objective vs. subjective rabbit hole
There are many on this site who advocate, reasonably enough, for pleasing one’s own taste, while there are others who emphasize various aspects of judgment that aspire to be "objective." This dialectic plays out in many ways, but perhaps the most obvious is the difference between appeals to subjective preference, which usually stress the importance of listening, vs. those who insist on measurements, by means of which a supposedly "objective" standard could, at least in principle, serve as arbiter between subjective opinions.
It seems to me, after several years of lurking on and contributing to this forum, that this is an essential crux. Do you fall on the side of the inviolability of subjective preference, or do you insist on objective facts in making your audio choices? Or is there some middle ground here that I’m failing to see?
Let me explain why this seems to me a crux here. Subjective preferences are, finally, incontestable. If I prefer blue, and you prefer green, no one can say either of us is "right." This attitude is generous, humane, democratic—and pointless in the context of the evaluation of purchase alternatives. I can’t have a pain in your tooth, and I can’t hear music the way you do (nor, probably, do I share your taste). Since this forum exists, I presume, as a source of advice from knowledgable and experienced "audiophiles" that less "sophisticated" participants can supposedly benefit from, there must be some kind of "objective" (or at least intersubjective) standard to which informed opinions aspire. But what could possibly serve better as such an "objective standard" than measurements—which, and for good reasons, are widely derided as beside the point by the majority of contributors to this forum?
To put the question succinctly: How can you hope to persuade me of any particular claim to audiophilic excellence without appealing to some "objective" criteria that, because they claim to be "objective," are more than just a subjective preference? What, in short, is the point of reading all these posts if not to come to some sort of conclusion about how to improve one’s system?
mahgister
Not that I want to get in to the whole free will debate here, but the fellow in that video pretty much ignored addressing the incompatibilist/hard determinist arguments against free will. He sort of mentioned determinism, but didn’t actually address or "solve" how his idea of free will either 1. Indicates determinism and it's implications against free will is false or 2. Is compatible with determinism (I’m a Compatibilist, btw)
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great post ! I feel in agreement with all you just said... Only a remark:
For sure you are right... But we must not forgot that sound/music is not about only a certain measured level of some aspect of some information resolution in some scale defining what is possible or impossible to perceive... Hearing a sound is also in the brain/body a work of not only psychological but of a biological "interpretation" linked to the non linear architecture of the ears design and work...The ear is tuned to catch some complex information package prepared to be interpretated by the ears by the nature of his design and not reducible to a mere Fourier based model of hearing only ... Some sound are produced by a consciousness for another prepared consciousness and are not perceived even if they can be recorded because they cannot be interpreted...(dolphin language for example or arachneid "music" concept on their extension web body) For example what is the meaning and information weight of silence in a musical sentence or in a speech discourse or what is the information weight of the silence separating the onset of two specific sound and what is the impact on the interpreted threshold of perception ? Then reducing all hearing possiblities to a scale frequencies or some measured sound level or even time level perception pre-supposed possibilities is forgotting that sound are most of the time in nature and speech a complex package of information that the ears is prepared to interpret and we must remember that some aspect of sounds are there only for the human ears to be perceived; bat ears will interpret sound differently or cat and a microphone coupled to another tool will not described what all there is to be perceived but will onbly recorded some chosen aspects etc ... Our measuring apparatus can and must be designed with a hearing theory adequately tuned with the actual working of the hearing system to be able to analyse and detect some phenomena natural for the human ears but no so for some measuring protocols or for cats and bats......We dont know all there is to know about hearing plain and simple... Then the correlation between objective installation and subjective experience is an ONGOING process which is not finished but always in his course.. it is also the reason why we all must learn to listen and why all audiophile must study acoustic and why most serious audio engineer study psycho-acoustic which is a field in progress...
