Episode 97: Karl Popper On Conservatism in Music (w/Chris Johansen)

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:00]  Peter: Hello out there. I know I say this just about every time, but this is truly one of our most exciting episodes ever, for a couple of reasons. First, we discuss Karl Popper's chapters on music, from his excellent intellectual autobiography, Unended Quest. These chapters haven't been discussed or written about hardly anywhere. Please correct me if I'm wrong. He makes it clear in these chapters that many of his central ideas come from his appreciation for music. For example, thinking about the difference between Beethoven and Bach helped form his ideas about World 2 and World 3. Thinking about progress in music led to his refutation of historicism. His thoughts on dogmatism, essentialism, and more make an appearance in these four chapters. It's also very clear in these chapters that Popper was a man who had the utmost appreciation for what Western music has accomplished in terms of solving actual real world musical problems. Kind of like what he does with his philosophy. In the context of classical music, he rejects the atonal stuff that was becoming trendy at the time, tried to like it, but then went back to church music. I think it would be fair to call him a musical conservative of a sort. I got chills when I realized how much his ideas overlap with someone I know, who happens to be my brother, Chris Johansen. Now, Chris and I have been arguing about these issues for nearly 30 years. Some families argue about politics, we argue more about music. To be clear, I am an insatiable and obsessive lifelong listener of virtually all kinds of music. I do not criticize anything.

[00:01:53]  Peter: Even when I was working at a record store for all those years, I considered myself a kind of anti-snob record store clerk, who would be positive and happy and interested in everything my coworkers and our customers liked. However, over the years, I've become somewhat appreciative of my brother's perspective too. He is a professional straight ahead jazz musician working with the big dogs in New York City. Rather than spend any time touting my brother's credentials, here is a snippet of the Chris Johansen quartet playing Riftide by Coleman Hawkins. After the podcast, I put the whole track of him playing the great American songbook standard, You Turned the Tables on Me. Please look up his group on Spotify.

[00:03:56]  Peter: Welcome to The Theory of Anything Podcast. Today is a very special episode. All our episodes are special, I think, but today we have a very special guest, my brother, Chris Johansen. How you doing, Chris?

[00:04:14]  Chris: Pretty good, how are you? Thanks for having me.

[00:04:16]  Peter: Yes, and of course, Bruce, as always.

[00:04:19]  Unidentified speaker: Hello.

[00:04:20]  Peter: Bruce, how are you?

[00:04:21]  Unidentified speaker: Good.

[00:04:24]  Peter: Today we're gonna talk about something that has, at least as far as I know, not been talked about much, at least according to my Google research, and that is Karl Popper on music, three chapters, four chapters from his excellent intellectual autobiography, Unended Quest. He displays himself to be a highly sophisticated lover, appreciator, and critic of music in these chapters, and I wanted to get my brother's perspective on it. To be honest, when I first read the chapters, when I went back and reread the chapters, I guess, thinking that I might talk about them with my brother, I got chills, really. There were so many areas of agreement with my conservative brother, musically conservative brother. Is that fair, Chris? Are you a musical conservative?

[00:05:34]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:05:35]  Unidentified speaker: No.

[00:05:35]  Chris: I totally feel comfortable with that term.

[00:05:38]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:05:38]  Peter: Okay. My musically conservative brother, that it was like, like I said, I got chills.

[00:05:45]  Bruce: So you're a right-wing extremist when it comes to music. That's what I heard.

[00:05:51]  Peter: Well, let me first talk about that. What I'm going to do is steel man your position, Chris. Well, first I want to talk about what a wonderful musician you are. You're a humble guy. I'm sure you don't talk a lot about what a virtuoso you are. But Chris, I think of you as the kind of person who knew what he wanted to do when he was 13 years old pretty much and that's play the tenor saxophone. You had a vision, you had a purpose, and you've pursued that your whole life for the last 30 years or whatever. You went to obviously music school and now you live in New York City and play with all the top dudes. You are not a fan of, well, okay. Let me start with Steel Manning, how I think of your perspective on music and perhaps you can come back and tell me if it's a Steel Man or a Straw Man. Okay. You are a bebop musician. Meaning for people who don't quite understand that what that implies. Bebop is the smaller group jazz that came out of Swing starting in the 40s with Charlie Parker and Lester Young, and I guess Monk and Bud Powell and a bunch of these dudes started playing in smaller groups. I think perhaps partly because of the advent of the microphone, maybe made it easier to do that. I'm kind of interested in the whole history of technology and music, but I think maybe the sound reinforcement technology had something to do with it, maybe. But anyway, and these guys took the innovations of swing and made it weirder, I guess, more improvisational.

[00:08:04]  Peter: Maybe weirder is not the right word, but it took it and ran with it in a more small group setting, at least according to the perspective of someone like you, Chris, which I think is a pretty valid perspective. This was perhaps the highlight of American music. All this great music that America has produced, I think you could make a pretty good case that swing and bebop is our country's musical contribution to the world. Amongst all the other great forms of music that have originated in our country, but has there ever been anything as musically, harmonically sophisticated as bebop and swing?

[00:08:57]  Unidentified speaker: I am not sure.

[00:08:58]  Chris: Yeah, I think that's right. I usually, calling myself a bebop musician works, I usually just say straight ahead.

[00:09:08]  Peter: Straight ahead.

[00:09:08]  Chris: It's a more general term.

[00:09:11]  Unidentified speaker: Fair enough.

[00:09:12]  Chris: Technically, bebop was a specific thing that happened in the 40s.

[00:09:16]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:09:16]  Chris: It's more strict and that's definitely what I do. But also, I have other, there's other things going on, other influences from swing and some of the other styles that happened before and after like the bebop musicians.

[00:09:34]  Peter: Hard bop and then things and.

[00:09:37]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:09:38]  Peter: Fair enough.

[00:09:39]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:09:39]  Peter: The heads know what you're talking about when you say straight ahead. They probably immediately think you're a snob or something. But anyway, so at some point, what happened in jazz is that swing and bebop became fusion and avant-garde. I want to back up a second and say that my brother and I have been debating the music and other similar issues in terms of quality and art for 30 years. So I'm not representing a opinion that I necessarily agree with. But at the same time, I'm not sure that I completely don't agree either. I mean, if you took a gun to my head and said, has there ever been a composer as great as Duke Ellington? Even though I like heavy metal and comic books and just every kind of music that's out there, I'm not exactly sure that I could say that music has produced anything better since the greats of that era, or going back in classical music, Bach, Brahms and Beethoven. Has there been a composer in the 20th century as great as these dudes? I would have a hard time making that case. But anyway, so at a certain point, swing and bebop became fusion and avant-garde. Classical music became minimalist and also avant-garde, something more primitive, I guess. Ugly might be a word that could be used for some of it. Art deco in architecture became modernism and functional. Well, my brother is also a licensed tour guide in New York City. People might not know you can become licensed at that, but you have some interest in architecture as well, right?

[00:11:52]  Chris: A little bit, a little bit, yeah.

