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It's interesting how entropy maps to arts. Some art has almost no surprises, like romantic novels and pop songs. Other forms of art like experimental music and

It's interesting how entropy maps to arts. Some art has almost no surprises, like romantic novels and pop songs. Other forms of art like experimental music and theater of absurd is built around surprises. Depending on your tastes you would seek out art with just the right amount of surprises that keeps you engaged. The brain struggles to find the meaning in consumed media. If it is too easy to find then the content is trivial and boring, if it is too hard then content is frustratingly inaccessible (and often labeled as pretentious). For example the prog rock music is to my tastes a just right mix of familiar structures and frequent surprises. It is curious how same art piece becomes more enjoyable after you experience it multiple times. For me the song enjoyment peaks around forth listening. It's like brain enjoys repeating same surprises over and over. I'd guess that can be explained by experience of the reward that comes from brain creating a successful model of input that can perfectly predict next parts. One case that stands out from this predictability-of-art model is modern sitcom format. Generally the humor is built around concept of surprising with punchline, but many sitcoms are just repeating same joke in predictable way. Instead of actual humor they are just broadcasting "this bit right here is supposed to be funny" every couple of seconds. The laugh track creates conditioning that triggers good emotions in people. Just find a sitcom video with laughing track removed and see how eerie they become. Anyway this is more about how mind experiences entropy, and has nothing to do with information theory itself. For that I would recommend a great book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. The historical treatment of information storage (writing) and transmitting (communication) is especially good.

jvvw 6y ago
There's a nice 5 minute video by neuroscientist Anil Seth here: https://aeon.co/videos/on-the-beholders-share-how-past-experience-influences-our-perception-of-art https://aeon.co/videos/on-the-beholders-share-how-past-exper... and I was going to link to Schmidhuber too - I like this page on his site: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html There's also a chapter about these sort of ideas in the context of music in Daniel Levitin's book This is Your Brain on Music. I'm still trying to make sense of this all myself - you've got Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle essentially saying that the brain is trying to minimise surprise. And yet if you look at the explore-exploit dilemma then 'optimism in the face of uncertainty' is a possible strategy. I'm sure there is a way to reconcile these - I don't understand the Karl Friston stuff properly yet.
azornathogron 6y ago
> Generally the humor is built around concept of surprising with punchline, but many sitcoms are just repeating same joke in predictable way. Instead of actual humor they are just broadcasting "this bit right here is supposed to be funny" every couple of seconds. The laugh track creates conditioning that triggers good emotions in people. Just find a sitcom video with laughing track removed and see how eerie they become I've heard this idea a few times, and seen YouTube videos of, for example, segments from Friends with the laughter removed. And it does feel weird without the laughter. But I'm not sure it's correctly diagnosed. Friends (which I'm picking on because that's the example I've seen) was filmed in front of a live audience, and the actors respond to the audience. I think mostly it feels weird without the laughter because you get lots of unnaturally long pauses in the flow of the lines - those pauses are where the actors were leaving space for the audience's laughter. This is completely normal when acting in front of a live audience and doesn't mean that the jokes aren't funny. (Yes, some of the jokes aren't funny - when you have a lot of episodes you'll get some duds)
mudita 6y ago
See also the goldilocks effect in developmental psychology: "Human Infants Allocate Attention to Visual Sequences That Are Neither Too Simple Nor Too Complex". https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3359326/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3359326/
bschne 6y ago
There's a paper by Schmidhuber [1] in which he argues, IIRC, that not the surprise as in high or just-right entropy is what satisfies the observer of e.g. art, but the fact that it teaches you a new, previously unknown pattern of regularity about the world which allows you to compress information better. I may be misconstruing it though b/c it's been a while since I looked into it. On another note, Brian Eno has cited Morse Peckham's "Man's Rage for Chaos"[2], which seems to be more in line with what you are saying and to claim that the purpose of art is offering surprising shifts in perspective that break up the otherwise overly strong drive towards order and predictability. 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360 https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360 2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4552798-man-s-rage-for-chaos https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4552798-man-s-rage-for-c...
js8 6y ago
This view of art, where the spectator is active participant and generalizes from incomplete information, reminds of the painting that Dan Dennett loves to talk about: https://youtu.be/fjbWr3ODbAo?t=690 https://youtu.be/fjbWr3ODbAo?t=690

jvvw 6y ago

There's a nice 5 minute video by neuroscientist Anil Seth here: https://aeon.co/videos/on-the-beholders-share-how-past-experience-influences-our-perception-of-art https://aeon.co/videos/on-the-beholders-share-how-past-exper... and I was going to link to Schmidhuber too - I like this page on his site: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html There's also a chapter about these sort of ideas in the context of music in Daniel Levitin's book This is Your Brain on Music. I'm still trying to make sense of this all myself - you've got Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle essentially saying that the brain is trying to minimise surprise. And yet if you look at the explore-exploit dilemma then 'optimism in the face of uncertainty' is a possible strategy. I'm sure there is a way to reconcile these - I don't understand the Karl Friston stuff properly yet.

azornathogron 6y ago

> Generally the humor is built around concept of surprising with punchline, but many sitcoms are just repeating same joke in predictable way. Instead of actual humor they are just broadcasting "this bit right here is supposed to be funny" every couple of seconds. The laugh track creates conditioning that triggers good emotions in people. Just find a sitcom video with laughing track removed and see how eerie they become I've heard this idea a few times, and seen YouTube videos of, for example, segments from Friends with the laughter removed. And it does feel weird without the laughter. But I'm not sure it's correctly diagnosed. Friends (which I'm picking on because that's the example I've seen) was filmed in front of a live audience, and the actors respond to the audience. I think mostly it feels weird without the laughter because you get lots of unnaturally long pauses in the flow of the lines - those pauses are where the actors were leaving space for the audience's laughter. This is completely normal when acting in front of a live audience and doesn't mean that the jokes aren't funny. (Yes, some of the jokes aren't funny - when you have a lot of episodes you'll get some duds)

mudita 6y ago

See also the goldilocks effect in developmental psychology: "Human Infants Allocate Attention to Visual Sequences That Are Neither Too Simple Nor Too Complex". https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3359326/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3359326/

bschne 6y ago

There's a paper by Schmidhuber [1] in which he argues, IIRC, that not the surprise as in high or just-right entropy is what satisfies the observer of e.g. art, but the fact that it teaches you a new, previously unknown pattern of regularity about the world which allows you to compress information better. I may be misconstruing it though b/c it's been a while since I looked into it. On another note, Brian Eno has cited Morse Peckham's "Man's Rage for Chaos"[2], which seems to be more in line with what you are saying and to claim that the purpose of art is offering surprising shifts in perspective that break up the otherwise overly strong drive towards order and predictability. 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360 https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360 2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4552798-man-s-rage-for-chaos https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4552798-man-s-rage-for-c...

js8 6y ago

This view of art, where the spectator is active participant and generalizes from incomplete information, reminds of the painting that Dan Dennett loves to talk about: https://youtu.be/fjbWr3ODbAo?t=690 https://youtu.be/fjbWr3ODbAo?t=690