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From: eliot@phoenix.princeton.edu (Eliot Handelman)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Re: Auditory Cyberspace
Message-ID: <12160@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 2 Dec 90 05:44:53 GMT
References: <11565@milton.u.washington.edu> <12073@milton.u.washington.edu>
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In article <12073@milton.u.washington.edu> mukesh@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Mukesh Pate
l) writes:
;
;In article <11565@milton.u.washington.edu> eliot@phoenix.princeton.edu (Eliot H
a
;ndelman) writes:
;>
;>Yes. Consider Tom Nagel's famous article about what it's like to be a bat
;>-- his point, of course, was that no amount of description of echolocation
;>can give us an idea of "what it's like".
;
;Here's my 2 penny worth - Surely Nagel's main thrust was not merely that
;we dont have the ability to "see" what a bat does/can but that this would
;be impossible because we dont have a semantics for what it "see".  So 
;what semantics can music/sound have (other than the usually catch-all
;terms like romantic, tragic, etc).

Nagel didn't say that "it was impossible" to know what it's like to be
a bat, which is to say to visualize auditorily, and sometimes in greater
detail, it seems, than we visualize visually -- he said that consciousness
isn't described unless "what it's like" is brought to bear on the
description; otherwise you're not describing consciousness.

Music has no semantics. To hear a piece of music, by, say, Anthrax, is
not equivalent to labeling this piece of music "x," where x is one of
"happy, sad," etc. To analyze the hearing of a piece of music is to
say "what it's like" when you hear this piece in such a way that this
account is equivalent to, and can substitute for, the experience which
it describes, or conveys, or transmits. Similarly for the analysis of
the consciousness of a bat. The relevance of this to vr/cyberspace/hypermedia
is that this transmission, almost certainly, is NOT one which feeds
off the semantics of language. The answer to "what it's like" is almost
certainly the transmission of this consciousness on a suitable medium.

--eliot


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