[00:11:54]  Peter: Okay. Fine art obviously became something indistinguishable from garbage at times. Is that a piece? There's these videos. I'm sure you've seen. Is that a piece of garbage or an artwork? I don't know. Even cars. Cars at some point became ugly. I mean, if you look at the classic cars from the 50s and 60s, does that even exist anymore? Even toasters in the 50s were like beautiful works of art. Somehow, for some reason, [unclear]— It seems to me there's been a general decline in quality in art. Again, I'm not really even talking about my perspective here because I'm more like, I'm crazy. I like every kind of music that's out there, but I'm just trying to steel man your position. So art became something more about self-expression than virtuosity and sophistication. Music became geared towards younger audiences, less sophisticated audiences. If you think about like a Thelonious Monk, if Thelonious Monk was coming up today, would anyone even appreciate his music? It's not clear to me who is out there that's doing what he did. So how am I doing, Chris?

[00:13:28]  Unidentified speaker: Is this a steel man or a straw man?

[00:13:30]  Chris: It's pretty good.

[00:13:31]  Unidentified speaker: Pretty good.

[00:13:32]  Chris: I'll call that a steel man. Yeah, I think it's a conservative outlook. I should say, though, that most of my fellow musicians wouldn't use that word, even those that share my point of view, because it can be confused with political conservatism.

[00:13:54]  Unidentified speaker: Fair enough.

[00:13:55]  Chris: Most of them are not.

[00:13:56]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:13:57]  Chris: But nevertheless, it does share many of the same elements, as far as respect for the tradition, respect for the elders of the music, a focus on craft over self-expression. I mean, if those things are conservative, I don't know what is.

[00:14:22]  Peter: Well, and I was happy to, like I said, to see that in these four chapters of Popper's autobiography, your perspective is all over it.

[00:14:38]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, it was, yes.

[00:14:42]  Chris: When you had told me to read those, and you said that I would really be into it, I was excited and sure enough, I found myself nodding along the whole time. It was almost like there were truth bombs exploding on every page. I mean, really, I pretty much agreed with everything. I felt like I come to the same place as him through a different path, and really, I can't think of anything that he said that I disagree with.

[00:15:24]  Bruce: I was going to say, have we actually given the references to what we're talking about, like what's chapters?

[00:15:30]  Unidentified speaker: No.

[00:15:30]  Bruce: This is all from Unended Quest. It starts at Chapter 11, which is entitled Music. Then Chapter 12 is Speculations about the Rise of Polyphonic Music, Psychology of Discovery or Logic of Discovery? That's Chapter 12. Then Chapter 13 is Two Kinds of Music. And then Chapter 14 is Progressivism in Art, especially in Music.

[00:15:57]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:15:57]  Chris: So those are the three concepts. Chapter 11 is like an introductory chapter. And then the next three chapters are the three concepts that he learned from music that he adapted to other fields, right?

[00:16:16]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:16:17]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:16:18]  Bruce: He actually says that a great deal of his epistemology of science came from his study of music.

[00:16:23]  Unidentified speaker: I didn't know that.

[00:16:25]  Unidentified speaker: That's fascinating.

[00:16:26]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:16:27]  Peter: That was that was crazy. He talks about the world too. We'll get into this more, but he talks about his world two and world three, that all came from him initially thinking about Bach and Beethoven. I was like, I feel like there's got to be a lot of Popperians who are not really aware of that. But yeah, he's highly sophisticated about music. I got the—[wording uncertain] he mentions elsewhere in the biography. I think that he it was a massive part of his life living in in as a as a 20 something and I believe Austria.

[00:17:01]  Bruce: He considered becoming a musician, he says.

[00:17:04]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, yeah.

[00:17:05]  Peter: And he went to the the the musical performances every night of the week, he thinks he says at one point.

[00:17:13]  Chris: But one thing I valued valued about it was that he he even spent, he says, a couple of years in a society that is dedicated to atonal music. So and and he says at the end of it at the end of the two years, he liked it even less than he did at the beginning.

[00:17:34]  Peter: Well, let me just you know what, since you bring that up, let me just read that quote, because that was so good. This is in his introductory chapter, just called Music. He says, I was always conservative in the field of music. I felt that Schubert was the last of the really great composers, though I liked and admired Bruckner, especially his last three symphonies and some Brahms. I disliked Wagner even more as the author of The Words of the Ring. Yeah, he hates Wagner, Mahler and Schoenberg are his big enemies. Enemies, I guess. Then he goes on to say, let's see, he talks about joining that society dedicated. I guess he, like a lot of people, he dabbled in being interested in the atonal music of Schoenberg. Then he joined the society dedicated to performing compositions by Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton von Webern, Webern, and other, what is it, Webern?

[00:18:45]  Unidentified speaker: Webern.

[00:18:46]  Peter: Webern and other contemporary advanced composers like Ravel, Bartok and Stravinsky. For a time, I also became a pupil of Schoenberg's pupil, Erwin Stein, but I had scarcely any lessons with him. Instead, I helped him a little with his rehearsals for the society's performance. In this way, I got to know some of Schoenberg's music intimately. I also went to rehearsals of Webern, especially his Orchis Strucker [title pronunciation uncertain] or whatever, and of Berg. After two years, I found I had succeeded in getting to know something about a kind of music which I now liked even less than I had to begin with. So I became for about a year, a pupil in a very different school of music, the Department of Church Music. But all this added to my love of classical music and my boundless admiration for the great composers of old. So basically, he dabbled in all this modern experimental music, and then shifted gears and went back to church music.

[00:19:51]  Unidentified speaker: So he was not-

[00:19:54]  Chris: Yeah, I really value that because even if you don't like the atonal school of music, it was very influential. What happened, these are very smart people. I think it's worth checking out instead of dismissing right off the top. So I think that's the way to do it.

[00:20:18]  Peter: I think you've told me you have somewhat mixed feelings about Wagner and Mahler and some of the people he mentioned.

[00:20:25]  Chris: Did he say he didn't like- I think what he said was he didn't especially didn't like Wagner and Strauss, Richard Strauss. Did he say Mahler?

[00:20:36]  Peter: He name checks Mahler in a negative way many times.

[00:20:45]  Chris: I think I totally agree with him. I can't say I've spent a lot of time listening to Wagner.

[00:20:51]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:20:52]  Peter: Well, I will say as just a fan of classical music, I've never liked Mahler. The symphonies are just too long. They just go on and on. There's no great melodies in the way there is Beethoven.

[00:21:05]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[00:21:06]  Peter: I mean, I'm not like a sophisticated person in terms of classical music, so I'm sure there's all kinds of things that I'm not getting in there. But to me, a Mahler symphony is the snooze fest. I'll say that straight up.

[00:21:21]  Chris: There is something egotistical about it. I'm not going to say anything negative about Mahler though.

[00:21:29]  Unidentified speaker: I just-

[00:21:30]  Chris: But yeah, I think Wagner is in a different category. I'm totally on board with what he says against Wagner.

[00:21:39]  Peter: Okay, so you don't like Wagner. You're willing to go on the record disliking Wagner. So he puts this in the context of, maybe you've heard the term historicism, right? This idea that history has a direction, right? So the idea is that these composers are improving on one another, maybe in a similar way as science or technology improves. But he's really against that. He does not like historicism in music. It sounds like you're very aligned with him in that way.

[00:22:14]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:22:15]  Chris: I never heard it put like that. But I really responded. I love how he expressed that. This idea that originality is the most important thing, that finding your own voice is something that should be the utmost importance instead of just trying to make the most beautiful music you can.

