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Re: Coffeehouse Guitar vs street-busker
Oh yeah....you gotta love Aristotle...Plato's defiant home boy. Basically
Aristotle was going against Plato's theory of the forms (it was not
Socrates, btw) that matter and form can be separated, elevating form (or
essence) to the etheral status of a non-physical Universal concept...like
Chairness, Redness, Justice, Goodness, etc...or maybe even Idiotness. :)
Aristotle rejected that and said you could not separate matter from form,
hence why his theory of identify was so strict in terms of binding
characteristics to things. Yet Aristotle wasn't able to foresee what John
Locke developed nearly 2000 years later, namely the notion of primary and
secondary qualities. Qualities such as color and smell are secondary
qualities of things. They aren't essential to it's being or identiy. The
only essential properties a thing can have, according to this particular
line of once brilliant scientific revolution thought are physical
properties
of mass, extension, etc. Interestingly enough, one can't observe primary
qualities, only secondary ones....hence the introduction of the Unknown X
as
a physical object.
In any event, according to the above and bringing this back to music, what
you think you are hearing when you listen to a performance is not even
close
to a primary quality, but is far removed from it. In fact, taking this
further, what you hear is the result of a chain of cause and effect from a
set of unobservable physical objects generating fluctuations of air
pressure, which propagate through the air, reach the human ear, vibrate
the
ear drum, generate a neurological response and impluse through axons, make
it to the brain, and eventually arise as a mental "perception"...so
ridiculously far removed from the so called physical event, that one can
only suggest, in this theory at least, that music is only in the mind. Now
enters Berkely who contracted Locke with his theory of Idealism or
Immaterialsm...pretty cool theory imo.
But this is all passé philosophy, based on the causal theory of perception
and realism. Along came phenomenalism (NOT phenomenology, which is
radically different and out in the weeds), which states that all the
action
is in the sense data, which is metaphysically neutral. It simply is,
neither
physical nor non-physical, mental nor external, primary nor secondary.
A looping performance from the listener's standpoint is then defined as a
collection and series of sensory data....no more than that. And back to my
original point, in that collection you never come across anything like a
value like good or bad, uninspiring, etc...that's quite unthinkable.
Man, I love this shit....I'll never be able to get to sleep now.
Kris
----- Original Message -----
From: <Matthew.Quinn@sunlife.com>
To: <Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com>
Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2006 12:35 PM
Subject: Re: Coffeehouse Guitar vs street-busker
>>>>>>>I think I've turned this thread into a philosophical tract. Sorry.
>
>
> I've been enjoying your (dead accurate) philosophical musings all
>morning!
> Feel free to continue!
>
>
>
>>>>>>>>IF we are talking about actual inherent or
> instrinsic characteristics of music, then it would be impossibe for a
> piece
>
> of music to be both X and Not-X.
>
>
> A is A!
>
>
> http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/Metaphysics_Identity.html
>
>
>
>
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