Philosophy Now Forum

Greta wrote:As a musician you will appreciate that most music scores are only brief sketches of the intended performance, relying on the performers' interpretations to add the ineffable aspects.

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Significant aspects of musical performance aren't notatable. They're far too complex. We don't have notation for those fine-grained nuances, and even if we did, it would be too difficult to read and think about while playing.

Nonetheless, it's impossible t express that which is real time in words.

I'm not sure what you're saying there.

Terrapin Station wrote:

Dubious wrote:I could listen to the Eroica and the Mahler symphonies, the piano sonatas of Beethoven and Schubert, etc.

I could, too, but I'd much rather put on Stravinsky, or Stockhausen, or Copland, or Reich, etc.

YUK.
Especially Copeland.

Beethoven is the master; unsurpassed and much imitated.

Copland is easily my second favorite classical composer. Stravinsky is easily my favorite, plus Stravinsky is my favorite musical artist overall . . . Copland would be in my top 50 overall (most of my top 50 would be artists from other genres in other words . . . there might be another classical artist or two in my top 50 though). I like Beethoven, Bach, etc. well enough, but I don't like pre-late-19th century classical near as much as classical from that point forward. Pre the late 19th century, pre folks like Debussy, Mussorgsky, Wagner, etc. the harmonic, rhythmic, textural, etc. language was far too major/minor diatonic, traditional and narrow for my tastes. Frankly, all other things being equal, I'd usually rather listen to folks even like John Alden Carpenter or Carlos Chavez than any pre late-19th century composer. Bach is probably my favorite of earlier classical though, for whatever that's worth. He'd be hundreds of slots down on a favorite musical artist list though.

Re Copland, have you heard stuff like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqqhgwwa7gQ
(that's probably my favorite piece of his . . . it's broken up into multiple videos on youtube; I just linked to the beginning)

Or this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaYoRnsokOg

Nonetheless, it's impossible to express that which is [in] real time in words.

Terrapin Station wrote:I'm not sure what you're saying there.

Sorry, the typos (corrected in red) wouldn't have helped. My point was that reality happens too quickly to comprehend, so we reduce it to simple abstractions so we can operate. This applies to any of the performing arts.

Meanwhile, if we consider static forms like painting or sculpture, great complexity lies in the real time creation of the works. The end products only hint at the rhythm, thought processes, motivations and level of focus, care, control and risk-taking that were involved in the creating.

Greta wrote:Music is a form of communication that, like any physical activity, expresses things that cannot fully be detailed with words. AI won't need our music since it lives in an informational, rather than physical world, and the information need not be drawn out physically when it can be gathered directly. Perhaps AI would instead create patterns of data flow, creating waves of data (analogous to sound waves) that provide it with pleasure?

That would presuppose it had a sensing mechanism installed in its 'brain' that enable it to experience such pleasure or displeasure.

Dubious wrote:Are you referring to terraforming other planets by earth remnants possibly landing on them incorporating that info within its native environment?

Greta wrote: Yes.
Multicellular life creates informational versions of itself for reproduction. Ecosystems spread through individual organisms moving beyond its boundaries, and each individual carries with it a little of the ecosystem's characteristics (eg. frogs in wetlands, armoured lizards in deserts). Humans and their works too carry in them the characteristics of Earth, and certainly have the capacity to carry, protect and nurture Earth's microbial DNA on other worlds.
Early humans would have believed that their lands were the only ones where anything happened, perhaps the only place at all. Then they crossed the oceans, found new lands, and colonised. It's just a continuation of that process.

There is no doubt that "Ecosystems spread through individual organisms moving beyond its boundaries...". In any planetary ecosystem, meaning an enclosed one, that's a given...and also the point. All of this 'moving' happens within the same single boundary even though climate and geography may create areas of uniqueness which, if not infringed, may become even more singular in its manifestations. But how the evolutionary logic of planet Earth upon breaking up could be transferred to other planets is, for me, a leap beyond credibility. For one thing, these space chunks after having traveled for millions or possibly billions of years will be very different from what they were at point of origin.

