Pointing out your misunderstanding is not denying, but giving you the real truths and guidance to your learning journey. — Corvus

I am not going to continue such an exchange since it is not a debate!

The phenomenon comes in via perception in the form of impressions and ideas. Hence we are not really seeing the reality, but the phenomenon. — Corvus

The point though, is that Hume represents sense perception as a succession of distinct perceptions. But in reality sense perception consists of continuous activity, because it has temporal duration. And what is actually sensed is the activities which occur in time. The distinct "impressions and ideas" are only created when we impose breaks into the continuity of perception.

So for example, the wall is described as "green" at t1, and as "red" at t2, and these are distinct impressions or ideas. However, sense perception has provided a continuous activity, during which the wall was painted. Whenever we break down sense perception into distinct impressions or distinct states (the colour of the wall was green, then the colour of the wall was red), we completely avoid describing the temporal aspect of change (the colour of the wall was changing). So we intentionally remove the temporal aspect from the phenomenon, to work with a less accurate representation, because it is easier to work with.

Because they we are perceiving the phenomenon in impressions and ideas, we can analyze them with reasoning. We can stop them, rewind them and even predict them too. You seem be talking about the reality which is not accessible via perception totally disregarding the way our perception works. — Corvus

So if we do this, analyze the phenomena as distinct impressions or ideas, we have already imposed those breaks onto the continuity of the phenomenon of sense perception, to divide that continuity into a multitude of distinct impressions. Therefore this analysis is not giving us a true representation of sense perception, as continuous phenomenon, because it is analyzing distinct impressions which have been artificially created by breaking the continuity down.

So if we do this, analyze the phenomena as distinct impressions or ideas, we have already imposed those breaks onto the continuity of the phenomenon of sense perception, to divide that continuity into a multitude of distinct impressions. Therefore this analysis is not giving us a true representation of sense perception, as continuous phenomenon, because it is analyzing distinct impressions which have been artificially created by breaking the continuity down. — Metaphysician Undercover

Reality events happen once uniquely in space and time.  The phenomena of the movement is captured by perception at the moment when it happens.  The movement of the object is captured as it appears in the space i.e. in continuity.   Continuity is also an idea which has the matching impression in reality.
But once it has happened, you cannot get back to the same movement again.  It passed.  The new movement could be recreated for observation.  But it wouldn't be the same movement as the original movement.

Taking out a slice of the movement out of the continuity is only possible in the course of reflection of the ideas.  Human mind can achieve this, because it has memory and reasoning which can recall the perceived ideas and analyze them with the rational investigation.

I don't believe that Hume meant we perceive the movement slice by slice as the broken images. Well it can happen in the old film movies which creates the illusion of the movement via running the stills images continuously on the project screen using the latent memory of mind.

The point though, is that Hume represents sense perception as a succession of distinct perceptions. But in reality sense perception consists of continuous activity, because it has temporal duration. And what is actually sensed is the activities which occur in time. The distinct "impressions and ideas" are only created when we impose breaks into the continuity of perception. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hume was explaining how human mind works especially on perception. He was not talking about the reality itself.

The phenomena of the movement is captured by perception at the moment when it happens. — Corvus

The point though, is that there is no such thing as "the moment when it happened". Movement requires time, duration, temporal extension, whereas "the moment" implies a point in time with no extension. This means that there is no such thing as the moment when a movement happened.

That's why @Banno's conception of "instantaneous velocity" is self-contradicting nonsense.

Taking out a slice of the movement out of the continuity is only possible in the course of reflection of the ideas.  Human mind can achieve this, because it has memory and reasoning which can recall the perceived ideas and analyze them with the rational investigation. — Corvus

The problem is that there is more than one way to take "a slice of the movement".

In one way, we can assume two distinct states, at t1 and at t2, each with a corresponding description (the room is green, and the room is red, or object is at point A and object is at point B). From this we can infer that a change from A to B occurred during that time period. We can make all kinds of assumptions about what happened between A and B (the room was painted, the particle took every possible path), what caused this change, etc.. But these would just be assumptions without the empirical evidence required to support them.

In another way, we can describe the activity which occurred between t1 and t2 (the room was being painted, the object was moving, the wave function). In this way we are actually describing the continuity between t1 and t2, what happened in that duration of time.

The important point is that the two are very different types of descriptions. And, if we take the first way, the description of two distinct states at t1 and t2, and assume that this way provides a description of the activity which occurs in the duration of time between t1 and t2, we are accepting a false assumption. It does not provide that description.

I don't believe that Hume meant we perceive the movement slice by slice as the broken images. — Corvus

Yes he did clearly mean that. He described a "succession of impressions", rather than the continuity of change which we actually sense.

Hume was explaining how human mind works especially on perception. He was not talking about the reality itself. — Corvus

He falsely described perception as a succession of impressions, rather than as a continuity of activity.

