European composers have known for a long time (I think Fux was the first music theorist to point it out in 1725) that a perfect fourth is more "dissonant" than a major sixth, even though the harmonic series would suggest otherwise. Similarly, this theory doesn't explain the near-ubiquity of the major pentatonic scale.
You raise good points. Especially the last one; I realised after I posted that the book on counterpoint was indeed written later, and that he was allowed to change his mind, even if he was ultimately wrong about that.
Having said that, I get the impression that Schoenberg saw Bach-style chorale harmony exercises almost as a necessary evil, whereas he saw Palestrina-style strict counterpoint exercises as useful. Now I'm wondering if that was a change of mind, too.
Similarly, it could be argued that the scandal over Elvis had quite a bit to do with him singing "negro music".
Radiolab did an episode a few years ago which told the story of The Rite of Spring but also a very interesting one about a guy who listened to a lot of Gregorian Chant and... well, I won't spoil it for you, but it's a very thought-provoking story.
Strangely enough, I'm reading Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony right now. I recommend the opening chapter to everyone interested in this topic, because it's one of the most well-written rants in all of music theory.
What Schoenberg opposed was the idea, which he claimed to be prevalent among music theorists in the late 19th and early 20th century, that we could discover "laws of beauty" which could be applied to make beautiful art. Schoenberg argued that when you propose "rules" of making art (be it writing, drawing or music composition), those "rules" tend to be mostly exceptions. Moreover, these "rules" are almost always proposed by theorists, not art creators.
Now he may have been right about this view being common in the music theory community at the time. Today, we know better.
For a start, we now understand the role of culture.
We can only imagine what Palestrina sounded like to people brought up on Gregorian chant. Today, it still sounds beautiful, but it also sounds very old. We can't imagine what was in the minds of the people who rioted at the premiere of The Rite of Spring. Hell, most of us can't even imagine what the big deal was about Elvis Presley! Why did anyone think that old music was shocking and an affront to civilization?
And, of course, music theorists discovered traditions other than the European one, which sound odd to us, but normal to someone brought up in India or China or Indonesia or wherever the music comes from.
Secondly, we now understand that music theory, and the "rules" therein, are descriptive, not prescriptive. They are a language for understanding and talking about music in the tradition of the European common practice era.
In that sense, it's like category theory in mathematics or design patterns in software engineering. they're not recipes on how to write programs or do maths, they are a vocabulary for understanding, reasoning about and talking about programs or mathematical structure.
Schoenberg was a pioneer. Like all pioneers, he was wrong about quite a lot. But he did have a very good point to make, which in the modern context is moot.
Incidentally, in his book on counterpoint, Schoenberg also railed against modal tonality, judging it to be a poor imitation of the modern major and minor keys. If you haven't yet had your recommended daily intake of irony, you're welcome.
If it helps, consider that what we call "quantum field theory" isn't really a "theory" either. It's a framework for constructing theories, one of which is the standard model.
All supersymmetric theories may eventually be falsified, but that effort won't be wasted. Not only will we have ruled out a large family of possibilities for physics beyond the standard model, we will have also developed quite a lot of applied maths which may find applications in other areas. Either way, we win.
Like fatphil, I suspect it will be falsified. Failing that, if it's confirmed, then I suspect that it will eventually (though possibly not in our lifetimes) turn out to be the low-energy limit of something more elegant.
The UK is looking into this at the moment with the Scottish independence movement. Apparently the rest of the UK doesn't have enough places to park nuclear submarines (or something along those lines), and there isn't enough time to build new ones before the deadline.
Another interesting question which came up in the case of Scotland is how to divide up the national debt, which is something that seceding US states would also have to deal with. There's an additional quirk in the case of Scotland, namely, that the UK government currently holds an 82% stake in the Royal Bank of Scotland.
SUSY is not a theory which is altered every time a new relevant discovery is made. It's a (quite large) family of theories, some of which are ruled out every time a new relevant discovery is made.
You might be new around here, so let me explain the thinking. Note that I personally don't necessarily agree with this, but I know how to apply the Principle of Charity.
"IP" is an umbrella term which describes at least four things: copyright, patent, trademark and trade secret. These four things are very different, and obey very different rules. Moreover, terms like "IP protection" do seem to be thrown around in such a way that either the person using the term is confused that "IP" means four distinct things, or are deliberately trying to confuse the person they're talking to into blurring the important distinction between those things.
Not only that, but it blurs the distinction (possibly deliberately, possibly not) with the laws of "property", something which copyright, patent, trademark and trade secret are not. In particular, so-called "IP" is covered under civil law, where property is dealt with under criminal law.
