A Natural History of Beauty — new (?!) Melting Asphalt post on the ecology and game theory of beauty meltingasphalt.com/a-natural-hist
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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)
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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
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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
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(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)
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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
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
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desserts: desserts are generally expensive by weight, it just happens that the end of the meal offers the best tradeoff of positive valence vs cost (plus it satisfies novelty-seeking after a hearty main course)
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