[00:22:42]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:22:45]  Chris: And that's a real mistake that people make, and that in music education, that students are told, find your own voice.

[00:22:55]  Peter: So you see that as pretty bad advice.

[00:22:57]  Unidentified speaker: Don't find your own voice.

[00:23:00]  Chris: Well, like he says, you don't have to worry about it. You will always sound like you. So it's the wrong thing to focus on. And, you know, if you're like, what is he, there's a great quote.

[00:23:17]  Bruce: So from Popper, for everything a man or an animal can do is among other things, an expression of an internal state of emotions and of a personality. This is trivially true for all kinds of human and animal languages. So what he's saying is, yeah, of course, it's going to express some inner thing about you. But pursuing that as the goal doesn't make any sense because it's always going to be true. It's just trivially true. It just doesn't matter as the goal of music.

[00:23:48]  Unidentified speaker: So I thought that was interesting.

[00:23:49]  Peter: Yeah.

[00:23:51]  Chris: So as self-expression became the thing that was most important, he sees that as a decline in music.

[00:23:59]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:24:00]  Peter: You've been telling me that for 30 years, I think that all this music is not about self-expression. At some point, it became all about like music became more about just expressing your inner turmoil or your inner feelings or whatever, and that led to a- I mean, that's basically exactly what he says explicitly in that progressivism in art and music chapter. He talks about this was a formal school of thought, that people developed and that just led to a decline in music.

[00:24:44]  Chris: Yeah, and he sees as great as Beethoven was, and he really admires him as I do very much. He, Beethoven should not be seen as the ideal because everyone should copy, because that led to self-expression taking over. Then in my field, in jazz music, that same thing happened in the 1960s.

[00:25:14]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:25:15]  Chris: When everyone started going on their personal journeys. It was all about going on a quest, like an express quest of self-expression.

[00:25:32]  Chris: It was also a time where politically, things changed a lot in the 1960s. A lot of it for the good, some not so good. But if you look at the musicians of that time, people like Coltrane, John Coltrane, every album is different. He's changing all the time. He's on this journey.

[00:26:02]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:26:03]  Chris: And other musicians tried to do that, and we're not so successful at it. But that was just like the direction the music was taking.

[00:26:13]  Unidentified speaker: Sure.

[00:26:13]  Peter: And you know, if you think about it just from Giant Steps, 1959, the most harmonically complicated music practically ever made, there's different chord every whatever, there's more chords than you can imagine. And then just a couple of years later, moving on with the, you know, I love all this stuff too, but moving on to the, what do you call it? Modal jazz, where it's just like, there's just like two chords or something?

[00:26:42]  Chris: Yeah, sometimes one chord.

[00:26:44]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:26:45]  Chris: And you're playing, you're just using a scale basically.

[00:26:52]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:26:53]  Chris: And it's very interesting how some musicians, like the great Sonny Rollins, you know, one of the, one of my personal heroes of the tenor saxophone. After his incredible work of the 50s, he tried to, to change his music in the 60s in response to everything that was going on. And it, I think most would agree that it didn't really work.

[00:27:22]  Peter: Shots fired. Well, there's plenty of fans of his, his music in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. I might be one of them, but yeah, I know that you're, you're not. So that's.

[00:27:36]  Chris: Well, if you, I mean, if you agree with like what I'm saying, and what Popper is, Popper is saying about like self-expression and you know, going on a personal musical quest and all that.

[00:27:49]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:27:50]  Chris: You know, I think, I think that was the wrong direction for the music to take.

[00:27:55]  Unidentified speaker: Fair enough.

[00:27:57]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:27:57]  Peter: Well, let's, let's back up a little bit. We're getting into some, let's move through some of these quotes.

[00:28:05]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:28:06]  Peter: If you don't mind. They're okay. The chapter, the next chapter 12 on polyphony. I'm saying that right, right? It's not polyphony, right?

[00:28:17]  Unidentified speaker: Polyphony.

[00:28:18]  Peter: Polyphony.

[00:28:18]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:28:19]  Peter: It was, I thought that was so cool. This quote where he says, My problem is this, Polyphony, like science, is peculiar to our Western civilization. I'm using the term polyphony to denote not only counterpoint, but also Western harmony. Unlike science, it does not seem to be of Greek origin, but to have arisen between the 9th and 15th centuries. If so, it is possibly the most unprecedented, original, indeed miraculous achievement of our Western civilization, not excluding science. What do you think, Chris? Is polyphony one of the greatest achievements of Western civilization along with science?

[00:29:07]  Chris: Yes, I'm on board with that. I thought that was beautifully put.

[00:29:13]  Peter: Maybe you can tell people what polyphony is or what counterpoint is. I had to Google exactly what the difference between polyphony and counterpoint is.

[00:29:26]  Chris: I think there are related terms. I'm not an expert on this, but it's different voices like musical lines, melodies happening at the same time. That's basically what it is. If you listen to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, it's always several melodies moving. There's never a time where it's just an accompaniment with the left hand, then melodies happening with the right hand. They're always just moving melodies together. That's what he's talking.

[00:30:12]  Peter: Sorry, keep going.

[00:30:14]  Chris: I was just going to say, he goes into the history of how that came to be, where it comes from church singing, where they had strict rules, but then it developed. He thinks maybe by mistake, by people trying to hit a note, but then they're missing it, putting it to a different note where their voice was more comfortable. Then polyphony developed that way. That's where he gets into his whole thing about dogmas.

[00:30:55]  Bruce: The advantage of dogma. This is such an interesting thing. It's something that I've emphasized very strongly on the podcast, that the upside of dogmatism. And most people think that when Popper talks about the upside of dogmatism, that he doesn't really mean it, right? Because dogmatism is bad. But in this case, he's explaining how the greatest musical development, he thinks that the greatest, he has a theory at least, that the greatest musical development ever with polyphony, came from a dogmatic view about music that we all have to sing exactly the same. And he even goes so far as to say that if you were to be outside of a church where they're trying so hard to have canonized music, where everybody sings the same thing together, that it wouldn't have been possible without those constraints to have found it, polyphony in the first place. There's like some really great quote he makes about that, and I don't have it handy.

[00:31:58]  Peter: I've got one here, I think. He definitely seems to indicate that you've got to have, putting it as you've always put it, Chris, to me, that you've got to have rules in music. You've got to have rules that can be broken, right? So, I mean, you might break the rules, but the rules serve a valuable purpose.

[00:32:23]  Chris: It actually forces you to be more creative, not less.

[00:32:27]  Unidentified speaker: Having rules, yeah.

[00:32:28]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:32:29]  Unidentified speaker: And so like, yeah, go ahead.

[00:32:32]  Peter: Well, here's a good quote on that. According to this perhaps untenable historical conjecture, it was thus the canonization of the Gregorian melodies, a piece of dogmatism that proved the necessary framework or rather the necessary scaffolding for us to build a new world. I also formulated it like this. The dogma provides us with the frame of coordinates needed for exploring the order of this new, unknown, and possibly in itself, even somewhat chaotic world, and also for creating order where order is missing. Thus musical and scientific creation seem to have this much in common. The use of dogma or myth as a manmade path along which we move into the unknown, exploring the world, both creating regularities or rules, and probing for existing regularities. Once we have found or erected some landmarks, we proceed by trying new ways of ordering the world, new coordinates, new modes of exploration and creation, new ways of building a new world, undreamt of in antiquity unless in the myth of the music of the spheres. Indeed, a great work of music, like a great scientific theory, is cosmos imposed upon chaos, and its tensions and harmonies inexhaustible even for its creator.

