objective vs. subjective rabbit hole

After plowing through this heavy intro, I'm reminded of something my concise, low impact Forester pal, Sam, once observed on a road trip.  In passing by a lovely stone fence in rural Maine, Sam says, "Now, there's a feller with lots of time on his hands."  

I'm too outta gas to read the responses.  Why can't we just dangle one foot in both ponds at the same time, aka, John Atkinson?  ...pant, pant,  More Peace, Pin

 

@snilf

Granted: all causal relationships "presuppose" a connection between cause and effect,

Yes, which is why, wary of going down the nature-of-causation rabbit hole, I couched my reply as a simple appeal to consistency: Insofar as we normally accept X method of inference as establishing causation, it can be justified in applying to the particular case at hand.

 

and the correlation (sorry: causation)

 

Ha! That suggests we have similar views on causation :-)

I was happy to read your reply on Descartes in any case. I can understand why my reply could have been read as being confused.

I’ve had lots of fun discussions with people of opposing "world views" on things like Foundationalism vs Coherentism (and other "isms"). In the end I still can’t say specifically where I land, so often enough I’ll just appeal to consistency (which..uh...I guess tips a hat towards Coherentism to some degree...though every time I go down these roads I can sort of argue for different sides. After all consistency/coherency is also a necessary feature of Foundationalism and other isms...).

Hume’s problem of induction has always been fascinating to chew over. (His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion drew me in to philosophy more than any other book I think).

Probably even more than you, as you apparently have some restraint, I can be a bit annoying on some of the forums for my own tendency to pull things towards the philosophical.

For us mere mortals, then, some kind of non-objective language is our only option in trying to express what turns us on in an audio system.

Yup! We manage to successfully navigate through the world every day, often through just such intersubjective exchanges of information.

This is what I emphasize when trying to talk about this with the more rigid "objectivists" who will wave off even subjective descriptions of different speakers as being too unreliable. Sighted bias confounds the conclusions!

I try to point out that, yes, some level of skepticism about our perceptual inferences is warranted, but it cannot be wholly unreliable since we use this every day to successfully get out our front door, among countless other tasks, as well as relaying information from our "mere subjective sense inference" to one another. "The snow plow blocked the end of our driveway with snow again, so you’ll have to leave time to dig that out..."

So we have on one end, in our most careful empirical inquiry, we want to account for the variables of human biases. That will almost always be the path to the most reliable forms of knowledge. On the other hand, we have the day to day "knowledge" that our casual subjective perceptions are reliable enough to perform all sorts of tasks. We must therefore be able to acknowledge BOTH of these situations, and be able to work from one towards the other for consistency.

We are going to at one point encounter some fuzzy borders where justification may go one way or the other. But my solution has been an appeal to the basis of the simple heuristic most of us use much of the time, which found nice wording in Sagan’s aphorism: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

I already gave a nutshell account of how, for me, this plays out in vetting audio claims. The more a claim slides towards the "extraordinary" GIVEN commonly understood features of that gear (e.g. how cables work), the less plausible the claim, the more strict and careful I’d want to be in vetting that claim. The more plausible, the less need for controls in order for the claim to be taken, provisionally, at face value.

 

E.g. if you tell me you heard differences between two HDMI cables, I’m going to want firmer evidence than your say-so. If you tell me you heard a difference between some Spendor speakers and some MBL omnis, I can provisionally accept the claim given it’s high plausibility on well known technical grounds. This justifies both the use of objective/scientific evidence and the pragmatism of every-day exchanges of subjectively-derived information.

IMO. :-)

Prof: We don't disagree here about, well, anything, I think. Granted: all causal relationships "presuppose" a connection between cause and effect, and the correlation (sorry: causation) between certain measurements and the correlative subjective impressions is probably no more problematic than most other supposed causal connections. Note, however, that I'm still being cagy here. Hume may be right: the difference between "correlation" and "causation" may be nothing more than "habitual expectation," common sense and physics notwithstanding. But I don't mean to drag philosophy into this again. I completely agree with you that there are "objective measurements" that reliably correlate with intersubjectively identifiable experiences; for audio professionals who work in the no-man's land between measurements (the science that created the equipment in the first place) and customers with desires and expectations, the objective language of measurements may be fully adequate to unambiguously identify features of an audio component that are sought in a given situation.

Sorry for the remarks about Descartes. I guessed you weren't confused about his "foundationalism." But I spent the last two weeks lecturing on Descartes; playing my role as "professor" is a hard habit to break.

Here's the main point, though, to return to the theme of this thread. Few of us are "audio professionals" who have witnessed again and again the correlation (or causation) between certain measurements and a given desired subjective effect. For us mere mortals, then, some kind of non-objective language is our only option in trying to express what turns us on in an audio system. What my OP was asking for was some sort of standard by means of which your subjective impressions can be communicated to me with sufficient clarity to persuade me that you are actually experiencing something I might also expect or want to experience from a given component. I can't have a pain in your tooth, but I can be persuaded by your language that you do. That's what I look for in posts that rave about some feature of our shared hobby.

great post !

I feel in agreement with all you just said...

Only a remark:

If someone says "I can hear things our most sensitive instruments can’t measure" then it requires more justification than their say-so

For sure you are right...

But we must not forgot that sound/music is not about only a certain measured level of some aspect of some information resolution in some scale defining what is possible or impossible to perceive...

