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All of stephen_s's Comments + Replies

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective? (updated)

Definitely interesting ideas about perception and this topic. Also, I'm not overly aware of ASMR but I'll have to look into that that there's a limited amount of triggers (and like you said, the hedonic treadmill of how our brain habituates to sound). Thanks for the thoughts!

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective? (updated)

stephen_s2y10

Really interesting thoughts to add to the discussion, I'll be thinking over these ideas for sure. Thanks again for being so thorough / contributing!

1nim2y

Continuing to ponder it, I've stumbled onto a few areas that seem like key points in refining the underlying question about what "running out of new art" might mean: * Covers of songs. When some elements of a piece of Good Art are reused, does that constitute New Art? * Sampling. Consider the situation when a song samples an iconic soundbyte from a movie -- the order in which one encounters the song and movie will change one's experience of both. My personal example is having known the guns n roses song Civil War for many years before eventually seeing Cool Hand Luke, so my movie experience was "hey, it's the thing from that song!", whereas someone who met them in the other order would have heard the song and gone "hey, it's the thing from that movie!". * Movie adaptations of books and remakes of movies. Consider the difference between fairy tales in the Brothers Grimm versus their Disney adaptations, or the impact of Shakespeare on much of modern western media. Is a retelling of Hamlet technically "new art" if it's an old story? I think that although we can technically exhaust the space of recordings, there's probably a decent argument to be made that we cannot meaningfully exhaust the space of retellings. Each retelling differs from the original story due to the context in which it's told. Each context for storytelling differs from prior contexts in part due to what prior retellings have happened in it. Therefore, each new retelling is meaningfully distinct from prior retellings.

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective? (updated)

stephen_s2y10

Yea, what you're talking about that a story has to "mean something" is what I'm getting at, that there isn't an infinite amount of those theoretically. So if there aren't infinite possibilities that "make sense" (like you said) then won't we eventually run out of them (even if you think it would be far into the future)?

And if we will run out of possibilities that "make sense", then isn't it just a question of when?

3dr_s2y

Well, but you also have to consider that the kind of "sense" we're interested in changes with culture, so in a way this might be more a sign of cultural stagnation (art managed to run out of big things to say since the last time there was a shift large enough to change the themes of most interest).

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective? (updated)

stephen_s2y10

Thanks for letting me know! I didn't realize it. Should be fixed now

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective? (updated)

stephen_s2y10

Really interesting thoughts, thanks for contributing. It seems like you think it's possible we could "exhaust" good art, even if not anytime soon. My other blog posts (you don't need to read them) are about if this concept applies to everything in human development (that it will be substantially "completed" one day) then what would be the implications of that and how would people live and how should society be set up. Do you have any thoughts on any of that? (it's ok if you don't, you just gave a really thorough good reply above so I thought you might)

2nim2y

yeah! I super briefly alluded to it with "and the goalpost for what does qualify as "good art" also moves over time as a function of culture and individual experience." above -- that reply didn't feel like the place to go into detail on the potential for exhaustion. Thinking it through now, I think I may have found a stronger justifiable claim than I was aware of at the time of the initial comment, as well. Modern use of the term "art" is inexorably linked with the concept of recording. Listening to the same recording of a song, or the same cut of a movie, at different times, is easy to conflate into being "the same" experience, because the differences in the experience are subtle enough to be treated as unimportant. Decouple "art" from "recording", and there's a lot more hope that we'll never "run out" in a meaningful way. It's pretty plausible that someday we'll discover all of the very "best" recordings under a certain length, by the standards of all creatures recognizable as human -- at that point, having a limited number of senses and a limited number of consecutive hours to consume media in a sitting become entwined with the definition of what we recognize as "people like us". Some future descendant of our species who possesses a dozen senses that they cannot explain to us, for instance, would not really be "like us" as a connoisseur or consumer of art. So, I'd say maybe we can find all the best recordings, but so what? Have you ever been part of a group of humans that sings "the same" song repeatedly, year after year, decade after decade, or even century after century? I think this is most common in churches, but it also shows up in some social gatherings, reenactment events, etc. Is the experience of it really the same for you each time, in the way that listening to a single recording over and over would be, even if the words and tune remain consistent? Each time a song is re-sung, you can hear subtle differences -- peoples' moods and health impact their

