A Natural History of Beauty — new (?!) Melting Asphalt post on the ecology and game theory of beauty meltingasphalt.com/a-natural-hist
11
75
238
Conversation
Replying to
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)
1
11
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
1
1
6
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
2
4
(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)
in fact the analogy to the "high creation cost, but low verification cost" design principle of blockchain stuff here is so strong that I feel wary about my own hypothesis, the framing seems overly powerful
1
4
on to the other things to ponder:
appetite for novelty is probably the counterpart of mutation: it is to encourage and exploit mutations, because as a species one doesn't want to get stuck in a genetic/aesthetic rut
2
1
Show replies