Re: OT - Disturbing Reading and So True


"Audio actually used to have a goal: perfect reproduction of the sound of
real music performed in a real space. That was found difficult to achieve,
and it was abandoned when most music lovers, who almost never heard anything
except amplified music anyway, forgot what "the real thing" had sounded
like. Today, "good" sound is whatever one likes. As Art Dudley so succinctly
said [in his January 2004 "Listening," see "Letters," p.9], fidelity is
irrelevant to music."

There's a word for the philosophy that Dudley is promoting: Solipsism.

Back in the day when there was intelligent life on rec.audio.opinion, one of
the resident gurus who went by the handle JJ, frequently warned about the
intellectual wasteland that solipsism led to.

RATs as a rule should take it to heart - their prevailing mindset nets out
to be solipsism.

First: what is solipsism? Here's a decent definition, courtesy of
Wikipedia:



"Solipsism (Latin: solus, alone + ipse, self) is the philosophical idea that "My mind is the only thing that I know exists". Solipsism is an epistemological or metaphysical position that knowledge of anything outside the mind is unjustified. The external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist. In the history of philosophy, solipsism has served as a skeptical hypothesis.


Denial of the materialist existence, in itself, is not enough to be a
Solipsist. Possibly the most controversial feature of the solipsistic
world view is the denial of the existence of other minds. We can never
directly know another's mental stability. Qualia, or personal
experience, is private and incorrigible. Another person's experience
can be known only by analogy.

Philosophers try to build knowledge on more than an inference or
analogy. The failure of Descartes's epistemological enterprise brought
to popularity the idea that all certain knowledge may end at "I think
therefore I am" (cogito ergo sum).[1]

The problem of solipsism also merits close examination because it is
based upon three widely held philosophical presuppositions, which are
themselves fundamental and wide-ranging in importance. These are:

1. That my most certain knowledge is the contents of my own mind --
my thoughts, experiences, affects, etc.
2. That there is no conceptual or logically necessary link between
the mental and the physical -- between, say, the occurrence of certain
conscious experiences or mental states and the 'possession' and
behavioral dispositions of a 'body' of a particular kind (see the
Brain in a vat);
3. That the experiences of a given person are necessarily private
to that person.

Solipsism, like other skeptical hypotheses, is likely impossible to
refute. Likewise, the core assertion of materialism -- that there is an
external universe -- is also impossible to refute.

Solipsism refers to several world views whose common element is some
form of denial of the existence of a universe independent from the
mind of the agent. The reference to Solipsism as a singular belief is
no more correct than the principle that "Christian" is a single
belief. However, like Christianity, Solipsism is often used in speech
as though it refers to a singular concept."<<

We see that the issue is not solipsism, per se, but a disregard for
veracity in the reproduction of sound. Fidelity is no longer the sine
qua non, but rather, a sound the listener likes. This is well and good
as long as we recognize it for what it is. It should not be called
high fidelity.

Buying interconnects which do slightly change the sound for thousands
of dollars, because of varying cable capacitances in high impedance
circuits, is foolish in and of itself only because the exact same
thing can be done with a couple of five cent capacitors. The use of
high impedance interfaces in solid state equipment is also a little
foolish, in the context of audio fidelity. Neither practice will
change as long as the fundamental driver exists, and that fundamental
driver is that expensive audio gear is largely bought as a virtual
extension of the buyer's penis. When the WGBD market dries up, change
will occur. But since penis size has been ingrained in the male mind
as a dominance marker-the peckering order,as it were-for sufficiently
many generations for it to be hard coded in the male DNA, fighting the
concept is a matter more for evolutionary biology (cf.Sailer) than
electrical engineering.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Is God a Solipsist ?
    ... >>>Solipsism is also commonly understood to encompass the metaphysical ... >>>experiences are merely parts of one's own mind. ... >> In Christ Jesus, ... There is only one actual mind that exists anywhere, ...
    (alt.religion.christian.roman-catholic)
  • Re: The Hidden Harmony of the Universe
    ... They did do this so there is no way to ask a meaningful question about ... corresponds to one's state of mind. ... It's a reality, but it's a subset ... It sounds like solipsism to me, but I don't recall Iain being a ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: OT - Disturbing Reading and So True
    ... "good" sound is whatever one likes. ... As Art Dudley so succinctly ... There's a word for the philosophy that Dudley is promoting: Solipsism. ... Back in the day when there was intelligent life on rec.audio.opinion, ...
    (rec.audio.tubes)
  • Re: Todays word is..
    ... "Solipsism is the philosophical idea that "My mind is the only thing ... the history of philosophy, solipsism has served as a skeptical ... Where would you be without Google? ...
    (uk.people.support.depression)
  • Re: Capacitor questions.
    ... Note that people are substituting digital nonlinear distorters for tubes in ... Solipsism is the philosophical idea that ... "My mind is the only thing that I know exists." ... In the history of philosophy, ...
    (rec.audio.tubes)