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Prof: We don't disagree here about, well, anything, I think. Granted: all causal relationships "presuppose" a connection between cause and effect, and the correlation (sorry: causation) between certain measurements and the correlative subjective impressions is probably no more problematic than most other supposed causal connections. Note, however, that I'm still being cagy here. Hume may be right: the difference between "correlation" and "causation" may be nothing more than "habitual expectation," common sense and physics notwithstanding. But I don't mean to drag philosophy into this again. I completely agree with you that there are "objective measurements" that reliably correlate with intersubjectively identifiable experiences; for audio professionals who work in the no-man's land between measurements (the science that created the equipment in the first place) and customers with desires and expectations, the objective language of measurements may be fully adequate to unambiguously identify features of an audio component that are sought in a given situation. Sorry for the remarks about Descartes. I guessed you weren't confused about his "foundationalism." But I spent the last two weeks lecturing on Descartes; playing my role as "professor" is a hard habit to break. Here's the main point, though, to return to the theme of this thread. Few of us are "audio professionals" who have witnessed again and again the correlation (or causation) between certain measurements and a given desired subjective effect. For us mere mortals, then, some kind of non-objective language is our only option in trying to express what turns us on in an audio system. What my OP was asking for was some sort of standard by means of which your subjective impressions can be communicated to me with sufficient clarity to persuade me that you are actually experiencing something I might also expect or want to experience from a given component. I can't have a pain in your tooth, but I can be persuaded by your language that you do. That's what I look for in posts that rave about some feature of our shared hobby. |
Granted: all causal relationships "presuppose" a connection between cause and effect, Yes, which is why, wary of going down the nature-of-causation rabbit hole, I couched my reply as a simple appeal to consistency: Insofar as we normally accept X method of inference as establishing causation, it can be justified in applying to the particular case at hand.
and the correlation (sorry: causation)
Ha! That suggests we have similar views on causation :-) I was happy to read your reply on Descartes in any case. I can understand why my reply could have been read as being confused. I’ve had lots of fun discussions with people of opposing "world views" on things like Foundationalism vs Coherentism (and other "isms"). In the end I still can’t say specifically where I land, so often enough I’ll just appeal to consistency (which..uh...I guess tips a hat towards Coherentism to some degree...though every time I go down these roads I can sort of argue for different sides. After all consistency/coherency is also a necessary feature of Foundationalism and other isms...). Hume’s problem of induction has always been fascinating to chew over. (His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion drew me in to philosophy more than any other book I think). Probably even more than you, as you apparently have some restraint, I can be a bit annoying on some of the forums for my own tendency to pull things towards the philosophical. For us mere mortals, then, some kind of non-objective language is our only option in trying to express what turns us on in an audio system. Yup! We manage to successfully navigate through the world every day, often through just such intersubjective exchanges of information. This is what I emphasize when trying to talk about this with the more rigid "objectivists" who will wave off even subjective descriptions of different speakers as being too unreliable. Sighted bias confounds the conclusions! I try to point out that, yes, some level of skepticism about our perceptual inferences is warranted, but it cannot be wholly unreliable since we use this every day to successfully get out our front door, among countless other tasks, as well as relaying information from our "mere subjective sense inference" to one another. "The snow plow blocked the end of our driveway with snow again, so you’ll have to leave time to dig that out..." So we have on one end, in our most careful empirical inquiry, we want to account for the variables of human biases. That will almost always be the path to the most reliable forms of knowledge. On the other hand, we have the day to day "knowledge" that our casual subjective perceptions are reliable enough to perform all sorts of tasks. We must therefore be able to acknowledge BOTH of these situations, and be able to work from one towards the other for consistency. We are going to at one point encounter some fuzzy borders where justification may go one way or the other. But my solution has been an appeal to the basis of the simple heuristic most of us use much of the time, which found nice wording in Sagan’s aphorism: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." I already gave a nutshell account of how, for me, this plays out in vetting audio claims. The more a claim slides towards the "extraordinary" GIVEN commonly understood features of that gear (e.g. how cables work), the less plausible the claim, the more strict and careful I’d want to be in vetting that claim. The more plausible, the less need for controls in order for the claim to be taken, provisionally, at face value.
E.g. if you tell me you heard differences between two HDMI cables, I’m going to want firmer evidence than your say-so. If you tell me you heard a difference between some Spendor speakers and some MBL omnis, I can provisionally accept the claim given it’s high plausibility on well known technical grounds. This justifies both the use of objective/scientific evidence and the pragmatism of every-day exchanges of subjectively-derived information. IMO. :-) |
After plowing through this heavy intro, I'm reminded of something my concise, low impact Forester pal, Sam, once observed on a road trip. In passing by a lovely stone fence in rural Maine, Sam says, "Now, there's a feller with lots of time on his hands." I'm too outta gas to read the responses. Why can't we just dangle one foot in both ponds at the same time, aka, John Atkinson? ...pant, pant, More Peace, Pin |
