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?

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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...

 

 

 

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.

Very important point...Because many sceptic debunking circles act like believers without even knowing that they are believers...

The doubt method is never itself subject to doubt by them , and instead of a suspension of belief, their doubt is only an expression of a belief in the non value of any belief...

Which is the opposite way Descartes use his doubt method and the opposite way Husserl in his Cartesian meditation use Descartes to reveal the deep intentionality of meaning itself...The Method of Husserl is called : epochè...

Each phenomenon is then perceived for a consciousness as a meaning not as a fact...

The usual sceptic reject the meaning with the associated fact which are believed rightfully or not to be wrong... They throw the baby with the muddy waters... An error Descartes and Husserl dont commit...

What cannot be rejected and what must be true is the meaning of meaning itself...An experience of the conscious intentionality itself...

What is interesting is the way Arthur Young depict the meaning of meaning in a pragmatic way to be an angle... The great thinker and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce, rejecting nominalism, will create a complete new field of science and philosophy called " semiotic" , where the meaning of meaning will be described as a sign... But Arthur Young is way simpler to understand than ALL writers i spoke about...

For Young all meaning is an angle, for Descartes all meaning is an "i am" moment, for Husserl all meaning is a consciouness act, for Anirban Bandyopadhyay all meaning is music, even time is music and for Alain Connes too numbers are music and not the reverse...

Now what is the relation between, meaning, sign , angle, numbers, music, time, and consciousness: in Anirban model all that is a system of nested clocks which express the way we synchronized ourself with all that exist... It is "a conscious machine", the living body in a conscious universe...

I will not go beyond here to speak about the soul... And about the way our soul is not reducible to the living body, no more than the cosmos is reducible to the physical unique universe we live in for the time being...

 

I can state with a fairly high degree of certainty that the stereo separation of my audiophile headphones is the width of my head.

You forgot to add the width of the room or the width of the headphones shell to your equation...Each one of our ear "think" by itself about the room in our brain so to speak...

In my world my room is a part of my brain, and not only my brain is in the room but the room is in my brain...

it is a nested meaningful world! and here the angle between all waves means a lot...

I can state with a fairly high degree of certainty that the stereo separation of my audiophile headphones is the width of my head.

 

« All angle is an hour so what! This is a mere watch»-Groucho Marx 🤓