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On Aesthetics — On things that are beautiful

[article] Preferring Coherence — 2 May 2025
Cogntive dissonance often describes a bias towards seeing ourselves as coherent. Sure, it’s sneaky and prevalent, but entirely necessary. And, other times we tolerate how noisy we are, keeping us open to new insights and better equipped for a complex world.
[article] Cognitive dissonance isn't discomfort — 25 Apr 2025
Cognitive dissonance is often thought of as the discomfort we have with conflicting cognitions. But it’s really about how the brain will smooth over dissonant cognitions, whether they’re uncomfortable or not. It happens a lot.
[article] Evolution is overrated — 18 Apr 2025
Without time-travel, evolutionary narratives can only identify theories that don’t make sense (like death drives). It can’t tell you what theories do make sense, because you can make many to explain the same thing. All they do is let you see what people wish the world was like.
[article] On Cynosure — 7 Mar 2025
Cynosure is the idea betterment is empty without gratification and connection. No true betterment can occur without celebrating the fruits of our success and betterment is only meaningful in its reflection in the lives of others. Everyone agrees.
[article] Aesthetics are facts too — 21 Feb 2025
Cultural and aesthetic ‘facts’ are as real as any ‘objective’ truths. They’re just centred on different kinds of meaning. Trivialising them because they ‘go against’ the evidence is failing to recognise what evidence they care about.
[article] It's not social media, life is just worse — 2 Aug 2024
Social media use probably isn’t the problem. Social media use is probably just the most obvious manifestation of lots of problems. And in fact, social media could probably be a solution. It’s up to you.
[article] Purple doesn't exist — 18 Apr 2024
We see short light waves as blue, medium as green, and long as red. When the brain senses short (blue) and long (red) but not medium (green), it ‘makes up’ a colour to fill in the blank.
[article] Panpsychism isn't that fun — 22 Sep 2023
Panpsychists reckon they’ve one-upped materialists and non-materialists in explaining how consciousness might have come to be by telling us that everything is conscious. Then they just leave us hanging.
[article] On managing magic mushroom experiences — 29 Jul 2023
Mushrooms change the balance between inside-out forces (the all-consuming neural networks that support the ‘self’) and outside-in forces (the environment and world around us). This model seems most useful in explaining the mushroom experience.
[article] Everything is ideology — 19 Sep 2022
Ideologies are presented to us as distortions of reality—a synonym for ‘false belief’. But they are merely a subjective understanding of the relationship between things. In this sense, all things are ideologies. We can only choose those better or worse.
[article] The origin of insight — 20 Feb 2022
Lightbulb moments are one crucial key to creativity, and though they appear elusive, there are many ways to encourage the happy accidents that bring them into being: we must bring together the unfamiliar and the familiar.
[article] Honey-bees are smarter than they should be — 29 Mar 2020
Animals show glimpses of cognitive abilities that challenge our traditional notions of higher-order thinking, making us question what truly characterises sophisticated thought and what it means to be clever.
[article] On attraction and love — 13 Mar 2020
Much is written on the subject of attractiveness. It has become synonymous with beauty. Attractive celebrities, attractive influencers, attractive art. And through this myopic lens, attraction becomes something ugly. Something that people have or do not have. Something to be jealous of. Something to be torn down. But it doesn’t have to be. It can actually be something very beautiful indeed.
[article] Attractiveness might be more about the environment, than about you — 23 Aug 2018
There are a number of things that occur naturally in our environment that can alter the attraction we feel for people. These things might seem small, but they have an outsize influence on our preferences for people.
[article] The most powerful way to get someone to like you, is to like them first — 23 Apr 2018
One of our most powerful urges is to be liked. Strange to find, then, that one of the most powerful influences on our likeability is whether others think we like them—‘reciprocal liking’.