The Invisible Universe

[CraigD]

One of the points I am making is that those things which are outside of our natural ability to perceive are interpreted into something which we can perceive. This is undoubtedly losing detail in the translation process. With the loss of detail comes loss of comprehension.

I don’t think these last two – loss of detail and comprehension - necessarily follow from perceiving phenomena “artificially”.

 

For example, like most people, when I listen to a recorded musical performance in realtime, I miss many details. If I perceive it artificially – for example, by reading transcribed sheet music, by listening to the individual tracks of its pre-mixed, master recording (or using filtering technology to get something similar from the raw, post-mixed recording, or simply by listening to it repeatedly, focusing my attention of specific parts – I become aware of more information – detail – about it, and, I would say, “comprehend” it better.

 

According to my personal definition of “comprehension”, a strong test of comprehending the performance is when I can reproduce it, typically with different instruments and voices, abbreviating and omitting sometimes large amounts of detail (and even adding details not present in the original), in such a way that a listener who’s never heard the recording I heard “gets” a feeling similar to what they’d have gotten from the original.

 

I’m hard pressed to decide where or whom in this process had the most and the least comprehension – this determination seems hopelessly subjective. This subjectivity is, I think, the reason for differing preferences in music that lead some people to prefer, say, Bach, some Beethoven, and some ZZ Top. A “loss/gain of detail” explanation doesn’t seem a good fit with the concept of comprehension, and the related concept of appreciation and liking.

 

In a very important way, practically all phenomena are to some extent “outside of our sensory range”. When we hear the sound produced by a voice, instrument, or loudspeaker, we don’t perceive anything for many of the sound frequencies it produces, and we don’t perceive the overall sound as the complicated mixture of different frequencies that are actually, objectively, there. We form an impression, which is to a great extent a creative act as important as those of the composers and performers of the song.

 

Perception is, mechanically and philosophically, very complicated!

Take the example of the blue fish. To our eyes it is those shades of blue, but to eyes with the natural ability to see in ultraviolet it may be another color all together.

Color, shape, motion, and other sight perception is arguably even more complicated than hearing. While different people, particularly those with a large difference in age, are mechanically and neurologically sensitive to different sounds (alas, as a general rule, the older a person, the less he actually senses), with sight, a significant number of people – about 8% of men, 3% of women worldwide, more among various ethnic cohorts - perceive color significantly differently via various forms of color blindness. So it’s not even necessary to venture into the infra-red and ultra-violet, or between species, to find dramatic variations in sight.

 

What’s more, perception of all sorts involves the integration of much learned information. When we say an expert in a field “sees” more in the objects of his expertise than a non-expert (eg: a horse-breeder seeing the lines of horse, a geologists seeing details in a rock sample, or even a person in love seeing into their partner’s eyes), this is not simply a metaphor – the nerve firings that actually, physically occur, and the neurological state and stored memories that result, are actually different. The lines between sensation, perception, thought and learning are difficult to definitively draw.