After saying I'm not going to comment, I can't help but mention this paragraph of Singer's. I think it's a sign of something wrong in the foundations. I won't try to say why, yet - I have ~a thousand or so words of notes on the trouble, but don't have clear understanding yet..
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I really resonate with this, and don't really understand my reaction - maybe a vast oversimplification would be to say - it's like he's optimizing for life, but removing the entire purpose of life.
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Yeah. There's a _lot_ of apologies for this: justification of having kids, for art, for eating ice cream, but it's always special pleading, in tension with doing the right thing.
It's super-interesting. But there's something missing.
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It seems as if art is the cuckoo child of life, the artist being an intelligent control agent that falls in love with its representations and forgetting their instrumentality for the purposes of regulating its interaction with the universe. This mode does certainly exist!
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The purpose of art seems to be the capturing of conscious states, which seem intrinsically important to the artist. Artists who do not see that as instrumental to the edification of an audience can be very pure and beautiful, but practically dysfunctional human beings.
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Yet art does serve a purpose: it allows us to develop a shared reflection of our outer and inner conditions. Museums help us to understand and reflect our culture and civilization, and so do opera and literature.
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However, I suspect that music is functionally parasitic, on the mechanisms that let us learn language, and only later acquired secondary functions for mental self regulation and social synchronization.
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This is pretty astute. What does this say about music's ability to capture conscious states versus other mediums of art?
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Music is somehow able to represent the embedding space of human emotion; while there exists a lot of practical engineering advice for film music composers, I am unaware of a proper cognitive science explanation
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I was very excited to read Daniel Levitin's book "This is your brain on music". And then very let down...
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One of my hobbies is listening to different arrangements of the oldest known musical piece, from 3,400 years ago: youtube.com/watch?v=QpxN2V
There's something very strange about music.
