Why on Earth are women beautiful?
You gotta love these click-bait titles that attempt to explain the subjective nature of aesthetics. :-/
You gotta love these click-bait titles that attempt to explain the subjective nature of aesthetics. :-/
We tend to assume our brains as perfectly laid machines, but we know our meat computer is anything but perfect. What if it is "interference" from nearby systems? Maybe our sexual attraction subsystem shares some neurons with recognising striking sky colours and we find them beautiful, with no real evolutionary reason.
That would explain why we do or like many things that are not necessarily useful to survive. And this is also my pet theory of consciousness: it is just a side effect caused by our pre-frontal cortex, its effect on memory, creating a sense of past and the ability to simulate future events. Those mechanism resonate together to create what we call "awareness of the self", but it is not something we have evolved directly.
I think there is something to the idea that low Kolmogorov complexity is pretty.
I've also had a weird esthetic experience commuting by a bus once - it was a sunny winter day and along the road for dozens of kilometers there were power lines with unusually thick wires. There was a lot of contrast between white snow and black wires and they went up and down in a regular but slowly changing pattern that was very beautiful in the moment, but it's very hard to explain after the fact :) I was amazed by it despite commuting that same route 100s of times before and after that and never noticing it or caring about it.
I have a form of light synesthesia [2], where I intuitively see the concept of time and age as a three-dimensional line, that slowly morphs as I grow older. Whenever someone says "I'm x years old", I subconsciously place them somewhere on that line. (Now that I think of it, years too have a particular three dimensional structure in my mind)
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