Why have money? Sure, it’s been around for ages and it’s used the world over, but if there’s nothing inherent in money that makes it valuable, then how long and how widely it’s been used isn’t terribly important. Furthermore, if one coin or bill is made of the same stuff as any other, than why mint currency at all? Should we even have “money” as a thing?
EDIT: Just in case it needs saying: An awful lot of things that are terribly important to humans and can change their lives for better or worse do not correspond to ontological primitives or the first-order phenomena on which reality is ultimately based.
Money has value by consensus agreement—even the most dedicated Gold Standard advocates will usually cop to the fact that it’s gold’s properties that make it useful for trade, and anyway most money now and through much of human existence has no basis in gold. You cannot melt down a gold coin, shred a banknote of paper or plastic, and extract the raw value from it. It’s totally made up. And oddly enough, this may very well not prevent you from starving to death if you run out of it...
Money has value by consensus agreement—even the most dedicated Gold Standard advocates will usually cop to the fact that it’s gold’s properties that make it useful for trade...
This is already a weaker claim than the one you seemed to be presenting before—though I may have misunderstood you at the time. Rather than saying that one piece of music is as good as any other (f.ex., a random tune that I’m humming is as good as anything produced by The Beatles or Brittney Spears or whomever), you are now saying that there exists a “consensus agreement” regarding which music is better. Thus, it is possible to rank music according to quality, even if we define “quality” as “alignment with the consensus”. I’m going to chip away at your claim a little more, though.
While it is true that the value of money is governed by consensus, this value is not entirely arbitrary. For example, if Mexico’s government got its act together, somehow developed fusion power, and began exporting energy to its neighbours, I would expect the value of the Peso to rise relative to the Dollar. I can’t predict exactly what this value will be exactly, but I am fairly sure it will be much higher than it is today.
This is because the consensus that governs the value of money is rooted in at least two real-world quantities:
The total production of the entity who wields the money (typically, a country or a corporation)
Human psychology (which, in aggregate, is reasonably static and non-arbitrary, though of course there’s a great deal of variation among individuals)
Is this also true of music ? Or is musical quality still completely arbitrary ?
This is already a weaker claim than the one you seemed to be presenting before
This is my first post in the conversation. Are you thinking of a different person maybe?
you are now saying that there exists a “consensus agreement” regarding which music is better.
Nooooot exactly. What I’m saying is that questions of whether music is pleasurable to listen to or holds up to sophisticated aesthetic analysis do not dissolve even if we assume the criteria are arbitrary (and indeed, different musical traditions around the world have different tone scales, different ideas about what constitute good lyrics, rhythm, et cetera—so while two humans from entirely different social contexts may disagree with each other’s tastes in music, it is still rather likely they both have a taste in music).
I like listening to Tuvan throat singing (no, really). I know plenty of people who can’t stand it (one of my spouses being a prominent example, but she adores heavy metal). There’s no a priori reason why I’d dig phase-shifting and simultaneous harmonies in a raspy voice while she prefers electric guitar and heavy thumping drum beats.
So you’re right that it’s arbitrary, but the statement “these preferences are arbitrary” is kind of meaningless—I still have the brainbits that respond well to Kongar ool-Ondar, and my spouse still has the brainbits that respond well to Apocalyptika and Sammael, and this will lead to important, meaningful social behaviors on our part.
Don’t get too confused by my money analogy—it’s true that money stands in for trade balances in a sense and so relative valuations between currencies can be expected to vary in response to economic conditions, but that doesn’t make any instance of the symbols or tokens of trade-balance valuable unto themselves.
What I’m saying is you can’t make meaningful statements about music quality outside of context; you should taboo the word “arbitrary” here.
Yeah, I seem to be doing that a lot, lately :-( Sorry about that.
and indeed, different musical traditions around the world have different tone scales, different ideas about what constitute good lyrics, rhythm, et cetera...
Is this actually true ? I was under the impression that there were a handful (maybe as few as two, IIRC) tonal scales that persist across cultures, but I could be wrong. Lyrics are another matter entirely, and are probably out of scope for this discussion, as they are closer to literature than to music.
...but that doesn’t make any instance of the symbols or tokens of trade-balance valuable unto themselves.
No, but it does mean that there’s something else besides social consensus that governs the value that people place on these currency tokens.
...you should taboo the word “arbitrary” here.
Fair enough.
My point is that, if the measure of quality that we assign to a piece of music is completely independent on any properties of that piece of music, as the original commenter seemed to be suggesting, then it makes no sense to even recognize music as a discipline. And I argue that the reverse is also true: if we are willing to claim that music is a thing, and that some pieces of music are better than others in some way, then these pieces of music must possess some properties which are relevant to their quality. It would therefore be possible—just as an example—to identify these properties, and to predict whether a given piece of music will be successful or not.
