Useless Meme or Side Effect?
Cataclyst proposed in his response to my music question that we are looking at it the wrong way:
That music does not increase our survivability, and thus isn't really part of the evolution argument. That instead, it is a meme that has been passed on from generation to generation because it is, itself, a highly adaptive and survivable "entity."
I am not convinced though that "music" and "art" are "memes." I do believe however that individual songs or works of art would be memes. These can be grouped together by genre, and the ideas that tag along with them, styles of clothes, culture, spawn and die on a whim. And so, following a particular song's influence on a group would fall right in line with Cataclyst's explanation.
I think the ability to create music however is something entirely different. We often use art as the measuring stick that separates humans from machines.
"We can be creative, machines cannot."
But what is art other than another form of masturbation? A collective way of pleasing ourselves?
A certain combination of sounds evokes a certain response in our brain that we enjoy. So what do we do? We play that combination of sounds. We continue to alter it to get greater pleasure. The complexity of the combination continues to increase and change with each new song, but in the end, it is little more than an attempt to stimulate ourselves.
Now, the question as to WHY it stimulates us is best left to a neurosurgeon and it is answering this WHY which would give us the best understanding as to how music fits into our brain functions. Suffice it to say, music is little more than a mathematical pattern, and given our massive pattern recognition abilities (one of our greatest strengths over machines), when presented with the complex pattern get to work unraveling it, and in the process we enjoy it. (That enjoyment is what I think ultimately is a by-product of our brains evolving their phenomenally huge pattern recognition abilities) There are some key things that we enjoy more than others, likely due to evolutionary conditioning (constant beats, deep bass). But in the end, we do receive pleasure, and the birth and rise of music is the result of our quest to increase our pleasure, not unlike the great lengths we go to attract other humans to get a little play.
That music does not increase our survivability, and thus isn't really part of the evolution argument. That instead, it is a meme that has been passed on from generation to generation because it is, itself, a highly adaptive and survivable "entity."
I am not convinced though that "music" and "art" are "memes." I do believe however that individual songs or works of art would be memes. These can be grouped together by genre, and the ideas that tag along with them, styles of clothes, culture, spawn and die on a whim. And so, following a particular song's influence on a group would fall right in line with Cataclyst's explanation.
I think the ability to create music however is something entirely different. We often use art as the measuring stick that separates humans from machines.
"We can be creative, machines cannot."
But what is art other than another form of masturbation? A collective way of pleasing ourselves?
A certain combination of sounds evokes a certain response in our brain that we enjoy. So what do we do? We play that combination of sounds. We continue to alter it to get greater pleasure. The complexity of the combination continues to increase and change with each new song, but in the end, it is little more than an attempt to stimulate ourselves.
Now, the question as to WHY it stimulates us is best left to a neurosurgeon and it is answering this WHY which would give us the best understanding as to how music fits into our brain functions. Suffice it to say, music is little more than a mathematical pattern, and given our massive pattern recognition abilities (one of our greatest strengths over machines), when presented with the complex pattern get to work unraveling it, and in the process we enjoy it. (That enjoyment is what I think ultimately is a by-product of our brains evolving their phenomenally huge pattern recognition abilities) There are some key things that we enjoy more than others, likely due to evolutionary conditioning (constant beats, deep bass). But in the end, we do receive pleasure, and the birth and rise of music is the result of our quest to increase our pleasure, not unlike the great lengths we go to attract other humans to get a little play.
posted by Gigaflop at
5:50 AM
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