Hearing a sound is also in the brain/body a work of not only psychological but of a biological "interpretation" linked to the non linear architecture of the ears design and work...The ear is tuned to catch some complex information package prepared to be interpretated by the ears by the nature of his design and not reducible to a mere Fourier based model of hearing only ...

Some sound are produced by a consciousness for another prepared consciousness and are not perceived even if they can be recorded because they cannot be interpreted...(dolphin language for example or arachneid "music" concept on their extension web body) For example what is the meaning and information weight of silence in a musical sentence or in a speech discourse or what is the information weight of the silence separating the onset of two specific sound and what is the impact on the interpreted threshold of  perception  ?

Then reducing all hearing possiblities to a scale frequencies or some measured sound level or even time level perception pre-supposed possibilities is forgotting that sound are most of the time in nature and speech a complex package of information that the ears is prepared to interpret and we must remember that some aspect of sounds are there only for the human ears to be perceived; bat ears will  interpret sound differently or cat and  a microphone coupled to another tool will not described what all there is to be perceived but will onbly recorded some chosen  aspects  etc ...

Our measuring apparatus can and must be designed with a hearing theory adequately tuned with the actual working of the hearing system to be able to analyse and detect some phenomena natural for the human ears but no so for some measuring protocols or for cats and bats......We dont know all there is to know about hearing plain and simple...

Then the correlation between objective installation and subjective experience is an ONGOING process which is not finished but always in his course..

it is also the reason why we all must learn to listen and why all audiophile must study acoustic and why most serious audio engineer study psycho-acoustic which is a field in progress...

 

 

 

mahgister

 

Not that I want to get in to the whole free will debate here, but the fellow in that video pretty much ignored addressing the incompatibilist/hard determinist arguments against free will. He sort of mentioned determinism, but didn’t actually address or "solve" how his idea of free will either 1. Indicates determinism and it's implications against free will is false or  2. Is compatible with determinism

(I’m a Compatibilist, btw)

 

 

@snilf 

 

Thanks for the reply.

Of course, this presupposes that the subjective correlate ("warmer" male voice, or whatever) is causally connected to that measured phenomenon.

I'd disagree that it "presupposes" such a thing - it is justified on the same basis people accept cause and effect relationships almost everywhere else.  When I employ an EQ boost it changes the subjective impression reliably in the same way as putting your finger on a too-hot stove element reliably causes pain.

Deciding intersubjectively that we sense certain frequency boosts as "warmth," or will refer to it as such, is similar to our agreement to refer to a skin burning as "painful."   It all has fuzzy edges of course, but that's our lot as human beings.

 

I'm not saying it isn't, but I think a lot of folks on this site would want to say so, or would want at least to say that there are other, and important, subjective impressions that don't correspond to any known measurement.

 

That's fine for anyone to claim of course.  But the same is said by virtually every dubious belief system.  Psychics, cults,  New Age Wellness fairs and various pseudo-sciences are full of people making the same appeal to save their hypotheses.   If someone says "I can hear things our most sensitive instruments can't measure" then it requires more justification than their say-so, if it is to be sifted from all the similar noise as plausible.  I'd think you agree?

As to Descartes, thanks also for the reply. To be clear (and I can understand why it may not have been clear in how I quickly wrote it):  I'm certainly aware of Descartes Foundationalism.  By referring to "Descartes' doubts" I was referring to the part in which he employs doubt to first "level" the foundations, questioning all possible assumptions, before building it up again on a purportedly firm foundation.  I think many people new to that level of epistemic skepticism - the "doubt" part - can at first be taken with the doubting and wield the "doubting" cudgel with glee.  Rather than any emphasis on how we can justify claims to knowledge.  That's also what I meant by tossing in the term radical skepticism:  The tearing down part feels more fun, at first :-)

Cheers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The free will theorem is also interesting by his implication if free will exist..

http://www.quantumphysicslady.org/glossary/free-will-theorem/#:~:text=This%20theorem%20states%20that%20if%20the%20human%20experimenters,universe%20up%20to%20the%20moment%20of%20the%20experiment.

 

Anirban Bandyopadhyay concept of "conscious machine" illustrate how the possibility of free will is programmedin the design of the cosmos itself which is a conscious machine like our body is...

The difference between A.I. with bits and Q-bits and non Turing conscious machine based on a geometrical/primenumbers  language expressing and controlling an indefinite chain of synchronizing clocks at all scales is enormous... The difference between a soul and a conscious machine another thing completely... I cannot enter in it here and describe those three kind of being...

In a word an A.I. lived in an external relation to a corner of one universe... A conscious machine is integrated potentially and actually to one universe and is internally related to its totality ... A soul inhabit more than one universe and more than one body...

I don’t really believe we have free will nor is there an overarching design but that’s a different discussion.

I can assure you that Anirban Bandyopadhyay who " came to limelight for inventing nanobrain^[4], in 2008, built a 16 Duroquinone molecule-based brain-like computer^[5] that looks like a wheel or sliced neuroglia^[6] acts like a brain for nanomachines." do not speculate about an overarching design in belief scpeculation...

he designed all parts of his nanobots with the guiding principles of an overarching design on integrated clocks spanning from the atoms to the solar system and beyond... ... Then this is not belief but experimental science...

 

For free will it is an experience not a belief only, like consciousness is an experience not only a belief...