[00:34:07]  Bruce: He talks about how the freedom that existed in music prior to church music, there was just too much freedom, so they weren't able to find something like polyphony, that they required the constraints to be able to search.

[00:34:26]  Chris: He says, he compared it to folk music.

[00:34:30]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, yeah, that's it.

[00:34:31]  Bruce: He compared to folk music. Yeah, the freedom of folk music. I have to find that quote now.

[00:34:36]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:34:36]  Peter: He might have been a bit of a snob about folk music though.

[00:34:40]  Chris: Well, I don't think he's saying anything too negative. He's just saying it didn't reach the heights of European classical music.

[00:34:52]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:34:53]  Unidentified speaker: Fair enough.

[00:34:54]  Chris: You know, I just love that passage that you read. It made me think of a lot of things, including Beethoven's approach with sonata form, the forms of the classical and early romantic eras were things that everyone at that time followed. It's just what you did. The opening movement of a sonata or a symphony had to have this strict structure.

[00:35:31]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:35:34]  Chris: And it's there because it sounded good. You know, it's, I think, András Schiff said that sonata form was one of the most incredible inventions of humankind, maybe in the arts. But I think that's what he's talking about, is having that structure there, those coordinates to work from makes it gives gives it such order. It just makes it more interesting. It's like playing, also, you know, the whole cliche, playing tennis without the net or playing tennis with the net. That's what it is. You know, you take the net away. Tennis is not so interesting.

[00:36:27]  Bruce: By the way, here's the quote, given the heritage of the Greeks and the development and canonization of the church modes in the time of Ambroise and Gregory the Great, there would hardly have been any need for or any incitement to the invention of polyphony. If church musicians had had the same freedom as, let us say, the originators of folk song.

[00:36:50]  Unidentified speaker: That was the quote I was thinking of.

[00:36:55]  Peter: Well, one more thing about this chapter that I thought was interesting. He then goes on to compare music to his ideas about epistemology and science, in a way I found fascinating, but a little bit confusing too. Let me just read the quote and see.

[00:37:18]  Bruce: I've got some interesting opinions on this too.

[00:37:22]  Peter: Well, let me just read the quote and we'll see if we can work this out. The very last chapter, or the very last paragraph, I should say, or a couple of paragraphs. Our theories beginning with primitive myths and evolving into the theories of science are indeed man-made, as Kant said. We do try to impose them on the world, and we can always stick to them dogmatically if we wish, if we so wish, even if they are false, as are not only most religious myths, it seems, but also Newton's theory, which is the one Kant had in mind. But although at first we have to stick to our theories, without theories we cannot even begin for we have nothing else to go by, we can in the course of time adopt a more critical attitude towards them. We can try to replace them by something better if we have learned with their help where they let us down. Thus there may arise a scientific or critical phase of thinking, which is necessarily preceded by an uncritical phase. Kant, I felt, had been right when he said that it was impossible that knowledge was, as it were, a copy or impression of reality. He was right to believe that knowledge was genetically or psychologically a priori, but quite wrong to suppose that any knowledge could be a priori valid. Our theories are our inventions, but they may be merely ill-reasoned guesses, old conjectures, hypotheses. Out of these, we create a world, not the real world, but our own nets in which we try to catch the real world.

[00:39:03]  Unidentified speaker: I love that quote.

[00:39:04]  Peter: If this was so, then what I originally regarded as the psychology of discovery had a basis in logic, there was no other way into the unknown for logical reasons. What do you guys make of that? That's a little, it's sinking in what his point is.

[00:39:25]  Bruce: I related to it immediately because of my growing disagreements with the rest of the CritRat community over Popper's epistemology. And I feel like he's explaining very eloquently what I've been trying my best to explain, right?

[00:39:42]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:39:42]  Bruce: So, how would you summarize what I see as my disagreements with other CritRats over the meaning and intention of Popper's epistemology? I see Popper's epistemology, when I read particularly the logic of scientific discovery, but really any of his books, I think do have this element. If you just read it, right, it's there. He was trying to create a set of conventions. He was trying to create this order or this theory about how knowledge is created, and he was doing it through a series of constraints, saying this is how we should actually do it. Now, he didn't invent these constraints. He's the first to notice this is what scientists are doing, whether they realize it or not, and to try to put it down on paper and say, here are the main one that I've brought up is the no ad hoc rule, right? That you simply have a hard, fast convention that you do not ad hoc save your theories. That doesn't mean you accept them as false the moment there's some counter example. It means that you are allowed to save your theories, but you have to make the saves themselves not be ad hoc. They must have their own independently testable consequences that you can go and corroborate through tests. Now, when I bring this up to other crit rats, even though you can easily find quotes of Popper saying exactly what I just said, almost every crit rat I talk to disagrees with this point of view. They'll often acknowledge that Popper said these things. Let's say, but that's not really the important part of Popper.

[00:41:19]  Bruce: I had a crit rat who maybe he was listening to this podcast, or maybe he was just responding to things I had said online. But he said that my view of Popper was, he said, that's nonsense. You cannot make a goal to make your theories more empirical. I made some comment about we should strive to make our theories have greater empirical content. And he says, you cannot set a goal to make your theories more empirical. Changing theories is dependent on the content and the problem encountered with that content. And thus, it is not predictable upfront that you'll get it more empirical, nor is it preferable to try to get it more empirical. That's not an exact quote, but that's pretty close to what he said to me.

[00:41:59]  Unidentified speaker: I'm kind of paraphrasing.

[00:42:01]  Bruce: And you can kind of see where he's coming from, right? You can see, and from a certain point of view, he's straining against the constraints that Popper actually wrote about with science. And he's saying, that's ridiculous. We should just use our criticism, and this is another common one that crit rats come up with. We should allow all criticisms. We shouldn't constrain our criticisms to only be, you know, empirical criticisms or, you know, the best criticisms. We should just allow all criticisms, come what may, just criticize the theories, and then you'll come up with the best error corrections if you just allow all sorts of criticisms, right? And he's saying kind of the same thing. You can even see how he's trying to invoke the Deutschian idea of you can't predict the growth of knowledge. So he's saying you can't predict upfront if it's going to be a more, the better theory is going to be more empirical or less empirical, right? And he's trying to invoke that idea and therefore he concludes it is not preferable that we try to increase the content of our theories, right? And it's this kind of almost intuitively appealing argument, and I can see where he's coming from, and it is entirely wrong. Every ounce of it is wrong. Popper's epistemology is counterintuitive in its emphasis on constraints. Just as the musical constraints of church music can drive innovation, Popper argues that scientific theories act as constraints that enable error correction.