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y00

I understand what you are saying, but I am still curious if you agree that there is a limit of distinctness in music? It seems difficult to argue that there is unlimited distinctness in music, and I don't think you are, but that you are instead arguing that it requires a certain level of the artistic sensibility to gauge the limits of musical possibility.

If so, who do you think / what type of person would have the requisite artistic sensibility to make such a judgment with some accuracy (but still imperfect)?

If you have the requisite artistic sensibility ... (read more)

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y00

I understand your point. My experience is in the genre of rock music (which is songs) and not in classical music, so my explorations into the metaphysical nature of music is based on extensive experience with songs (and not in other pieces of music). However, I believe at the metaphysical level that this idea applies to, there is not a substantial difference in examining the nature of songs and other pieces of music. That may make the perspective I'm coming from clearer to you, or we may have to agree to disagree.

I have not read the Fun Theory Sequence article, but you're right that is connected to this topic. I appreciate the link. Thanks for your comments!

2komponisto8y

Aieee! (The tradition of rock music is what you meant.) Whether or not there is a substantial difference in the metaphysical nature of songs versus other kinds of musical works, there is certainly a substantial difference in the conclusions about musical possibility that one can draw if one's appreciative apparatus is exclusively (or near-exclusively) derived from mass culture, versus the case where one has a more refined artistic sensibility and greater powers of appreciation.

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y00

To be more clear, putting pieces of music under different labels (bagatelle, folk song, house track, etc) doesn't have a bearing on this discussion of what is the metaphysical nature of a piece of music. I understand that I was using the word "song" colloquially for a piece of music. I was not attempting to initiate a debate on the dictionary definition of a song or its characteristics in relation to other types of music. Again, I would refer you to the metaphysical discussion that many of the other posters contributed to.

I understand that music categorization and music theory are a separate and important topic of which you may have an expertise in, but that is a different discussion.

4komponisto8y

The vocabulary you use conveys information about your background, experience, perspective, and conceptual framework -- in short, your epistemic state. Someone who un-self-consciously uses the word "song" in the way that you have is unlikely to be familiar enough with music to have good intuitions about its ultimate philosophical nature. My suggestion to you, therefore, is that before attempting to philosophize about the size of musical space and the proportion of it that is occupied by the mass-cultural products that seem to constitute the entirety of your experience, you acquaint yourself further with the higher realms of human possibility in this domain, if not others as well. I don't mean this as a slapdown -- I genuinely think your beliefs would change if you had more knowledge. This all being said, the question of the ultimate information-theoretic limits of interestingness in the universe is (plausibly) an important one, and (this being Less Wrong) I recommend the Fun Theory Sequence as a starting point.

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y00

IE "what is a piece of music?" from a metaphysical perspective.

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y00

You're failing to engage the question of the nature of songs and music as a metaphysical level. I agree that mass culture and dissemination of works is part of the discussion, but it doesn't seem like you're trying to engage with that nature of "what is a song?". (See a number of the longer comment chains by other posters who provided thoughts on this topic if you're not sure what is under examination besides mass culture and dissemination.)

2bogus8y

The comment you're replying to did exactly that, actually. Since you seem to have missed that part, here's a hint: a song is a piece of music that's supposed to be sung by someone, i.e. it has lyrics, and a vocal part. Beethoven's Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor for solo piano (generally known as Für Elise) has neither: hence it's an instrumental piece, not a "song". (It's not even drawing overt inspiration from the song genre as a whole; but if it was, it might be somewhat sensible to call it a song by analogy/extension, as we do with Felix Mendelssohn's Songs without Words).

