X-Message-Number: 22336
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2003 21:56:00 -0400
From: Francois <>
Subject: A musical analogy of the mind

In message #22316, Mike Perry made a very interesting comment about music
being performed on actual intruments or on their modern electronic
simulations. Take, for instance, a real piano and its computer simulated
counterpart. Both have very different structures. A real piano has taught
metal wires that vibrate when hit by felt covered hammers. A computer piano
has microchips and circuitry. A real piano produces sounds through a real
physical process while a computer piano simulates the behavior of that
process and uses the results to control the production of those same sounds.
To the ear however, both sounds are extremely similar. Indeed, there are
very few people on Earth that could spot the difference, and that number of
people is steadily shrinking as computer pianos become better and better at
recreating a real piano's sounds.

I think you can see the analogy I'm aiming for here. Whether produced by a
real piano or a computer one, the music is the same, or close to it and
becoming closer. They will someday become impossible to distinguish and the
nature of the hardware producing the sound will become irrelevant. But we
can go far beyond this simple opposition between real and computer piano. I
can play a musical piece on a piano, or a flute, a violin, an organ, a
bagpipe, or any of a wide variety of instruments. In each case, the melody
will be easy to recognize even though it will sound quite different. I
believe sentience can similarly be expressed by many different devices, our
organic brains being only one of them. An exact simulation is not needed,
only one that faithfully recreates the melody. And I believe that makes it
possible to translate a mind from one device's format to another's and still
retain the sentience and the sense of self experience by that mind in its
original support. The real piano-computer piano analogy even suggests that a
mind can be expressed by pure computer software, although this is far from
an ironclad demonstration.

Music has another feature that could illustrate what qualia is, provided I
understand the concept correctly. A musical piece cannot be percieved all at
once, like a painting can. It has a temporal extension and must be listened
to over a certain time period in order to make sense. Memory is very
important in this process because it would be useless to listen to music if
you forgot each note as soon as it was played. All the notes must be somehow
combined in our minds in their proper sequence, those already played and
those being played, in order for the musical piece to truly come into
existence. Something similar must occur in our brain's functionning in order
for the mind to manifest itself. Maybe this continuous interraction between
current processes and memory is what qualia is based on.

Francois
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"First they ignore you, then they laugh at
you, then they fight you, then you win."

Mahatma Gandhi
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