When I read about the disputes of philosophers, I sometimes had the impression that they treated their views as equivalent to the objects they studied. Despite the discovery of very clever, sometimes accurate, mental combinations, reality almost always escaped them when people tried to apply them in every case. Of course these research conclusions are very useful to maintaining civilisation but human mind doesn’t need them to feel music.
Listener doesn’t need to know does a piece of music a kind of abstraction (realism) or a concrete realization (nominalism). He can follow the Chopin Competition and analyze every interpretation of every Chopin piece with no knowledge about ontology and or phenomenology.
Music permeates almost inertly from the creator, through the performer, to the listener. The word music describes the entire set of elements from this journey; it can even be recreated in the listener’s memory. Of course every philosophical view are in his boundaries accurate but I will try to enter a higher level of understanding – the human mind.
And what is human? He is a wonderful machine—he is not uniform, yet he is one.
It can process numerous impressions, feelings, thoughts, and gestures—and still remain a whole, like a point. This is how music is perceived—in many dimensions. Each instance of performance, musical notation, structural solution, emotion conveyed by the composer, cultural and historical aspects, move human unity with varying force in different areas of essence. Sometimes they “touch” through “abstractions embedded” in mathematics, sometimes through emotions, sometimes analytically, and sometimes even philosophically (contemplatively)…
It is known that the centers that concentrate all these “messages” are located in different areas of the brain, but they are processed simultaneously in a single person. How is this possible? As British physicist Roger Penrose suggested (“The Emperor’s New Mind: On Computers, Mind, and the Laws of Physics”), the mind cannot be a wholly mechanical entity. This is impossible, if only because of the previously mentioned inability to synchronize sensations. Instead, the mind must be an entity that reaches into the quantum “world,” one that, unfortunately, cannot be studied in detail. Mathematicians (based on Gödel’s theorem) and physicists (Heissenberg’s uncertainty, Schrödinger’s equation) have proven that quantum mechanics is unlikely to become a theory, meaning it will likely not transcend the framework of a set of specific theories.
Let’s focus on this: what could this human uniformity be?
Music demonstrates the shortcomings of materialism: pure atoms cannot explain the concept of “F. Chopin’s music”—this is the world of ideas. Similarly, determinism, which is “married” to pantheism, cannot explain the phenomenon of creating a new musical work. Determinism has two additional weaknesses: chaos physics and the “never-definable” quantum world. Determinism is not necessary—assuming belief in God, he does not need to know the future—he creates it at will (Thomism).
People know that the material world is vast and capacious—this is true. However, the quantum world contains barriers that reason can never overcome—it may contain an even more vast and capacious world of ideas “on the other side.” There may exist structures and/or constructs more complex than computers, computer systems, computer games, or any other inventions made by humans or even other beings.
Can music be a “reflection” of this (Platonic) world?
Thesis 1: The human soul is uniform not only in the moment of time, but also uniform in duration from its birth.
Thesis 2: The human soul is a multidimensional bundle that is equivalent to a record of the “whole” in time.
Thesis 3: The human soul is “corroded” over time by experiences, emotions, sins, pain, etc.
Thesis 4: Music is, in a sense, the reverse of these “corrosions” – it fills the “corrodes” and soothes the “pain of existence” of human souls.
Additionally:
Thesis 5: Free will exists because, having abstractions in reason, man can make choices between nice evil and painful good. This creates a feedback loop, like disturbances in deterministic chaos.
Ad. 4 If a person without musical education, but with internal experiences, is able to feel the emotions contained in music – this would prove the existence of the soul described in “attempt to understand music”.
Proving this thesis would require large-scale anthropological research—or observations of people from their surroundings. The best evidence for this would be provided by individuals who grew up in “quiet” environments and were exposed to music for the first time in their lives.
What could be so moving about music to people without musical education? Primarily, it’s cyclicality (in frequencies and the repetition of fragments of a piece) and change (in frequency, intensity, and tension). Combinations of these can induce bliss, irritation, and states in between (in a whole range of different experiences—so-called moods). This may reflect their daily lives, long periods of life, or selected aspects of life. Music can reveal the truth about themselves to the listener, but in most cases, it temporarily “lies” to them. Most often, composers who intend to evoke beauty use harmony, structure, and other classical aspects to present an ideal “sketch” of the soul.