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y00

Even though we are of slightly different opinions, I'm glad we are on the same page of what I was trying to discuss and get thoughts on--this has been good. You're right that the sparseness I'm proposing is hard to judge and you can't break down the argument further. My perception comes from my experience in attempting songwriting in the genre of rock where I felt like after spending many hours songwriting that I could understand and perceive the boundaries of the genre/niche at an intuitive level from much trial-and-error--which isn't an argument to convi... (read more)

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y00

Yea, I'm a fan of Joseph Campbell's ideas, and of course the great monomyth movies (Star Wars, LOTR, The Matrix, Harry Potter, etc). I agree that every story relies on structures that other stories use and nothing is fully original. Star Wars is a great example because it borrowed not only from the monomyth story, but from westerns, samurai movies, WWII movies, space operas, high fantasy (LOTR), science fiction epics (Dune), etc. Star Wars was great because it was really the perfection of the space opera genre, just like The Matrix was the ideal cyberpunk... (read more)

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y20

Yes, you are getting into the heart of what I'm trying to examine. This concept began to form for me as I was writing and recording rock songs and trying to create a distinct sound within that genre. New distinct music is largely created intuitively by people borrowing on the past but adding variation (like you said). But songs contain a more specific balance of factors than I think people realize, which makes a song more like a complex puzzle than just a complex combination of attributes. Many factors must sync together correctly including chord progressi... (read more)

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y20

Sure, I didn't mean to imply that art is just about new creations. There are many other values to art and creativity of course. Also, I agree that we are fortunate to have an abundance of music available. So don't take what I'm saying as a criticism of creativity or art, or not appreciating the value of them apart from newness. I'm more examining this topic in the interest of understanding human progress and discovery in general.

I agree that this idea is difficult to prove as of now, which is why I'm doing my best to explain my thought process as to what ... (read more)

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y40

I don't mean to press you on a point, but when you say in reference to musical consensus, "Probably, but I think your example is a little bit too extreme to demonstrate your point", I think it is important to say whether you believe there is any musical consensus of what is good, or if you believe there is zero consensus. The degree does not matter as to whether the point I'm trying to make is true. Is there any consensus based on how shared human nature interacts with physical sounds as to what is agreed upon as "good"? It seems diffic... (read more)

5bogus8y

This whole idea that you need "infinite variation", or rather arbitrarily large variation, if artistic endeavors are to be worthwhile in the near term is just weird to me. A big enough space is plenty enough to keep us all busy for the foreseeable future, and this isn't even accounting for the fact that art is in no small part about gaining a thorough understanding of such creative possibilities, as opposed to developing new 'creations' persay. After all, there's already more music in the world than one could feasibly listen to in a lifetime!

3Han8y

I really like your thread: thank you for writing me back! I think you have good intuitions about how sound works. I don't think I can determine whether there's a consensus on what is good: I'd venture to guess that any audio humans can perceive sounds good to someone. A friend of mine sent me an album that was entirely industrial shrieking. But I agree with you that there's a limit to the distinctness -- humans can only divide the frequency spectrum a certain number of times before they can't hear gradation any more, they can only slice the time domain to a certain extent before they can't hear transitions any more, and you can only slice the loudness domain to a certain extent before you can't hear the difference between slightly louder and slightly quieter. We can make basically any human-perceivable sound by sampling at 32 bits in 44.1khz. Many of those sounds won't be interesting and they'll sound the same as other sounds, of course. But if nothing else, that puts an upper limit on how much variation you can have. In ten minutes, at 32 bits, in 44.1khz, you have about 840MB of audio data. You could probably express any human-perceivable song in 840MB, and in practice, using psychoacoustic compression like MP3, it would take a lot less space to do the interesting ones. I think that for us to run out of music, the domain of things that sound good has to be pretty small. Humans probably haven't produced more than a billion pieces of music, but if we pretend all music is monophonic, that there are four possible note lengths, and twelve possible pitches (note: each of these assumptions is too small, based on what we hear in real music), then you only need to string six notes together before you get something that nobody has probably tried. What I was really responding to were these ideas that I thought were implicit in what you were saying (but I don't think you thought they were implicit): * if you try every human-perceptible sound, most of them will sound ba

