Thermoaesthetics: Life in Terms of the Nonliving

A concept of aesthetic complexity based on universal animal preferences for mixtures of more and less exciting physical and psychological opposites.

Thermoaesthetics
292 min readFeb 25, 2024

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Salvator Rosa’s “The Death of Empedocles.” Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

© 2024 Andrew Hodgson. Edited by Lisa Anthony and Margaret Krous. The idea that physical conditions in the brain are related to our sense of beauty was first proposed and demonstrated, to my knowledge, by Esther Leslie in Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form.

Contents

· Thesis
Primitive Dualities
Excitement and Mental Categories
Thermal Dualities
Liquid Crystallinity
Indifference
Derived Dualities
List of Monoaesthetic Mixtures
· Beauty and Mixtures
Sensory Bias
Universality
More and Less Exciting Things
Aesthetic Indifference
Conceptual Relatives
Other Mixtures
Degrees of Excitement (deg)
Categories of the Mind
Hue Heat
· Complexity
Metaphysics
Philosophy
Creation Stories
Complexity Theory
The Magical-Looking Water of Tsalal Island
Liquid Crystals
Aesthetic Reflex
Consciousness
Thermal Indifference
· Disruptions of Inwardness
· Exciting Things in Containers
· Verticality
Mixtures of Up and Down
· Painted by Nature
· Time is Boring
· Temperature
Brain Heat
Heat

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Thermoaesthetics

A concept of aesthetic complexity based on universal animal preferences for mixtures of simple, more and less exciting physical and psychological opposites.