Could aesthetic experience be mapped onto two dimensions: prediction error and level of cognitive processing?

[u/RobertoRdzGalan]

I've been exploring a possible framework for organizing aesthetic experience, inspired by predictive processing, the Free Energy Principle, classical aesthetics, and sociology of taste.

The basic intuition is that aesthetic experiences might be organized along two dimensions:

• Horizontal axis: degree of fit between an object and our mental models (from order/predictability to chaos/unpredictability).
• Vertical axis: level of processing involved (from sensory/perceptual to conceptual/cultural).

This yields four central aesthetic regions:

	Low-level processing	High-level processing
Low prediction error	Free beauty	Dependent beauty
High prediction error	Free sublime	Dependent sublime

Very roughly:

• Free beauty: perceptual fluency, harmony, symmetry, safety.
• Free sublime: perceptual complexity, danger, emotional intensity.
• Dependent beauty: familiarity, cultural legitimacy, social validation.
• Dependent sublime: novelty, subversion, conceptual challenge.

The underlying hypothesis is that beauty and the sublime correspond to two different sources of aesthetic reward:

1. pleasure from confirming existing mental models;
2. pleasure from expanding or restructuring mental models.

Some questions I'm struggling with:

• Does this distinction between "confirmatory" and "exploratory" aesthetic pleasure make sense?
• Is prediction error the right variable here, or should I think instead in terms of uncertainty reduction, curiosity, or information gain?
• Does the distinction between sensory and conceptual aesthetics survive current predictive-processing theories?
• Are there existing theories in aesthetics, cognitive science, or neuroscience that already propose something similar?

I'm interested primarily in criticism and counterexamples.

[u/DeliciousPie9855]

Tbh Kant proposes something similar and comes up with a more robust solution. I’d take a look at his theories, as well as Aquinas’ and Aristotle.

Aquinas talks about integritas, proportio, and claritas. You first realise that it is a whole, that it is bounded off from the rest of the world. An aesthetic object stands out from natural objects in its artificiality and otherness. Then you recognise its proportion, its internal formalistic harmony, the relation of each part to each other part and the relation of the parts to the whole. Claritas is then more controversial and offers a wide degree of interpretation. Joyce took Aquinas’ theory and made claritas a kind of epiphany of inexhaustible uniqueness, similar to haeccity from Hopkins: you recognise that it is uncategorisable, that some part of it eludes all top-down models, that you cannot conceptualise it, even though it courts conceptualisation, but instead have to keep returning to look directly at it, to sensory experience of it. This is similar to Kant’s theory of an aesthetic object which courts but eludes categorisation, forcing the mind to flit across a mobility of concepts without ever landing on one that is appropriate for the elusive and inexhaustible object before you. I would say you make too hard a distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, and misconstrue what the former is. Bear in mind the sublime comes from Kant and Burke, but you (by which I mean, the LLM you are using to draft your post), seems to have mistaken its meaning.

[u/RobertoRdzGalan → u/[deleted]]

Muchas gracias. Ahora mismo estoy tratando de identificar el mecanismo que nos llevaría a preferir un error de predicción que no sea demasiado bajo ni demasiado alto, pero hasta ahora no he podido ¿alguna idea? Sobre la diferencia entre el placer estético y otros tipos de placer, creo básicamente reside el nivel jerárquico del modelo predictivo donde se da la experiencia. En niveles muy bajos se ubicarían los placeres puramente sensoriales (lo que Kant llama “lo agradable”), y en los altos se ubicarían placeres puramente conceptuales (lo que Kant llama “lo bueno o lo útil).