“CURT: Q: So how would you say something like “the feeling of awe at seeing an i

–“CURT: Q: So how would you say something like “the feeling of awe at seeing an immensely beautiful natural scene” fits in there?”–

Excellent question of both subtlety and import.

There is a difference between objective third person operational description, and subjective first person experiential description. In other words, operations (existence independent of experience) vs qualia (experience of existence).
If I tell you that the human perception of beauty consists of the presence of resources and their application which roughly equates to fertility, fecundity, productivity, and generativity.
All behavior originates in the pursuit of, defense of, and consumption of whatever we can acquire from time, to rest to stuff to relationships to knowledge. Yes we are really that simple.
So what you are sensing is the animal instinct (reward) at the discovery of a) the availability of information at a distance and b) an unknown hunting and gathering territory free of visible evidence of competitors.
But does knowing that matter? Do we really care why we feel the way we do when we experience such things? Do we really prefer NOT to know?
Some of us are capable with the duality of the intellectual and the emotional and can enjoy both. Some of us have trouble outside of the emotional. And very few of us have trouble with the emotional other than autistics.

So your question is one of the deeper one’s of philosophy – but it is just a matter of ability and choice. If you have the abilty to practice duality then you have the choice to do so. If you lack it or prefer not to then you can rely on your instincts, intuitions and emotions, while at the same time knowing there is a reason for them even if you don’t care of it’s origin or constitution. And lastly you could consider it a divine experience since it is the product of evolution over millions of years – and it is that alone that should overwhelm our wonder. 😉

Cheers

Reply addressees: @slenchy @IntuitMachine