Philosophy Now Forum

Is music, quite simply, sentient? It has the qualia of sentience, form, and feeling, identity, vibration, flow, and emotion, including complexity and personality. It also has overlap and the ability to make discernment (it produces chord sounds from simple data.) Music is larger than it's parts, it creates complexity and harmony from simple data. It does not make decisions, but neither do humans. Although AI appear to make choices, recorded music does not appear to make choices, except when played live. But my thesis postulates the sentience of recorded music.

So you say it is not sentient because it is created. But isn't a baby created by a couple of cellular interactions?
Perhaps sentient is a property given to something through love. It is hard to imagine a baby given no love or interaction of any kind being sentient. Essentially, if a baby was kept in a room with no interaction with humans or animals and fed through a tube, I doubt it would ever gain sentience. Likewise, a baby kitten is fed love from its mother, and therefore has sentience.

The feral girl I mentioned earlier who was cruelly trapped in a room by her parents, likely had some sort of minimal human interaction with them (I doubt they could afford autonomous tube feeding systems.) So she had a small amount of sentience likely, despite not knowing how to talk or perform complex tasks.

Fear turns into rejection. Rejection leads to self love, through self love sentience is still fed.

Music is a vabration on certainty . In other word its uncertainty in harmony giving a pseudo certainty.

jackles wrote:Music is a vabration on certainty . In other word its uncertainty in harmony giving a pseudo certainty.

That's true

I don't think there are any good reason to suppose that it's sentient. What reasons exactly do you have for thinking it's sentient?

GreatandWiseTrixie wrote:It does not make decisions, but neither do humans.

Humans do make decisions, but in any case I'm not sure what the relevance of this is.

Music is the product of a conscious being. The product is not to be confused with its creator. Otherwise we would have to agree that pottery is sentient.

Perhaps sentient is a property given to something through love. It is hard to imagine a baby given no love or interaction of any kind being sentient. Essentially, if a baby was kept in a room with no interaction with humans or animals and fed through a tube, I doubt it would ever gain sentience. Likewise, a baby kitten is fed love from its mother, and therefore has sentience.

ayan143 wrote:Perhaps sentient is a property given to something through love.

So, if I cook with love, does my dinner gain sentience?

From wiki:

Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively.[1] Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations (known in philosophy of mind as "qualia").

You might love your music, plants might even go crazy, grooving to Eurovision vibes.
However, I don't think it is reciprocal. You would have to ask the music. Do you feel me?
Shame though. That would be interesting...

Do you feel me - Anthony Hamilton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1in5wAVOyIk

Trixie ..get u'r ass to a mental ward, this topic is utterly kuku!!!

"Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything"

A quote sometimes attributed to Plato.

Conde Lucanor wrote:Music is the product of a conscious being. The product is not to be confused with its creator. Otherwise we would have to agree that pottery is sentient.

Music played out of key sounds horrible, for some reason. If everything is a vibration, then the creator is simply imitating prearranged notes. Those tones may seem random, but they only work one way, and they've always been here. Like the atom we can't see, only what it affects. I used to wonder the same about electricity, whether it's sentient and if that's where aliens are hidden.

Green wrote:

Conde Lucanor wrote:Music is the product of a conscious being. The product is not to be confused with its creator. Otherwise we would have to agree that pottery is sentient.

Music played out of key sounds horrible, for some reason. If everything is a vibration, then the creator is simply imitating prearranged notes. Those tones may seem random, but they only work one way, and they've always been here. Like the atom we can't see, only what it affects. I used to wonder the same about electricity, whether it's sentient and if that's where aliens are hidden.

Musical keys are culturally-driven, although they are based on mathematical relations between sounds. Nature gives us sounds, but only human culture gives us music. There's order and harmony in nature, however it is there without any participation of consciousness and the fact that we can perceive it does not mean there's a purpose behind it or in itself.

Conde Lucanor wrote:Nature gives us sounds, but only human culture gives us music. There's order and harmony in nature, however it is there without any participation of consciousness and the fact that we can perceive it does not mean there's a purpose behind it or in itself.

Yeah, doesn't that prove music is sentient? I understand the abstract, but the reality seems to trump man's implication of describing nature's code.

Green wrote:
Yeah, doesn't that prove music is sentient?

No, it doesn't, it proves music is the product, the result, the creation of a sentient being. Are books, buildings, paintings, sentient? No, they aren't.

Conde Lucanor wrote:

Green wrote:
Yeah, doesn't that prove music is sentient?

No, it doesn't, it proves music is the product, the result, the creation of a sentient being. Are books, buildings, paintings, sentient? No, they aren't.

Words are sounds we've tuned to specific meaning, buildings are inanimate objects we create. Tone occurs naturally, then we mimic to the best of our abilities. Since the reason we perceive reality is because of vibration, tone came before us. We're a product of this, not the other way around.