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y40

Sure, the position I'm coming from is that there is a varied and subjective experience of music, but there is clearly a shared consensus of what is good. That we all share common characteristics of auditory and musical experience because we are all human--not that we all experience music the same way or have the same appreciation of individual songs, but that our experience of music has similarities due to our shared human nature.

So if I hit random piano keys with my hands a few times and call it a song, the consensus of music listeners would be that Beet... (read more)

2komponisto8y

First of all, Beethoven's "Für Elise" isn't a song, it's a bagatelle; let's get the genre right. (The previous sentence also demonstrates the proper use of the word "genre", by the way.) The rest of your comment is just a reaffirmation of your confusion of mass culture and culture tout court. I (might) agree that mass-culture's greatness-producing capacities have plateaued, but I don't look to mass culture as a source of artistic greatness, so I don't really care. If you studied music in sufficient depth, you'd see the possibilities for yourself, and your intuition would switch from "music is almost exhausted" to "mass culture is really poor at generating musical value".

5Han8y

I think two of your premises aren't necessarily true: Probably, but I think your example is a little bit too extreme to demonstrate your point. There are a lot of genres, like taarab, that won't sound like good music to you because of your cultural background. Acid house probably wouldn't sound good to people who were raised in the 1800s, either. There are commonalities between how people appreciate music, but people come up with new ways to introduce musicality to a piece really often, which means that it's hard to enumerate all the songs there could be. If atonal or microtonal music suddenly got trendy, you'd come up with all kinds of new tone patterns we didn't have before. If people started thinking about timbre differently, we could come up with instruments we don't know how to listen to now. Both of these things happened after the first synthesizers came out. I don't think you can predict in advance what will make people think "this sounds good." The great classical artists of the time of Debussy and Ravel were musicians like Chopin and Beethoven. The great classical artists of the time of Stravinsky and Schoenberg were musicians like Debussy and Ravel. Reich and Glass had Stravinsky and Schoenberg. (and maybe Gershwin), and now we're venerating Reich and Glass. Arvo Part is probably going to get canonized real soon now. I think that when you're talking about "classical music" you're talking about music that most people are only exposed to in curated form. It seems like when that happens, curators stick to examples that are really broadly accessible, which isn't a good way to get a picture of the whole genre. The last trends of really broadly accessible music were 1800s romanticism and 1960s minimalism, and 1960s minimalism doesn't seem old enough for curators to put it on the classical music shelf. It's not like painting ended with Da Vinci, but today's public doesn't particularly like Liechtenstein, Warhol, Rothko, Picasso, and so on. This doesn't unde

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y00

Yes, I think we are stuck at this point. It seems that you are saying that it is self-evident that all relevant factors are unlimited and completely subjective, but from the points I was making I was trying to show why to me it is self-evident that the relevant factors are limited and objective. Just because something can have unlimited gradation, doesn't mean that something like "instrumentation" or "melody" is indistinct and has no boundaries. And the distinctness is what leads to its perceived limit.

