On ''what there is''

This post doesn’t belong on an audio forum, so I should just resist the temptation of weighing in. But I can’t.

First, Quine’s point (in "Ontological Relativity," from which comes the "Gavagai" coinage), as well as in several other places, is just that our best scientific theories should govern our ontology. This is a fancy way of saying that if an accepted and useful scientific theory demands that we regard a given theoretical construct as "real," then we should do so. As David Lewis put it, although "sets" were "unknown to Homo javanensis," they are nevertheless indispensable in modern mathematics and therefore should be regarded as "real." This question dates at least to Plato, for whom numbers were more "real" than the things of perception they enumerated, being pure intelligible entities not subject to perspective, change over time, and so forth. Which is to say that, although they proclaim themselves to be "empiricists," Quine, et al., are really committed to idealism—to the "reality" of non-empirical theoretical entities.

This insight dovetails with what I think mahgister was trying to say in citing Goethe. But Goethe’s view just follows Kant: the "real" is always already a construct of consciousness—of perception, which is sense information processed and interpreted by the mind. The real "in itself" is simply unknowable. Thus, Goethe says that perception is already "theoretical": "Alles vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis." This insight makes it exceedingly difficult to know where to draw the lines between the "real" and the "imaginary"; in effect, the real IS what "imagination" constructs for experience. But that is NOT to say there is no independent reality "in itself"; rather, we just don’t know anything about it except insofar as we experience it (that is, insofar as it becomes mental).

What a bunch of useless navel gazing and a terrible waste of time.

Music is inside us not only outside us....

I can accept that. So the recording would spark the music within us. In what sense can it be said that music is within us? Perhaps, as we are what we eat, we are also what we hear (have heard). Though it is also said that musical attunement is innate with humans. So maybe true in two independent ways.

Watts is good, but even he cannot convey the nature of reality in less than a minute.