ASEBL Journal Volume 11, Number 2 | Page 45

ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015 perhaps what we in modern industrialized societies perceive as “the arts” is a subset of another behavior. This is not to say that the behaviors classified as art in modern societies are unrelated. Indeed, as the very concept of “the arts” suggests, many people see a common thread weaving through them, which is probably why they are widely perceived as being different facets of the same phenomenon. Rather, I am proposing that the common thread cannot be artification, because virtually anything can be artified yet not all things that are artified are assigned to the category of “the arts.” What these behaviors have in common with each other but do not necessarily share with other instances of artification is that they are all instances of symbolic behavior. On this view, what we experience as different art forms is a side-effect of our capacity to use different media – e.g., marks, sound, movement – to communicate meaning. Signals vary in effectiveness, and can be modified in various ways to make them more attention-getting and emotionally arousing. The degree to which a given modification or set of modifications triggers our evolved attentional biases and motivational systems (e.g., aesthetic preferences and/or revulsions) affects the degree to which we experience the signal as “attractive” or “moving.” On this view, artification is signal modification – the use of elaboration, repetition, pattern, and/or exaggeration to increase the attentional salience and emotional intensity of a given signal relative to others. This brings us to another definitional issue, hinted at in my reference to evolved “aesthetic preferences and revulsions.” Biologically speaking, there is no such thing as a single “aesthetic sense.” Aesthetic responses are motivational mechanisms, the function of which is to direct attention to environmental stimuli and guide responses to them in ways that, in ancestral environments, increased fitness. Our aesthetic responses are programs, and programs are specialized: there is no general aesthetic response capable of directing attention and guiding behavior toward each and every environmental stimulus to which our ancestors recurrently had to respond. This is because different classes of environmental stimuli are useful in different ways. For example, an opposite-sex conspecific is potentially useful as a mate, a piece of fruit is potentially useful as food, and a lush meadow is potentially useful as a campsite or hunting ground. We use different criteria and cues to evaluate the quality of a potential mate than we use to evaluate the quality of a piece of fruit or a campsite. For example, proximity to fresh water is an important criterion for choosing a campsite, but not for choosing fruit or mates. Waist-to-hip ratio is a cue used in mate assessment, but not in fruit or campsite assessment. Moreover, different stimuli require different motivational responses: sexual arousal is a fitness-enhancing response to a willing and attractive partner, but not to fruit or meadows. On this point, it is important to note that aesthetic responses include revulsions, which motivate us to avoid interacting with potentially harmful stimuli. Evolved revulsions underscore the impossibility of designing a general-purpose aesthetic response: a program that motivated both, approach and avoidance, would paralyze its bearer. In sum, there is no universal criterion of beauty, no one quality that all aesthetically arousing entities have in common. The use of elaboration, repetition, pattern, and/or exaggeration for signal intensification can be productively understood in terms of these aesthetic preferences and revulsions. Much of what we experience as aesthetic responses are evolved attentional bi- 45