It is an experience in the way a chosen  ethical motive can power our action to a freely chosen adopted goal ...For example a hunger strike to protest violence like the late south African leader Mandela did...It is a free spirit here...Impossible to break his free will...

 

All reality are linked to assumptions, because a reality is a complex set of dimensional phenomena which we perceived only a part relating to our own assumptions..

an exemple:

we assume that fires burns no ?

 

yes we assume and fires burn us...

But suppose someone assume other thing ?

listen this video carefully... Dont go with your reflex this is impossible like unicorn orbiting Mars...

it is 46 minutes but is anything save boring... 😁😊

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj7iqdj1wT8&list=PLnQJF3Qi_4_CGFyisehOpLvbpDhdIe_ld&index=179&t=1s

I don’t really believe we have free will nor is there an overarching design but that’s a different discussion.

Crick like any Nobel prize is a human being which words may be improved...

I never say that because Alain Connes is a field medallist he must be right, i say that he is perhaps serious and we must try to understand him...

We will try with Crick description and complete it with Anirban Bandyopadhyay description of what is the scales interlocking clocks from the atoms to the brain and beyonfdto the solar system and to the galaxies...Lofe is a universal presence in the cosmos not a soup in an exceptional  pound anymore like some Nobel claims in the past...

And if we meditate about the way these inlerlocking clocks are working, an increasing chain of time-like fractals crystals integrated in one anither by rythms and frequencies, wee will have perhaps a clearer ideas than the old Crick an up to date science view about what id a conscious machine like our body...

and perhaps we will understand in a better way what isfree will and why any atom has free will... Because it is part of the cosmos design...

read a book i cannot resume this here...

 

 

Music speak without assumptions like God speak....They are self sustaining realities...

Music is a reality, God is an assumption. 

@mahgister 

You're always tossing Nobel Prize winners around like skittles. Francis Crick won the Nobel here's what he says about it. Is he  dumb? Not know what he's talking about? Great winner of numerous prizes? 

 

The Astonishing Hypothesis is that “You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.”

 

I know I’m conscious, we understand consciousness exists.

It is the good point...

But consciousness is a word also not only an experience and it is related as word or concept to all these others words which are also experience...

Then we must specify our "assumptions" to point to our experience and to the facts...We cannot speak without assumption...

This is the reason why Husserl described the experience he called suspension of all assumptions or beliefs , he stay silent to do so...

Speaking without assumption is the definition of "unicorn orbiting mars"....it is called poetry...

But beware poetry is not a meaningless activity ... It is a very deep dimension in thinking where language is born, call it music and metaphors....Each word even the more prosaic one hide a metaphor...

Music speak without assumptions like God speak....They are self sustaining realities...

This is why music is so powerful....More powerful than mathematics itself which is ultimately  music anyway for Alain Connes or for Anirban Bandyopadhyay....

The bad point is you think consciousness is a fact distinct from soul, spirit or God..

Why is this bad? I know I'm conscious, we understand consciousness exists. We may not agree on every specific definition, the others, spirit, soul, God we haven't the slightest idea if they exist. They're ideas, things we made up. 

And because you know you the difference between consciousness , soul, spirit and God, you certainly know that consciousness is not a fact but an experience, like soul, spirit and God are...

And because you are the only one to speak without any assumption you will teach us what a unicorn orbiting mars is and is not ?

The good point is you begin like me with consciousness...

The bad point is you think consciousness is a fact distinct from soul, spirit or God..

Sorry but consciousness is an interpreted experience, and the " knowing act "that is always a concrete meaningful charged intentionality is precisely the basis of phenomenology...

Then consciousness yes is different from soul, spirit, God, but if we can distinguish them we cannot separe them completely in safe drawers...Like separated words in a dictionary for example...

This is why we speak always with assumptions which we know about, or of which we are unconscious about...

The only thing we can do is becoming conscious of the meaning of our assumptions in our discourse and in our thinking...And we can try to stay coherent with our own assumptions without circling our own brain like a unicorn orbiting mars...It is called keeping an open mind...

Negating these assumptions presence and presenting our opinion like a truth without assumptions is meaningless, thinking about the assumptions behind our opinions is the beginning of thinking...

The only people who talk without assumptions are fundamentalist citing the scripture which is the absolute truth, needing not any assumptions, because coming directly from God...The only thing they assume is the fact that God speak without assumptions through them...

I can assure you that for them their experience is real as yours and has nothing to do at first sight with unicorn orbiting mars...

 

 

 

Yes, it’s possible to talk without assumptions. Consciousness isnt an assumption, saying consciousness is spirt or soul or a part of some God or the other is.

 

«There is no unicorn orbiting mars,  mars is a unicorn »-Groucho Marx 🤓

 

Which is why I have dual FR speaker system, FR at 92db-95db, always out performs any and all woofer/tweeter system. Higher sens makes superior fidelity.

Not to me. Active speakers using DSP crossovers and controlled directivity makes superior fidelity. There isn’t a passive speaker that can compete with the newest active speaker designs at least using superior fidelity as a goal line. 

