A new meaning of the term "self-aware."įiat logos. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. “I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. We become dissatisfied with the way ordinary people look because they can't compare to supermodels.” How? The way any drug becomes a problem: by interfering with our relationships with other people. And the result is that beauty is slowly ruining our lives. You've got pharmaceutical-grade beauty, the cocaine of good looks.īiologists call this "supernormal stimulus" Our beauty receptors receive more stimulation than they were evolved to handle we're seeing more beauty in one day than our ancestors did in a lifetime.
But take a person with one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional makeup and retouching, and you're no longer looking at beauty in its natural form. Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks - call it the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex - and in our natural environment, it was useful to have. That's when it becomes addictive.īeauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to advertisers. But refine it, purify it, and you get a compound that hits your pleasure receptors with an unnatural intensity.
In its natural form, as coca leaves, it's appealing, but not to an extent that it usually becomes a problem.
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