But maybe audiphiles genuinely ARE interested in pursuing perfect sound. Maybe they are NOT motivated by other factors, and are not pretending. That doesn't necessarily mean that they are still not subject to these factors, as we agree upon. But i get the impression that there is an accusation of complicity directed towards the discerning big spending audiophile.
As a discerning big spending audiophile myself
I know how easy it is to fool myself into hearing significant differences (precisely why I'm not pouring scorn on anyone, I'm in the same boat myself). I suppose it's possible for others to be motivated by nothing other than the search for perfect musical reproduction, but I have my doubts. As you said yourself, "first and foremost i am a human being before i am a listening device", with all the other stuff that entails, not least that our hearing is only one of our senses, and is mediated by conscious and unconscious processes that are exceedingly complex. Someone who is capable of listening to a system without making any extra-aural assumptions about it at all is probably not equipped to be able to get anything out of the experience of listening to music in the first place, I suspect.
BTW, before anyone jumps down my throat, I am not saying everything sounds the same, just that, sometimes, things may well sound the same but we can completely convince ourselves they sound markedly different. I've caught myself doing this, and I doubt very much I'm the only person who has this flaw.
It's easy: rather than disprove scepticism, do what Wittgenstein did, and point out its inherent absurdity
Yes, but this still doesn't leave me with anything? The word itself is meaningless ad infinitum
Infinity disproves all in its compass? Hence the only hiding place is in nothingness?
It's an old debate, much older than Descartes. The sceptic can always kick over the foundations of a belief, simply by appealing to the fact that we cannot
prove that their objection to the belief is baseless ("how do you know you can trust your senses?", "how do you know the world isn't a figment of the imagination of an evil genius?", or whatever). Wittgenstein's point is that the fact the sceptic can do this simply points up the meaninglessness of the question they are asking: questions that are truly incapable of answer, purely by virtue of the fact that the structure of the discourse in which they are asked makes it impossible to answer them, are meaningless. As he says, what would it mean to live one's life as if one
really believed in solipsism? The fact that such an existence is impossible means its an absurd question; we should concentrate on answering questions that may really have some effect on our practice.
There's an anachronistic story about Bertrand Russell, who allegedly received a letter from a reader praising him for something he'd written in an introductory text about solipsism: "Mr Russell, I can't understand why
everybody isn't a solipsist!" I think this makes Wittgenstein's point very well. Philosophy ends up in absurdity when it's a discourse that precludes the logical possibility of answering its own questions. The answer is to cure philosophy of its delusions, not to try and answer the deluded questions.
It's a Rorsach test change of perspective type thing, not a "answer" per se, if that makes sense. (In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein uses an example of a line drawing that, depending on how you look at it, looks like either a duck or a rabbit. Philosophy sees the duck, when the problem would go away if only it saw it as a rabbit.)
How far off-topic is that, then?
-- Ian
) Besides, its a bit boring really, which must be trying to tell me something.