[00:43:26]  Bruce: Popper was deeply interested in the convention scientists use, the constraints that they use that makes error correction possible. Even many crit rats, people who are students of Popper, see these constraints as limitations. They may think that accepting all forms of criticism equally improves upon Popper's ideas. However, this actually removes what makes his approach effective. Some criticism, what I've called objective criticisms, are more valuable than other kinds of criticisms. And the scientific method prioritizes these objective criticisms to facilitate error correction. Popper's constraining conventions, like the rule against ad hoc explanation, may seem restrictive. But abandoning these for a more subjective approach, deciding criticism based on personal judgment, eliminates the structured error correction that strengthens Popper's epistemology. His conventions are specific so that they can be critically tested and refined and not vaguely applied. And this is really kind of what I am trying to express, and I feel like Popper is expressing this in the realm of music just so well, right? Popper was, to the core, he was about constraints. And these constraints that you set up, and yeah, maybe you do get the constraints wrong. That's not a problem that you get them wrong. It's a problem that you didn't have them. And that's really what I saw him as expressing both with music and with epistemology here.

[00:44:56]  Peter: Yeah, there's some interesting, that's very well put. There's a lot of like really interesting parallels between his ideas about philosophy and music in here. Let's move on to the next chapter, Two Kinds of Music, if that's okay. He talks about, maybe you don't know, this took a while to really sink in for me and Chris, and maybe you don't know about this so much, but one of Popper's ideas is that he had three worlds that he thought of as three sort of, I think of them as dimensions of reality, world one, world two, world three. World one is physical reality, that's all around us. World two is subjective states of consciousness. I hope I'm explaining this well. This is how I'm thinking of it at least, is our consciousness. And then world three is, I guess you can think of it as memes, or even, you know, it's our ideas that are out there in this reality, outside of our brains. He associates, now this is, he talks about this in the context of Bach and Beethoven. I'm actually not positive if he means that, I think that he might think of Beethoven as more associated with world two, which is more like subjective states of consciousness, whereas Bach is world three. I might have that reversed. But anyway, he definitely associates Beethoven's music with more self-expression, and Bach as more like objectively solving problems.

[00:46:58]  Bruce: I can probably give a little bit of context here that might help. So at the time of Popper, this is something that is still around amongst philosophers, but us laymen, we never hear stuff like this, and it doesn't matter much to us. But philosophers have this idea that knowledge can only be subjective. They don't mean that in a postmodern sense. They're not necessarily denying knowledge. They mean for knowledge to count as knowledge, it has to be inside the brain of a person, okay? And if it's not inside the brain of a person, it's not knowledge. So if I have a book, if I don't have an actual brain that knows how to read that book, that book is no different. This so goes this theory, which is a false theory, that that book might as well just be ink on a page, right? It could be anything, okay? Because there is no actual knowledge in the book. Knowledge exists only inside of a person. Now, they called that subjective knowledge, which is a weird thing to call it. But it kind of makes sense. The idea is, is that you have the subjective, what's inside your brain, and then you have the stuff that's outside your brain, which would be the non-subjective, okay? So philosophers had developed this idea that the only kind of knowledge was subjective knowledge. And they weren't talking about relativistic knowledge or it's my truth. They weren't talking about that at all. They just meant knowledge only counts as knowledge when there's a person, there's a brain, there's a person that is processing it as knowledge.

[00:48:34]  Bruce: And Popper pointed out that this is just false, that there actually is this other, there is, he's not denying subjective knowledge, right? Subjective knowledge is a real thing, okay? That's his world too. But he's saying there's this other world, this world three, where the knowledge in the book is objective. It exists as knowledge and it is objective. And even if every human being died, it would still be knowledge. And aliens might come and decipher it and figure it out precisely because it is in fact objective knowledge completely separated from the mind that created it. Now, the thing that I find so weird about, particularly about trying to call this objective and subjective, is that there's not a lot of difference between subjective knowledge and objective knowledge. Philosophers who talked about such things existed before computers. And it's really hard to maintain the subjective objective divide that philosophers used to maintain and some still do. When you know about computers, right? Where we know computers can contain all sorts of knowledge. And really we now kind of see the knowledge stored within the brain as a type of computer, at least by analogy or if you believe in the Church Turing-Deutsch thesis, then you think it's a lot more than an analogy. But this idea that really the brain is kind of just a computer and it's not really the subjective knowledge in the brain is not different than the objective kind that's on the outside of the brain.

[00:50:08]  Bruce: And I think that's really the correct point of view, which kind of ruins Popper's Three Worlds to some degree, since it was really meant to respond to a certain kind of philosopher. That really, when it comes down to it, the world two and the world three are kind of the same thing. But you do have to look at the problem he was trying to solve, not talking to us normal laymen today. He was talking to philosophers that had a real problem with this idea that there could be knowledge outside the brain.

[00:50:38]  Peter: Well, let me back up for a second about that. All right, so he definitely says that Bach, and he even says in there that this is totally imprecise and he's probably exaggerating the differences between Bach and Beethoven and that he loves both.

[00:50:52]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:50:53]  Peter: So I wouldn't make too big of a deal out of this. But he definitely says that Bach is more the objective and Beethoven is more the subjective. Is that implying, Bruce, that Bach is more associated with world three or world two? So, okay, so here's the objective world three or world two, I guess.

[00:51:14]  Bruce: World three is the objective.

[00:51:16]  Peter: That's what I thought. So he sounds like he's saying that Bach is associated with world three and Beethoven.

[00:51:20]  Unidentified speaker: That's correct.

[00:51:22]  Bruce: That's what he's saying.

[00:51:23]  Unidentified speaker: That's what I...

[00:51:25]  Peter: Okay, I just wanted to get that straight. Well, Chris, let me read you this one more quote from that and get your thoughts on this. Because, yeah, so he, I think his general idea is that, well, he says, I felt there could be no greater danger to music than an attempt to make Beethoven's ways an ideal or a standard or a model, which is basically the direction music went, for better or for worse.

[00:51:53]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:51:54]  Peter: After Beethoven, it became more about self-expression. To read this quote, he says, I should... Perhaps start with a criticism of a widely accepted theory of art, the theory that art is self-expression or the expression of the artist's personality or perhaps the expression of his emotions. The main criticism of this theory is simple. The expressionist theory of art is empty. For everything a man or an animal can do is, among other things, an expression of an internal state, of emotions, of a personality. This is trivially true for all kinds of humans and animal languages. It holds for the way a man or a lion walks, the way a man coughs or blows his nose, the way a man or a lion may look at you or ignore you. It holds for the way a bird builds its nest, a spider constructs its web, and a man builds his house. In other words, it is not a characteristic of art. For the same reason, Expressionist or emotive theories of language are trivial, uninformative, and useless. I do not, of course, propose to answer the what is question, what is art, but I do suggest that what makes a work of art interesting or significant is something quite different from self-expression.

[00:53:20]  Chris: Yeah, so that goes back to the idea that you can't help but have, but put your personality in to the art.

[00:53:29]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:53:29]  Chris: But it's just going to be there whether you want it to or not. But if that's your focus, that's a problem.

[00:53:45]  Chris: Beethoven, as I think he says elsewhere, how kind of disappointing he was to come to the conclusion that Beethoven was not the ideal because he admired his music so much.

[00:54:01]  Unidentified speaker: As do I.

[00:54:03]  Bruce: So I didn't quite understand this part, so I actually wanted to get you guys' opinion on this. He clearly thinks of Beethoven as a great composer on par with Bach, but he sees Beethoven as going about this in a way that's unhealthy. And yet, he clearly did it well, right?

