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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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In Reply to: Trusting your senses posted by Presto on March 20, 2007 at 15:43:46:
The point is not whether it is possible to fool the senses. Of course it is, and it can be fairly easy to do so under the right circumstances. In real life, however, we are rarely fooled which is why examples like your experience make strong impressions upon us. How many other sensory errors came to your attention on that day? Maybe another one or two on a bad day but that would probably be all. We constantly rely on our senses without thinking, we do trust them, and we trust them because they rarely let us down, not because we think they're perfect. We trust our friends also, and they occasionally let us down but we accept that. Trust does not require a perfect record with no chance of error.It does not make sense to say that because we can make mistakes, we can't trust our senses. You made a visual mistake. Do you now distrust your eyes? If you do, how many times do you re-read everything you read in order to ensure you got it right? How many times do you look at people you know in order to convince yourself that they are the people you think they are? How many times do you recheck the liquid level in the measuring cup to ensure that you have 1 cup of liquid in it for the recipe you are making, and to ensure that the liquid is milk instead of coffee? You aren't going to do any of those things differently because you made this particular error, and you are going to look once only for each one of them and for most of the other things you look at during the day, and there are simply too many things we look at each day to count. Our error rate is extremely low.
I'm fed up of hearing how we can be fooled as if that fact were a proof that our senses are unreliable. Unreliability depends on the incidence of error, not the possibility of it, and our senses are pretty damn reliable under most circumstances. In general we also know when we have to pay a bit more attention because particular circumstances which are present may lead us to make a mistake. Then there are simply the occasional odd case like yours that makes a profound impression on us. I'm not downplaying that experience but I am trying to fit it into it's proper place as a fairly rare occurrence in your visual life.
Yes, we audiophiles can make mistakes with our hearing as well, but I have yet to see any proof that we are more prone to do so with our audio activities than we are elsewhere in our lives. Hearing may or may not be as reliable as seeing—part of that depends on how good a particular individual's eyesight and hearing are and a blind person's hearing is always likely to be better than their sight while a hearing impaired person's sight is likely to be better than their hearing—but our hearing is reliable in normal activities and there's nothing to suggest that it suddenly becomes less reliable when we listen to our systems.
Beliefs and wishes can predispose us to making an error of judgement, but they don't guarantee that we will do so. Just because we're listening to a new component that we hope will make an improvement in our system and we believe we hear an improvement does not mean that the improvement we believed we heard is a result of our hope and that we did not hear an actual improvement. Most of the time we are capable of discerning whether or not something makes a genuine difference. On those occasions when we do make an error, it does not have to be that we made it because of our pre-existing hope or beliefs. We can make errors for other reasons as well and our hopes and beliefs don't protect us from those other causes and ensure that the only way we can make an error is as a result of our hope or belief.
There's an awful lot of rubbish claimed about just what the possibility of error means for the reliability of our senses, and just as much rubbish claimed about how our beliefs and hopes impact on the reliability of our senses. I wish the so-called objectivists who want to call the reliability of our senses into question would actually start to be honest about just what the possibility of error really means when it comes to reliability, and just what the impact of holding a pre-existing belief really is when we make judgements, instead of making absolutely sweeping statements about these things which simply don't hold up to real life experience.
Yes we can make mistakes. Yes we should check and double check some things. No it is not the case that we are automatically mistaken just because we claim to hear a difference that can't easily be accounted for. If someone is going to make a claim that another is mistaken because they had to have made a particular sort of mistake, that claim requires just as much proof as the claim being dismissed. Claims that somebody heard something aren't automatically more suspect than claims that they couldn't have heard it and had to have made a mistake. If you want to ask for evidence that the person really heard something, that's fine but you should also be prepared to put up evidence that they made a mistake if you're going to claim that they did and the fact that people can make certain sorts of mistake is not proof that they actually did so in a particular case. If you're going to claim that they're mistaken in a particular case, you have to show that they are actually wrong in that particular case and that means testing that particular individual under the circumstances in which thec claim to have seen/heard/perceived a difference.
You can't prove anything other than the fact that you made a mistake in a particular set of circumstances, and that the particular sense or senses involved aren't infallible, from any particular incident, no matter how striking it is. Claims about reliability have to be demonstrated with data showing the frequency of error. One mistake says nothing about reliability.
David Aiken
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Follow Ups
- I think you're missing the point… - David Aiken 00:10:42 03/22/07 (4)
- A superb post. Thank you. nt - markrohr 04:35:30 03/22/07 (3)
- Second that! nt - bjh 11:55:17 03/22/07 (2)
- We need to have David record that post on tape . . . - markrohr 12:53:19 03/22/07 (1)
- Re: We need to have David record that post on tape . . . - bjh 13:41:05 03/22/07 (0)
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