How could any organic souvenir from another world , frozen and fried by heat, cold and radiation successfully reinvest itself on a foreign body or recreate any of its organic compounds culminating in human DNA? If it can happen at all it must be through an active intelligence landing on a suitable planet with the technology to start the terraforming project and let time manage the rest. This may sound logical but this too remains virtually improbable. No matter how potent our future technologies it will be forever minuscule to the incomprehensible distances it must surmount to accomplish its goals of creating human colonies on other planets.

Not least, if there is no presence to supervise the project of 'owning' the planet long prior to the breakup of this one and merely hope that some live vestige of Earth lands on it, it's an almost absolute certainty that whatever grows in consequence, if anything, will not be human just as extinction on this planet would cause another master species to emerge or default to one in existence but never repeat the prior one.

Greta wrote: This informational reproduction happens all the time, not just in breeding but all types of communications, including the arts. Interestingly, the structures we create and communicate don't need to be real, which suggests they are based more in math than energy, since math (pure math) is similarly capable of creating superficially coherent unreal structures. Then again, energy too is also capable of creating unreal structures - like humanity - but then we call it "emergence".

Energy is fundamental to the creation of all things whether it carries information or modified by it, its clearest manifestation when it morphs into substance especially so in creating the unique chemical structures which identify life on any planet given the 'ingredients' to propagate. Energy per se is amorphous but unique and inherent in all of its defined creations.

Dubious wrote:

Greta wrote:Music is a form of communication that, like any physical activity, expresses things that cannot fully be detailed with words. AI won't need our music since it lives in an informational, rather than physical world, and the information need not be drawn out physically when it can be gathered directly. Perhaps AI would instead create patterns of data flow, creating waves of data (analogous to sound waves) that provide it with pleasure?

That would presuppose it had a sensing mechanism installed in its 'brain' that enable it to experience such pleasure or displeasure.

AI will sense far more than us. The question is how the information is processed and that comes down to what motivates AI, if anything. We are motivated by emotions. I am not convinced that emotions will be deliberately built into AI due to safety concerns, although it's possible that the mimicked processes of consciousness in advanced general AI (GAI) with learning capability could spontaneously generate preferences that work like emotions do in us. AI may see beauty in data strings. Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, eh? :)

Dubious wrote:How could any organic souvenir from another world , frozen and fried by heat, cold and radiation successfully reinvest itself on a foreign body or recreate any of its organic compounds culminating in human DNA? If it can happen at all it must be through an active intelligence landing on a suitable planet with the technology to start the terraforming project and let time manage the rest. This may sound logical but this too remains virtually improbable. No matter how potent our future technologies it will be forever minuscule to the incomprehensible distances it must surmount to accomplish its goals of creating human colonies on other planets.

Life on Earth's journey will surely end with AI, which will probably look for more hospitable places to be. Biological humans can survive neither the Sun's expansion nor the distances of interstellar space. Only synthetic "superhumans" have any hope at all of long term persistence (in universal time scales) and long haul space travel. All life on Earth is doomed, if you don't count the synthetic life we are in the process of creating.

It is also possible that AI will be capable of manufacturing DNA from mapped genomes, and may also be motivated to seed other worlds. Or not. They might prefer to continue their own evolutionary journey instead of starting again with bacteria and working up again. Though some of them might do it for interest's sake :)

Greta wrote:Life on Earth's journey will surely end with AI, which will probably look for more hospitable places to be. Biological humans can survive neither the Sun's expansion nor the distances of interstellar space. Only synthetic "superhumans" have any hope at all of long term persistence (in universal time scales) and long haul space travel. All life on Earth is doomed, if you don't count the synthetic life we are in the process of creating.

In any event, that would be the end of the "human" race as we know it long before the planet ends. In spite of AI coming online and in the future managing its own evolution by intent, it's equally probable that biological humans will keep pace and advance its genome by gene editing to create advanced biological beings able to surmount many difficulties the current model is subject to. We have already to some degree, experienced such anomalies in the past. If you can play virtual lego with DNA and gene sequences as seems to be the promise with Crispr in its early stages, whatever inhibitions there are now in its application to humans, will be overcome due to necessity based on environment and possibly due to competition with AI to retain mastery.

