From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Mon Jul 01 2002 - 19:28:10 MDT
Glories of Materialism
I've just been transported, as usual, by the two
Mendelssohn piano concertos. It happens, in my case,
to amount to a moving, nearly religious experience.
Yet, were we living a thousand years ago, we and many of
the people in our society would debate whether it would
ever be possible to reduce music to the printed page.
How could it in fact ever be possible to take the sheer
emotional rhapsody, the sublime perfection of music,
and capture it on cold bare printed paper? But it
was done---gradually over the centuries, (else it might
not have been bearable).
To be sure, further refinements of the debate would
center upon whether---even if it did turn out to be
possible to reduce music to bars and dots so that a
talented musician never before hearing a piece would
be able to reproduce it---whether it would even so
be *complete*. Some would point out, and rightly so,
that a merely mechanical performance always lacks a
vital something; indeed, performers do add a great
deal.
(In Damien's Trancension, a passage describes a heroine's
lackluster performance on her violin as her mind dwells
on other, dangerous thoughts. Excellent and readable SF,
by the way.)
But exactly to what have I been listening in the last half
hour? Not physical musicians, to be sure, but a *digital*
recording! A final triumph of materialism (especially
from a medieval perspective): the *entire* concerto---
nuances and emotions and all---has been reduced to a string
of bits.
With this historical example before us, why is it still so
difficult for most people to accept the possibility of
uploading, or of logically being able to be in two places
at once? To resist the notion that their personalities
are merely physical phenomena?
Were you at age 20 or so revolted by the picture of a cold
universe consisting only of atoms rushing about in the
void? Have you even yet overcome that revulsion?
Or were you, like me, liberated and enchanted by it? By the
possibility that so much complexity could arise from such
simplicity?
Lee
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