Let's take the example of the book you wrote, which I copy without permission. This is copyright infringement. It is not "theft" or "stealing" of "IP", because there is no "property" of which you have been deprived.
I haven't stolen anything from you or anyone else; you still have your copies, and everyone else has theirs. I haven't even stolen a "right"; you still have the right to copy it, exploit it commercially, publicly perform it and so on, and moreover these are all rights you would still have even if there were no copyrights.
Copyright is not a piece of property you posess which I can steal. It is a restriction imposed on me (and everyone else) which I can break.
And it's not an absolute restriction, either. I'm allowed to copy parts of the book, or even the whole book, under certain circumstances, and you can't do a damn thing about it.
The phrase "IP doesn't exist" simply means that what you "intellectual property" is not a thing, not "property", and an unhelpful and confusing term.
For those who don't have an emotional investment in the GPL vs BSD pissing contest, it's good that we have two free compilers which are good enough to compile a kernel. GCC has different design goals (e.g. multiple front-ends), but still, the competition is good for it.
If we have leaned nothing else from seven seasons of TNG and seven seasons of Voyager, it's that the Prime Directive never makes it clear what course of action is correct.
I'm sure your correct on the last point, though is an Aquinan Christian, say, not an atheist? They simply argue that there must be a first cause of some sort and entitle this cause "god." In other words, what differentiates something called God from any spiritual concept?
As with all non-technical words, the word "god" is defined by how it's used.
You can use the word "god" as an improper noun. So the god of Sol Invictus is a "god" by any reasonable standards. (Incidentally, since that god is the Sun, which exists, a god exists and therefore atheism is untenable. QED!)
You can also use the word "God" as a proper noun, and there you run into trouble, since any monotheistic religion from Mormonism to Hinduism can with some justification use it, albeit to refer to different theoretical things.
In regards to your first point, an atheist can certainly be spiritual. The feeling of connectedness with the world, a proud and selfless love for humanity, or so-called peak experience are all essentially spiritual concepts espoused by many self-identified atheists.
Similarly, there are plenty of atheists who adhere to a religion. Buddhists, Confucians and religious-but-secular Jews are the obvious ones, but there is also a sizeable Christian Agnostic movement, as well as Paul Tillich/Rudolf Bultmann/John Shelby Spong-style Christianity.
I would far sooner write Java using Eclipse, and I would far sooner write C++, Perl or Haskell using gvim.
Admittedly this could just be my limited experience, but Java seems pretty hard to write effectively if you don't have a refactoring editor. You could spin it as a shortcoming of the language, or you could spin it as a symbiosis between the language and the IDE. Which way you choose to interpret it largely depends on what barrow you're pushing.
I would also say, however, that myself and many other new atheists subscribe to the "skeptics first" framework. Essentially, we try to believe as many true things as possible and not believe in as many false things as possible.
I also consider myself a skeptic. Having said that, I think it's useful to distinguish between the truth of a belief and the utility of a practice.
If you look at the anthropology of religion, it seems to be primarily about cultural practice. Belief is important to the practice, to the extent that the practice only works if you buy into it. It's kind of like all the research that's been done on luck: people who feel lucky tend to be more lucky, invariably because people in the right frame of mind tend to identify and take up more opportunities for good things to happen.
The closest thing we have to the ancestor of modern religions today are indigenous animist religions. If you look at, say, Native American or Australian Aboriginal religions, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who literally believes that stuff about Corn Woman or the Rainbow Serpent is true. But you'd find plenty who engage in the traditional cultural practices, tell the traditional stories, perform the traditional music and dance, and produce the traditional art.
Karen Armstrong has written a lot about this, too. If you understand religion primarily as something you do, not something you believe, then you understand its value.
Religion is one of the tools that humans used to move from villages to cities. We have used it to act as a superorganism, working towards a common goal rather than our own individual wants. Without evolving religion, or some other trait which achieves the same purpose, it's doubtful that we could ever have done this.
That doesn't mean that we still need religion to organise ourselves, any more than we need to hunt our own food, sew our own clothes or even entertain ourselves. Modern industrial society has seen to it that we have pretty efficient alternatives to all of these. Nonetheless, I'd be sorry to lose religion, much like I'd be sorry to lose fishing, or knitting, or amateur dramatics.
I would say that figures like Dawkins and Hitchens represent this position pretty poorly, since they both (Hitchens especially) tend to get mired in name calling and "who killed more people" arguments.