Yes, it's possible to talk without assumptions. Consciousness isnt an assumption, saying consciousness is spirt or soul or a part of some God or the other is. 

claim to audiophilic excellence without appealing to some "objective" criteri ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Exactly, w/o a objective stat, its impossible to say which is superior to another. The only criteria i consider in speaker selection is based on sensitivity. Which is why I have dual FR speaker system, FR at 92db-95db, always out performs any and all woofer/tweeter system. Higher sens makes superior fidelity. All your box speakers are below 91db. And if the manufacturer claims above 92 db, they are lying. There is no box speaker in the world above 92db. vs FR which are most all above 92db. = FR will always outperform a box speaker Every single time, Due to higher sensitivity. Took me 40 yrs to figure this out, But via resaerch and lots of $$$$$$ I got the answer. My dual FR + T's cost me $1200, vs Wilson's $$$$$$. Spending $$$$$$$ will not give you high fidelity. ONly sensitivity can make fidelity.

Planck believe God created the universe and the universe is a thinking entity so what ! You will reject Quantum mechanics because Planck creator of the field believe in God?

 

Do you think your argument so to speak is rational? Or perhaps look like a circle ?

«I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.»-MaxPlanck

To me the biggest problem with talks from people like Arthur M Young is they begin their argument with assumptions. His first assumption is humans have a spirt, the second ESP exists. It’s like discussing God with a priest, I might as well be discussing unicorns or Tea Pots orbiting Mars.

 

 

« Is it possible to talk without assumption? My wife believe she did all the time..»-Groucho Marx 🤓

 

I forgot to say that Whitehead rejection of the Cartesian bifurcation meet Cassirer deep symbolic forms concept coming from Goethean semiotic ( and not merely from Kant like many people erroneously think, because Cassirer meditated Goethe all his life and he used Goethe "dynamic seeing" of form to correct the self enclosed Kant so to speak)...

The meaning of meaning for Whitehead and Cassirer are symbolic forms what Goethe creating mammal and plant morphology called an archetypal phenomenon...

Goethe method in mammal morphology boogle the mind and is described in this 1,300 pages books with 1,500 figures..

Wolfgang Schad ...

http://www.adonispress.org/threefoldness.php

This morphological approach need a transformation of the observer itself, because the attention must be mobilized...

This phenomenology of the meaning of form and of the correlative form’s meaning is an antidote to a purely mechanical conception of molecular biology...

Anyway molecular biology is now discovered to be more like "music" than mechanistic...

Pure materialism is dead... But some dont have received the news...

 

 

 

To me the biggest problem with talks  from people like Arthur M Young is they begin their argument with assumptions. His first assumption is humans have a spirt, the second ESP exists. It's like discussing God with a priest, I might as well be discussing unicorns or Tea Pots orbiting Mars. 

You forgot to add the width of the room or the width of the headphones shell to your equation...Each one of our ear "think" by itself about the room in our brain so to speak...

In my world my room is a part of my brain, and not only my brain is in the room but the room is in my brain...

it is a nested meaningful world! and here the angle between all waves means a lot...

I can state with a fairly high degree of certainty that the stereo separation of my audiophile headphones is the width of my head.

 

« All angle is an hour so what! This is a mere watch»-Groucho Marx 🤓

I can state with a fairly high degree of certainty that the stereo separation of my audiophile headphones is the width of my head.

By the way, Descartes was not a skeptic, despite the game he plays with his "method of systematic doubt" in, for instance, the first Meditation.

Very important point...Because many sceptic debunking circles act like believers without even knowing that they are believers...

The doubt method is never itself subject to doubt by them , and instead of a suspension of belief, their doubt is only an expression of a belief in the non value of any belief...

Which is the opposite way Descartes use his doubt method and the opposite way Husserl in his Cartesian meditation use Descartes to reveal the deep intentionality of meaning itself...The Method of Husserl is called : epochè...

Each phenomenon is then perceived for a consciousness as a meaning not as a fact...

The usual sceptic reject the meaning with the associated fact which are believed rightfully or not to be wrong... They throw the baby with the muddy waters... An error Descartes and Husserl dont commit...

What cannot be rejected and what must be true is the meaning of meaning itself...An experience of the conscious intentionality itself...

What is interesting is the way Arthur Young depict the meaning of meaning in a pragmatic way to be an angle... The great thinker and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce, rejecting nominalism, will create a complete new field of science and philosophy called " semiotic" , where the meaning of meaning will be described as a sign... But Arthur Young is way simpler to understand than ALL writers i spoke about...

For Young all meaning is an angle, for Descartes all meaning is an "i am" moment, for Husserl all meaning is a consciouness act, for Anirban Bandyopadhyay all meaning is music, even time is music and for Alain Connes too numbers are music and not the reverse...

Now what is the relation between, meaning, sign , angle, numbers, music, time, and consciousness: in Anirban model all that is a system of nested clocks which express the way we synchronized ourself with all that exist... It is "a conscious machine", the living body in a conscious universe...

I will not go beyond here to speak about the soul... And about the way our soul is not reducible to the living body, no more than the cosmos is reducible to the physical unique universe we live in for the time being...

 

Great post!

By prof and you...

I will only add that there exist a simple illuminating way to relate all basic meaning in the symbolic subjective world and in the objective world, this description of the meaning of meaning for Arthur M. Young is an angle....

Then we can understand the very general basis on which we can relate consciouness subjective phenomena and objective science basic concept...

His philosophy is related to the description by Anirban Bandyopadhyay of what is a conscious machine, it is an organism that can synchronize itself with the universe and with meaning in the same acting moment and Young theory predate the Indian model by decades...But way simpler to understand ....

