It seems to me that some of these explanations for beauty are overkill. Start from the straightforward idea that natural selection shaped our pattern-recognition hardware, in all of its varieties, for “ordinary” evolutionary reasons. Then suppose that we discovered ways of contriving input (e.g. music, art) that exploited and tickled our pre-existing hardware, after the fact. I don’t see the need for music itself to have developed from anything that increased fitness.
Similarly, for sunsets and rainbows, suppose that we already had hardware that responded to color, as well as perceptual responses to scale, and even the intelligence to think about how much bigger the world and the sky is than us. Is it not enough to say that sunsets and rainbows supply sensory input that engages this pre-existing hardware in concert, provoking the feelings that we experience as wonder? Why would the specific source of sensory input itself have to have imparted a benefit?
Consider those trippy graphical music visualizers. They exploit our sensitivity to color, light, and particularly motion, but it does not follow that we need to have encountered anything specifically like them in the ancestral environment. It may be worth thinking about why our hardware interprets certain characteristics of sensory experiences as pleasant or discordant, but I think this can be done at a lower level that does not require ancestral exposure to anything like the compound phenomenon in question. Once you have the hardware, any sufficiently intense stimulation of it is bound to produce some reaction. There need not be any specific flavor of meaning (evolutionary psychological) in the input source.
It seems to me that some of these explanations for beauty are overkill. Start from the straightforward idea that natural selection shaped our pattern-recognition hardware, in all of its varieties, for “ordinary” evolutionary reasons. Then suppose that we discovered ways of contriving input (e.g. music, art) that exploited and tickled our pre-existing hardware, after the fact. I don’t see the need for music itself to have developed from anything that increased fitness.
Similarly, for sunsets and rainbows, suppose that we already had hardware that responded to color, as well as perceptual responses to scale, and even the intelligence to think about how much bigger the world and the sky is than us. Is it not enough to say that sunsets and rainbows supply sensory input that engages this pre-existing hardware in concert, provoking the feelings that we experience as wonder? Why would the specific source of sensory input itself have to have imparted a benefit?
Consider those trippy graphical music visualizers. They exploit our sensitivity to color, light, and particularly motion, but it does not follow that we need to have encountered anything specifically like them in the ancestral environment. It may be worth thinking about why our hardware interprets certain characteristics of sensory experiences as pleasant or discordant, but I think this can be done at a lower level that does not require ancestral exposure to anything like the compound phenomenon in question. Once you have the hardware, any sufficiently intense stimulation of it is bound to produce some reaction. There need not be any specific flavor of meaning (evolutionary psychological) in the input source.