Considering how asymmetries can be both pleasing (complex stimuli seem more beautiful to me than perfectly symmetrical spheres) and useful (as Holly Ellmore points out in the domain of information theory, and as the Mosers found with their Nobel prize winning work on orthogonal neural coding of similar but distinct memories), I question your intuition that asymmetry needs to be associated with suffering.
Asymmetries in stimuli seem crucial for getting patterns through the “predictive coding gauntlet.” I.e., that which can be predicted can be ignored. We demonstrably screen perfect harmony out fairly rapidly.
The crucial context for STV on the other hand isn’t symmetries/asymmetries in stimuli, but rather in brain activity. (More specifically, as we’re currently looking at things, in global eigenmodes.)
With a nod back to the predictive coding frame, it’s quite plausible that the stimuli that create the most internal symmetry/harmony are not themselves perfectly symmetrical, but rather have asymmetries crafted to avoid top-down predictive models. I’d expect this to vary quite a bit across different senses though, and depend heavily on internal state.
The brain may also have mechanisms which introduce asymmetries in global eigenmodes, in order to prevent getting ‘trapped’ by pleasure — I think of boredom as fairly sophisticated ‘anti-wireheading technology’ — but if we set aside dynamics, the assertion is that symmetry/harmony in the brain itself is intrinsically coupled with pleasure.
Edit: With respect to the Mosers, that’s really cool example of this stuff. I can’t say I have answers here but as a punt, I’d suspect the “orthogonal neural coding of similar but distinct memories” is going to revolve around some pretty complex frequency regimes and we may not yet be able to say exact things about how ‘consonant’ or ‘dissonant’ these patterns are to each other yet. My intuition is that this result about the golden mean being the optimal ratio for non-interaction will end up intersecting with the Mosers’ work. That said I wonder if STV would assert that some sorts of memories are ‘hedonically incompatible’ due to their encodings being dissonant? Basically, as memories get encoded, the oscillatory patterns they’re encoded with could subtly form a network which determines what sorts of new memories can form and/or which sorts of stimuli we enjoy and which we don’t. But this is pretty hand-wavy speculation…
Ok, thank you for these thoughts.
Considering how asymmetries can be both pleasing (complex stimuli seem more beautiful to me than perfectly symmetrical spheres) and useful (as Holly Ellmore points out in the domain of information theory, and as the Mosers found with their Nobel prize winning work on orthogonal neural coding of similar but distinct memories), I question your intuition that asymmetry needs to be associated with suffering.
Welcome, thanks for the good questions.
Asymmetries in stimuli seem crucial for getting patterns through the “predictive coding gauntlet.” I.e., that which can be predicted can be ignored. We demonstrably screen perfect harmony out fairly rapidly.
The crucial context for STV on the other hand isn’t symmetries/asymmetries in stimuli, but rather in brain activity. (More specifically, as we’re currently looking at things, in global eigenmodes.)
With a nod back to the predictive coding frame, it’s quite plausible that the stimuli that create the most internal symmetry/harmony are not themselves perfectly symmetrical, but rather have asymmetries crafted to avoid top-down predictive models. I’d expect this to vary quite a bit across different senses though, and depend heavily on internal state.
The brain may also have mechanisms which introduce asymmetries in global eigenmodes, in order to prevent getting ‘trapped’ by pleasure — I think of boredom as fairly sophisticated ‘anti-wireheading technology’ — but if we set aside dynamics, the assertion is that symmetry/harmony in the brain itself is intrinsically coupled with pleasure.
Edit: With respect to the Mosers, that’s really cool example of this stuff. I can’t say I have answers here but as a punt, I’d suspect the “orthogonal neural coding of similar but distinct memories” is going to revolve around some pretty complex frequency regimes and we may not yet be able to say exact things about how ‘consonant’ or ‘dissonant’ these patterns are to each other yet. My intuition is that this result about the golden mean being the optimal ratio for non-interaction will end up intersecting with the Mosers’ work. That said I wonder if STV would assert that some sorts of memories are ‘hedonically incompatible’ due to their encodings being dissonant? Basically, as memories get encoded, the oscillatory patterns they’re encoded with could subtly form a network which determines what sorts of new memories can form and/or which sorts of stimuli we enjoy and which we don’t. But this is pretty hand-wavy speculation…