He falsely described perception as a succession of impressions, rather than as a continuity of activity. — Metaphysician Undercover

It was just an explanation on how perception works. You can read about, and use many different methods on describing how human mind and perception works from different point of view and angles. I feel that Hume and Kant's explanations are very intelligible one.

I understand what you're saying, and of course "movement" is used to refer to all sorts of things that aren't physical entities. In speaking about music and tones, I'm talking about an illusion of a particular kind of movement that seems to be physical but isn't.

We can say, "The melody moves higher, then lower." This is true, if we allow "melody" as an item to be talked about (as we should) and if we allow the metaphor of "higher and lower frequencies" to be analogous to physical highs and lows. But a melody is not a physical object. While comprised of physical stuff, it is our way of perceiving successions of tones. No physical thing moves when a melody occurs. And the only reason this is interesting is that, as we listen, we could swear that we hear something moving. I don't know whether this is a baked-in mental construction, or whether we're taught to think this way from such a young age that it seems unavoidable. All I know is that, acoustically, pitches can't move. There is no "there" there to move.

Maybe listen to more slide? — Banno

Seriously, it's a good example. We watch the finger with the slide move up the guitar string. This is certainly "movement" if anything is. What do we hear? A series of tones that change pitch, at intervals that are in fact specifiable acoustically, but indistinguishable to the human ear. So we want to say that "the tone moves up." But it doesn't. Each tone changes in the direction of higher and higher frequencies. But there is no substratum that starts at A, then moves to Bb, then to B natural . . . etc.

Oh, and as for the "higher/lower" metaphor with frequencies: Frequencies are measured in hertz, and numbers are assigned based on cycles of vibrations per second. The more cycles, the larger the number. So this is the metaphor of, say, 1,000 being a "higher number" than 500. It's an absolutely standard and acceptable use of "higher" as long as we don't confuse it with physical height. Having more of something (hertz, in this case) doesn't render it physically higher.

Sorry, didn't see you guys on this sub-thread. See my reply to @Banno, above.

That such things confuse some when considered in fine detail does not detract from the fact of their practicality. It's what can be done with such language that counts. — Banno

Exactly!

That is sort of the reason I'm trying to be better about being too dissuasive about esoteric philosophies because they may be implying something that, when properly translated into my language, is not all that peculiar or useless.

Whether you want to treat this language difficulty in analogy to trying to figure out what a child wants who has limited language capabilities or in similarity to trying but failing to put simply an extremely complicated collection of concepts is up to you.

We can say, "The melody moves higher, then lower." This is true, if we allow "melody" as an item to be talked about (as we should) and if we allow the metaphor of "higher and lower frequencies" to be analogous to physical highs and lows. But a melody is not a physical object. While comprised of physical stuff, it is our way of perceiving successions of tones. No physical thing moves when a melody occurs. And the only reason this is interesting is that, as we listen, we could swear that we hear something moving. I don't know whether this is a baked-in mental construction, or whether we're taught to think this way from such a young age that it seems unavoidable. All I know is that, acoustically, pitches can't move. There is no "there" there to move. — J

There in lies the trouble.

However, it gets even stranger if you flip this in the opposite direction to see what comes out even if rather unnatural. It will, because of its unfamiliarity, come out as purely poetic to speak of motion or change as some sort of music. One that in a non-spatial sense varies.

It's peculiar that some metaphors are fine in one direction but when flipped to perform a similar but opposite duty that they come off as so out of place.

That's why Banno's conception of "instantaneous velocity" is self-contradicting nonsense. — Metaphysician Undercover

Not Banno. Physics and mathematics.

Meta is unable to understand basic calculus. He and Corvus should have fun together.

Looks like equivocation to me. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, Meta, I was pointing out that was an equivocation.

Not Banno. Physics and mathematics. — Banno

. . . or just language. Ergo why others seem so afraid of spatialized metaphors for time and the supposed problems they can create. Out of mere conceptual misunderstanding one could get themselves in loops if the terms they use to talk about changing things regard them as by definition as unchanging.

Then it just becomes a language holism problem. If you make static nouns of a certain sort extremely central then it wouldn't be mysterious if it becomes strange why all our verbs now seem 'unreal' or difficult to explain in our base terms.

In that context, is the cinematographic view of time as 'frames of a universal movie' really the only respectable manner in which a physicist can talk about it? Is there literally no other language/metaphor one can use or create to go past the ones which clearly hold the throne now?

What is to count as a part and what as a whole here?

Here's a bit of tab for a slide...


It marks the beginning and end of the slide, the D, and the end, the E; however the slide does not consist in these two notes, but the movement between them. The tone of slide blues is very different to that of, say, a straight folk pick, and a portamento is distinct from a glissando. Notice that the move can be counted as a unit, and that it is distinct to the individual notes. We do not hear a series of distinct notes - unless the artist is incompetent.

