acoustonaut:

Also, the things I describe over on @sinesalvatorem wrt doing math super fast or it feeling like beauty aren’t really that surprising when I think about it.

The brain does a lot of math really really really fast. It’s solving equations of parabolic motion any time it tells you where to position your hand to catch a ball. And what does that feel like? Well, it just feels like Knowing where the correct place to put your hand to catch the ball is.

I think that aesthetics is, deep down, about varying levels of that feeling of Correctness. Placing my hand in the right place to catch something feels like it requires the same sense for figuring out what is Correct that deciding where apply makeup or which clothes to wear does.

Certain things just register to the brain as more Correct in certain forms than others, when they need to complement something else. Like what colour of eye shadow to wear, or which top matches my tights, or where to put my hand to catch a ball. Similarly, the integer 27 feels like it complements the concept of 3^3. That they meet in the same place, much like the specific point in space that my hand and the ball intersect.

And while these may all feel like they’re the products of different processes and should be represented as such, I’m not so confident the brain does represent them as different. I think that, at the level of implementation details, the human mind might actually work a fair bit like the Greek philosophers. Where the beautiful, the true, and the good all have the same functional representation.

And I think a lot of semi-conscious thought is just these low-level Correctness-locators printing to stdout. So the sense of one’s eye being drawn to pretty things, and the sense of one’s hand reflexively shooting out into the parabolic path of a ball, and the sense of one’s thoughts turning toward the right answer to a math problem – that all of these are the same kinds of thoughts. But looking at them from the perspective of the conscious mind, they’re hard to understand. (I’m about to start reading How The Mind Works by Steven Pinker and will maybe get some more ideas here.)

But lately I’ve been trying to look really carefully at what I want, why I want it, and how those wants are represented inside me. And I think that, even if not everyone works the way I describe above, I seem to. When I’ve been talking lately about doing the things I really want to do, I could just as well have said doing the things that feel prettiest to me. On the lowest level, there doesn’t seem to be any distinction. The things I want to do will just seem prettier when I think about them, and that will be what tells me that they’re what I want to do. I think beauty is just a catchall attractor in the mind.

And since I started just doing whatever has the strongest feeling of beauty/truth/goodness as much as I can, I’ve been incredibly happy and productive. I can trust that I’m actually doing what matters to me, because I’m doing what satisfies the cluster of mattering. The sense that assigns value to world states and their requisite actions relative to each other.

Being charitable to others is Beautiful. Symmetric wallpaper designs are True. Understanding mathematics is Good. None of these are explicitly true, but all of them point to sense that truth springs from. Comprehend it, and the Dao shall unfold before you. (At least, that’s what happened for me. No idea if it works for other people. I’m just trying to report these internal experiences as best I can, in case they’re useful.)

In a moment of coming full circle, *Alison* is now the one explaining what it’s like to have a mind with certain parts intermingled.

I don’t think I know the above feel myself. Honestly, I’m not even sure I know the *components* of this feel. For all I know, maybe my low aesthetic drive and poor aim *are* linked.

(It doesn’t bother me much: I don’t need to aim very often, and I’ve been able to turn the limitedness of my ability to appreciate beauty into an advantage. Still, it’s fascinating to get a glimpse of the inner workings of someone for whom beauty is clearly very important.)

Tags:

#(context of the first sentence: sinesalvatorem and I first got to talking because) #(she saw my ”people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me” tag) #(and was curious what that was like) #adventures in dragon capitalism #(tangentially) #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #the wondrous variety of sapient life