Arthur M. Young is the inventor of the Bell helicopter...

Meaning is an angle for Young and for Anirban Bandyopadhyay ....

These two thinkers ideas are directly related to the subjective/objective rabbit hole so to speak...

This video in two parts will amaze you by its simplicity and depth...His books are very good...

 

 

 

Prof: interesting point about how a measurement (e.g., a 4 dB boost at 150 Hz) can express a "subjective impression" to another specialist who speaks the language of decibels and Herz. Of course, this presupposes that the subjective correlate ("warmer" male voice, or whatever) is causally connected to that measured phenomenon. I'm not saying it isn't, but I think a lot of folks on this site would want to say so, or would want at least to say that there are other, and important, subjective impressions that don't correspond to any known measurement. I'm not saying that isn't so, either; I really don't know. But your point about "objective" phenomena corresponding to subjective impressions in such a way that professionals who speak the technical language understand measurements in terms of their own subjective experience is revealing here. 

By the way, Descartes was not a skeptic, despite the game he plays with his "method of systematic doubt" in, for instance, the first Meditation. On the contrary, Descartes deploys doubt not in order to show that everything can be doubted, but rather, to discover what can't be doubted, what therefore must be true. This skeptical starting point is motivated by historical circumstance: the intellectual dominance of Aristotle in medieval science, and the contamination (for lack of a better word) of philosophy by theology in medieval Scholasticism. Were it not for Descartes' clearing away everything doubtful and building his system back up from a foundation of certainty using only logic (or, at least in principle, only logic), "modern" science would never have been possible.

@snilf

"To put the question succinctly: How can you hope to persuade me of any particular claim to audiophilic excellence without appealing to some "objective" criteria that, because they claim to be "objective," are more than just a subjective preference? What, in short, is the point of reading all these posts if not to come to some sort of conclusion about how to improve one’s system?"

As I wrote in a paragraph of my profile description (and because I don’t like repeating myself with a reformulation):

"I don’t acknowledge sound perception as such being subjective, it’s rather about the aspects of what we hear that we prioritize."

Put a bunch of people in a concert hall witnessing a performance of some symphony, and let’s imagine - for the sake of the argument - that each one of them will get to experience the concert from the same seating position with the concert being appropriately repeated (to quench any "but they weren’t seated the same place"-arguments), and then from an outset of carte blanche have them "recreate" that concert by putting together a stereo system + acoustic locale with a reproduction that to their ears most closely emulates said concert. We’d likely have a wild variety of sonic outcomes from the different systems, even via differently sized listening rooms, and yet let’s remember they attended the same concert. And that’s just assuming, again, that their reference is similar and that they even care about the best ways to most closely reproduce or replicate it.

In reality and as an example some prefer sitting rather close to the orchestra, others further behind; this, at least as a singular aspect, will have a lot to say about the way someone orients themselves in putting together a stereo system, and also how far they may be placed from the speakers and in how big a room.
Then again I’d imagine many if not most aren’t really interested in recreating a live acoustic event in the first place (or any other type of musical event with the intention of using as a reference in assembling and implementing one’s own setup) - it’s more about something centered around itself, dictated also by possible spousal demands, economy, the time one wants to invest in this hobby, preconceived ideas, etc.

It should follow that the context of people and what forms their incentives in this endeavor varies a lot, and hence finding a point of reference here for one to follow  (looking for inspiration) can be tricky. Your premise above rests on the assumption that reading through forum posts is a with the goal of improving one’s own stereo setup, and as such I can imagine why you’d want some "hard intel" to go by and not fluffy pie-in-the-sky assertions. In the end though I gather anyone claiming to be from the "objective" camp will either need to ground their empirical findings (i.e.: measurements, data, theory) with listening evaluations (or so I hope) as a means to challenge these findings, or they don’t place much faith in the human hearing (a shame, I find) which is then effectively downplayed and replaced by a sound-by-number approach.

What is objective criteria, and how would we even agree on it? I guess it’s mostly a matter of getting your hands dirty and start persuading yourself.

What can i say?

What you care for means zip

Nothing...

But your vision is so simplistic about organism and their meaning i cannot say anything to you...

You are a doctor, do your understand the meaning of mammal morphology? if you understand that, how can you think that all biological form are accident waiting to be integrated by a machine?

I bet you know NOTHING about the meaning of morphology , save to be an insignificant appearance...

Morphology is like acoustic, you learn it with your body and seeing intention not with the electrical equalizer manual or with memorized organic chemistry formulas...

An A. I. can replace you as a doctor, i bet you dont even know why you are not replaceable by a machine. ? Some people are so deluded...They dont know themselves and why they exist...

We are here on Earth to grow, not to be integrated in a machine...

Try Dostoievsky : very short novel, an absolute masterpiece, you will learn something...

"The dream of a ridicule man"

 

Your attitude illustrate the superficial thinking in America in particular where the transhumanist cult is very rooted.., Are you not ashamed to be associated to a cult which is not even over scientology level in intellectual term ?

Try Dostoievsky, you can claim that i am an idiot, i am perhaps one why not ?  but Doistoievsky is not an idiot...

Argue with a giant....

Or stay in your ridiculous hole...And instead of beginning a post by insulting  me think...

Whatever feeling we have will be transferred to machines with the ability to remember every syllable they ever heard. In the end humans will not have the ability to counter it. Fighting nature is a losing battle all we can do is destroy it.

