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?

128x128snilf

The free will theorem is also interesting by his implication if free will exist..

http://www.quantumphysicslady.org/glossary/free-will-theorem/#:~:text=This%20theorem%20states%20that%20if%20the%20human%20experimenters,universe%20up%20to%20the%20moment%20of%20the%20experiment.

 

Anirban Bandyopadhyay concept of "conscious machine" illustrate how the possibility of free will is programmedin the design of the cosmos itself which is a conscious machine like our body is...

The difference between A.I. with bits and Q-bits and non Turing conscious machine based on a geometrical/primenumbers  language expressing and controlling an indefinite chain of synchronizing clocks at all scales is enormous... The difference between a soul and a conscious machine another thing completely... I cannot enter in it here and describe those three kind of being...

In a word an A.I. lived in an external relation to a corner of one universe... A conscious machine is integrated potentially and actually to one universe and is internally related to its totality ... A soul inhabit more than one universe and more than one body...

@snilf 

 

Thanks for the reply.

Of course, this presupposes that the subjective correlate ("warmer" male voice, or whatever) is causally connected to that measured phenomenon.

I'd disagree that it "presupposes" such a thing - it is justified on the same basis people accept cause and effect relationships almost everywhere else.  When I employ an EQ boost it changes the subjective impression reliably in the same way as putting your finger on a too-hot stove element reliably causes pain.

Deciding intersubjectively that we sense certain frequency boosts as "warmth," or will refer to it as such, is similar to our agreement to refer to a skin burning as "painful."   It all has fuzzy edges of course, but that's our lot as human beings.

 

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.

 

That's fine for anyone to claim of course.  But the same is said by virtually every dubious belief system.  Psychics, cults,  New Age Wellness fairs and various pseudo-sciences are full of people making the same appeal to save their hypotheses.   If someone says "I can hear things our most sensitive instruments can't measure" then it requires more justification than their say-so, if it is to be sifted from all the similar noise as plausible.  I'd think you agree?

As to Descartes, thanks also for the reply. To be clear (and I can understand why it may not have been clear in how I quickly wrote it):  I'm certainly aware of Descartes Foundationalism.  By referring to "Descartes' doubts" I was referring to the part in which he employs doubt to first "level" the foundations, questioning all possible assumptions, before building it up again on a purportedly firm foundation.  I think many people new to that level of epistemic skepticism - the "doubt" part - can at first be taken with the doubting and wield the "doubting" cudgel with glee.  Rather than any emphasis on how we can justify claims to knowledge.  That's also what I meant by tossing in the term radical skepticism:  The tearing down part feels more fun, at first :-)

Cheers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

mahgister

 

Not that I want to get in to the whole free will debate here, but the fellow in that video pretty much ignored addressing the incompatibilist/hard determinist arguments against free will. He sort of mentioned determinism, but didn’t actually address or "solve" how his idea of free will either 1. Indicates determinism and it's implications against free will is false or  2. Is compatible with determinism

(I’m a Compatibilist, btw)

 

 

great post !

I feel in agreement with all you just said...

Only a remark:

If someone says "I can hear things our most sensitive instruments can’t measure" then it requires more justification than their say-so

For sure you are right...

But we must not forgot that sound/music is not about only a certain measured level of some aspect of some information resolution in some scale defining what is possible or impossible to perceive...

Hearing a sound is also in the brain/body a work of not only psychological but of a biological "interpretation" linked to the non linear architecture of the ears design and work...The ear is tuned to catch some complex information package prepared to be interpretated by the ears by the nature of his design and not reducible to a mere Fourier based model of hearing only ...

Some sound are produced by a consciousness for another prepared consciousness and are not perceived even if they can be recorded because they cannot be interpreted...(dolphin language for example or arachneid "music" concept on their extension web body) For example what is the meaning and information weight of silence in a musical sentence or in a speech discourse or what is the information weight of the silence separating the onset of two specific sound and what is the impact on the interpreted threshold of  perception  ?

Then reducing all hearing possiblities to a scale frequencies or some measured sound level or even time level perception pre-supposed possibilities is forgotting that sound are most of the time in nature and speech a complex package of information that the ears is prepared to interpret and we must remember that some aspect of sounds are there only for the human ears to be perceived; bat ears will  interpret sound differently or cat and  a microphone coupled to another tool will not described what all there is to be perceived but will onbly recorded some chosen  aspects  etc ...

Our measuring apparatus can and must be designed with a hearing theory adequately tuned with the actual working of the hearing system to be able to analyse and detect some phenomena natural for the human ears but no so for some measuring protocols or for cats and bats......We dont know all there is to know about hearing plain and simple...

Then the correlation between objective installation and subjective experience is an ONGOING process which is not finished but always in his course..

it is also the reason why we all must learn to listen and why all audiophile must study acoustic and why most serious audio engineer study psycho-acoustic which is a field in progress...

 

 

 

Prof: We don't disagree here about, well, anything, I think. Granted: all causal relationships "presuppose" a connection between cause and effect, and the correlation (sorry: causation) between certain measurements and the correlative subjective impressions is probably no more problematic than most other supposed causal connections. Note, however, that I'm still being cagy here. Hume may be right: the difference between "correlation" and "causation" may be nothing more than "habitual expectation," common sense and physics notwithstanding. But I don't mean to drag philosophy into this again. I completely agree with you that there are "objective measurements" that reliably correlate with intersubjectively identifiable experiences; for audio professionals who work in the no-man's land between measurements (the science that created the equipment in the first place) and customers with desires and expectations, the objective language of measurements may be fully adequate to unambiguously identify features of an audio component that are sought in a given situation.

Sorry for the remarks about Descartes. I guessed you weren't confused about his "foundationalism." But I spent the last two weeks lecturing on Descartes; playing my role as "professor" is a hard habit to break.

Here's the main point, though, to return to the theme of this thread. Few of us are "audio professionals" who have witnessed again and again the correlation (or causation) between certain measurements and a given desired subjective effect. For us mere mortals, then, some kind of non-objective language is our only option in trying to express what turns us on in an audio system. What my OP was asking for was some sort of standard by means of which your subjective impressions can be communicated to me with sufficient clarity to persuade me that you are actually experiencing something I might also expect or want to experience from a given component. I can't have a pain in your tooth, but I can be persuaded by your language that you do. That's what I look for in posts that rave about some feature of our shared hobby.