On 06/12/2008, at 1:03 AM, John Mikes wrote:
> Kim,
> I enjoyed your bilingual blurb 'around' music, as I guess.
> Is mathematique (numbers?) something like music? a gift one either
> has or not?
Every gene helps, I suppose. I have musicians on both sides of my
family, one of whom is a distinguished composer (Alfred Hill 1869-1960)
I don't believe that talent is the sine qua non of musical fortitude
though. Creativity CAN be taught - we don't have to wait for geniuses
to come along
Imagine if the science world actually depended solely on the the
Newtons, the Einsteins, the Schroedingers etc. to do the day to day
scientific stuff.
I would say that everybody should have at least a modest degree of
scientific understanding or appreciation; the job of education, the
business I am in - this would be far more valuable in the long run
than pouring billions into funding an academy to find and nurture
geniuses (the "Gifted and Talented Syndrome" - if you aren't G & T you
can just go rot; so says today's education world)
Same point holds for music - not every kid who learns to play the
violin becomes an Andre Rieu, but anybody with a modest ability on the
fiddle will appreciate a certain aspect of music a whole lot better
than somebody who never picked up a musical instrument in his life
> David Bohm said (and I have great esteem for the man) that numbers
> are human creations.
Yeah - that would appear to be the 64 cent question. If he's right,
some of us here may have been barking up the wrong tree for quite a
while
> If Bruno - and his cohorts - state that everything is just numbers -
> integers in long series - (I still don't know if WITH functions
> between them, or just the balnk series?) - I figure it after Bohm
> that they found a 'tool' in this human invention to use as the
> otherwise inaccessible 'materialization' of the feeling 'reality' or
> call it 'essence of the world' etc., - (materialization meant in a
> 'higher' sense than the figment (misconcept) of the physicists'
> world of matter/energy(?) in their explanations of accessed and
> misunderstood phenomena).
I believe the mathematicalisation of Everything to be one of the most
profoundly interesting developments in post-modern thinking. I do not
NEED a material universe, except in the sense that without this
perfect illusion(?) I might not be in a conscious state at all and
therefore incapable of any qualia It excites the intellect and the
intuition. It FEELS correct, but then so does going to church and
burning incense and reciting catechism for some people.
Let's just say it's a bit like a headache - you've got one if you
think you've got one
If it turns out that some Brain The Size Of A Planet (BTSOAP) can
prove we are the dream of numbers then I am perfectly happy with that
thought. Now all we need to work out is what the numbers in fact ARE
> Your (and maybe mine) 'materialization' is "music".
Thank you for that supremely useful insight John
> I do not realize it into tunes but it in a vague sense of "IT" -
> musical experience is closest, - I figure: as Bruno's 'numbers' -
> and your 'ever existed' Eroica Symphony is just a notion of 'a'
> realization...
True, BUT
I still hold that the Eroica existed BEFORE Ludwig van gave birth to
it!! He merely DISCOVERED it sitting there and wrote it down. It's
kind of like Dark Matter. Composing music is often like that; you have
the feeling that you are not so much inventing something as
discovering something. Suddenly you are being swept into the
gravitational field of something you cannot see or touch - only feel.
It gains shape only as an aural experience for some bizarre reason
that nobody has yet understood
Note - this is no argument for the existence of a God as some would
say (Michaelangelo "seeing" the sculpture in the virgin block of
marble etc)
In the same breath I would say that the Everett no-collapse wave-state
was clearly a discovery, not a construct. On the other hand, Niels
Bohr and the Copenhagenists confabulated a dodgy, politically correct
notion of the observer collapsing the wave function; no explanation,
just a "happy ending" to the movie so people wouldn't ask for their
twenty bucks back as they left the cinema...
In music there are lots and lots of dodgy, ad-hoc, derivative,
nonsensical essays that are clearly designed to generate market value
- NOT communicate something fundamental about reality. Most Rock music
(In My Extremely Humble View) is designed to hoodwink the brain in
this way. It's all "as if" it were real music but lacks dimensional
depth
Any music designed to be listened to only at MEGA VOLUME is clearly
trying to be better than it is. Volume of delivery gives a false
importance to crappy musical design.
Try listening to ACDC or Led Zeppelin at moderate or soft volume.
Suddenly it's all smoke and mirrors
>
> If I may use the pronoun: "WE" have a hard time in our 'musical'
> predisposition to switch to numbers, even more so to express what we
> feel/think in the 'words' created for a baseless communication in
> the superficial average mental activity of humans.