On the other hand, at the time Htichens wrote a book subtitled "religion poisons everything", he sent his daughter to a Quaker school. As with Thomas Jefferson owning slaves, you can interpret it either that in two ways. Either he was a hypocrite, or his position was far more nuanced than fanboys seem to think. I think the latter is a fairer characterisation.
Dawkins is similar. People quote him as saying that giving children a religious identity is tantamount to child abuse, but neglect to point out that he was saying it in the context of Northern Ireland, where religion really was used like a gang symbol. Again, Dawkins' position is more nuanced than either side seems to want to appreciate.
Proof? How about you prove to me that my faith is harmful?
Hint - you'll be wanting to understand my faith first, k?
Bingo. That is the issue which no anti-theist has yet tried to address in anything remotely resembling a rational way.
It's easy to argue that certain specific religious claims are untrue. All you need to do is nominate a few.
It's straightforward to argue that religion, much like art, is quite useless or unnecessary. A few examples of well-adjusted non-religious people is all you need.
A claim that religion is inherently harmful, on the other hand, is a claim about every religion and every religious person. That carries a very high burden of proof, which nobody has yet met.
Every attempt so far essentially boils down to defining benign religion out of existence, as being "not really religion". Like how atheistic forms of Buddhism are not really religion, because Sam Harris likes them. Or how to Christopher Hitchens, Stalinism was religion but Trotskyism was not religion. (Guess which of the two he was in his younger days?)
This is probably the most common "new atheist" form of the No True Scotsman argument. You get the impression that to many "new atheists", "religion" means "anything I don't like" and "non-religion" means "anything I like".
What a confusing sentence. In any event, you actually get tons and tons who abandon their superstitions. That's why 20% of US adults are now atheists or "not religious."
Ah, but what proportion of the "not religious" prefix that with "spiritual but"?
The largest, and fastest-growing, religious group in the English-speaking world is people who self-identify as some type of Christian, but who do not regularly attend a place of worship. Organised religion is on the decline, but unorganised religion is growing.
Slashdot Mirror
European composers have known for a long time (I think Fux was the first music theorist to point it out in 1725) that a perfect fourth is more "dissonant" than a major sixth, even though the harmonic series would suggest otherwise. Similarly, this theory doesn't explain the near-ubiquity of the major pentatonic scale.
You raise good points. Especially the last one; I realised after I posted that the book on counterpoint was indeed written later, and that he was allowed to change his mind, even if he was ultimately wrong about that.
Having said that, I get the impression that Schoenberg saw Bach-style chorale harmony exercises almost as a necessary evil, whereas he saw Palestrina-style strict counterpoint exercises as useful. Now I'm wondering if that was a change of mind, too.
Similarly, it could be argued that the scandal over Elvis had quite a bit to do with him singing "negro music".
Radiolab did an episode a few years ago which told the story of The Rite of Spring but also a very interesting one about a guy who listened to a lot of Gregorian Chant and... well, I won't spoil it for you, but it's a very thought-provoking story.
Strangely enough, I'm reading Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony right now. I recommend the opening chapter to everyone interested in this topic, because it's one of the most well-written rants in all of music theory.
What Schoenberg opposed was the idea, which he claimed to be prevalent among music theorists in the late 19th and early 20th century, that we could discover "laws of beauty" which could be applied to make beautiful art. Schoenberg argued that when you propose "rules" of making art (be it writing, drawing or music composition), those "rules" tend to be mostly exceptions. Moreover, these "rules" are almost always proposed by theorists, not art creators.
Now he may have been right about this view being common in the music theory community at the time. Today, we know better.
For a start, we now understand the role of culture.
We can only imagine what Palestrina sounded like to people brought up on Gregorian chant. Today, it still sounds beautiful, but it also sounds very old. We can't imagine what was in the minds of the people who rioted at the premiere of The Rite of Spring. Hell, most of us can't even imagine what the big deal was about Elvis Presley! Why did anyone think that old music was shocking and an affront to civilization?
And, of course, music theorists discovered traditions other than the European one, which sound odd to us, but normal to someone brought up in India or China or Indonesia or wherever the music comes from.
Secondly, we now understand that music theory, and the "rules" therein, are descriptive, not prescriptive. They are a language for understanding and talking about music in the tradition of the European common practice era.
In that sense, it's like category theory in mathematics or design patterns in software engineering. they're not recipes on how to write programs or do maths, they are a vocabulary for understanding, reasoning about and talking about programs or mathematical structure.
Schoenberg was a pioneer. Like all pioneers, he was wrong about quite a lot. But he did have a very good point to make, which in the modern context is moot.
