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Tube DIY Asylum Do It Yourself (DIY) paradise for tube and SET project builders. |
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In Reply to: RE: "Objectivity is a subjective construction" posted by Jim McShane on September 4, 2012 at 11:34:52:
Humans created positivist science. It is not somehow embedded in the fundamental nature of reality. As we now know, even in electronics, reality is probabilistic.You can't predict off of a probability. You can only guess and hope.
In another similar thread, one engineer told the story of how Intel found that uP operation is probabilistic. Do enough operations and "unexplained nonlinearities" show up.
If I gave the power supply and tube to a tribe of wild hunter gathers, they could come up with an entirely spiritual explanation couched in terms of gods and spirits that fits observed events perfectly and has the same predictive value as our power rating.
In Nigeria, a medical anthropology study was done on traditional vs. Western methods of treating compound fractures. the local method actually had a higher success rate. What was it? Brak your leg, then go to a local healer who breaks a chickens leg and wraps yours in cloth. When the chicken's leg is healed, your leg is healed.
Another example: Advanced metallurgical work on ancient swords has shown that the traditional techniques employed by Japanese swordsmiths yields steel with a high content of carbon nanotubes. Did these traditional artisans know about carbon nanotubes or did they have a techno/religious framework for their processes?
I don't deny that "science" has proven to be an excellently practical fiction whereby we organize the social work of invention and creation, but it is a cultural overlay.
Look at all of the definitions and standards used that were established by committee. How socially constructed can you get? Compare a "low distortion" amp from 1948 with what DiyA considers "low distortion" today. What in "reality" changed over the past 60 years?
Listen, to say that science is cultural does not deny the existence of something we might call brute reality. However, man has no way of knowing or interfacing with reality directly. We only have culture and this is always symbolic, contingent, partially arbitrary, and subjective at base.
What man can do, with or without formal science, is learn via trial and error. Perform empirical experiments and take note of where they screwed up. This is the basic idea behind Popper's famous dictum that the fundamental criteria of science is falsifiability. Nothing new or unique to Western science bout that.
But be this all as it may, the main point I am making is that musical listening is not in the scientific bailiwick. There is no falsifiability, no prediction, only preferences.
I am also strongly arguing that "objectivity" does not exist. It is a Western creation of the Enlightenment era that gained a lot of purchsse but it is fundamentally a cultural construction.The closest we can get is to try to understand where our cultural beliefs come into play and then consciously correct for them, such that we don't fall into cognitive traps strictly due to habit, but in the end we are still cultural animals. It is all we have.
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Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent -- Wittgenstein
Free your mind and your ass will follow -- Parliament/Funkadelic
Edits: 09/04/12
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- RE: "Objectivity is a subjective construction" - Joe Roberts 12:01:30 09/04/12 (0)
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