Along the same lines, you are arg... (read more)

1Erfeyah8y

Just to clarify on your last comments: I am not saying that. It is actually a mixture. The human nature part is objective. For example, as far as I can tell the perception of the octave is a human universal in music. But a large part of art, is undeniably subjective. This is easily demonstrated by exploring traditional music and checking studies on different cultures perception of each others music. You can think of the way art functions as linked to the nature / nurture human characteristic. Thank you too. It was fun! :)

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y00

Yes I see what you're saying. I think a larger set of elements does not mean that all combination of those elements "works" as a movie story. It seems better to view possibilities as limited and sparse distinct points. A movie like Star Wars requires the correct combination of thousands of factors, and if you only had the right balance of half of the factors then there wouldn't necessarily be another workable story there.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that there seems to be a certain number of distinct point possibilities of movie storie... (read more)

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y00

Thanks for taking the time to read the article and continue responding. To progress further, maybe the idea I need to address is distinct points vs gradation.

Would you agree in music that there are limited factors involved in what makes a song? There are probably more than I can name (rhythm, chords, melody, instrumentation, etc), but there is a limit to how many factors are at play. These factors exist in limited distinct manifestations but that have infinite gradation. For example, look at the factor of instruments in an orchestra. There may be infinite ... (read more)

1Erfeyah8y

Not really. There are limited factors if you define 'song' in a limited way (see previous post). What if I define a song as 'the arranging and reproduction of sonic sensory objects perceivable by humans, with the intention of producing an effect on a human being' ? Why are you choosing to focus on the limited factors (of our own defining) instead of the infinite gradations and permutations? And don't forget that music is created by the permutations. There are 12 tones in an octave in the western system but music is created, among many other things, by their arrangement in time. It is a completely different thing to play an A and then a C to playing a C and then an A. Also, why are there 24 instruments in an orchestra? Assuming that is true, it would be because people decided they liked the balance and it became a convention. But there is nothing that stops you using any number of instruments as a composer. You could decide that you want a dog in the middle of the orchestra that you have trained to bark when the maestro signs. Cool, now you have a dog concerto (sorry, too much avant garde exposure :P). Now, here is an, apparently, general statement. I would rephrase as: 'The laws and matter of the universe allow for sound waves, the permutations of which are experienced by humans through what we could define as 'songs' (those combinations of sound waves that produce an effect on a human being)'. I find this more accurate as I am being descriptive without sneaking in conclusions in my definition. The word 'limited' you will have to offer supporting arguments about. A piece of music is experienced very differently from different people. We actually do not fully understand how it works. There are linguistic components, musical components, social components etc. Could you explain what you mean by 'effect'? Is this really true? This is related to defining 'effect' in my previous question. After we do that, we can ask about consensus. It is here where the rabbit hole g

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y00

These are good points. I agree with you that we can view songs within a "song-space", but I think that specific points (songs) of a certain value or effect on humans are actually very sparse in the song-space. I can strum a few random chords, record it, and call it a song, but that is very different from the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction". If you take all the factors that comprise a song, it is only very specific combinations that turn out to be songs that have a strong effect on people. So the song-space would be large, but the specifi... (read more)

1Hal8y

Right, that's a good point you're making about most points in song-space being worthless, and it maybe even shows that the multidimensional-space way of looking at things isn't really appropriate in this situation. Since I can't think of anything better, though, we might as well just keep talking about a "sparsely populated" space. I think that distinction comes to core of the problem here: we're talking about a hugely vast space, where a hugely vast proportion of points in it are inconsequential. There's a battle going on between those intuitions of "hugeness;" for me, the space wins out, for you, the sparseness. It's probably not possible to reconcile these intuitions easily, as they're not immediately based on anything concrete. As unfortunate as the phrase is, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree (unless I'm totally wrong here, which is a possibility). For what it's worth, I'm less confident now in my opinion that music genres like "classical" and jazz aren't close to being filled up. You're making a bit of a different point in this comment, though, which I think it's important to clarify. It seems to me to be far more likely that a specific genre that has existed for decades or centuries is filling up, than that music as a whole is anywhere close to completion. The two are very different claims. You mention rap and electronica as being some of the "final genres" to be substantially completed, but think of where they came from, and why they are the most recent genres. Rap (or hip-hop, not really sure which is the more accurate term for what I'm talking about) came out of a period of profound social change, while electronica is only possible due to technological advances in the last 30 or so years. I don't think anyone would have been able to predict Skrillex, or anything like it, in the '60s or maybe even the '70s (though I'm unconfident about exactly when because my history is lacking). Doesn't this suggest that it's most prudent to "expect the unex

