Tyler Cowen: preference

Transcript context

…Well, the interesting thing that I think you have there — you have multiple ways to predict that outcome. I’m going to take an aesthetic example. For example, say you went to the symphony, and there was a violin concerto or, if you prefer, a blues concert or even a rap concert. And in the middle of the cadenza or the solo or the biggest thing, the performer begins to break out in a sweat. They’re really exerting themselves. The question is this: Do we like the music because they’re sweating? Or do they have to sweat in order to make the musical performance that the audience likes? Both of those are equal. But most people would say that this is an indicator of quality because they’re pushed to motor limits, but aesthetic processes are going to do the same. We don’t like the ballet because many amazing artists and athletes are injured in the process of producing the ballet. We like it because of the aesthetic impact of the ballet. There are other hypotheses for why traits are extreme, and maybe at the limits — performance limits or health limits — of those individuals. How do we differentiate between those two? Well, I spend a lot of time thinking about that, and I think that the special hypothesis — the one that demands specific evidence — is that the correlation is actually a result of the relation between the signal and some other kind of benefit, other than the benefit of beauty. I have cardinals and blue jays in my backyard. I enjoy them greatly. I like their colors. If bird aesthetics are arbitrary to the mating processes of birds, why do I also find it beautiful? Isn’t that a funny coincidence? That is deeply cool. I think that’s because humans are intelligent, and we have time on our hands and excess cognition and curiosity to burn, and that leads us to become fascinated by nature. But interspecific aesthetic regard is a fascinating thing. In the case of color and the case of song, it’s explicable in some ways because at least some of this is physics. There is an inherent wavelength relationship between various color combinations. The same for acoustics, in which we can imagine the harmonic relationship between notes in a bird song, just like we could analyze a piece of music. The real fundamental mystery is why do flowers smell beautiful? That one does not have [laughs], at least immediately, appealing answers because, it turns out, there are no receptor genes in common between a bee and a human, and they’re responding to the same flower odors in a similar way. I don’t think it’s because the olfactory space is just filled with all sorts of other things, and that’s where they’re left, and we learn about that. I think they are generally positive. I think there are graduate-level research questions to be pursued in interspecific aesthetic impression.…

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