[00:54:23]  Unidentified speaker: Now, why is that?

[00:54:24]  Bruce: Is that because Beethoven, is the argument implicitly that it's because Beethoven happens to just be that good, he could get away with breaking the rules?

[00:54:35]  Chris: So, yeah, I think, basically, yeah, I think Beethoven gets a pass because he had such a strong, I mean, his music is generally just so strong. But also his, like I was, the way I've put it before is the musical journey that he went on.

[00:54:56]  Unidentified speaker: It was so compelling.

[00:54:58]  Chris: And it came about at a specific time when the classical forms were being expanded upon, which he was one of the first to do. So, but he says that shouldn't be the ideal. It's okay for Beethoven to do that. But if you're using that as a model for your own music, it's a bit arrogant.

[00:55:25]  Peter: Basically, geniuses can't help but be geniuses, right? So, if you're Beethoven and you're this dynamic, interesting person, you just can't help, but put that out there in your music, but it shouldn't be the focus of your music. Would you say that's fair?

[00:55:41]  Chris: I can't help but relate it to jazz again with Charlie Parker versus John Coltrane. Whereas the people who follow Coltrane, I don't find as interesting as Coltrane himself. But the people who follow, there are a lot of great musicians that follow Charlie Parker. Or Lester Young would be another example. Where in jazz, you could say that those guys were like Bach, and then Coltrane was like Beethoven.

[00:56:21]  Peter: Well, here's a quote where he lays it out. He says, what I have said may indicate what the difference was between Bach and Beethoven, which so impressed me. Bach forgets himself in his work. He is a servant of his work. Of course, he cannot fail to impress his personality on it. This is unavoidable. But he is not, as Beethoven is, at times conscious of expressing himself and even his moods. It was for this reason that I saw them as representing two opposite attitudes towards music.

[00:56:53]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:56:54]  Chris: It's sort of like the idea of craft versus art. Bach was just trying to, you know, craft the most beautiful fugue or whatever he was doing as possible. And like Popper says, even on his inventions, on his title page, he says, this is for educational purposes. This is to teach people how they could compose themselves a proper invention.

[00:57:36]  Peter: Is that where he's talking about? Bach saw himself as sort of a vessel for expressing something about religion or God?

[00:57:47]  Bruce: It's near that quote, but this is the part where he sees himself as a teacher, that his compositions were meant to teach others the right way to do compositions.

[00:57:59]  Bruce: I don't know much about music. You guys are talking about all sorts of things. I just don't even know what you're talking about. I had no idea that what Popper argues is that Beethoven was dealing with what we'd today call mental health issues and that he was trying to fight off negative emotions and depression and things like that, and he was using the music to do so. Because of that, Beethoven was uniquely a subjectivist version of music. We're talking about a guy who had the same level of craft as Bach, and so he knew how to do this, but his music really was an expression of exactly what he was going through at the time. Now, I had never heard that. Is that Popper's interpretation or is that like a well-known thing I just didn't know about?

[00:58:49]  Unidentified speaker: I think it is.

[00:58:50]  Chris: I'm actually reading a long biography of Beethoven right now. And it's true, a very troubled life, health problems. He went deaf, you know, starting as a young man and progressing to almost total deafness in his final years, he was a very tormented guy. And he kicked off the, although he wasn't a romantic himself, he was a man of the Aufklärung, the German Enlightenment. He basically kicked off the romantic movement in music.

[00:59:34]  Unidentified speaker: Interesting.

[00:59:37]  Chris: So everyone followed Beethoven. I mean, hugely influential.

[00:59:41]  Peter: Well, yeah, you listen to that second movement of the Seventh Symphony and you see why. I mean, he's, he did so many, every, every Beethoven symphony is, is just unique and brilliant and beautiful. And I mean, he, I hope no one interprets us as, as knocking Beethoven here or Popper.

[01:00:01]  Unidentified speaker: No, that's the thing.

[01:00:02]  Chris: It's just, it's just not the ideal. I think, I think Popper makes it clear that he admires him so much. It's just, just don't do that yourself.

[01:00:11]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:00:12]  Peter: It shouldn't be your goal.

[01:00:14]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:00:16]  Chris: Whereas, whereas Bach, I mean, it can be copied. If, if I was a composer, I would try to, I'd probably try to copy Bach, not Beethoven.

[01:00:29]  Peter: So Bach was more working out musical problems, not emotional problems.

[01:00:36]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[01:00:38]  Bruce: At least that's Popper's argument.

[01:00:39]  Unidentified speaker: Like I wouldn't know.

[01:00:40]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:00:42]  Bruce: But, you know, is this a more generalizable thing? I mean, obviously we talk about generalizing this to epistemology. So it must be very generalizable idea. But can we speak of other art having a similar sort of, of problem like this, modern artistic trends and things like that? Would that be fair or would that be, is this something that you see as primarily, okay, so you do think that's fair?

[01:01:10]  Chris: I think, yeah, in other fields of art, visual arts, architecture.

[01:01:19]  Peter: Well, that's the thing about the, if you look at something, if you go to a modern art gallery, you've almost got to become like bring some so-called education to it. You've got to know about what the artist is trying to convey, and their perspective, and maybe you read about their philosophy or something like that.

[01:01:41]  Bruce: Where you're able to appreciate it.

[01:01:42]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:01:43]  Peter: Whereas if you go to something more classical art, fine art or whatever, it's more, there's a virtuosity to it where you can just look at it and just get lost in just how beautiful this painting is.

[01:01:59]  Chris: Well, it's the traditional idea of beauty. Yeah. Modern art is more about the philosophy behind it. It's more about philosophy.

[01:02:10]  Unidentified speaker: I don't think Popper liked that at all.

[01:02:11]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:02:12]  Peter: He even talks about it one point. I actually know this is getting into the next chapter, but he talks about how these anti-movements you have, even worse, than the seeing art as self-expression, is seeing these artistic movements that are like a reaction to another movement or something. I mean, I think I agreed with him there. I don't see much value in that kind of thing.

[01:02:40]  Bruce: Can I read something from, are you guys familiar with Stephen King's book on writing?

[01:02:45]  Unidentified speaker: Sure, yeah.

[01:02:47]  Bruce: So he has a book that's about how to write, right? So he's obviously got to be one of the most prolific and successful writers of our time, maybe the most prolific and successful writer of our time, right? I thought it was humorous that William Goldman, the guy who wrote Princess Bride, I may have gotten the name wrong. He has a running joke where the Princess Bride is supposed to be an abridgment of some other great artists' work, which is just fictional. So one of the jokes he has is that after the movie was successful, he wanted to abridge the sequel to Princess Bride, and the publisher didn't think he did a very good job, so they brought in Stephen King to do it instead. So Stephen, he has this fictional conversation between him and Stephen King, where Stephen King says, William, you did a great job on the movie. So anyhow, Stephen King says, I don't want to speak too disparagingly of my generation. Actually, I do. We had a chance to change the world, and we opted for the home shopping network instead. But there was a view among the student writers I knew at the time that good writing came spontaneously in an uprush of feeling that had to be caught at once when you were building that all-important stairway to heaven. You couldn't just stand around with your hammer in your hand. So then he goes on and he says, I don't want to embarrass any of my old mates from that period. So here is a fictionalized version of what I'm talking about, created from bits of many actual poems. I close my eyes, in the dark I see.

