Human beings who care. Blow away the meters every time. All day long.
Ah, the siren call of the Golden Ear. "My powers of perception transcend your puny meters and science!"
How self-satisfying that must feel to believe. How hard it must be to even consider giving up those magical powers ;-)
Science and technology, double-blind and all that, we use these things to understand the human experience. Not to tell the human he didn’t have an experience.
To be clear: It all depends on the nature of the claim.
If you say "I experienced seeing a perpetual motion machine in my neighbor’s garage" then, sorry, science can investigate that claim and conclude you didn’t have that experience (for one, it can base the skepticism on known evidence and theory such a claim is unlikely, but also could investigate the alleged perpetual motion machine to determine it’s not doing what you think it is).
Of course science doesn’t deny that people "have experiences." The problem arises in how people try to EXPLAIN those experiences - the way we can so easily go wrong in our inferences and causal explanations.
So if you say "Today at a show I witnessed a man saw a woman in half and put her back together alive!" then, ok, we can take it you had an experience that left you with that impression. But the question arises as to what CAUSED that experience/impression: whether, in fact, a woman was sawed in half in front of you. Upon investigation it turns out it was a magic trick that left you with that impression, not a "true" instance of a woman being sawed in half. You should be open to amending your belief about how you ended up "believing" a woman was sawed in half IF you are at all interested in careful empirical reasoning.
And this is the issue with Golden Eared purely subjective audiophiles (like Millercarbon) who esteem their own subjective experience and perception above all else. They presume "I heard a sonic change with X tweak" is one and the same as "the sonic tweak DID objectively change the sound, and that is what I perceived." Subjective experience and objective claim meshed as one.
This is the paradigm behind every tweak any audiophile ever thought he heard. It’s how you arrive at audiophile positions (as it seems to be with Millercarbon) that "everything makes a difference" in the hi fi chain. Because, fact is, the way human minds work, one can imagine a difference at any time, for anything you change.
Challenging this paradigm is like being an atheist in a church. You are challenging a very personally held belief system, and the intensely subjective nature makes it wrapped up in someone’s own sense of self.So even challenging the idea with "it’s possible you imagined the difference" is taken as a personal affront. "how DARE you say I may not be hearing what I KNOW I’m hearing! I was there! YOU weren’t! "
To someone thinking in a more scientific mindset, you wouldn’t react this way. It’s obvious, well known, that we can fool ourselves in numerous ways, which is why science is essentially a systematized method of countering our biases. As the great Feynman said of doing science:
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Golden Ears simply haven’t taken this to heart. They don’t think, or can’t admit, that they may have fooled themselves. It strikes at the heart of their entire paradigm, and also sense of self. After all, if I claim that when I switch in my new fancy cables I can hear angels singing behind the trumpet section on a recording, so long as I refuse to submit my claim to any controlled test - e.g. "lets see if you can reliably identify the angels singing when you don’t know if the new cables are used or not - my claim can go unchallenged forever. "But you can see if other people hear the angels" you might say. Nope. Because I always leave myself the move of proclaiming "If YOU don’t hear the angels then the problem isn’t there are no angels - the problems are with YOUR ears. They clearly are not as refined as My Golden Ears because I can surely hear the angels!"
So the Golden Ear has the self-satisfaction of making his claim unfalsifiable, while being a position to denigrate anyone who "can’t hear what we Golden Ears hear!"
And round and round we go....