Is the slide or the portamento a physical entity? If not, then I am not sure what else it might be... Calling it a perception is wrong.

Denying continuity here is mistaken.

I'm not sure that you disagree. But I am pretty confident Meta disagrees. Corvus on past experience probably agrees and disagrees and thinks that's fine.

bear in mind, any series or collections of tones is only a tune when somebody recognises it as such. — Wayfarer

I agree. I’m also saying identifying one single tone is a collection recognized as such as well.

That is sort of the reason I'm trying to be better about being too dissuasive about esoteric philosophies because they may be implying something that, when properly translated into my language, is not all that peculiar or useless. — substantivalism

"May be...'. We make maximum sense of the words of others when optimise agreement. It remains that sometimes what folk believe is different to how things are. Sometimes we are wrong.

I don't see that physics does adopt "the cinematographic view of time as 'frames of a universal movie'". Certainly classical and relativistic physics assumes continuity. Some recent theories may use discrete mathematics - Lattice Quantum Field Theory, Cellular Automata, or Loop Quantum Gravity, for example. Not central and not accepted.

And it may be worth considering what is going on here. The physical world does not care whether we choose continuous or discrete mathematics to best describe it. It is what it is, regardless of whether we describe it one way of the other. The choice between discrete and continuous mathematics is not a choice between how things are, but about what we say about how things are.

↪Fire Ologist bear in mind, any series or collections of tones is only a tune when somebody recognises it as such. ‘It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure’ said Einstein. — Wayfarer

That is, melody is a cultural, not a physical, item.

We watch the finger with the slide move up the guitar string. This is certainly "movement" if anything is. What do we hear? A series of tones that change pitch, at intervals that are in fact specifiable acoustically, but indistinguishable to the human ear. — J

Actually, we do not hear a series of tones, we here a slide, which is a sound of changing pitch, consisting of no distinct tones. That's the point of my discussion of Hume's misrepresentation of sense perception. Hume describes sensation as a succession of impressions, which is consistent with "a series of tones". But that's not what we actually sense, which is a continuity of change, a slide. It is only when we apply the conception of distinct tones, to the sound which is heard, that we conclude there is a series of tones.

That it is not a series of tones which is heard, is demonstrable through the Zeno process. If a person was hearing a series of tones in a slide, we'd be able to say which distinct tones the person hears. Since we can't we have to conclude an infinite number of tones, as the slide is infinitely divisible.

Not Banno. Physics and mathematics. — Banno

Yes, it's Banno's conception. You present it, and claim that it's justified by physics and mathematics.

Is the slide or the portamento a physical entity? If not, then I am not sure what else it might be... Calling it a perception is wrong. — Banno

We are discussing what is heard, and that is the perception. The point is that there is no "phyiscal entity" which corresponds with what is heard, because what is heard is a changing sound which is not a physical thing.

Notice that the move can be counted as a unit, and that it is distinct to the individual notes. — Banno

By what principles do you count a move as a unit?

The physical world does not care whether we choose continuous or discrete mathematics to best describe it. — Banno

A philosopher who is seeking truth does care. That is the difference between you and I. You don't care what we say about how things are, so long as what is said serves the purpose at hand. And language has evolved to facilitate common purposes. I want to be able to speak the truth about how things are, and that requires a much more thoughtful and deliberate use of language.

No, I'm familiar with how slide guitar works, and counterintuitive as it seems, when you slide from the D to the E, you really are producing a series of notes that can be discretely specified, though not, as I said, by the human ear. The "movement" is no less illusory than a standard non-slide move from D to E in which, because there are no intervening notes, we can hear the moment of the (only) pitch change. Now granted, there is a limit to pitch identification by any "ear," even the ultra-sophisticated software I might use in my studio. (I have a modest home recording studio, and used to make my living as a musician.) In that regard, it's Achilles and the Tortoise -- you can keep drilling down on microtones until you run out of bits, but wherever you stop, it's still a specific, determinate pitch that could, in theory, be further subdivided.

Is the slide or the portamento a physical entity? If not, then I am not sure what else it might be... Calling it a perception is wrong. — Banno

This is where it gets philosophically interesting. A slide from D to E is composed of nothing but physical stuff. But then lots of items that aren't physical as such are also composed of physical stuff. The familiar example of the football game . . . no ghostly material in use, yet it seems completely wrong to say that the game is a physical item, or least it does to me. I would argue roughly the same thing for musical "movement." No surprise, this gets us into terminology, because it comes down to whether "entity" is the right thing to call a slide. If you're not happy with "perception," how about calling it an "event"? The main thing I care about, in such talk, is that we don't picture a tone moving from T1 to T2 in the same way that a rabbit moves from P(lace)1 to P2. If asked, in the latter case, "What's moving?" we can point to the rabbit. The same question, in the former case, can't be answered at all. There's no entity or object that has the attribute "moves from D to E".

