediction reward :)
Jokes aside, I think there’s something subtle here that can be glimpsed by considering the example of the expert musician. As you mentioned, they have honed their predictive world model in a specific slice of the sensory realm. But this moved their sense of beauty. A simple song that a musical novice will find catchy and easy to sing along to, the expert musician might find monotonous and boring.
Therefore beauty is at this edge of novelty and predictability because it’s an incentive to increase our predictive power. Not just over generations through evolution as you suggest, but also within a lifetime. We get a strong reward signal when we tackle increasingly complex patterns and successfully predict them. Climbing the ladder of predictable complexity in whichever subjects we choose to become expert in.
This kind of bootstrap to complexity through the ever receding mirage of beauty may be a good explanation for the development of language, human specialization, and complex social structures.
Just a thought.
I am glad you enjoyed it Jake! :)
I very much agree with everything you propose here. There is indeed this incentive to climb the ladder of complexity. I wrote more detailed about this, from the perspective of the refinement of ones taste in "Taste is like physics, porn, and grammar". And indeed, I think the pursuit of beauty is more fundamental to what characterizes humans than it sometimes is given credit for by people with hard science perspectives.
thank you for writing this article. I've always joked that American Common churches lost the Baroque flair & replaced it with DROP CEILINGS & culture has noticeably suffered.