A modest proposal. I propose that hearing and perception are the same thing. There is no real reason to say they are something different. Hearing is a sensory perception just like vision. It's how we perceive realityThis is not to say there cannot be wide variations among even experienced audiophiles regarding hearing ability, experience in listening and so forth. But I think it's wrong to say perception of sound is something other than what we hear as if it's something undefinable or mysterious. Again this is not to say hearing is not complex or even sometimes mysterious. Heaven forbid! And I'm not discounting psychological effects from the whole listening equation, either, things like placebo effects, expectation bias, etc. Nor can we discount listeners' testimony regarding what they hear. It's unfortunate that naysayers frame positive results as some some of delusion.
Speaking of reality I also suggest that physics, strictly speaking, is not reality in the sense that physics as a science represents what we know, what we have discovered about physical reality. But physics as a science is incomplete, and continually growing. It would be rather presumptuous to assume something mysterious or puzzling MUST be inexplainable by physics. It's premuptuous to assume directionality of wire, disobeys some physical law or even theory. It may very well disagree with what many people assume is understood by science or physics.
From intro to Zen and the art of Debunkery:
Seeing with humility, curiosity and fresh eyes was once the main point of science. But today it is often a different story. As the scientific enterprise has been bent toward exploitation, institutionalization, hyperspecialization and new orthodoxy, it has increasingly preoccupied itself with disconnected facts in a psychological, social and ecological vacuum. So disconnected has official science become from the greater scheme of things, that it tends to deny or disregard entire domains of reality and to satisfy itself with reducing all of life and consciousness to a dead physics.
As the millennium turns, science seems in many ways to be treading the weary path of the religions it presumed to replace. Where free, dispassionate inquiry once reigned, emotions now run high in the defense of a fundamentalized "scientific truth." As anomalies mount up beneath a sea of denial, defenders of the Faith and the Kingdom cling with increasing self-righteousness to the hull of a sinking paradigm. Faced with provocative evidence of things undreamt of in their philosophy, many otherwise mature scientists revert to a kind of skeptical infantilism characterized by blind faith in the absoluteness of the familiar. Small wonder, then, that so many promising fields of inquiry remain shrouded in superstition, ignorance, denial, disinformation, taboo . . . and debunkery.