 

@mahgister , What you care for means zip. The fact of the matter is that there is nothing about us that is essential other than nature using biologic means to create the machines. It is a natural evolutionary step. We are pitifully inferior organisms. Whatever feeling we have will be transferred to machines with the ability to remember every syllable they ever heard. In the end humans will not have the ability to counter it. Fighting nature is a losing battle all we can do is destroy it. 

I dont contest

" that our ability to test electrical signals is sufficient to indicate whether a difference will cause an audibly detected change."

This is trivial... I contest the belief that electrical signals technology is all there is to know about human hearing and ordinary human experience...

You dont seem to catch this subtle difference, so eager to accuse everyone to be deluded by his perception... Perception so deceiving it is for each of us ask to be trained, and anyway hearing cannot be even understood till this day....Why then disregarding any subjective impressions ?

Do you think that the fact that two electrically identical amplifier measured the same must sound the same is the ultime audio fact? It is trivial...

But what is not trivial is the way each one of us will interpret these same electrical signals in different psycho-acoustic conditions, acoustic circonstances and environment....

Objective and subjective attitude is a two way road...And this circulating correlation is the basis of psycho acoustic, not electrical theory by itself...

Zealot are not better than fetichist....

 

My two ears dont live in a blueprint electronical design but in my room... There is Two kind of CORRELATED science here....We cannot erase  one science for the other... We must learn how to hear, not subordinate our hearing to specs sheets...

 

 

 

A better corollary will be that just because we know everything that we can know about electricity, this does not means we know all there is to know about audio matter and experience :)

 

No, that is not a better corollary nor is it even accurate. The statement wrt electricity speaks to the ability to be able to model and measure all aspects of an electrical signal with enough detail to quantify the potential for change when converted to sound.

From my limited knowledge, those measurements are possible to much much greater accuracy and resolution than any identified or tested aspects of human hearing. Not just better, but much much better. I understand most of those tested limits are under controlled circumstances with ideal stimulus. With real music, the ability to detect is much much less. If we can test electrically to much much better than tested human limits and humans limits are much much worse with real music, then we can conclude with high confidence that our ability to test electrical signals is sufficient to indicate whether a difference will cause an audibly detected change.

deludedaudiophile

Exactly! Very important point.

Analogy: Just because we’ve yet to reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity, nor deduced the exact character of Dark Matter, doesn’t give me an excuse to drop a bowling ball on your bare toes as if we don’t have enough understanding of physics to understand those consequences.

Corollary to your post, just because we don’t know everything about electricity, does not mean we don’t know enough for audio :-) I see that as a frequent justification in these forums for all kinds of what I consider ridiculousness.

 

A better corollary will be that just because we know everything that we can know about electricity, this does not means we know all there is to know about audio matter and experience :)

I see that as a frequent justification by some for all kind of what i consider arrogant ignorance in some audiophile forums by some, ignorance in psycho-acoustic and hearing science where subjective experience is studied seriously and taken seriously not only in his limitations but for his possibilities and performances like with trained musicians...

 

Is it not extraordinary that we must remember to some that audio is not mere electronical design but also acoustic experience and control in psycho-acoustic  science  personal and collective history ?

 

@prof ,

Corollary to your post, just because we don't know everything about electricity, does not mean we don't know enough for audio :-)  I see that as a frequent justification in these forums for all kinds of what I consider ridiculousness.

Thanks for this very clear and enligtening post prof about  the necessary CORRELATION ...

My deepest respect...

@snilf

I’m glad you found my indulgent speaker thread entertaining.

As to your status as an audiophile, hey, it’s a big tent in my view :-)

Nice to see a philosophy prof here. I’m not a prof, just a layman with a long interest in philosophy/science. I have a general lay-of-the-land understanding of the standard philosophical issues, though with particular interest in subjects like epistemology, free will, morality, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion (I’m not religious, but I’ve long been fascinated with "why people believe what they believe" including those belief systems that flourish outside the scientific world view).

Just to riff a little more on the subjective/objective thing:

I mentioned that one can use objective measurements to identify something in sound reproduction - e.g. 4dB boost at 150Hz - but that I’m also interested in "what that sounds like." It’s subjective character. For many such a boost is perceived and described as "increasing the warmth/body" of the sound, in particular say male vocals or any instrument in that range. So that’s the technical description along with the "subjective impression." The thing is, I work in pro sound (for film and TV). If you have enough technical familiarity, then a technical description can function like a subjective description. If you’ve heard enough what a boost at 150Hz sounds like, then saying "I’ve added a boost at 150Hz to that male vocal" equates to "telling you how it sounds" in the same way the words "adding warmth/body" to the vocal would. So in certain circumstances, with the appropriate experience, strict technical descriptions can equate to "what it sounds like."

Similarly, with enough experience correlating measurements to audible consequences, someone can look at certain speaker measurements and understand "what that sounds like." (To some degree). Many audiophiles who say "you can’t tell what X sounds like from measurements" are often deriving that from their own level of ignorance on the subject, where they don’t have the experience and knowledge to get a picture of how something sounds from measurements.

So this appeal to technical measurements aren’t necessarily at odds with the subjectivity of the matter.

However, two things I’d have to say about that:

1. Most people don’t have that level of experience, so all sorts of short hand subjective description terms - e.g. adding "warmth" or "body" or "punch" or "brilliance" or "air" or "cleaning up the muddiness" etc - are used.

