Hello tima,
First Ockham, now Wittgenstein. Who’s next… Oprah?
Appeals to authority tend to only ignite an arms race of ever more esoteric sound-bites from persons living or dead. So rather than counter your Wittgensteins with a Badiou of my own (1), I’ll simply share a few of my favourite Wittgensteinisms, like this one:
“It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.”
But the one possibly most relevant to subjective perceptual experience is surely this:
“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”
Having not heard the 2.0 and having only heard the 1.0 once (with the associated caveats of an unfamiliar system), more from me seems redundant. Despite the enjoyment of exchanging posts with you in this thread, I’ll make this my last.
As has been my main point during the latter parts of this discussion, if someone states “I hear X” or “I feel Y”, that is one thing. However, if someone states “I hear X and/or feel Y because Z” (i.e., we move beyond that which is suppositional to claims of proof), then that is another thing altogether.
And though it seems there may be worth in debating whether subjective perceptual experience and Monaco’s measurements constitute sufficient evidence for falsification of the assertion hyper accuracy and its first-order effects are free of higher-order effects of a problematic nature - effectively sending any counter arguments “up in smoke” (2) - it appears the issues related to that claim will not be solved by you and I trading inspirational quotes-of-the-day (as fun as that can be).
Better perhaps that those who find the claims made thus far of some merit follow up via subjective listening in which their own preferences and biases will be the ultimate arbiters of whether the 2.0 renders all other challengers defeated, or whether, as Roy Gregory intimated in his review, they’ll choose an alternative, even despite the impressive numbers.
Again, greatly appreciate the cordial manner in which you’ve expressed your ideas here.
Take care,
853guy
(1) Badiou argues Wittgenstein’s “what one cannot speak of and must therefore be silent” is essentially the reduction of the logical to the level of the rhetorical - i.e., language games in aphoristic form (it replaces the question of truth with that of meaning) - and that truth exists beyond the boundaries of both a Wittgensteinian philosophy of language and also, a Deleuzian philosophy of the body (see Badiou, A. Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy. New York, Verso, 2011; and, Badiou, A. Being and Event. London, Bloomsbury, 2007). Likewise, while Wittgenstein defines language use as a species of intentional action, Žižek would argue one must step outside intentional human actions (vis-à-vis Lacan), and instead defines language use as expression of the death drive (see Allen, R; Turvey, M, (Eds.). Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts. London, Routledge, 2001). Blah blah blah, right? In philosophy, as in hi-fi, opinions abound.
(2) As already mentioned, any higher-order effects of a problematic nature are likely only to be discovered with sample sizes of statistically significant numbers relative to time. Falsification of any assertion, after all, can only be considered to be true with respect to greater numbers of people and greater and greater durations of time. As you say, all we have are the claims that have thus far been made, which is also to say, we have a paucity of sufficient evidence for making claims worthy of anything approaching statistical robustness to validate those claims beyond purely subjective experience.
I suggest that the Wittgenstein quote on self deception, and perception secondly are part of the issue with large numbers of people perceiving things a certain way to reach statistical significance, and this being of any validity
The recent ‘Laurel versus Yanny’ controversy shows there may be both mechanical and perceptual reasons people hear something the way they do, I think this a most interesting observation about the population and our interpretation of what would seem to be objective reality at least in terms of audio.
Despite the fact that the actual word being synthetically spoken, was actually ‘Laurel’, a combination of human factors, recording factors and reproduction factors, make the perception of this ambiguous to the wider population
As a result people hear two total different and unrelated words despite the fact the parent stimulus was not.