…if it ain’t got that swing
One of the recurrent themes on The Hump, which I’m trying to address from different directions, is the priority of mind within our reality, and hence the myth of objectivity apart from human ideas. That ranges from the mind-based metaphysics of Eddington or Dembski (coming from quantum and information science directions respectively), to the “personal knowledge” of Polanyi’s philosophy of science or the Goethian approach to knowledge. I’ve included the thought that contemporary science has an inevitable tendency to abstract reality into symbolic representations, most marked in the eliminative materialism that ends up rendering everything – even matter and the minds that conceive it – as an illusion.
But in truth it isn’t a fault of science that it’s theory-laden – it’s just a sign of the central importance of mind, which needs to be recognised more than it is. I’m reading some heavy stuff in philosophy of science at the moment about how not just science, but even ordinary perception, is theory-laden – we see nothing until we already have a concept of what we’re looking at. Maybe that’s to be written about at another time. At present, though, I want to illustrate the idea in a lighthearted way, together with some ear-candy, by taking a couple of posts to look at something that makes a difference to life’s daily reality, but is exceedingly hard to reduce to formal analysis, and that is the musical concept of swing. Continue reading