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y00

Yea exactly, that's the point I'm trying to get at. It seems like there is a limit to the possibilities of "great" contributions to any field, and if that is so then it makes sense that eventually each field will be completed. Completion is the point where humanity has completed every field and discovered all knowledge (and could be viewed as the biggest goal for humanity in a way).

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y00

Great, thanks for the link. I've read a fair amount of his stuff, but I didn't know he had an article on this topic.

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y10

Ok great, yes this is what I'm trying to get at. First of all, I think your definition of art is good.

To your first point, I would say that I believe instincts, language, culture, knowledge, and conditioning are factors in art. But I believe that they are all limited in possibilities as well. So the manifestation of those limited factors into different art would lead to limited possibilities of art.

Let me try and clarify that by addressing your next points. I agree that genres are not real things. Like all language, it is imperfect labeling for a practical... (read more)

1Erfeyah8y

Thank you for your answer. I reread your article more carefully. I think I can see what you are trying to do, though I am not sure what the utility of it is. I have disagreements based on epistemological and ontological grounds but I would like for start to focus on your example of music as to me it fails to demonstrate, if not contradict, your very point. As I said in the previous post, there is no real completion of a genre. A completion can only be defined by defining a genre so the reasoning is circular. To give you another example, a huge chunk of modern music such as jazz, blues, rock, pop and the thousands of derivatives like metal, prog rock etc. are all using the same framework that Bach was using so can be conceptualised as being in the same genre. In other words you are creating boundaries by your definition and then offering your boundaries as evidence of completeness. That is not to say that my rebuttal proves that completeness is not possible. Just that the example is not working. Now, no matter what you do, how much you flex your definition, I can always take you one level of abstraction out until we reach the definition of art I gave you in my previous post. And even further. But If you want, as a start, to focus on art, can you argue completeness from that definition? If we can agree on that maybe we can debate the core of your argument.

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y00

That's an interesting idea, and yes I'm still thinking through the idea myself. But couldn't the lack of popularity of a genre could be caused by the slowdown in release of substantial new works? Declining quality leads to less popularity?

I'm thinking of it in terms of the idea that "you can't reinvent the wheel." Each song or style is a concept that once created can't be recreated, and in the case of art it loses its freshness eventually.

I think it works at the level of a single band or artist as well. Take AC/DC for example. They released most ... (read more)

1Hal8y

Yeah, whether the lack of popularity of jazz and classical music is caused by their slowdown or their slowdown is caused by their lack of popularity is one of those tricky questions. There's definitely causation going both ways, but it's really hard to tell which part has more impact, or which one changed first to start off the decline (and if they're both driving each other now, does it even matter which one started things off?). If I had to guess, I'd say that the rise of rock, pop, and (slightly later) hip-hop music gave people new musical options, and this led to the decline in popularity of jazz and classical because, for social reasons, their new competitors were more appealing to most people. This would then cause talented musicians to be attracted to the newer genres, making the older ones worse and less popular, and kicking off that whole vicious cycle. I'm completely speculating here, though; music history is not my forte. The example of a single band like AC/DC is interesting, and them running out of good music is quite plausible, but other plausible explanations exist too. It would make just as much sense to say that the band members and their relationships changed with time, and since most ways in which a band can exist do not lead to the highest quality music, these changes made them worse. This would explain their declining quality just as well as your hypothesis, and it's hard to tell which is true. It is certainly true that each song is unique, and once made, that point in song-space will no longer be fresh for the rest of time. The question is whether or not the space of good songs is so large that we don't care about specific points; if it is, your concern is unfounded. I'm not really sure what the truth is here, but I'm leaning toward the space being quite large. Music has a lot of different knobs to turn to make songs original (even while staying within the same genre), and I think you'd need more convincing evidence than "these genres' good o

1CronoDAS8y

Yeah, if you can write great-sounding music in the style of Bach or some other long dead composer, that doesn't make you as great as them, that makes you an unoriginal hack. (I can solve lots of math problems that Newton never could because I've read textbooks written long after he died, but that doesn't make me a better mathematician...)