Actually, we do not hear a series of tones, we here a slide, which is a sound of changing pitch, consisting of no distinct tones. That's the point of my discussion of Hume's misrepresentation of sense perception. Hume describes sensation as a succession of impressions, which is consistent with "a series of tones". But that's not what we actually sense, which is a continuity of change, a slide. It is only when we apply the conception of distinct tones, to the sound which is heard, that we conclude there is a series of tones. — Metaphysician Undercover

This fits nicely with what I was saying to @Banno. Terminology again . . . we do hear a series of tones, we just can't recognize them. A software program can. But if you'd rather reserve the term "hear" to mean "can distinguish acoustically," that's fine. Then we would say that I don't hear a series of tones when I hear a slide, I "process them auditorially" or some such, and when I do that, being human, I don't hear the discrete pitches. If a hundred people all speak at once, do I "hear what they're saying"? Depends how you want to divvy up the terminology. It doesn't really matter.

"But that's not what we actually sense, which is a continuity of change, a slide."

OK -- again, as long as we don't take the illusion of movement as real.

...you really are producing a series of notes that can be discretely specified, — J

I don't see what to make of this. In your own words,

it's still a specific, determinate pitch that could, in theory, be further subdivided. — J

and

...not, as I said, by the human ear — J

Measurements might well be discrete. The sound is not.

The same question, in the former case, can't be answered at all. — J

Volume or pitch move.

...we do hear a series of tones, we just can't recognize them. A software program can. — J

Well, if you do not recognise them, in what sense are they discrete? As you said above, a better program with more memory could add more data points...

That you could think this is somewhat astonishing. Did you not study calculus?

...what is heard is a changing sound which is not a physical thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

So sound is not a physical thing. I give up.

Relies on there being sound, but not reducible to it.

Yep.

Did you not study calculus? — Banno

Actually, no! :grin: But I recognize why calculus would be relevant here. Thinking about it, I realize I may have been wrong in saying that pitches are theoretically divisible ad infinitum. There must come an interval too short for a sound wave to vibrate. So, unlike numbers in that regard.

Here's why I don't think "movement" is the right way to describe what a slide does:

1) Achilles moves from point D to point E.
2) A slide moves from D to E.

These look the same but are not. In 1), Achilles goes on a journey from D to E. We could call that "the journey of Achilles". In 2), "slide" is the name of the journey; it's the equivalent of "the journey of Achilles." Unlike with 1), we're not describing a situation in which some entity (call it Slide) stands ready to set off from D, does so, and then arrives at E. There is no guy called Slide doing this. "Slide" is what happens, just as "the journey of Achilles" is what happens. But in 1), there is a guy called Achilles that we can additionally talk about. I maintain there is no such comparable figure in 2). If you try to substitute "pitch" as the protagonist, the thing that moves, you run into the basic acoustical fact that if a pitch moved, it would no longer be the same pitch. We can again see the dissimilarity with Achilles -- he doesn't change every time he moves on his journey (at least with common ontological commitments). We hold him constant; but there is nothing to hold constant in 2).

Sound produces the illusion of movement -- it fools us into believing that something is going from D to E, where in fact there is only the going, which proceeds pitch by pitch.

@Banno Yes.

2) A slide moves from D to E. — J

The pitch moved from D to E.

Speaking of sliding, the delta blues beat comes from laboring songs, songs that are meant to coordinate action so everyone does the same thing at the same time. It creates anticipation. I wonder if laboring songs may have been part of the emergence of a sense of time. As ancient monument builders dragged giant stones, was the concept of a precise moment in the future coming into consciousness? When we all pull on the rope together?

That's why Banno's conception of "instantaneous velocity" is self-contradicting nonsense. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sounds like an irrelevant word dug up from ChatGpt.

The problem is that there is more than one way to take "a slice of the movement". — Metaphysician Undercover

Revisiting Hume, it seems the case that he is not saying that we perceive movements via the sliced impressions. As I said previously, we can perform the operation of inspecting a single impression or ideas in our reflecting operations by mind after the perception.

What Hume seems to be saying is that impressions of movement are perceived as continuous movement via the principle of association of the ideas and impressions based on the contiguity of space and time.

Is continuity a single movement of smooth, undisturbed and conjoined movement from start to the end of the movement? Or is it an illusory appearance of the many instances of the sliced images? What is your own idea on this?

Wouldn't it be wonderful to hear the sounds the workers made building the classical structures of Egypt?

instantaneous velocity — Metaphysician Undercover

Sounds like an irrelevant word dug up from ChatGpt. — Corvus

:roll:

Wouldn't it be wonderful to hear the sounds the workers made building the classical structures of Egypt? — Banno

That would be awesome