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Originally Posted by Ken G
My point is that such a "feedback loop" is also possible for a deaf person-- they merely have to look at the expressions on others' faces as they play in a certain way. The "non-representational" approach to learning violin must view these on an equal footing to actually listening to the instrument, as actually hearing the notes is "representational".
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No, that is a common misconception. The patterns of information flow between musician and audience is of a different character than between musician and instrument. The musician will not respond the same way, either with the subtle muscle movements required to intonate and play in rhythm or with any of the emotional responses people tend to have towards music.
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The analogy is intended to show the flaw in restricting to non-representational descriptions, in the same way that a deaf musician would likely never accomplish the levels of one with hearing.
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Yes, you are setting up a variant of the "Mary the color scientist" thought experiment. I take it that you are suggesting that there is a key element to music experience that a non-representational approach could never come in contact with, but that a representational approach naturally provides.
That is our intuition, but it is not very rigorous. The thought experiment when presented as an argument is circular in that it assumes the existence of that which is in question. A "representation" doesn't really explain anything either. It is like blaming all illnesses on "toxins" in the body. Toxins may explain some illnesses like poisoning, but scientists should be wary of explanations positing singular entities that necessarily and sufficiently cause and explain the effect in question.
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No wonder you favor "non-representational" approaches to perception!
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I still love music. I guess you could say I'm a partial tone-zombie. A representationalist would say that I am missing some tone representations inside of me. That makes no sense to me. My impression is that I hear the strings of the guitar being plucked. I can hear the timber of the note change because the effective length of the string has changed and the relative intensities of the harmonics have changed. I just can't reliably tell the two apart in terms of the property of pitch.
There is an analogy that comes to mind. As kids we discovered that we could put pennies on a train track, let a train squash them, and then use them in lieu of quarters at a pinball machine. We could say that the pinball machine could not tell quarters and squashed pennies apart. But there is no need for a representational quarter to explain why that is so. The pinball machine does not need to generate an inner quarter that it responds to with credits for a pinball game. The machine simply lacks the means to distinguish the two coins. It provides credits for either coin.