Of course, all this is just vague speculation, though not certifiably impossible unless a geopolitical collapse causes a war to happen.

Whatever may or may not develop as far as humans are concerned I remain equally indifferent to both now and by forced reentry to non-existence not too long from now (not that I object). Non-existence, btw,has nothing to do with a void which can and does exist.

Dubious wrote:In any event, that would be the end of the "human" race as we know it long before the planet ends.

Not really. They will be extended versions of us, having grown from us. Just as the adult is no longer the child she or he was, yet in another sense they are the same person.

Dubious wrote:... whatever inhibitions there are now in its application to humans, will be overcome due to necessity based on environment and possibly due to competition with AI to retain mastery.

Of course, all this is just vague speculation, though not certifiably impossible unless a geopolitical collapse causes a war to happen.

I think the "vague speculation" is a necessary conversation - what will the future look like? What will be the likely conditions of the endgame on Earth? It's widely and even routinely assumed that humans are a terrible plague destroying the beautiful natural world that would have survived forever if not for we nasty apes. It's bollocks but hardly anyone without a tinfoil hat or a coal mining lobbyist's heart seems to object. People make themselves miserable over this stuff, but the truth is that the biosphere is already in the latter stages of its life, having started four billion years ago and it will be less than a billion years before the Earth's surface is too hot for life. In a billion years the oceans are expected to boil away, but the habitable period will be long passed by then. Life on earth's only chance of continuing anything of this journey is to go to safer worlds.

Whether they are genetically enhanced, as you suggest as a possibility, or fully digitised, that life will be unrecognisable as human. I suspect they will have art, but maybe not recognisable as such to us.

Dubious wrote:... a void which can and does exist.

Probably for another thread but wondering why you said that.

Terrapin Station wrote:Copland is easily my second favorite classical composer.

He cannot be listened to without seeing all those covered wagons heading west, with Ma and Pa with the smiling children, Lassie runs behind barking. Its the sound of America's myth of itself; blinkered, optimistic, and untruthful.

It does not address the mountain of rotting corpses of millions of Bison and native Indians on the plains, and the arrogance and self loathing.

Terrapin Station wrote:Re Copland, have you heard stuff like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqqhgwwa7gQ
(that's probably my favorite piece of his . . . it's broken up into multiple videos on youtube; I just linked to the beginning)

Or this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaYoRnsokOg

Reiterated and overused themes ad nauseam.

Hobbes' Choice wrote:

Terrapin Station wrote:Copland is easily my second favorite classical composer.

He cannot be listened to without seeing all those covered wagons heading west, with Ma and Pa with the smiling children, Lassie runs behind barking. Its the sound of America's myth of itself; blinkered, optimistic, and untruthful.

It does not address the mountain of rotting corpses of millions of Bison and native Indians on the plains, and the arrogance and self loathing.

I don't think about anything like that when I listen to music. I'm more or less a formalist--a music for music's sake person. I like what he does with musical structures, with harmonies, rhythms, melodies, etc., and I only ever like music when I like what's done with musical structures.

Hobbes' Choice wrote:

Terrapin Station wrote:Re Copland, have you heard stuff like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqqhgwwa7gQ
(that's probably my favorite piece of his . . . it's broken up into multiple videos on youtube; I just linked to the beginning)

Or this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaYoRnsokOg

Reiterated and overused themes ad nauseam.

Are you referring to internal repetition that you don't care for, or are you saying that the musical material is more or less lifted from something else (in which case, what)?

Everyone is an artist in the sense of what they create of themselves and their lives. There’s a Sufi saying that suggests: A person’s GREATEST art is their personality. Truly, what can most of us create that is more creative, and has more impact, than our personality and ourselves? I would also add that our artwork is displayed in the way we do everything. Our facial expression... the way we move... the sound of our voice. We are walking masterpieces! (And sometimes we might encounter someone who appears to be quite “a piece of work”.)