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y10

Sure, I didn't mean to take a narrow view of music, just to narrowly examine "newness" in music, which is a different question. I agree that music serves many purposes besides pop consumption of new songs or works. That is something I would want to explore further at some point.

I was aiming to understand the metaphysical question: is there is a limit to newness in music, and if so what does that imply about our universe? Could examining that question give us greater clarity in understanding the limits of other discovery or creation?

4Erfeyah8y

I see. It does still feel to me that you are asking a misguided question. I will try to unpack my thought so we can see where we are. There are two concepts that are part of your question: genre and newness. Before examining these though, let's give an (inevitably inadequate) definition of art for the purpose of our discussion. Let's say that art is "the arranging and reproduction of sensory objects perceivable by humans, with the intention of producing an effect on a human being". This is as general as I can think of at the moment and it is important to point to the fact that the human being and its current state (instincts, language, culture, knowledge, conditioning, etc.) is part of the definition. I would argue that in this definition the permutations of possible artworks are essentially infinite. But to get a bit closer to what you are trying to explore let's now carve out a subspace that you call 'genre'. This is where we are going to find a problem. I was, actually, just having this discussion with a friend of mine that is completing his PhD in Musicology and specifically in Jazz. He came to a point where he got really confused about what 'Jazz' means. Is it only trumpet, sax, double bass, piano etc. bebop style jazz? Is it still jazz if you play with electronic or traditional instruments? Is it still Jazz when there is improvisation but no theme melody? What about improvised traditional music of Turkey? You get the point. What is a genre anyway? I offered my opinion on the subject by saying that you are confusing a label with the thing itself. Naming a genre is useful for organising your database and communicating certain characteristics but a genre is not a real thing, it is a communication/organisation tool. This can then clarify our question on 'newness'. If you can define a genre in a way that is restricted enough to seem limited then yes, it will be. But you should take care to avoid confusing a limited, artificial concept for the universe itself.

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y10

Interesting points, yea you're getting at the heart of what I'm trying to figure out. I think you're right, that it's easy to see how the story possibilities that use the simplest story types (Hero's Journey, etc) have possibly been ~90% completed.

But what makes you think that more complex story types allow many more possibilities? Along the lines of your point, Game of Thrones is a fantasy epic with a much darker tone that breaks storytelling conventions, but wouldn't any fantasy epic series with similar attributes in the future seem less groundbreaking t... (read more)

1siIver8y

Isn't that an inherent property of complexity? A larger set of elements -> a larger powerset of elements -> more possibilities. In fact the size of the powerset grows at 2^x. I think a second game of thrones would be less groundbreaking, but doesn't have to be worse... and the same goes for the 1000th GoT. I don't know as much as you about the industry. These sound worrisome. I still think it is more likely that there is another reason (not that bold of an assumption) than that we really run out of complex things to write, because that just doesn't seem to be true looking at how complexity works and how much seems to be doable just by tweaking those more complex pieces we have. Adaption is another great example. But, I might be suffering from bias here, because I much prefer the world where I'm right to the one where I'm wrong.

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y00

The reason that I bring up classical and jazz, is that there has been a clear slowdown in meaningful additions to the genres over the past few decades. So, if music genres reach a limit of possibilities, then it seems likely to apply to other areas of art as well.

