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Lumifer comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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I don't see that as a controversial claim, it looks obviously true to me.
You should drop this analogy. The "information entering your brain" is very much NOT the same in both cases.
It seems obviously true to me too. And yet I seem to be having the very devil of a time convincing some people that it is true.
Yes, it is. This is a technical claim, and it is demonstrably true. I mean "information" in the information-theoretical sense, i.e. the log of the number of distinguishable states a system can be in. That the information is the same in both cases can be shown by showing that either system can be reconstructed from the other. The grooves can be reconstructed from the audio (this is how the grooves were created in the first place), and the audio can be reconstructed from the grooves (this is what happens when you play the record.)
If you want to challenge this claim, please mount an argument. Don't just proclaim that it's false.
Yeah, so? Some people just don't want to be convinced, why should you spend your time and effort on them?
Information in the information-theoretical sense does not "enter the brain". The audio can be reconstructed from the grooves, but not by the brain.
Simply put, the brain does not have the same information in those two cases. In particular, the brain does not care about some abstract theoretical information equivalence. It's just a brain, not an idealized infomation-processing agent.
I'm really beginning to wonder.
Of course it does. That too is easily demonstrated.
Maybe your brain doesn't care, but mine does.
Enlighten me, please.
This:
is irrelevant to the question of how the information flows. The information that comprises music is stored on the record, not the record player. The player merely transduces that information from one format (grooves) to another (sound). The brain can't do that transduction process, but it can (and does) process the information. The proof is that a brain equipped with suitable tools could make a copy of a record (and hence the information on that record) by looking at and making measurements of the grooves.
That's not what "processes information" means. A photocopier does not "process information" when it makes a copy of a document. It just makes a copy. Similarly, a brain could peer at the grooves all it likes, and, presumably, could make a copy of them, but that makes it no better than a record-producing machine.
Your claim is, essentially, that from the brain's point of view the information in the grooves and the information in the music is the same. However the brain cannot convert the grooves to the music (or the music to the grooves). It requires the transformation be made externally before it can process the information.
I really don't want to quibble over the meaning of the word "process". The original claim was:
And that is clearly true. It doesn't matter how (or even whether) that information is "processed".
Note that your re-statement of my claim, "from the brain's point of view the information in the grooves and the information in the music is the same" is not my actual claim. I said nothing about "the brain's point of view". That phrase is non-sensical with respect to an information-theoretical analysis.
If you really want to get technical, there is a "point of view" with respect to information content, and that is the repertoire of distinguishable states that a system can be said to potentially be in. The choice of that repertoire is arbitrary, and so can be said to be a "point of view." There is an implied "point of view" with respect to music, and that is the ability to reconstruct the audio waveform within the range of human hearing, roughly 20HZ-20kHz. With respect to that "point of view", my claim is correct, and can actually be mathematically proven to be correct by the Nyquist sampling theorem.
What is not the same -- and this is the whole point -- is the subjective experience of having the same information entering your brain through different sensory modalities. The intellectual understanding of spiritual experience in terms of neurobiology or whatever is very different from the actual subjective experience, and if you haven't had the actual subjective experience, your understanding of spirituality is necessarily limited by that.
You're collapsing two distinctions.
One is between information structured in such a way as to operate on our brains so as to produce a subjective response, and information that we have to do some work to interpret. (E.g., music in the form of sound waves versus music in the form of a printed score -- at least, for people who understand music notation but don't have the fluency of some professional musicians who can look at a score and "hear" what it says.)
The other is between information we are able to make sense of and information we aren't. (E.g., the text of a novel, and the same thing after encryption using a cipher I don't know how to break, with a key I don't know.)
In practice some things are intermediate. (E.g., the text of a novel, and the same thing after "encryption" with ROT13.)
Giving me a micrograph of an LP's grooves is much more like the second of those than like the first. Maybe the information is interpretable in principle -- I guess I could measure very carefully, and then do a Fourier transform by hand and figure out what frequences are present, etc., etc., etc. -- but in practice, showing me those micrographs is going to convey essentially no information about the music to me. I'm not much better off than if you'd encrypted the data (and certainly worse than if you'd just ROT13ed it.)
So when you contrast music and words, you're confusing matters because most of the difference you profess to find is not between music and words, but between different degrees of "difficulty" in reconstructing the content in a form we can make use of. If you'd compared "listening to the audiobook of a novel" with "reading the text of the novel, after encryption with a cipher of moderate difficulty" you'd have had something much nearer to the comparison between "listening to music" and "looking at micrographs of a record groove" -- and you'd no longer have found so big a difference between words and music.
The thing is, you could have done this right and it would have served your purpose almost equally well. Audiobook versus printed novel; recorded music versus printed score. For all but the very best musicians, the printed score will have far less power to please or move than the recorded music; the relationship here is much closer to the relationship between an audiobook and a printed novel; and you could run with that and draw your analogy with religious/spiritual experiences. But I have the impression that you wanted to stress (I would say, to overstate) the ineffability of those experiences -- and as a result you made a bogus comparison instead of a good one.
Well, OK, but this is a very different kind of critique than you were offering before. Before you were making a simple (and wrong) technical claim:
Now you're mounting a critique of my rhetorical choices. It's a constructive critique, so I thank you for that. But let me explain why I made the choice that I did.
The point I was trying to make is that the subjective sensation of spiritual experience matters. It is too facile to dismiss God as simply "a pernicious delusion" as Dawkins does. There are people for whom a phenomenon that they call "the presence of the holy spirit" (or whatever) is every bit as real and non-delusional as the phenomenon that you call "hearing the music" is for you. Their explanatory theory of this phenomenon is wrong, but their experience is a real experience, not a delusion.
The difference between music and spiritual experience is that all humans have the subjective experience of hearing music (even deaf people!) but not all humans have spiritual experiences. So I had to find a way to illustrate the reality of spiritual experience to an audience which by and large has not had such experiences and is generally predisposed to dismiss them as delusions. I considered and discarded many possible ways of doing this, and finally settled on music because of its universality. But the subjective sensation of reading sheet music depends on how much you have been trained to read sheet music, and I didn't want to muddy the waters with that kind of relativity. So for the counterpoint I wanted a rendering of music that no human has been trained to process. I picked grooves in the hopes that people would intuitively understand that the music is somehow there, but you can't "get at the essence of it" by looking. You have to do something else. In the same way, you can't "get at the essence" of a spiritual experience by understanding the neurobiology of it and calling it a delusion. You have to do something else.
I'm not sure if I made the right choice. But I think I made a defensible one.