Incidentally, in his book on counterpoint, Schoenberg also railed against modal tonality, judging it to be a poor imitation of the modern major and minor keys. If you haven't yet had your recommended daily intake of irony, you're welcome.
If it helps, consider that what we call "quantum field theory" isn't really a "theory" either. It's a framework for constructing theories, one of which is the standard model.
One more thing while I think of it.
All supersymmetric theories may eventually be falsified, but that effort won't be wasted. Not only will we have ruled out a large family of possibilities for physics beyond the standard model, we will have also developed quite a lot of applied maths which may find applications in other areas. Either way, we win.
Like fatphil, I suspect it will be falsified. Failing that, if it's confirmed, then I suspect that it will eventually (though possibly not in our lifetimes) turn out to be the low-energy limit of something more elegant.
HL3: Braid
Aperture is also mentioned in HL2:Ep2. But of course you knew that.
You mean Left 3 Dead.
The UK is looking into this at the moment with the Scottish independence movement. Apparently the rest of the UK doesn't have enough places to park nuclear submarines (or something along those lines), and there isn't enough time to build new ones before the deadline.
Another interesting question which came up in the case of Scotland is how to divide up the national debt, which is something that seceding US states would also have to deal with. There's an additional quirk in the case of Scotland, namely, that the UK government currently holds an 82% stake in the Royal Bank of Scotland.
SUSY is not a theory which is altered every time a new relevant discovery is made. It's a (quite large) family of theories, some of which are ruled out every time a new relevant discovery is made.
You might be new around here, so let me explain the thinking. Note that I personally don't necessarily agree with this, but I know how to apply the Principle of Charity.
"IP" is an umbrella term which describes at least four things: copyright, patent, trademark and trade secret. These four things are very different, and obey very different rules. Moreover, terms like "IP protection" do seem to be thrown around in such a way that either the person using the term is confused that "IP" means four distinct things, or are deliberately trying to confuse the person they're talking to into blurring the important distinction between those things.
Not only that, but it blurs the distinction (possibly deliberately, possibly not) with the laws of "property", something which copyright, patent, trademark and trade secret are not. In particular, so-called "IP" is covered under civil law, where property is dealt with under criminal law.
Let's take the example of the book you wrote, which I copy without permission. This is copyright infringement. It is not "theft" or "stealing" of "IP", because there is no "property" of which you have been deprived.
I haven't stolen anything from you or anyone else; you still have your copies, and everyone else has theirs. I haven't even stolen a "right"; you still have the right to copy it, exploit it commercially, publicly perform it and so on, and moreover these are all rights you would still have even if there were no copyrights.
Copyright is not a piece of property you posess which I can steal. It is a restriction imposed on me (and everyone else) which I can break.
And it's not an absolute restriction, either. I'm allowed to copy parts of the book, or even the whole book, under certain circumstances, and you can't do a damn thing about it.
The phrase "IP doesn't exist" simply means that what you "intellectual property" is not a thing, not "property", and an unhelpful and confusing term.
Did that help?
For those who don't have an emotional investment in the GPL vs BSD pissing contest, it's good that we have two free compilers which are good enough to compile a kernel. GCC has different design goals (e.g. multiple front-ends), but still, the competition is good for it.
If we have leaned nothing else from seven seasons of TNG and seven seasons of Voyager, it's that the Prime Directive never makes it clear what course of action is correct.
Waldorf iSalad. You heard it here first.
I'm sure your correct on the last point, though is an Aquinan Christian, say, not an atheist? They simply argue that there must be a first cause of some sort and entitle this cause "god." In other words, what differentiates something called God from any spiritual concept?
As with all non-technical words, the word "god" is defined by how it's used.
You can use the word "god" as an improper noun. So the god of Sol Invictus is a "god" by any reasonable standards. (Incidentally, since that god is the Sun, which exists, a god exists and therefore atheism is untenable. QED!)
You can also use the word "God" as a proper noun, and there you run into trouble, since any monotheistic religion from Mormonism to Hinduism can with some justification use it, albeit to refer to different theoretical things.
In regards to your first point, an atheist can certainly be spiritual. The feeling of connectedness with the world, a proud and selfless love for humanity, or so-called peak experience are all essentially spiritual concepts espoused by many self-identified atheists.
Similarly, there are plenty of atheists who adhere to a religion. Buddhists, Confucians and religious-but-secular Jews are the obvious ones, but there is also a sizeable Christian Agnostic movement, as well as Paul Tillich/Rudolf Bultmann/John Shelby Spong-style Christianity.