Yes, I agree that there are more intelligent (or less simple) stories that haven't been written yet. I'm not sure if you are saying that you agree that there is a limit of possible stories, or that you think there is no limit? If there is a limit, what do you think would be the signs that we are r... (read more)

2Hal8y

In the specific cases of jazz and classical music, it seems like a slowdown in creation of original properties could be pretty plausibly explained by those types of music not being very popular anymore (why that is so is a more complicated question), and so not attracting as many of the talented musical minds of the most recent generations. The people who were going into jazz and classical music 50 years ago could be going into rap and electronica now, and it would look pretty much like our world, I think. I'm not sure if this is actually true, as I know very little about the general state of the music world and how it works, but it seems like a reasonably possible explanation at first, and certainly comes to mind before "we ran out of jazz". Another possibility is that the music industry has changed greatly over the last few decades, and what qualifies as a "meaningful addition" to a genre is less clear than it ever was, as genres splinter and people's musical tastes are given the option to diverge. I much prefer Snarky Puppy's "Shofukan" to, say, "Take the A Train", but there's no way it could reach the same level of cultural saturation because people have so many other choices now (it's not just listening to the one or two jazz stations on your local radio or going to live music if you have a chance, it's Spotify, Soundcloud, YouTube, and probably more). I float both of these as just ideas; I haven't thought very hard about either of them, but at first glance, at least, they both seem more plausible than "we have made all of the good jazz and classical music already". Yes, such a theoretical limit exists, but music is so incredibly complicated that it's really unlikely we've hit it yet. It seems more reasonable to think this slowdown is due to something else, unless there's good evidence that the limit specifically is the cause. I could very well be wrong, though. I'm not very confident about any of this because it's a tricky topic.

2siIver8y

Well, there is a provably finite possibility space for stories. You only have so many ways to arrange letters in a script. The question is whether it's meaningful. To use some completely made-up numbers, I think the current possibility space for movies produced by the bottom 80% of people with the current style may be 90% covered. The space for the top 2%, on the other hand, is probably covered for less than 0.1% (and I resisted putting in more zeros there). To get more concrete, I'll name some pieces (which I avoided doing in my initial post). Take Game of Thrones. It's a huge deal – why? Well, because there isn't really anything like it, But when you get rid of all the typical story tropes, like main characters with invulnerability, predictable plot progressions, a heroic minority lucking out against an evil majority, typical villains, etc etc, not only does the result get better, the possibility space actually widens. (I'm not saying scripts of this quality don't exist, but it seems to be the only show where a great script and a huge budget and a competent team came together. There could be thousands of shows like this, and there is just one). Or take the movie Being John Malkovich. Basically, there is one supernatural element placed in an otherwise scientifically operating world, and you have a bunch of character who act like normal humans, meaning largely selfish and emotionally driven, acting over that element. Just thinking about how much you could do following that formula opens up a large area in that seems to be largely untouched. I think we're shooting at Pluto over and over again while (for the most part) ignoring the rest of the universe. And it still works, because production quality and effects are still improving. (edited)

Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s8y10

Yes, you're definitely right about reboots reflecting the preference of customers. But what leads to shifts in movie customer preferences?

It seems to me that movie audiences want to see a combination of newer, bigger, and better. A movie that doesn't seem like a new story, or a similar story but a bigger scale, or a similar story told better, doesn't seem to interest audiences in general. It's that feeling of "I've seen all of this before."

Is there a limit to how many new stories we can create, how big in scale the stories are, and how well we ca... (read more)

Against willpower as a scientific or otherwise useful concept (Nautilus Magazine)

stephen_s8y20

There continues to be too large of a magnet for psychological studies to "prove something interesting" so the study can become newsworthy. If that motivation comes into the picture, then there will obviously be some effect on the researcher's work. Whether the magnitude is as serious as some studies have shown, the replication crisis in psychology is a clear problem. Of course there are many academics not focused on discovering a pop-psych finding, but the pop-psych urge can't be helping the field as a whole.

Aside from the idea of ego depletion, ... (read more)