Releavant links:
https://curi.us/2451-human-problems-and-abstract-problems
I am trying to understand what do people mean when they say science is objective and things like music and morality are not objective but are subjective instead.
Is scientific and mathematical knowledge considered objective because science and mathematics doesn’t have anything to do with subjects? I think yes. This is one sense in which objective and subjective is used but this is not my main interest.
The main thing I am interested is this another sense in which people are using the word objective (maybe this use is related to the above use). When people say that science is objective they mean that scientific knowledge is more absolute and solid. By saying that beauty is subjective they mean that in music there isn’t that type of solidity and absoluteness. They mean
- That different people can have different preferences for which music is better and there is nothing one person can say to the other to show why one preference is better. For ex. in maths we can give proofs but in music there is nothing like proofs or experiments which is why music does not have that type of solidity.
- That saying Mozart is better than an average Joe makes no sense.
I don’t understand how preference and knowledge are related but I think they are related. “All Problems Are Soluble” article talks about how problems can be solved by changing preferences but I don’t get fully how knowledge and preferences are linked.
I have some other related confusions as well. Music lies in the field of aesthetics. In the field of science we try to discover scientific truth but what do we try to do in the field of aesthetics? Is a good song in the field of aesthetics analogous to a good scientific theory? Is a Mozart composition akin to for example Newton’s laws?
Whatever project you are working on in this thread.
I didn’t think of this as taking on a project. I just read the rules and now I have a little more context. I understand why the project planning criticism was raised.
The idea of planning and taking on projects makes me feel anxious. Which is why I don’t have a plan.
Is converting the category of the post allowed? I think the further discussion might go into stuff other than the topic of what makes beauty objective and that further discussion might be helpful to me so I want to change this to an unbounded discussion so that it can go into any unbounded topics that might be helpful to me.
I have changed the topic category back to friendly. I wanted ET and other higher class people to help me deal with my irrationalities regarding project planning and I wanted them to bring up topic themselves and guide me. I realized why wanting that is wrong so keeping this thread as unbounded doesn’t make sense. I will start a new unbounded thread for discussing my irrationalities about project planning and for getting help. I want this thread to be about this topic only.
I guessed an idea as to why people want to differentiate music and science. All knowledge is contextual. Subjects are not part of the context around which physical knowledge is created. Same is not true for music. For example a problem in music that Mozart faced: Is this composition beautiful to me(Mozart)? Here a subject (Mozart) is part of the problem context. For comparison a problem is physics would be: Do objects that have electrical charge exert electrical force on each other? No subject is part of the context of this problem. Does it make sense to classify music and physics in different categories I suggested above? One category is things like physics which doesn’t have subjects in the context of its problems. And the other category is music.
I think that science is objective and music is subjective is a common sense idea. I guess what this common sense idea means is that science is objective because the context of scientific problems doesn’t have anything to do with subjects and music is subjective because the context of musical problems involves subjects. Is this guess correct?