We do, yes; but the strength of the musician is that music is a
language itself. Beyond words, possibly beyond numbers. One enormous
advantage that music appears to possess over Math is that you don't
need to know how to "read" music to appreciate it. Innumerates like me
are forever locked out of the mathematical shovel dance
> When I play I am absorbed, no numbers, no politix
> even no personal malaises - only the music. If my fingers goof a
> passage what I (innerly) heard right, I am desperate.
But - your goofs are just an ALTERNATIVE to what is written on the
page in front of you (assuming that is what you were doing)
Don't imagine the composer got it 100% right!! You may have
accidentally discovered a very interesting alternative!
Respect your goofs, John - the multiverse applies to everything and
music is part of the Everything
In another universe you sat down and played a Mozart piano concerto
with the music upside-down and found that it actually works well!!!!!!!
>
> This 'musical comp' IS our reality, not 'understood' or
> 'explainable' because these terms work only "in words". Another
> 'plane'(religion?) in the human - (sub?)conscious existence.
> There are many such 'planes' and it is hard to switch.
It is all a bunch of BRAIN STATES ultimately. Brain chemistry. I
firmly believe that the people who will finally settle the dust in a
lot of this discussion will be the NEUROPLASTICIANS - the brain
analysts using their fMRI scanners and understanding of neuro-
transmitters and the way in which the (physical?) brain can wire
itself and unwire itself in a myriad ways - all the way into advanced
old age, if we keep on the learning curve and don't merely try to be
"right" about everything all the time.
"Neurons that fire together wire together"
If music gives you your emotional thrills then that is because it
always did
If Maths gives you your emotional thrills then that is because it
always did
If Logic gives you your emotional thrills then that is because it
always did
If Science gives you your emotional thrills then that is because it
always did
If Philosophy gives you your emotional thrills then that is because it
always did
etc.
To supplement all of this, try learning JAPANESE or CHINESE when you
hit your 70s and then you will open up a whole new wing of your mind
that you never even knew existed
keep wondering - it's the best tonic of all. There are no mysteries -
only perceptual shortcomings
regards
Kim
>
> What do you think? Bruno? Stathis? and my eternal critic: Brent?
>
> Musicalistically yours
>
> John M
>
> > La vérité sort de la bouche des ignorants. (JM)<
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 6:16 PM, Kim Jones <kimjones.domain.name.hidden>
> wrote:
>
>
> On 02/12/2008, at 4:58 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> >
> > Hi Kim,
> >
> >
> > On 28 Nov 2008, at 09:54, Kim Jones wrote:
> >
> >
> >> How is it - dans les termes comprehensibles a un gamin comme moi -
> >> that because I am a machine, SANS des MATHEMATIQUES, there is no
> >> substratum of primitive physical materiality?
> >>
> >> If you can explain this dans des termes simples pour une fois je te
> >> serais infiniment reconnaisant
> >
> >
> >
> > To explain that the world is (mostly) mathematical (and then
> psycho or
> > bio or theo logical), without mathematics, can be demanding.
>
>
> OK - accepted; I get this from mathematicians and physicists all the
> time - and I have quite a few as friends. Nevertheless, if there was
> one human on the planet who could do it, or at the very best make a
> heroic attempt at it, I reckon YOU'RE THE ONE!!!!!
>
> Court jesters like me cannot understand mathematics, but we understand
> the 'realities' described by mathematics through a kind of sixth
> sense. We are also very good judges of character. Tu peux te sauver,
> mais tu ne peux pas m'eschapper!!!
>
>
> >
> > What could help is the Mandelbrot Set. I will think about it.
>
>
>
> I LOVE the Mandelbrot set. I intuitively feel that reality is fractal.
> I do not know how I 'know' this. Please explain to me how I can know
> something without really knowing something
>
>
>
> >
> >
> > Also, I don't want to bore the list too much,
>
>
> I don't think all these 'brains the size of a planet' are being bored
> by a different way of looking at the same data for once. Hopefully
> they welcome it.
>
>
>
>
> > and there are already
> > many posts, so I will go extremely slowly.
>
>
> Yes, there are many monks hunched over their manuscripts in cloisters
> racking their brains by candle-light, trying to see in the data what
> they have long ago decided is already there.....
>
>
> >
> >
> > You may be disappointed.