But not just any pencil.
That is exactly the problem! Any language that depends on having a good IDE is badly designed IMHO.
Alternatively, the IDE is properly thought of as part of the language.
I know a lot of people were unhappy with Lucas, but I am a bit concerned at how much faith people are putting in Disney here.
It's possible that those people didn't see what Disney did with The Muppets.
I would far sooner write Java using Eclipse, and I would far sooner write C++, Perl or Haskell using gvim.
Admittedly this could just be my limited experience, but Java seems pretty hard to write effectively if you don't have a refactoring editor. You could spin it as a shortcoming of the language, or you could spin it as a symbiosis between the language and the IDE. Which way you choose to interpret it largely depends on what barrow you're pushing.
I would also say, however, that myself and many other new atheists subscribe to the "skeptics first" framework. Essentially, we try to believe as many true things as possible and not believe in as many false things as possible.
I also consider myself a skeptic. Having said that, I think it's useful to distinguish between the truth of a belief and the utility of a practice.
If you look at the anthropology of religion, it seems to be primarily about cultural practice. Belief is important to the practice, to the extent that the practice only works if you buy into it. It's kind of like all the research that's been done on luck: people who feel lucky tend to be more lucky, invariably because people in the right frame of mind tend to identify and take up more opportunities for good things to happen.
The closest thing we have to the ancestor of modern religions today are indigenous animist religions. If you look at, say, Native American or Australian Aboriginal religions, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who literally believes that stuff about Corn Woman or the Rainbow Serpent is true. But you'd find plenty who engage in the traditional cultural practices, tell the traditional stories, perform the traditional music and dance, and produce the traditional art.
Karen Armstrong has written a lot about this, too. If you understand religion primarily as something you do, not something you believe, then you understand its value.
Religion is one of the tools that humans used to move from villages to cities. We have used it to act as a superorganism, working towards a common goal rather than our own individual wants. Without evolving religion, or some other trait which achieves the same purpose, it's doubtful that we could ever have done this.
That doesn't mean that we still need religion to organise ourselves, any more than we need to hunt our own food, sew our own clothes or even entertain ourselves. Modern industrial society has seen to it that we have pretty efficient alternatives to all of these. Nonetheless, I'd be sorry to lose religion, much like I'd be sorry to lose fishing, or knitting, or amateur dramatics.
I would say that figures like Dawkins and Hitchens represent this position pretty poorly, since they both (Hitchens especially) tend to get mired in name calling and "who killed more people" arguments.
On the other hand, at the time Htichens wrote a book subtitled "religion poisons everything", he sent his daughter to a Quaker school. As with Thomas Jefferson owning slaves, you can interpret it either that in two ways. Either he was a hypocrite, or his position was far more nuanced than fanboys seem to think. I think the latter is a fairer characterisation.
Dawkins is similar. People quote him as saying that giving children a religious identity is tantamount to child abuse, but neglect to point out that he was saying it in the context of Northern Ireland, where religion really was used like a gang symbol. Again, Dawkins' position is more nuanced than either side seems to want to appreciate.
Bingo. That is the issue which no anti-theist has yet tried to address in anything remotely resembling a rational way.
It's easy to argue that certain specific religious claims are untrue. All you need to do is nominate a few.
It's straightforward to argue that religion, much like art, is quite useless or unnecessary. A few examples of well-adjusted non-religious people is all you need.
A claim that religion is inherently harmful, on the other hand, is a claim about every religion and every religious person. That carries a very high burden of proof, which nobody has yet met.
Every attempt so far essentially boils down to defining benign religion out of existence, as being "not really religion". Like how atheistic forms of Buddhism are not really religion, because Sam Harris likes them. Or how to Christopher Hitchens, Stalinism was religion but Trotskyism was not religion. (Guess which of the two he was in his younger days?)
This is probably the most common "new atheist" form of the No True Scotsman argument. You get the impression that to many "new atheists", "religion" means "anything I don't like" and "non-religion" means "anything I like".
What a confusing sentence. In any event, you actually get tons and tons who abandon their superstitions. That's why 20% of US adults are now atheists or "not religious."
Ah, but what proportion of the "not religious" prefix that with "spiritual but"?
The largest, and fastest-growing, religious group in the English-speaking world is people who self-identify as some type of Christian, but who do not regularly attend a place of worship. Organised religion is on the decline, but unorganised religion is growing.
You know, it's also my experience that Iranians tend to be more tolerant than Americans. No, I don't know why it is, either.