Musical Platonism, score nominalism, cognitivism, and modernist approaches in general, allassume the primacy of representation, and hence all ounder for similar reasons. Context is crucial to interpretation, but it is determined as part of the process of interpretation, not independently or in advance of it. Certain elements are recognized as the context of what is being interpreted,while others become part of the emergent musical \object" itself, and still others are deemed irrelevant. Moreover, the elements involved and their status can change very rapidly. Thus, every performance is uniquely situated, for both performers and listeners, in what may be very differentways.
In particular, every performance is embodied, in the sense that very particular aspectsof each participant are deeply implicated in the processes of interpretation, potentially including their auditory capabilities, clothing, companions, musical skills, prior musical experiences, implicit social beliefs (e.g., that opera is high status, or that punk challenges mainstream values), spatiallocation, etc., and certainly not excluding their reasons for being there at all (this is consistent with the cultural historical approach of Lev Vygotsky.
Most scientific studies of art are problematic for similar reasons. In particular, the third person,objective perspective of science requires a stable collection of "objects" to be used as "data,"which therefore become decontextualized, with their situatedness, embodiment, and interactive social nature ignored.
This paper draws on data from both science and phenomenology, in a spirit similar to the "neurophenomenology" of Francisco Varela, as a way to reconcile first and third person perspectives,by allowing each to impose constraints upon the other. Such approaches acknowledge that the first and third person perspectives reveal two very different domains, neither of which can be reduced to the other, but they also deny that these domains are incompatible.
Whatever approach is taken, qualia are often considered to be atomic, i.e., non-reducible, or without constituent parts, in harmony with doctrines of logical positivism, e.g., as often attributed to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Though I have never seen it stated quite so baldly, the theory(but perhaps "belief" is a better term, since it is so often implicit) seems to be that qualia atoms are completely independent from elements of perception and cognition, but somehow combine with them to give molecules of experience.
Peirce was an American logician concerned with problems of meaning and reference, who concluded that these are relational rather than denotational, and whoalso made an in uential distinction among modes of reference, as symbolic, indexical, or iconic...A semiotic system or semiotic theory consists of: a signature, which gives names for sorts, subsorts, and operations; some axioms; a level ordering on sorts having a maximum element called the top sort; and a priority ordering on the constructors at each level...
Axioms are constraints on the possible signs of a system. Levels express the whole-part hierarchy of complex signs, whereas priorities express the relative importance of constructors and their arguments; social issues play an important role in determining these orderings. This approach has a rich mathematical foundation...
The Anticipatory Model captures aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology of time. For example,it has versions of both retention and protention, and the right kind of relationship between them. It also implies Husserl’s pithy observation that temporal objects (i.e., salient events or qualia) arecharacterized by both duration and unity. Since it is not useful to anticipate details very far into the future, because the number of choices grows very quickly, an implementation of protention, whether natural or artificial, needs a structure to accommodate multiple, relatively short projections, basedon what is now being heard, with weights that increase with elapsed time; this is a good candidatefor implementation by a neural net of competing Hebbian cell assemblies, in both the human and algorithmic instantiations, as well as robots (as in [71]), and it also avoids reliance on old style AI representation and planning.
This paper has attempted to explore the qualitative aspects of experience using music as data, and to place this exploration in the context of some relevant philosophical, cognitive scientific, and mathematical theories. Our observations have supported certain theories and challenged others. Among those supported are Husserl’s phenomenology of time, Vygotsky’s cultural-historical approach, and Meyer’s anticipatory approach, while Chalmers’ dualism, Brentano’s thesis on intentionality, qualia realism, qualia atomism, Hume’s pointilist time, and classical cognitivism have been disconfirrmed at least in part.
In particular, embodiment, emotion, and society are certainly important parts of how real humans can be living solutions to the symbol grounding problem. The pervasive influence of cognitivism is presumably one reason why qualia in general, and emotion in particular, have been so neglected by traditional philosophy of mind, AI, linguistics, and so on. We may hope that this is now beginning to change.
This suggests that all consciousness arises through sense-making processes involving anticipation, which produce qualia as sufficiently salient chunks. Let us call this the C Hypothesis; it provides a theory for the origin and structure of consciousness. If correct, it would help to ex-plain why consciousness continues to seem so mysterious: it is because we have been looking at it through inappropriate, distorting lenses; for example, attempting to view qualia as objective facts, or to assign them some new ontological status, instead of seeing segmentation by saliency as an inevitable feature of our processes of enacted perception.
, other faiths, such as Japanese Shintoism and Judaism, consider the body to be sacred and still alive while there is any sign of on-going physiological activity.