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Re: Okay, fair enough

I am perhaps more dogmatic than you because there are experiences and results of tests that I trust "enough" to go with it. It has a price when I find out later I was wrong when I didn't triple check the results.

You don't need any tests to go with something. Just listen and go with whatever works for you. I'm not suggesting you or anyone else do otherwise. In fact, that's precisely what I do.

There is also the extreme position of being so agnostic as to never trust your own senses, ever.

Depends what you're trusting them to do. When it comes to telling me what I like and what I don't like, I trust my senses implicitly. However I don't entirely trust them to be unerring reflections of objective reality. There's just much too much evidence out there showing that this is simply not the case.

So to that end, I don't insist or assert that my subjective perceptions are anything but that; my subjective perceptions.

To what degree of confidence in an experiment will make you take a side? I'm sure logic, experience, and depending on exactly what the subject is will dictate the level, and it will vary.

Certainly.

But with regard to such issues as the audibilty of cable differences (beyond the obvious differences such as resistance, capacitance and inductance) there so far hasn't been any objective, independently verified proof.

So, if one MUST take a side, based on the preponderance of the evidence, we have...

On the one hand, a mountain of objective, independently verified evidence showing that our subjective perceptions are not always unerring reflections of objective reality.

On the other hand, not a shred of objective, independently verified evidence showing cables produce audible differences beyond their basic properties of resistance, inductance and capacitance.

Given this, what side would you take?

Would you wholly ignore that mountain of evidence and assume that somehow you're immune to the same weaknesses of every other human being and take the "yeasayer" side, or would you wholly ignore the fact that lack of evidence in support of something does not constitute conclusive proof against that something and take the "naysayer" side?

Or, would you take the side that says there simply isn't any conclusive evidence one way or the other and we simply don't know?

The extreme agnostic believes there is nothing that we can know, and would claim nothing at all, for all time. You can't even prove knowledge exists, so this is a fair assumption. But it's not practical.

I'm not taking agnosticism to any extreme at all. There's simply no conclusive proof in this matter.

I know not to stick my hand in a fire. I have experience with that one, and I don't like the results. I feel it's something I know, or know good enough.

Yet it would be a trivial matter to objectively prove that you're able to sense when your hand is exposed to a flame even under double blind conditions.

So philosophically we can claim agnosticism on everything. In practice, we don't do that. We are at least partial in some areas, and hence dogmatic. So yes I'm dogmatic that fire burns and cables have different sounds. By experience and experiment.

Then why don't you publish your experiments with regard to cable differences so that they can be reviewed and independently verified so that we can finally put an end to this 30 year old debate?

se





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