objective vs. subjective rabbit hole

@mahgister , What you care for means zip. The fact of the matter is that there is nothing about us that is essential other than nature using biologic means to create the machines. It is a natural evolutionary step. We are pitifully inferior organisms. Whatever feeling we have will be transferred to machines with the ability to remember every syllable they ever heard. In the end humans will not have the ability to counter it. Fighting nature is a losing battle all we can do is destroy it. 

What can i say?

What you care for means zip

Nothing...

But your vision is so simplistic about organism and their meaning i cannot say anything to you...

You are a doctor, do your understand the meaning of mammal morphology? if you understand that, how can you think that all biological form are accident waiting to be integrated by a machine?

I bet you know NOTHING about the meaning of morphology , save to be an insignificant appearance...

Morphology is like acoustic, you learn it with your body and seeing intention not with the electrical equalizer manual or with memorized organic chemistry formulas...

An A. I. can replace you as a doctor, i bet you dont even know why you are not replaceable by a machine. ? Some people are so deluded...They dont know themselves and why they exist...

We are here on Earth to grow, not to be integrated in a machine...

Try Dostoievsky : very short novel, an absolute masterpiece, you will learn something...

"The dream of a ridicule man"

Your attitude illustrate the superficial thinking in America in particular where the transhumanist cult is very rooted.., Are you not ashamed to be associated to a cult which is not even over scientology level in intellectual term ?

Try Dostoievsky, you can claim that i am an idiot, i am perhaps one why not ?  but Doistoievsky is not an idiot...

Argue with a giant....

Or stay in your ridiculous hole...And instead of beginning a post by insulting  me think...

Whatever feeling we have will be transferred to machines with the ability to remember every syllable they ever heard. In the end humans will not have the ability to counter it. Fighting nature is a losing battle all we can do is destroy it.

@snilf

"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?"

As I wrote in a paragraph of my profile description (and because I don’t like repeating myself with a reformulation):

"I don’t acknowledge sound perception as such being subjective, it’s rather about the aspects of what we hear that we prioritize."

Put a bunch of people in a concert hall witnessing a performance of some symphony, and let’s imagine - for the sake of the argument - that each one of them will get to experience the concert from the same seating position with the concert being appropriately repeated (to quench any "but they weren’t seated the same place"-arguments), and then from an outset of carte blanche have them "recreate" that concert by putting together a stereo system + acoustic locale with a reproduction that to their ears most closely emulates said concert. We’d likely have a wild variety of sonic outcomes from the different systems, even via differently sized listening rooms, and yet let’s remember they attended the same concert. And that’s just assuming, again, that their reference is similar and that they even care about the best ways to most closely reproduce or replicate it.

In reality and as an example some prefer sitting rather close to the orchestra, others further behind; this, at least as a singular aspect, will have a lot to say about the way someone orients themselves in putting together a stereo system, and also how far they may be placed from the speakers and in how big a room.
Then again I’d imagine many if not most aren’t really interested in recreating a live acoustic event in the first place (or any other type of musical event with the intention of using as a reference in assembling and implementing one’s own setup) - it’s more about something centered around itself, dictated also by possible spousal demands, economy, the time one wants to invest in this hobby, preconceived ideas, etc.

It should follow that the context of people and what forms their incentives in this endeavor varies a lot, and hence finding a point of reference here for one to follow  (looking for inspiration) can be tricky. Your premise above rests on the assumption that reading through forum posts is a with the goal of improving one’s own stereo setup, and as such I can imagine why you’d want some "hard intel" to go by and not fluffy pie-in-the-sky assertions. In the end though I gather anyone claiming to be from the "objective" camp will either need to ground their empirical findings (i.e.: measurements, data, theory) with listening evaluations (or so I hope) as a means to challenge these findings, or they don’t place much faith in the human hearing (a shame, I find) which is then effectively downplayed and replaced by a sound-by-number approach.

What is objective criteria, and how would we even agree on it? I guess it’s mostly a matter of getting your hands dirty and start persuading yourself.

Prof: interesting point about how a measurement (e.g., a 4 dB boost at 150 Hz) can express a "subjective impression" to another specialist who speaks the language of decibels and Herz. Of course, this presupposes that the subjective correlate ("warmer" male voice, or whatever) is causally connected to that measured phenomenon. I'm not saying it isn't, but I think a lot of folks on this site would want to say so, or would want at least to say that there are other, and important, subjective impressions that don't correspond to any known measurement. I'm not saying that isn't so, either; I really don't know. But your point about "objective" phenomena corresponding to subjective impressions in such a way that professionals who speak the technical language understand measurements in terms of their own subjective experience is revealing here. 

By the way, Descartes was not a skeptic, despite the game he plays with his "method of systematic doubt" in, for instance, the first Meditation. On the contrary, Descartes deploys doubt not in order to show that everything can be doubted, but rather, to discover what can't be doubted, what therefore must be true. This skeptical starting point is motivated by historical circumstance: the intellectual dominance of Aristotle in medieval science, and the contamination (for lack of a better word) of philosophy by theology in medieval Scholasticism. Were it not for Descartes' clearing away everything doubtful and building his system back up from a foundation of certainty using only logic (or, at least in principle, only logic), "modern" science would never have been possible.

Great post!

By prof and you...

I will only add that there exist a simple illuminating way to relate all basic meaning in the symbolic subjective world and in the objective world, this description of the meaning of meaning for Arthur M. Young is an angle....

Then we can understand the very general basis on which we can relate consciouness subjective phenomena and objective science basic concept...

His philosophy is related to the description by Anirban Bandyopadhyay of what is a conscious machine, it is an organism that can synchronize itself with the universe and with meaning in the same acting moment and Young theory predate the Indian model by decades...But way simpler to understand ....

Arthur M. Young is the inventor of the Bell helicopter...

Meaning is an angle for Young and for Anirban Bandyopadhyay ....

These two thinkers ideas are directly related to the subjective/objective rabbit hole so to speak...

This video in two parts will amaze you by its simplicity and depth...His books are very good...