Over on the ASR forum there are members that pretty much refute the relevance of any such subjective descriptors, especially those that come from the reviewing and audiophile world. They see it as unreliable and too vague at best, pure b.s. at worst. "Just give me the measurements; your subjective impressions are useless to me." This drives me a bit nuts because I’m often dealing with folks who seem to be reasoning in a bubble, not really examining their assumptions or the wider implications of their stance. (By habit, I reflexively do as wide a "consistency test" on whatever I argue).

 

These are typically people who don’t work in professional sound because if they did they’d immediately understand how impractical their demands are. Most of the very work they enjoy, be it music produced in studies or the sound (and images) of TV and movies, are constructed via the exchange of subjective descriptors. My clients don’t have technical knowledge, but we have to understand "how they want something to sound" and I have to know what they mean and how to fix or produce it. It’s all done via intersubjective communication, not reference to measurements. If subjective impressions and descriptions were truly that unreliable, not only would my job be impossible, much of human activity would be impossible.

I continually try to impress upon these folks that "less reliable" (than measured or scientifically controlled listening) does not equate to "wholly unreliable" or "useless" or "bullsh*t." (In this regard it sort of reminds me of the "Philosophy 101 student syndrome." That is where a philosophy student first encounters arguments for radical skepticism, e.g. Descartes doubts, and comes out admonishing people with "you can’t REALLY know that." Not realizing that they have to move beyond radical skepticism to actually building a practical version of "knowledge" even given our lack of omniscience. Similarly, some "science/engineering" obsessed audiophiles adopt a level of skepticism about our perception that becomes incoherent if you trace out the implications).

2. Even when you have some technical knowledge and familiarity with how some measurements correlate to sonic characteristics, there is still vastly more happening in the reproduction of any single music track to be described, from all the tonal differences, spatial differences, production techniques, playing, melody, instrumentation, and on and on. A "bump at 150Hz" doesn’t capture anything like the full buffet of subjective sonic impressions available to be described.

Them’s some of my thoughts anyway.

Cheers.

I can't help but think this discussion is softly approaching something of a eugenics direction - which has some historical significance in the development of some exceptionally significant mathematical and statistical methods.  

I choose to not partake.  Thankyou for clarifying the answer to my question.

Well said....

@deludedaudiophile I can’t help but think this discussion is softly approaching something of a eugenics direction - which has some historical significance in the development of some exceptionally significant mathematical and statistical methods. {edit - I'm can't remember which without doing a non-woke google (impossible), but I think it includes Gaussian and Bayesian methods}

I choose to not partake. Thankyou for clarifying the answer to my question.

It is only a non sequiter to you, and perhaps others, but not to me since I can see a logical progression. In order to be of some productivity, to someone, i.e. in order to keep up, people will need to accept human/machine integration. At the bottom end of the economic pole, will be those who for economic reasons must accept the government supplied augmentations. For those with the resources, they will be able to buy the best available. The divide between the haves and have nots will hence grow, from purely economic, to intelligence, effective life span, etc.

It will get ugly before it gets better.

I am afraid that you are right...

But unlike you i am not optimist at all for the transhumanist program of integration with artificial intelligence, it is a hellish world,  worse than Huxley and Orwell combined...

i am anti-integration, i dont speak about medical prosthetics here, i spoke about the sociological cult that wanted to change the rooting of the human body in nature...I dont even consider the hierarchical power pyramid which this demonic ideology could and would  produce...

 

 

@noske

 

Machine/ human integration with what kind of machine?

An A.I. ?

I just distinguish and separate in the above post conventional "artificial intelligence" using Bits and Q-bits and statistical methods in the general Turing paradigm with "conscious machine" as defined by Anirban Bandyopadhyay in a non Turing context of machine design ...

The integration with A.I. is a monstruous business who cut the rooted human of his link with Nature...This is doomed to begin with...This is Frankenstein business passed some limits, like entertain transhumanists cultists...

Interacting with "conscious" machine is completely different business...Because conscious machine are autonomous individuality even if artificial one...We will interact with them WITHOUT integrating with them...They are not a tool like A.I. but a new species of being...This conscious machine contrary to the integration with A.I. will not uproot humans from Nature...

And like i said we can mathematically distinguish the three beings: artificial intelligence is not rooted at all in a universe, it is limited to a " mathematically prepared" corner of this universe and interact in an external way with this universe...

A "concious machine" is rooted in one universe, by definition of his autoprogammed learning sets of time-like fractals set of clocks, it synchronize with a universe internally...

But this synchronization, unlike human spirit, make the machine captive of this universe and identical at the end with it, like my body is part of this universe...My body is a  kind of "conscious machine"  in a way i am not, as human...

Reality is so complex that monism and dualism are true at the same time at different ontological level...

Because  "conscious machine" cannot live simultaneously in many universes and reincarnate at will...Unlike human spirit consciousness , which advanced medical science research reveal now that it probably survive the death of the body then survive even the death of this universe....

 

i will stop here to not annoy some...

Of course gradually less and less people will be able to contribute in meaningful ways to society as AI becomes more capable.

Define capable. The prior paragraph does not support anything, it only asserts, or speculates. Then the prior words here may be examined.

The obvious outcome is machine/human integration and an even greater divide between have and have nots.

