Friedrich Schlegel on meaning in music (1798) (English translation below)
Es pflegt manchem seltsam und laecherlich aufzufallen, wenn die Musiker von den Gedanken in ihren Kompositionen reden; und oft mag es auch so geschehen, dass man wahrnimmt, sie haben mehr Gedanken in ihrer Musik als ueber dieselbe. Wer aber Sinn fuer die wunderbaren Affinitaeten aller Kuenste und Wissenschaften hat, wird die Sache wenigstens nicht aus dem platten Gesichtspunkt der sogenannten Natuerlichkeit betrachten, nach welcher die Musik nur Sprache der Empfindung sein soll, und eine gewisse Tendenz aller reinen Instrumentalmusik zur Philosophie an sich nicht unmoeglich finden. Muss die reine Instrumentalmusik sich nicht selbst einen Text erschaffen ? Und wird das Thema in ihr nicht so entwickelt, bestaetigt, variiert und kontrastiert wie der Gegenstand der Meditation in einer philosophischen Ideenreihe ?
It generally strikes many people as strange and ridiculous if musicians talk about the thoughts (=themes) in their compositions; and often it may even happen that we perceive that they have more thought in their music than about it. Who has a feeling, however, for the wonderful affinity of all the arts and sciences will at least not consider the matter from the flat and so-called "natural" point of view, according to which music should be nothing more than the language of sentiment, and he will find a certain tendency of all pure music to philosophy not inherently impossible. Must not pure instrumental music itself create its own text? And is not the theme in it developed, confirmed, varied, and constrasted in the same way as the object of meditation in a philosophical series of ideas?
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Sunday, October 09, 2005
Pieces of knowledge
One central question about processes in the mind is: How is knowledge represented internally in the mind ? At the end there are many different kinds of objects and relationships between them in our universe, and we can use language for most cases to control those internal representations. So, what would be a good model to unify all these things, or how do mental data structures look like and how does knowledge access with language work ?
When I was reading the PhD thesis of Push Singh about an architecture for reflective common sense thinking lately, I came to understand better what the "frame-idea" of Marvin Minsky is about. It might be well possible that the smallest pieces of knowledge our mental agencies use during reasoning are "frames", i.e. structures that consist of a basic typical form and that can be tuned with a set of pre-defined knobs to specific instants. For example, the word "car" should arouse at each listener this frame: Some metallic structure with a certain color and 4 wheels at the bottom. All additional variables can be tuned by asking questions to the story-telling person or letting our memories do this job. And recursively, wheels, windows and cockpit are frames as well, and will arouse also certain agents in our cerbral cortex for vision and sound. (Also interesting, our physical models of light could be seen as a collection of frames: photons (i.e. particles), waves, rays.)
There are two interesting directions to walk from this frame-concept, the first is how are frames connected to our language and speech agencies and second, what kind of frames are there. For the first point, I got to understand better Minsky's polyneme concept. Language can be seen as interface system to transfer some meaning, knowledge or frame into another mind. For this at least two sub-systems are necessary: First some system for recognizing some concept and second a system to bring the short-term memories into certain states (maybe similar to compare this with zipping and unzipping some packets of information for transport). The polyneme does this recognizing (k-lines do the memorizing). For example we all have acquired a collection of basic structures in our minds for descriping circles, boxes, colors, substance, etc. A polyneme arouses agents in these different agents in different realms. This parallel processing of meaning is the underlying idea of Minsky's statement something has only a meaning when it has multiple meanings: If we have only one way to represent a thing, our agencies will fail to "turn" the object in the mind, when we want to apply some different way of thinking to this.
The second part that I just found interesting about frames, and by reading Push Singh's work, is, that stories can be seen as collection of frames as well. And even a full story can be seen as just some basic frame that can be used by other stories or ways to think. When we deliberate about how to solve a problem, we might just re-activate an old story with its main actors, with its protagonists and antagonists, the different objects in the scene, and then look carefully in our mind how the problem was solved the last time. A huge amount of knowledge is transferred by story-telling.
When I was reading the PhD thesis of Push Singh about an architecture for reflective common sense thinking lately, I came to understand better what the "frame-idea" of Marvin Minsky is about. It might be well possible that the smallest pieces of knowledge our mental agencies use during reasoning are "frames", i.e. structures that consist of a basic typical form and that can be tuned with a set of pre-defined knobs to specific instants. For example, the word "car" should arouse at each listener this frame: Some metallic structure with a certain color and 4 wheels at the bottom. All additional variables can be tuned by asking questions to the story-telling person or letting our memories do this job. And recursively, wheels, windows and cockpit are frames as well, and will arouse also certain agents in our cerbral cortex for vision and sound. (Also interesting, our physical models of light could be seen as a collection of frames: photons (i.e. particles), waves, rays.)
There are two interesting directions to walk from this frame-concept, the first is how are frames connected to our language and speech agencies and second, what kind of frames are there. For the first point, I got to understand better Minsky's polyneme concept. Language can be seen as interface system to transfer some meaning, knowledge or frame into another mind. For this at least two sub-systems are necessary: First some system for recognizing some concept and second a system to bring the short-term memories into certain states (maybe similar to compare this with zipping and unzipping some packets of information for transport). The polyneme does this recognizing (k-lines do the memorizing). For example we all have acquired a collection of basic structures in our minds for descriping circles, boxes, colors, substance, etc. A polyneme arouses agents in these different agents in different realms. This parallel processing of meaning is the underlying idea of Minsky's statement something has only a meaning when it has multiple meanings: If we have only one way to represent a thing, our agencies will fail to "turn" the object in the mind, when we want to apply some different way of thinking to this.
The second part that I just found interesting about frames, and by reading Push Singh's work, is, that stories can be seen as collection of frames as well. And even a full story can be seen as just some basic frame that can be used by other stories or ways to think. When we deliberate about how to solve a problem, we might just re-activate an old story with its main actors, with its protagonists and antagonists, the different objects in the scene, and then look carefully in our mind how the problem was solved the last time. A huge amount of knowledge is transferred by story-telling.
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