Note that such properties need not be completely objective, in a way that mass and length are objective. They just need to be relatively stable within our current culture.
Why have money? Sure, it’s been around for ages and it’s used the world over, but if there’s nothing inherent in money that makes it valuable, then how long and how widely it’s been used isn’t terribly important. Furthermore, if one coin or bill is made of the same stuff as any other, than why mint currency at all? Should we even have “money” as a thing?
EDIT: Just in case it needs saying: An awful lot of things that are terribly important to humans and can change their lives for better or worse do not correspond to ontological primitives or the first-order phenomena on which reality is ultimately based.
Money has value by consensus agreement—even the most dedicated Gold Standard advocates will usually cop to the fact that it’s gold’s properties that make it useful for trade, and anyway most money now and through much of human existence has no basis in gold. You cannot melt down a gold coin, shred a banknote of paper or plastic, and extract the raw value from it. It’s totally made up. And oddly enough, this may very well not prevent you from starving to death if you run out of it...
This is already a weaker claim than the one you seemed to be presenting before—though I may have misunderstood you at the time. Rather than saying that one piece of music is as good as any other (f.ex., a random tune that I’m humming is as good as anything produced by The Beatles or Brittney Spears or whomever), you are now saying that there exists a “consensus agreement” regarding which music is better. Thus, it is possible to rank music according to quality, even if we define “quality” as “alignment with the consensus”. I’m going to chip away at your claim a little more, though.
While it is true that the value of money is governed by consensus, this value is not entirely arbitrary. For example, if Mexico’s government got its act together, somehow developed fusion power, and began exporting energy to its neighbours, I would expect the value of the Peso to rise relative to the Dollar. I can’t predict exactly what this value will be exactly, but I am fairly sure it will be much higher than it is today.
This is because the consensus that governs the value of money is rooted in at least two real-world quantities:
The total production of the entity who wields the money (typically, a country or a corporation)
Human psychology (which, in aggregate, is reasonably static and non-arbitrary, though of course there’s a great deal of variation among individuals)
Is this also true of music ? Or is musical quality still completely arbitrary ?
This is my first post in the conversation. Are you thinking of a different person maybe?
Nooooot exactly. What I’m saying is that questions of whether music is pleasurable to listen to or holds up to sophisticated aesthetic analysis do not dissolve even if we assume the criteria are arbitrary (and indeed, different musical traditions around the world have different tone scales, different ideas about what constitute good lyrics, rhythm, et cetera—so while two humans from entirely different social contexts may disagree with each other’s tastes in music, it is still rather likely they both have a taste in music).
I like listening to Tuvan throat singing (no, really). I know plenty of people who can’t stand it (one of my spouses being a prominent example, but she adores heavy metal). There’s no a priori reason why I’d dig phase-shifting and simultaneous harmonies in a raspy voice while she prefers electric guitar and heavy thumping drum beats.
So you’re right that it’s arbitrary, but the statement “these preferences are arbitrary” is kind of meaningless—I still have the brainbits that respond well to Kongar ool-Ondar, and my spouse still has the brainbits that respond well to Apocalyptika and Sammael, and this will lead to important, meaningful social behaviors on our part.
Don’t get too confused by my money analogy—it’s true that money stands in for trade balances in a sense and so relative valuations between currencies can be expected to vary in response to economic conditions, but that doesn’t make any instance of the symbols or tokens of trade-balance valuable unto themselves.
What I’m saying is you can’t make meaningful statements about music quality outside of context; you should taboo the word “arbitrary” here.
Yeah, I seem to be doing that a lot, lately :-( Sorry about that.
Is this actually true ? I was under the impression that there were a handful (maybe as few as two, IIRC) tonal scales that persist across cultures, but I could be wrong. Lyrics are another matter entirely, and are probably out of scope for this discussion, as they are closer to literature than to music.
No, but it does mean that there’s something else besides social consensus that governs the value that people place on these currency tokens.
Fair enough.
My point is that, if the measure of quality that we assign to a piece of music is completely independent on any properties of that piece of music, as the original commenter seemed to be suggesting, then it makes no sense to even recognize music as a discipline. And I argue that the reverse is also true: if we are willing to claim that music is a thing, and that some pieces of music are better than others in some way, then these pieces of music must possess some properties which are relevant to their quality. It would therefore be possible—just as an example—to identify these properties, and to predict whether a given piece of music will be successful or not.
Note that such properties need not be completely objective, in a way that mass and length are objective. They just need to be relatively stable within our current culture.