Saw them in New York probably 1985ish. I love the band but I wouldn't attend another concert. During the encore, they ignited two toasters on fire. It was at the Kitchen in downtown Manhattan and the place was packed.
I think the most fascinating thing about music (from a mathematical/scientific perspective) is the fact that the principal harmonics of equal temperament are so close to the mathematical ideals. Fourths and fifths are so close trained musicians typically cannot hear the difference. Major thirds are farther from the ideal but still are less than 1% off. That can be heard by the trained ear, but in the real world there are chorus effects (multiple voices/instruments at nominal but slightly varied pitch), vibrato, reverb etc. such that in most cases a just major 3rd sounds fine.
Without just temperament, we would never have had "The Well Tempered Clavier", Bobby Daren's "Mac The knife", and basically all of western music from the baroque period on.
It is nearly incontrovertible that perfect (aka absolute) pitch is either 100% innate or picked up in very early childhood. A product like this could easily discourage kids from learning music.
It's also a well-established fact that many of the most famous musicians in history, from the Beatles to Tchaikovsky did not have perfect pitch.
Perfect pitch can even be a negative factor in one's musical training. For example, in musical theater, cabaret, and jazz, transposition is a necessary skill. Singers routinely ask the accompianist (on piano) to move the key up or down to match their vocal range. I have heard anecdotally that perfect pitch actually makes it difficult to transpose, because if you learned a song in a certain key, the transposed version sounds like a different tune.
Perfect pitch is a hindrance because it is an inability to perceive relative pitch.
However relative pitch people can hear perfect pitch with training. I can do this for the most part. I typically always start singing in the same key after years of practice and base my pitch off of that. At this point it's automatic for the most part. I always start my songs on middle G. And Bs are extremely distinct.
But I agree the obsession with perfect pitch on here is weird. I'm guessing someone saw a friend do a parlour trick and is convinced this is some great advantage. It's not.
I find it strange that no one talks about consciousness and intelligence from the perspective of evolution.
We have big brains for exactly one reason only: bigger brains bestowed reproductive success upon our species.
Evolution doesn't give a shit about the meaning of 'consciousness'. It just pushed us farther and farther along a trajectory that led to modern humans (and other animals).
This take suggests, then, that consciousness might be an epiphenomenon -- an aspect of the system that comes about outside of the pressure to reproduce and thrive. It arises unbidden, and we don't have any a-priori information as to its purpose or effect on reproductive success.
Put another way: we have a correlation (the smartest things seem to be conscious) but not causation. Consciousness may arise naturally in any system above some intelligence threshold. Perhaps it arises early in the evolutionary cycle, and does in fact have an impact on species success. We really have no way of knowing what is the chicken vs the egg (Smart things become conscious, or consciousness promotes intelligence). Or maybe some smart things are conscious and others are not.
Looking at this from an AI perspective, in some sense it doesn't matter which scenario is true, if all you care about is results. The AI equivalent of "Shut up and compute" (riffing on Feynman's "Shut up and calculate").
Where this gets tricky is when we haul in the baggage of ethics and morality into the picture. Is it OK if our AI system is treated poorly by human standards? If it is conscious, does that imply an ability to suffer, and/or to feel pleasure? If the answer is yes, does that not make the case for considering their moral status?
In the end, we need to decide if the evidence points to AI as being a form of "philosophical zombies", to which we need not attribute moral status, or they are like us -- presuming we are not zombies ourselves!
Lots of people do though. Daniel Dennett (probably the most influential philosopher of mind in the late 20th century) for example had an evolutionary view of consciousness arguing it was favored by natural selection. And (if I remember correctly) Steven Pinker argued that consciousness was an epiphenomenon.
However there were pretty strong arguments against this idea as early as the 1990s, by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. Gould actually wrote an excellent paper against Dennetts idea[1].
I think Dennetts ideas were extremely popular but have largely fallen out of fashion. Basically what has changed is philosophers no longer take the human mind to be much more special then the minds of other species. What plagued Dennetts ideas the most was this notion of Darwinian fundamentalism sort of the idea that evolution was destined result in high beings like us humans. Modern philosophers (at least the good ones) reject this.
I think consciousness could be a side effect of our limitations. The fact that we can pay attention to at most 2% of our visual field and need to move it constantly around to provide more training data and prompts to "smart" path in our brains. And the movement is physical so it takes time. And processing the information through the loops in our brains takes time. And you can't pause it. And we have the same attention motion system virtualized in our dreams to burn in our memories into chemistry. We are biologically single threaded. If we create similarly limited, embodied AIs we would feel they might be conscious at least at the level of animals. Because they would exhibit conscious like behaviors that we didn't program in.
Look at jumping spiders. With a handful of carefully trained neurons and a body to match they exhibit behaviors that make it very hard to think they are not conscious. Just because they have a body, narrow angle good eyesight and need to look around with their eyes and body.
Consciousness is a red herring. Of all possible intelligences conscious ones are the bottom rung of the ladder, easily simulated by anything above. Below there are only automatons.
Well, it matters quite a bit ethically. If AI were conscious (I don't believe it is) then we'd have a major responsibility to like, not make them suffer, and not kill them.
Are you sure that AI-consciousness implies a responsibility to not make them suffer? Suffering is an evolutionary invention that motivates living things to improve themselves.
But also, what qualifies as suffering to token prediction engines? Their idea of suffering might be massively different than ours. Therefore it's not clear to me at all that consciousness alone implies responsibility.
Certainly the lion does not feel responsibility towards the reduction of suffering in the creatures that it hunts.
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