A non sequiter, methinks, in context. [some words striked out for interference]

 

The human brain is the most astonishingly capable problem solving technology ever developed by evolution; why would we willingly give up exercising it? The machines will take over not by force, but because we've gradually ceded control over our own lives to "labor saving devices" that do supposedly trivial chores better.

 

You could argue that it opens up limited brain capability to more artful and altruistic or even scientific pursuits as opposed to drudgery, just like automation did with manual labour. I for one don't lament using a shovel or even a ox to plow my fields.

Of course gradually less and less people will be able to contribute in meaningful ways to society as AI becomes more capable. The obvious outcome is machine/human integration and an even greater divide between have and have nots.

Great post thanks...

Your reflection complete mine...

 

 

Don't know how or why this discussion got off onto this particular set of rails, but hey: this is my wheelhouse, actually.

I've done a lot of thinking recently about AI and "consciousness." The new GPT-3 AI program is formidable; what it can do led to these reflections. I'll try to be brief.

For one thing, I don't think it's killer robots we have to worry about. Rather, it's that, little by little, AI is taking over the various cognitive tasks we used to perform for ourselves. Our cars decide when to turn the headlights on, when to lock the doors, when it's wet enough for windshield wipers...they even park themselves now, and drive themselves for a while. Our refrigerators decide what food we need to buy, and will even order it for us. GPS guides us to our destinations. But as a result, no one has a sense of their own physical geography anymore, no one knows where north is or how to read a map. The human brain is the most astonishingly capable problem solving technology ever developed by evolution; why would we willingly give up exercising it? The machines will take over not by force, but because we've gradually ceded control over our own lives to "labor saving devices" that do supposedly trivial chores better.

Anyway, GPT-3 is so damn good at, for example, writing creative texts that it has made me wonder if we're posing the problem in the wrong way when it comes to the "Turing Test" and the questions about artificial "intelligence." Maybe the question is not "Can machines think?" but rather: "Do we really do anything more than manipulate language when we 'think'?" Maybe a machine can be structured to manipulate a complex sign system, a language, in "creative" ways. But...I don't believe a machine can be structured to CARE about the result. The human experience, then, is perhaps not to be located in the creative act itself, but in the response to it—in the reader instead of the writer or, better, in the interaction between them. GPT-3 can even compose music "in the style of" whoever you like. But does GPT-3 enjoy music, listen to music?

gregm: agreed. I think. The uncertainty concerns what "consistency" would mean here. Am I "thorough"? Yes, I hope so. "Spontaneous"? Sure—at least when I'm not too concerned with being "thorough." Do I prefer baroque, classical, romantic? Yes! But I'll throw in some classic rock, too, and I'm listening to Tool's "Fear Inoculum" a lot these days (mesmerizing played loud on a good system). Do I seek to "simulate reality" in my room, or rather to "reproduce what's on the medium"? Again, it depends. Those on this site who insist on "live performance" as the Original, the thing in itself that needs to be accurately represented, will have trouble convincing me that this is either really possible or even desirable when the original utilized microphones and electric instruments through amplifiers in imperfect noisy spaces. But even concerts of acoustic music cannot really be simulated very closely when the ensemble is large (say, a symphony orchestra) and the venue grand (say, the Musikverein). Solo piano, or cello (my wife plays the former, I the latter): yes, then I want my system to sound like the instruments do in my music room.

All of which is to say, I suppose, that I "agree" with you to the extent that what you really seem to value in someone else's opinion is that it be expressed well. Isn't that the bottom line for any kind of performance, in writing or in notes?

 

We are the ancestors, the makers of machines, machines that can exist under circumstances we can not. One day they will rule the universe and like billions of species before us we will become extinct.

I dont think so....i dont like Yuval Noah Harari philosophy at all...

Humans are spirit not only conscious machine....We are rooted in more than one uinverse...A conscious machine is rooted in only one universe...And A. I. is not rooted at all in a universe but create his own artificial corner in a universe...These distinctions correspond to precise  MATHEMATICAL distinctions  by the way not my impressions...

And evolving in a machine/hybrid cage is not a progress at all...

Even a conscious machine, which is not to be confused with the actual A.I. which is not conscious, even a conscious machine by definition of what is a conscious machine, and i proposed a scientist, the only one on earth that give a definition of a concious machine in another thread, even by this first definition of a conscious machine, we can see WHY this conscious machine will be prisoner and captive in ONE UNIVERSE... Human spirit is not...

I will not explain here save if you want an answer... I dont like to be insulted...i like to discuss...

An A.I. work with bits and Q-bits and statistical mathematical learning... Conscious machine as defined for the first time by Anirban Bandyopadhyay do not.operate like any Turing machine improved by quantum computation..They need another language invented by Anirvan and described by him and his team...This new language reproduce the brain/body/cosmos language... This was even anticipated by a great mathematician the late Charles Muses before Anirban idea in his book about the chronotopology of time...

https://www.amazon.ca/-/fr/Charles-Muses/dp/157898727X

@mijostyn - pretty much a given that we will evolve to a human/machine hybrid. I don’t see any other way for us to progress.

@mijostyn - pretty much a given that we will evolve to a human/machine hybrid. I don't see any other way for us to progress.

We are the ancestors, the makers of machines, machines that can exist under circumstances we can not. One day they will rule the universe and like billions of species before us we will become extinct.