Sir Mustapha
Group: Musicians
Posts: 2802
Joined: April 2003 |
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Posted: Jan. 07 2008, 10:33 |
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Quote (Alan D @ Jan. 04 2008, 17:16) | Ah, now there I put up my hand and object. '1 and 0' are states, which in themselves are meaningless. 'True and False' are concepts, which we superimpose on the states to give them meaning. |
Not really. "True" and "false" are values, just like 0 is a value and 3.14159... is a value. "True" and "false" don't have meanings, either; they're actually simply names, just like 0 and 1 are also names given to 0V and 5V in the transistors. "True" and "false" only become the concepts you speak of when you see them within a program, or among the data of a program, but that is already abstraction - and even only in certain cases. I'm going to look pompous for going into technobabble but please forgive me, but anyway, if you have a while(true) { ... } loop in a program, the "true" isn't even a concept exactly; it's a value, that keeps the loop running indefinitely. It's not "yes", or "positive". So, basically, any kind of "concept" you extract out of it is already an abstraction, but it is ENTIRELY the product of bits, and you can only abstract using some kind of external influence (i.e. the brain), because the computer itself doesn't do that.
So, yes, the abstraction is a subjective and completely human effort, but behind the layer of human interpretation, there's an inevitable, deterministic, measurable sequence of things going on. If we assume that happens in our brains too (in the form of immensely complex chains of communication between braincells), accepting that is not denying that those things result in an external, much bigger perception; it's merely an observation that may or may not lead to a bigger understanding about things. It's not a nihilistic "we're all a bunch of cells and this 'life' thing is just an illusion" statement; that is a mistake I think is made by those who abhor the idea of mathematics in music. In the very end, music is a bunch of sounds stringed together, but there are many layers above them, which are the point of music. Nobody makes music thinking of the frequencies and amplitude (okay, maybe Stockhausen did?); they do it without thinking, inevitably.
Also, I do not think that "pure science" can explain everything. Maybe it will, in a far future, when our supercomputers can finally discover the fundamental question of life, the universe and everything, but until then, we can't say. Studying the brain chemistry searching for the impact of a poem will yield near zero results, probably; to make yet another parallel to programming, it would not be possible to try to understand the whole working of my computer just by looking at the instructions the processor executes. We also need the abstraction in those cases.
-------------- Check out http://ferniecanto.com.br for all my music, including my latest albums: Don't Stay in the City, Making Amends and Builders of Worlds. Also check my Bandcamp page: http://ferniecanto.bandcamp.com
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