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card_zeroyesterday at 11:45 PM0 repliesview on HN

(Belatedly) yes. Kind of a big argument to grapple with, but let's start by considering everything. I mean, all the stuff, the abstract stuff, that's out there objectively in the universe and in the future, waiting to be discovered. I believe there's quite a considerable amount of it. It's all potentially of interest to us eventually, and only a teeny tiny part of it is comprehensible to us now. That part is at the leading edge, the cutting edge of our enquiries, and in order for us to see and comprehend and even care about that part, it has to relate to us. It has to be oriented to us and our thoughts and things we can use.

You see what I'm getting at? Humans don't really like abstract things. Mathematicians seem to, but I doubt that even mathematics truly has an objective abstract quality that's distant from human concerns. I reckon humans do human mathematics, and it probably has fashions, too, it's probably modern and current, that is, of its time and place.

So you could accept that, but still claim that music relates strongly to mathematics as we know it. Of course there's such a thing as the mathematics of music. I could dispute the value of that to the quality of the music, as being too abstract and niche compared to the evocative qualities of music, where it evokes things in our physical world: the sounds of hitting things with sticks, heartbeats, tones of voice, meaningful instruments such as bugles evoking battles, mazy noodling around evoking contemplative thoughts (is that abstract?) ... but either way, the point is that we live in a sort of parochial Bag End, if Middle Earth represents everything abstractly possible, and so we only understand hobbit things and only appreciate hobbit art. So to speak.