[Fis] ongoing themes

Dear FISers,

The comments exchanged these days about power laws --particularly Viktoras
and Guy-- bring me back to the FIS session on music last year. Why do we
enjoy music? Why does music so easily penetrates throughout our emotional
structures? As I argued those days, in our perception of sound or in vision
there is a state-space of enormous magnitude (in vision for instance, it
may expand on 11-12 orders of magnitude! I do not know exactly in the case
of sound, but probably it will be similar). No wonder that we are
perceptually organized following the Weber-Fechner logarithmic law, that
(in Rodolfo Llin�s' opinion--2001) directly underlies the octave tonal
structure of music. The preference for '7' exists in quite many of our
sensorimotor categorizations (the seven basic notes, but also seven colors,
seven vowels.... again see Llin�s, and the classical work of G. Miller). An
old partitional hypothesis by Karl (on 7 'constancy') helps to explain its
advantages in navigating amidst the power laws that also appear in partitions.

Formally interested parties may argue far better than me, and may help to
formulate properly the following speculation. In our inner power-law
organization of soundscapes, as the above Weber-Fechner implies, we
particularly rely and detect some multi-level crossing structures, or
'fractures', that have been evolutionary converged upon to display
important biological communicational themes --emotionally laden. These
differentiated 'sentic forms' (so called by M. Clyne) are played with by
the professional musicians, or instinctively by any loving person voice, or
by any merry child, or any angry party... a website that explores quite
many (disconnected) artistic aspects related to sentic forms:
http://www.wavecrest.org.uk/wavecrest/Sentic%201a2.htm
http://www.wavecrest.org.uk/wavecrest/Superior%20Colliculus%20involved%20in%20optical%20pattern%20recognition.htm

Sentic forms are some sort of elementary curves, with a resemblance to
natural landscapes of peaks and valleys --say, level crossing 'fractures'
in the global soundscapes that imply a vivid signal for an immediate
behavioral/emotional reconfiguration. Evolutionary wisdom at its best.
Advancing in the conceptualization of sentic forms by power-laws, fractals,
Tsallis, etc., would be a great challenge for FIS theorists --applying
Michael Leyton 'process grammar' could be attempted too... however, I do
not quite agree with Michael's basic thesis that musical works are per se
maximized memory-recovery structures).

The other discussion around variants of logical positivism should not be
taken too far. Given that we face a philosophical discussion on consilience
on next September, why we do not keep our best ammunition for that time? I
will just produce a couple of light comments. Besides positivism, quite
many other interesting schools on philosophy of science have flourished
during the 20th Century. Figures such as Whitehead, Bertalanffy, Wiener,
Ortega y Gasset, Merleau-Ponty, Joseph Needham... had in common the
reluctance to single out a 'unique' scientific method, obviously inspired
by physics, that would conduce to what Ortega called "the imperialism of
physics". A perusal in several bio-neuro-psycho-and socio- fields shows how
devastating was during very long decades in those sciences the blind
imitation of physical approaches. Fortunately, our contemporary panorama on
the global knowledge enterprise is far more complex and multidisciplinarily
oriented. As Bas van Fraassen has put, "science moves forward by discarding
past images and forgetting the agonies of those conceptual wars"... The
other brief point I was willing to make is about the importance of
'consilience', both in general relationships among disciplines and in the
convergence of specialized inductions... Reminding Vannevar Bush image for
science as the 'endless frontier', we might put that consilience represents
the exploration of the 'internal frontiers' of science.

best regards

Pedro
Received on Wed Jul 7 14:00:24 2004