Re: OK, I think I'm on to something now.


"Matthew Fields" <spam@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:srFYe.182$yb2.122@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> As the perception of those waves, not the waves themselves, perhaps.
> That'd be the usual phenomenological way, and it'd account for the
> sound of tinnitis, imagined sounds, and hallucinated sounds.
>

I thought about this before when you mentioned it, and these were the best
arguments that sound does not have to exist solely in the physical world.

Tinnitus is a malfunction of the ear. You're not hearing anything, your
nerves are producing sensations that the brain perceives as ringing.
Imagined sounds, well, they're imagined. They're memories. Hallucinations is
a toughie, because I thought about this too. But they are still learned. You
have to have already heard sounds to hallucinate them. I get these "thumps"
every once in a while, after playing a gig when I come home and sit in
silence. It's like my ears might be "decompressing" or something. In that
case they seem to me to be physical movement of the ear drum - a malfunction
again. Like when you get those little "pin pricks" of pain - ever get
those? - they are a nerve misfiring or something. Nothing actually happened
on your skin, only in your brain. but let's say you're "hearing voices".
Still, I'd say you're not actually hearing anything. Your eardrums are not
moving, and your auditory nerves might not be transmitting anything (it'd be
interesting to show brain scans of this to see) - the things are happening
in your brain.

There's definitely a distinction between perceiving acoustical vibrations as
sound, and perceiving memories of sounds. But I would argue that, those
vibrations still exist and are perceived as music by people, and, if you
were totally deaf, you couldn't do it because you'd have no way of forming
the initial memories (getting the initial stimuli) in the first place. Also,
if someone's brain dead, that doesn't preclude someone else from perceiving
the music.

The problem is, we define everything by perception. We make mental
connections and categorizations based on experiences we get through external
stimuli. The external stimuli needs to be present first. We define things by
what we know, how we've used them, how they look, how they smell, and so on.
When we encounter something new, we use those experiences to define how this
new thing fits in (which is why, when you wrote Absinthe..., some posters
responded "it reminds me of neo-classic Stravinsky" etc. they are trying to
categorize something new in terms they already are familiar with -
relational experiential definitions).

Steve



.

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