Kevin Simler

re common strategies for visual beauty, I think there's two main forces at work: 1. clean lines and smooth surfaces are strong signs of "can maintain homeostasis even under adverse conditions", which makes them useful as costly signal (plumage) or hard to counterfeit (flowers)

2. any kind of order can be proof of work, so why these patterns specifically? I suspect they need to be cheap to verify (so as to not impose unnecessary cost on cooperators) and the hardware most animals have for that is neural networks

and it may or may not be a coincidence that flowers look like form constants fun implication: other brain types (non-neural) will find other things cheap to verify and therefore beautiful; other modalities (smell, touch) will have different patterns

(this answers why deep-sea creatures are ugly: they don't really rely on sight. for all I know, the water flowing over their bodies may make really beautiful sounds if you're an abyss dweller)