[01:04:28]  Bruce: Rodin Ribbod [names uncertain], in the dark, I swallow the cloth of loneliness. Crow, I am here. Raven, I am here. And then he goes on to say, If you were to ask the poet what the poet meant, you'd get—you'd likely get a look of contempt.

[01:04:49]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:04:50]  Unidentified speaker: So should we move on to the last chapter?

[01:04:52]  Peter: Any more to say about the two kinds of music, Chris?

[01:04:58]  Chris: I have another anecdote that's similar to that. That I heard one of my teachers say long when I was in college. He went to a concert once in the 60s.

[01:05:17]  Chris: And the audience sat down, but nothing happened on stage. And after a few minutes, they realized that people were building a brick wall over the exits. That was the performance.

[01:05:36]  Unidentified speaker: Are you kidding me?

[01:05:39]  Chris: They were going to be trapped in the theater there. That's how far those ideas came.

[01:05:49]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, well, he kind of...

[01:05:50]  Peter: Okay, that leads right into the next quote here from the Progressivism, Chapter 14, Progressivism in Art, especially in music. And this is his chapter where he talks about historicism, or this idea that... This was my favorite chapter, actually. Where he talks about... He goes against this idea that music or philosophy has a direction and that the newest stuff is always the best.

[01:06:21]  Peter: He says, but I would not now contend that there are not other equally pernicious creeds. So he means other than this idea that art should be self-expressionist. And among them are some anti-expressionist creeds, which have led to all kinds of formalistic experiments from serialism to music concrete. So you say it. All these movements, however, and especially the anti-movements, largely result from that brand of historicism, which I will discuss in this section, and especially from the historicist attitude towards progress. It is interesting, though, a lot of this, like what I just had this thought, that how you were talking about the break thing. I almost, so much of that is from Marxists, I think. I mean, am I wrong there? The Marxist influence on art, they're always like anti-art, anti-this, anti-that. A lot of it does come from, I think, what Popper would call bad philosophy. Am I off-base?

[01:07:36]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:07:36]  Chris: I think it's about calling into question the traditional idea of beauty.

[01:07:43]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:07:44]  Chris: I think that that's a really interesting thing that everyone should pay attention to.

[01:07:50]  Peter: They want to deconstruct what's beautiful.

[01:07:53]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:07:53]  Peter: Rather than just make something that is enjoyable and beautiful and virtuosic, virtuosic and all that. Yeah. That's not what you do.

[01:08:06]  Unidentified speaker: But that's, no.

[01:08:12]  Chris: I think most people can recognize that. It's pretty silly though.

[01:08:16]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:08:17]  Chris: The postmodernism. But you see that the ideas that Popper's talking about, historicism and progress, that's very common. I mean, you see that all the time. There's this idea that what came before is okay, but it's 2024. We got to do something different now. We have to progress upon what happened in the past. And like Popper says, there is progress in music, especially with technology.

[01:08:54]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, there's truth.

[01:08:55]  Peter: There are problems to be solved.

[01:08:58]  Chris: Yes, but I like what he says, that you could solve some problems, but it creates new problems.

[01:09:06]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:09:08]  Chris: Then that happens a lot. Yeah. When Schoenberg and the atonal composers did away with the idea of tonality, that caused a whole new set of problems. Not least that it's really not that fun to listen to.

[01:09:29]  Peter: Yeah, that's a pretty big problem, I guess, if you're creating music that's not fun to listen to.

[01:09:38]  Bruce: So how would this relate to David Deutsch's idea of objective beauty, if at all?

[01:09:49]  Peter: Well, that's a difficult question. Maybe some people listening to this have listened to what I think will be our previous episode on our flowers. Why are flowers beautiful? Geez. I'll have to think about that. What do you think, Chris?

[01:10:12]  Chris: I mean, that seems like one of those questions. It's like, what is art? That's it's a very difficult question to answer.

[01:10:22]  Chris: Why do we think things are beautiful? What makes a piece of music beautiful? I think generally people just know it intuitively.

[01:10:40]  Bruce: I don't think that's really what my question is. Let me see if I can get a little bit more specific. I know that you're not familiar with David Deutsch. And Peter's right that he and I did a podcast episode on this that will probably air before this one because we were planning to do them back to back. So David Deutsch has a chapter on why flowers are beautiful. And one of the things he does say, I would have to go find the quote, is that because there is such a thing as an objective beauty that we can make progress towards that objective standard or ideal of beauty forever. Meaning that it should be the case that we should be able to find increasingly good music to infinity, right? That it will always be that we can improve the beauty of our music. Now, I actually took some issues with some things that David Deutsch said in that chapter. So I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with that. And I mean that quite literally like I don't know. I'm not being cute here. I'm kind of open to the possibility he's right. I'm kind of open to the possibility that he's overinterpreting this. But is Popper agreeing or disagreeing with David Deutsch on this idea that I guess I could see Popper's stance that the new version of music is always better, that he's got a problem with that, although he's not denying some sense of progress, but just the idea that it's always going to keep improving. That seems to me like maybe it's at odds with David Deutsch's view on objective beauty from that chapter. And he mentions music as a specific example. So this isn't just me throwing music in there.

[01:12:34]  Bruce: He throws out music as an example of objective beauty.

[01:12:38]  Peter: He seems to be saying that not everything newer is better, but there are still musical problems to be worked out. So I don't think he rejects the idea that progress is possible in music, right?

[01:12:55]  Chris: Well, one thing he says is that you have an advantage for coming after someone like Beethoven did after Bach, or Mozart did after Bach, because you can try to master what Bach gave us. And it's like he relates that to Einstein and Newton. First, he says, was Einstein a better physicist than Newton? Maybe not, but he mastered Newtonian physics.

[01:13:32]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:13:33]  Unidentified speaker: Well, let's get really out there.

[01:13:36]  Peter: Let me ask you this, Chris. A thousand years from now, we're on the Dyson Sphere in a post-biological state. Death has been cured. Presumably, musical problems will have been worked out during this time, and will become objectively better and better. Will the composers of then make Bach look like a child banging on a piano?

[01:14:04]  Chris: I can't see that happening.

[01:14:10]  Bruce: I read Popper is saying he can't see it happening either. Maybe I'm reading too much in, and I don't think Popper is quite clear enough that I can be sure I got what he meant. Well, I read Deutsch as saying, yes, someday while we're living on the Dyson Sphere, see Bach as a child banging on the piano, and he would never literally say that of course, but that's the feeling I get. I read Popper as saying, look, there is going to be progress and there'd be interesting problems to solve in that sense.

[01:14:47]  Unidentified speaker: Here it is.

[01:14:47]  Bruce: Of course, there can be something like progress in art in the sense that certain new possibilities may be discovered and also new problems. In music, such inventions as counterpoint revealed almost an infinity of new possibilities and problems. He says that, that's the part that you were getting at, Peter. But then he immediately goes on to say, he just doesn't really agree that there's, that on the Dyson Sphere, that Bach is going to be like a child banging on the piano, right?

