"Meaning" is how things become intelligible. In addition to Kant's method of unifying a manifold in accordance to the concept of an object, the point is to understand how things matter. It is not just that I connect and keep tack of different representations. More importantly, the question is about how I can care about any of it in the first place -- why experience makes a difference to me, at all? To understand this difference, generally, I am partial to Heidegger's approach advocating the centrality of time. The experience of time provides a handle, or telescopic tool of sorts, to scale the question over multiple granularities and orders of magnitude. Ideally, the structure of time should stay the same through different durations of experience, making the rules of one also apply to the other. What applies to the example of a melody will, ex hypothesi, reach beyond just listening to music. The next few entries will focus on articulating how things become intelligible in accordance to time experienced, respectively, in the modes of being present, past and future. This post deals with experience of the present, which I call Conversion.
Conversion means to convey the sense in which the present is a turning-together of different temporal phases -- their synchronous concurrence. Conversion describes the gathering of the present; it is the unity of the present with the modes of being past and future. Conversion is how the experience of time corresponds with itself, like a limit or nexus of merging difference. Conversion is like the interface of experience: it is why the time is always now, right now. With conversion I intend to provide an account of time that applies both to different durations, or ontic degrees of difference, and also to ontological time itself.
Empirically, on the ontic level, the working example asks how it is possible to have the experience of listening to music? Specifically, how can I experience a sequence of individual notes that together are unified to produce a melody? In order to experience a melody, I have to recognize individual notes before being able to unify them as such. I do not need perfect pitch, just the ability to distinguish relative differences thereof. Already, discerning individual notes is complicated, as mentioned in the previous post, even before comparing the differences between them becomes possible. The question remains, how are the notes experienced as parts of a whole?
Cue: "Is that all there is?" When I listen to the last strophe of the song "... if that's all there..." as the penultimate word is being sung, it is as though the song itself calls for participation in its own completion. The words and notes together cajole and tease the audience with rising anticipation to finally release that otherwise absently dangling participle, singular present form of the verb to "be." The resolution, ironically, fails to disappoint. How is this possible?
At the second to last moment, in order to feel some anticipation for completion, it is not sufficient to only be presented with that which is "... there..." The final "...is" can only be anticipated from "...there..." when "if that's all..." is experienced before it as having just occurred. Throughout the entire song, we are always anticipating what comes next in virtue of also being directed toward that which was before. The exchange between the future and the past informs the way in which the present is experienced. The present is always somehow connected to the past and future. This is conversion.
Next, I will deal with how conversion merges different temporal phases, starting with the past. With respect to the example, how is it possible that at any point in time, the current experience of a musical note is always informed by what was just played before? How is the present always and already connected to the past?
Discussion of this particular thread will continue at:
http://www.dimitrihamlin.com/crx
Because someone over our head
or
some people
are trained to hear them as notes?
What if songs are recorded in layers...
and each layer of song
may contain notes or words
or may rework the notes or words
in such a manner
that they all mean
something different
if you are able to separate the layers..
which seems to be more of a depth concern than a continuum of time concern such as you have presented...
and which
I am still trying to work through.
I have experimented with something perhaps similar to what you are writing about...perhaps not similar at all..but your article reminded me of it...
I have recorded my voice singing along to musical albums...
in order to hear my voice...as a nondistorted
capture of
what I sound like...at any given minute...the present...
(conversion?)
I must resort to headphones...
which are sitting fairly deep within my
ear canal.
Is conversion
the act of making ourselves live in the present...
and convert all sensory stimuli
to ourselves at one moment...
I am blessed to have strong peripheral vision
...maybe that wiill help with my
ontic levels.
Thank you for expressing yourself carefully. Indeed, what we mean by "real" covers the landscape. In a previous post, I recommended David C Hoy's "The Time of Our LIves" that is as readable and thorough a survey of phenomenological notions of time as I have read so far. Yet I am so encumbered by my expectation that time is something as definite as the tick of a clock (which my everyday normal world rewards) that I still cannot account for time.
Heidegger back during his Being and Time days accounted space to a temporal context. Later he repudiated that. Hoy tries to limit the discussion to temporality, but even that is slippery. Glad to fan you comment.
Not so. There is only the recognition and re-cognition of the melody. The notes are its building blocks and are not discerned. Only the flow is discerned. However as a musician you must be conscious of the notes. In order to play it, you must discover how a piece is constructed. This is the opposite of just listening. When performing, this listening provides feedback to the performance but can also interfere with it. But for the audience, there is simply listening, the passive reception of melody comprised unconsciously of notes.
"With respect to the example, how is it possible that at any point in time, the current experience of a musical note is always informed by what was just played before?"
Here it may be wise to explore Martin Heidegger 's predecessor Edmun Husserl's Inner Time Consciousness model.
That means talking about the finite, according to Heidegger's mature comments in TIME AND BEING, considered by many to be equivalent to the missing section of the earlier work. As Stambaugh interprets that: "Heidegger can say that if being is thought as in-finite, it must be thought as a 'definite' infinity. If it is thought as finite, its abysmal character is brought out." I understand the "abysmal character" to mean that there is no ground, no fixed or final principle, to the human (Dasein's) experience. Our understanding requires a context, and those come as better and worse, not absolute or final.
Better to examine the nature of consciousness itself, the so-called "subjective" aspect of human presence, and how the various activities of the brain color and determine it's affect, even condition it--and to wonder at what it's subjective qualities might be when brain activity is non-conventional, as in children or, say, Alzheimer's sufferers (or even in sleep and dream states). Or, more accessible, that of the conventional mind under the influence of psychoactive chemicals. Or, even more interesting, as in some states of meditation when the mind is free of "the known" but remains awake and present. Difficult to explore, yes, but significant to the overall understanding of what we are as humans.
But anyway, since all experience is IN consciousness (ever had a thought, sensation or experience that was not?), an attempt to objectify time should probably be couched in it's absolute subjectivity as a variable function of consciousness.