My Senior Thesis Project

This page will be updated periodically. Most recent updates appear at the top. Check the thesis tag for more.

2025-01-15

I've had a not-very-productive past week, partially because I turned 21 and spent some time celebrating, and then I got married and spent some more time celebrating. Oh, well, so it goes.

The point of this update is to say that rather than force you to scroll to the bottom and read backwards, I'm splitting my posts between pages like a normal person. This page will still be the ‘main’ page for my thesis project, but I'll just write posts with the thesis tag for my standard thinking-out-loud stuff.

2025-01-07

An update

I'm working on my January independent study, doing broad exploration to prepare for further research. I have a four week schedule, which begins with a week on philosophy. I'm starting with some tricky foundational questions:

• What does 'aesthetic' mean?
• What is 'beauty'?
• Why does someone find something to be beautiful?
• Why do different people find different things to be beautiful?

I'm not trying to flesh out all of this perfectly, but rather trying to get a sense of what I believe and how strongly I believe it, and have a mostly-working theory of aesthetics I can apply moving forward while being aware of my theory's weak spots.

Digging a bit deeper, and getting more concrete:

• Is aesthetic judgment directly a function of sense perception without the formation of concepts as an intermediary, as Kant says?
• How are opinions and beliefs about the way the world ought to be related to what we find beautiful, and how are they separate?
• There is a general question in philosophy about whether something can be beautiful because it is useful, or whether beauty must be separate from usefulness. This is an important question when it comes to our subject of interest, categorization, because mostly categories are thought of as a tool for efficiency rather than an art form. What is a beautiful categorization? Is it one that is useful? Which brings us to ...

A ramble

Epistemic status: throwing paint at a wall to see what sticks.

I'm not going to deal with necessary or sufficient conditions for beauty because I don't think that's how beauty works. However, broadly speaking in order for a categorization to be aesthetically pleasing, it should make some sense - there should be at least the feeling that there is some sense of 'belong' by which the items in a category belong together, where the sense of 'belong' rests on something about the items, not a circular 'they are in the same category --> they belong together'.

Now this feeling of belonging can be a continuous and ill-defined thing (I have thoughts on how this relates to neural networks which I'm planning on getting to eventually) or it can be a clearly defined discrete set of rules which attempt to be objective and eliminate grey zones so that everything always has an obvious category to fall into. It can be some composition or combination of these poles. But a given categorization has roughly the following things:

1. A domain, or set of items which might be categorized by it; this can be finite or infinite, can vary in all sorts of different interesting ways
2. A way of deciding which items belong in which category

Let me point out a confusion in what I've written - does a categorization require a way of deciding which items belong together, however unclear or difficult to generalize? Well, yes, although circular definitions are perfectly valid. It's just that circular category definitions are not usually very aesthetic.

While both of these things might have an impact on our aesthetic experience of a category, the second one is usually the most consequential to defining how we think of the actual categorization. This might be because the domain of a category can usually be quite flexible - while the four Houses in Hogwarts has the domain of Hogwarts students (and alumni), plenty of people can easily think about which of their friends, pets, or even furniture pieces belong in which different houses, intuitively extending the categorization to all sorts of things to which it did not originally apply.

Here are a few things people seem to find aesthetically pleasing about categories - this is not very rigorous but the core of this project is making it more so:

• Rough equality: A categorization should not place most items in a single category. On second thought (see epistemic status note above), this is totally not true in general of categories. But consider that the proportions of how many items fall into different categories in a given categorization has an impact on the aesthetic experience.
• Crispness: A categorization should be clear about which items fall into which category, especially items inside of its domain
• Contingency: The category assigned to a certain item should be contingent, i.e. assigned to the item based on qualities of the item which exist prior (causally, not temporally per se) to its assignment. There's more depth to this, a lot more, and just how well the categorization manages to be consistenly contingent on a variety of factors can matter a lot.

More line items may be added in time. But for now, let me point out a few more things.

We can look to existing aesthetic philosophy to learn about what's going on here. It seems like equality, crispness, contingency are usually useful properties of categorizations. Assuming they are generally aesthetically pleasing, are they pleasing because they are generally useful (think evolutionary or otherwsie learned preferences here)? Or is that entirely separate?

Note - can we think of any aesthetic preferences which are in general very much not useful? We can certainly think of scenarios where aesthetics and functionality come into conflict.

Another thing here which is part of aesthetics more broadly is the kind of aesthetic 'sophistication' or dialogue which might take place around categories. We value freshness, so perhaps crisp equal predicatable categories will start feeling a little bit stale and out of fashion, so people will prefer lopsided blurry and chaotic categories. This is something that's certainly already been discussed to death elsewhere. I'd like to read some of that discussion though.

2024-09-30

Well the form responses were quite helpful, so thank you. 42 people gave their input. About 30% of you advised me to choose aesthetic categorization decisions, while over 50% thought that I should go with unconscious versus conscious reasoning speeds. I've chosen to side with the minority and I'm putting together a proposal for an independent study proposal for January now.

If you have any resources you think will be relevant to my study of how people categorize things using aesthetic preferences, please let me know.

2024-09-25

Hello!

I'm choosing an initial topic for my research work over the next year which will lead into my senior thesis. I have two ideas and I'd like to know which one you find more interesting!

Please just fill out this form before it's too late and I've already made up my mind.

I'm going to be doing a thesis project my senior year of college. I'll actually be starting work on it this January, and I'm submitting my initial proposal for this winter's work on October 2nd of this year. So it's time to choose a first direction for my project!

Here are my two ideas right now:

1. Aesthetic categorization decisions

I'm interested in how people make decisions about categorization based on aesthetic preferences. Most prior research on categorization decisions looks categorization as a way to maximize efficiency or provide some other useful function; I'm interested in the way we categorize things in specific ways based on aesthetic preferences. How would a child choose to categorize toys? By shape, size, color, material, something else? How does a fantasy or sci-fi novelist decide what imaginary things aesthetically ‘fit’ in their imaginary world? Can we learn about this by using computer models to do similar kinds of categorization?

2. Conscious versus unconscious reasoning speed

Unconscious intuitive reasoning can be done in parallel, often extremely quickly. Think about how we can recognize a type of animal - we don't have to think through each animal category which we know about one by one, we can send our visual stimulus to all of our animal categories simultaneously and only consciously latch on to the animal category or categories which seem the most likely. Conscious formal reasoning, on the other hand, must be done in series, which is extremely slow by comparison. Conscious reasoning has a lot to do with attention. Attention is generally a single stream process, and we are conscious of the reasoning processes which we attend to. Why can’t we be conscious of many thoughts at once? We are certainly capable of being conscious of many external sensory stimuli at a given time.