>
>
> That nobody can explain reality without using mathematics? But reality
> already IS - I don't see algebra floating around inside my living
> room!! Maybe the universe is most ACCURATELY described in the
> (devil's) details using the numbers but what about SIMPLIFYING it all
> for once?
>
> Surely a FIVE YEAR OLD can sit at this table and appreciate some of
> this stuff? Maybe a five year old can actually PUT something on the
> table to be considered because the brains-the-size-of-a-planet have
> forgotten that simplicity is a much more effective force for good than
> complexity.
>
> There is much FOGWEED growing on this list. Maybe reality is too
> simple to understand - as opposed to too complex. Let's get into a bit
> of jardinage!!!
>
>
>
>
> > In general mystic-open people like the
> > conclusion,
>
>
>
> Well - I'm not into mystery, that's for sure. I don't trust people who
> perpetuate mysteries. They are covering something up!!! I still expect
> the conclusion to follow from the reasoning, but I happen to believe
> that once you have cogitated on the mathematics, the output CAN be
> described in plain English (or French)
>
> Why should it be that anybody devoid of a PhD in higher mathematics
> and logic and computer science should be locked out of this
> discussion? As I said to Russell recently, "I worship at the feet of
> anybody who can understand this (mathematical) stuff"
>
> BUT
>
> I happen to believe (in my humble foolishness) that you can still
> communicate these (really quite) momentous ideas in a way that the
> 99.9999999% of humanity who don't inhabit universities for most of
> their lives can understand
>
>
>
>
>
> > but dislike the hypotheses and the methodology
> > (reasoning).
>
>
>
> If I could bloodywell understand it I might start to like it! Ain't my
> problem. It's YOURS
>
> I didn't ask to be born with a desire to understand the fabric of
> reality. It afflicts me like a DISEASE
>
>
>
>
> > The rationalists like the hypotheses and the reasoning,
> > but few appreciate the conclusion.
>
>
> That's because everybody only wants to see his own ideas confirmed by
> the reasoning. As Colin Hales says, scientists predict everything
> except a scientist.
>
> Even scientists want to be loved and appreciated, I guess
>
>
>
> >
> >
> > Are you really serious?
>
>
> As serious as any fool ever gets, I suppose. I imagine the attempt
> will be fun. New advances in neuroplasticity suggest that as we age,
> we should attempt to do the SAME things differently, because that way
> the neurons stay healthy.
>
> Some older people haven't learnt a new skill in 50 years. These are
> the ones who are merely confirming constantly their own conclusions
> under the guise of "doing science"
>
>
>
>
> > I could send a post per month, taking
> > everything at zero.
>
>
> That's fine. This is perhaps your BIGGEST challenge dear Bruno. You
> need to take it slowly and ENJOY the challenge my dear
>
>
> >
> >
> > Have you an intuition that consciousness is not material?
>
>
>
> Of course! If we take every score of Beethoven's 3rd symphony and burn
> them - if we trash every orchestral recording ever made of it - if we
> get every conductor and player who could remember parts of it or all
> of it and ERASED their memories of it or just murdered them outright
>
>
> I still believe Beethoven's 3rd symphony STILL exists. You will
> doubtless say "in Platonia"
>
>
> Music IS a bunch of mathematical objects spinning in their own space.
> Why I cry for some reason when I see Garrett Lisi's E8 thingy. It's
> MUSIC goddam it!!!
>
>
>
> >
> >
> > In case you were not serious, it is ok also.
>
>
> I am UNSERIOUSLY SERIOUS. I am not so "serious" that I have any pre-
> conceived notions about what I want. When I look in the mirror in the
> morning I always say to the guy looking back "Who the fuck are
> you????"
>
> I exist in an INFINITUDE OF INSTANTIATIONS IN THE MULTIVERSE
>
> I believe they are all talking at you now!!!!
>
>
>
>
>
> > But I like to share, and
> > others could benefit.
>
>
> That is the hallmark of a true teacher, somebody I have only the
> highest repect for
>
>
>
>
>
> > Who knows, you could be the one finding the
> > fatal flaw!
>
>
> You are too kind monsieur
>
>
>
> >
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > Bruno
> > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
> >
> > La vérité sort de la bouche des débutants.
>
>
> Genial. Faites-entrer les gosses!!!!!!!!
>
>
> Kim
>
>
>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > >
>
>
>
>
>
> >
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Received on Fri Dec 05 2008 - 18:57:36 PST