There's another related concept I came up with thinking about this discussion (which I've had with friends as well): 'freedom of utility'.
The basic idea is, forget about what you think is beautiful or motivational. Suppose you could choose to be motivated by something. Would you choose to be motivated by superficial mystery, or by deep knowledge of how things are? Should you choose to find beautiful just the surface of the flower, or also the wonders of how it works, its structure as a system, the connections to evolution and theory of color and so on -- all of which could turn out to be useful one way or another. If you could choose, would you choose to be exclusively motivated by the immediate external appearance or by the depth and myriad of relationships as well?
Unfortunately, (unlike AI systems we could design) I don't think we have complete control of our motivation -- our evolutionary biases are strong. But I'm also fairly certain much of our aesthetic sense can be shaped by culture and rational ideals. If I hadn't heard Feynman, watched so many wonderful documentaries (and e.g. Mythbusters) and many popularizers of science, perhaps I wouldn't see this beauty so much as I do -- and I'm grateful for it, because I want to see this beauty, I want to be motivated to learn about the world, and to improve it in a way.
The basic idea is, forget about what you think is beautiful or motivational. Suppose you could choose to be motivated by something. Would you choose to be motivated by superficial mystery, or by deep knowledge of how things are? Should you choose to find beautiful just the surface of the flower, or also the wonders of how it works, its structure as a system, the connections to evolution and theory of color and so on -- all of which could turn out to be useful one way or another. If you could choose, would you choose to be exclusively motivated by the immediate external appearance or by the depth and myriad of relationships as well?
Unfortunately, (unlike AI systems we could design) I don't think we have complete control of our motivation -- our evolutionary biases are strong. But I'm also fairly certain much of our aesthetic sense can be shaped by culture and rational ideals. If I hadn't heard Feynman, watched so many wonderful documentaries (and e.g. Mythbusters) and many popularizers of science, perhaps I wouldn't see this beauty so much as I do -- and I'm grateful for it, because I want to see this beauty, I want to be motivated to learn about the world, and to improve it in a way.