A few examples of this implicit premise in action: From aesthetics, politics, morality, principles, and passions.
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Aesthetics: How can we best understand our sense of beauty? The standard EP view is Pinker’s visual cheesecake story: we like paintings of voluptuous women, sometimes exaggeratedly so, b/c such paintings exploit our evolved predispositions. Seems right.
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But that’s only a small fraction of what’s interesting or puzzling about our sense of aesthetics. Take modern art for example. Almost none of that is cheesecake. Some of it is purposely grotesque. Other parts are highly cerebral.
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And in almost all instances the artists message is purposely opaque, with hidden gems that take a lot of detective work and art criticism to uncover. Hard to explain that with cheesecake. Cheesecake also can’t explain why we like originals more than replicas. (See Paul Bloom.)
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Take other components of our sense of aesthetics. In North East India, where I did some field work, many (male) villagers had two finger nails extra-long. Why? They told me it was beautiful. Wasn’t to me. Presumably not cheesecake.
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I like antique wooden furniture, where you can seeen tiny squiggly lines in it, only producable by slow acting worms. Takes hundreds of years to make. If you didn’t know better. You would think the furniture is just full of cracks.
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I also like artisanal chocolate. Particularly tasty is this grainy uneven stuff found in Boston, that a machine would have a hard time making, cause machines make smooth consistent chocolate.
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And for jewelery, I really like hammered metals. You know the kind that has to be done, unevenly, with a human and a hammer.
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Turns out the arts and crafts movement was also into furniture that couldn’t be machine made and not so evenly hammered silver. But only after the industrial revolution.
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The finger nails in north east India are not the only thing strange about their aesthetics. My R.A. there also liked eating ice cream, not because she liked the taste, but because it made her fatter, which her boyfriend, she assured me, liked.
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Since human sexuality needs to be directed on complex arbitrary patterns (like our gendered bodies and genitals, and very specific partners), it opens up potential for fixating on more advanced weirdness (kink, paraphilia).
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