[01:15:15]  Chris: Well, he just says it's never happened in music. Like what I said about Einstein and Newton, that never happened in music, according to Popper. Like the people that came the closest to Bach's mastery was perhaps Mozart, and he didn't do it.

[01:15:36]  Unidentified speaker: It just never happened before.

[01:15:39]  Bruce: Let me read the entire paragraph. I just started reading because it is the one that you're paraphrasing. Of course, there could be something like progress in art in the sense that certain new possibilities may be discovered and also new problems. In music, such inventions as counterpoint revealed almost an infinity of new possibilities and problems. There is also purely technological progress, for example, in certain instruments. But although this may open new possibilities, it is not a fundamental significance. Changes in the medium may remove more problems than they create. There could conceivably be progress even in the sense that musical knowledge grows, that is, a composer's mastery of the discoveries of all his great predecessors. But I do not think that anything like this has been achieved by any musician. Einstein may not have been a greater physicist than Newton, but he mastered Newtonian technique completely. No similar relation seems ever to have existed in the field of music. Even Mozart, who may have come closest to it, did not attain it, and Schubert did not come close to it. There is also always the danger that newly realized possibilities may kill old ones. Dynamic effects, dissonance, or even modulation may, if used too freely, dull our sensitivity to the less obvious effects of counterpoint, or say to the allusion [word uncertain] of the old modes. Now, whatever else you might say about that paragraph, it really doesn't seem like Popper is arguing for the kind of progress in music that Deutsch is.

[01:17:09]  Bruce: And again, maybe I'm interpreting, I feel like Deutsch is a little more clear here than Popper is. So I'm more likely, if I'm misinterpreting one of the two gentlemen, it's probably Popper. But it does seem to me like Popper and Deutsch are at odds with each other in this way.

[01:17:26]  Peter: Well, maybe, I mean, Deutsch definitely subscribes the idea of infinite progress, presumably infinite aesthetic progress too. Although Deutsch is kind of like a little bit of a conservative about music too. I think he likes that he probably sees eye to eye, and if I had to guess, on Popper, with Popper, the viewpoints expressed, I mean, he doesn't like all this bad postmodern philosophy.

[01:17:53]  Unidentified speaker: I get that from his tweets also.

[01:17:56]  Peter: And he seems to appreciate Bach and Beethoven and all this. Maybe it's a little bit hard to say.

[01:18:05]  Chris: Well, it's hard to predict the future. It's impossible to predict the future.

[01:18:15]  Chris: It seems unlikely that there will be another Bach. But, you know, how lucky we are to...

[01:18:22]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:18:24]  Peter: I mean, maybe it's once in a thousand years kind of a thing.

[01:18:28]  Chris: To me, Bach is like a Shakespeare level composer. So, you know, has there been another Shakespeare? You think, can you imagine there ever be an one?

[01:18:44]  Bruce: Well, there's a lot of people, there was a lot of people that would argue with you over there. Anyway, like, I feel like that's a good question that you're asking.

[01:18:53]  Peter: Yeah, no, it's a great question.

[01:18:56]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:18:56]  Peter: Well, anyway, I thought maybe this can be kind of one of our punchier episodes, but I really wanted to end it with the my favorite quote from from this, which is the last couple of paragraphs of this.

[01:19:12]  Unidentified speaker: This.

[01:19:12]  Chris: Let's see if it might be the same one I was going to end with.

[01:19:16]  Peter: Oh, I suspect it will be. But although fashions may be unavoidable, and although new styles may emerge, we ought to despise attempts to be fashionable. It should be obvious that modernism, the wish to be new or different at any price, to be ahead of one's time, to produce the work of art of the future, has nothing to do with the things an artist should value and should try to create. Historicism in art is just a mistake, yet one finds it everywhere. Even in philosophy, one hears of a new style of philosophizing or a philosophy in a new key, as if it were the key that mattered rather than the tune played. And as if it mattered whether the key was old or new. Of course, I do not blame an artist or a musician for trying to say something new. What I really blame many of the modern musicians for is their failure to love great music, the great masters and their miraculous works, the greatest perhaps that man has produced.

[01:20:30]  Bruce: Well, there's not a lot of wiggle room in that quote. Come on, Popper, tell us what you really think.

[01:20:38]  Chris: I've had that thought so many times, listening to music and thinking, do you love music? Do you actually love the great masters?

[01:20:54]  Chris: I responded to that so much.

[01:20:56]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:20:57]  Peter: Well, it's a sad fact about the world we live in, perhaps, that so many people have never heard them. I mean, I know people who are musicians, they don't go to the symphony. They don't know what it's like to sit in front of 80 musicians on stage playing Bach and Beethoven and Mozart, Brahms or whatever. It's not something that unfortunately, so many people just do not experience that.

[01:21:31]  Chris: Well, especially if you're a musician, though, you would think that you would be obsessed with the great masters of your given musical field.

[01:21:45]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:21:45]  Chris: But not everybody is. Or maybe they enjoy that, but think it's not, maybe going back to the historicism thing, I have to do something different than that.

[01:22:04]  Peter: Well, I've definitely appreciate that I've got a brother who sees things a little differently than most people, and you've turned me on.

[01:22:16]  Unidentified speaker: You think I do, though?

[01:22:18]  Chris: I don't think that I'm hugely controversial in this.

[01:22:23]  Peter: You're maybe not in terms of a niche population in New York City, but I mean, I don't know anyone else like you.

[01:22:34]  Unidentified speaker: I won't say that [wording uncertain].

[01:22:36]  Unidentified speaker: But it's weird.

[01:22:37]  Chris: It's, I mean, you might think I'm a snob or something, but it's actually anti-snob viewpoint. I mean, to be enjoying the great masters of the music that most people have recognized as the most influential, greatest musicians and composers, and being against the postmodernism and the avant-garde. So in that way, it's kind of, can you call it anti-snob snobbery?

[01:23:20]  Peter: You're an anti-elitist elitist, how about that?

[01:23:23]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:23:26]  Peter: No, but I've gotten so much from your viewpoint over the years, and you've turned me on to so much great music and art, and I really appreciate you, Chris, and I really appreciate you coming on our podcast to talk about this. Yes, thank you.

[01:23:45]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:23:45]  Chris: Well, thanks for having me on, and I got a lot out of the Popper chapters for sure.

[01:23:53]  Unidentified speaker: Really resonated with me.

[01:23:55]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:23:56]  Peter: You just need to read David Deutsch now.

[01:23:58]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:24:00]  Unidentified speaker: It's on my list.

[01:24:01]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:24:04]  Peter: Well, thank you, Chris. Have a great day.

[01:24:07]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.

[01:24:07]  Chris: Great to meet you, Bruce.

[01:24:09]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:24:09]  Unidentified speaker: Nice to meet you too.

[01:30:56]  Peter: Hello again. If you've made it this far, please consider giving us a nice rating on whatever platform you use, or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes. As you probably know, we are a podcast loosely tied together by the Popper Deutsch Theory of Knowledge. We believe David Deutsch's Four Strands tie everything together. So we discuss science, knowledge, computation, politics, art, and especially the search for artificial general intelligence. Also, please consider connecting with Bruce on X at BNielsen01 [spelling uncertain]. Also, please consider joining the Facebook group The Many Worlds of David Deutsch, where Bruce and I first started connecting.

[01:31:40]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.