Music and Speech

I've often wondered why we like music. It seems sort of arbitrary, and it may actually be soon (more on that later). But regardless, we do like music. It's found in every culture around the world. It is truly ubiquitous as a human trait (barring a small portion of the population whose brains are wired differently). So why do we like music?

Well it could just be a fluke. Maybe we just like music because it's something our brains just evolved to like. However I'd like to posit a different hypothesis. Of course this is just my opinion, and it could be wrong, but I think it hangs together pretty well.

Start hundreds of thousands of years ago. A branch of proto-humans starts experimenting with sound. This isn't anything new or unique. Dolphins and various birds make a whole host of complex sounds to communicate. Many animals do complex mating dances and calls. Of course many animals don't do much of this. Slugs don't do a whole lot of anything. Cats have a few different meows and hisses at their disposal, but there's only so much you can communicate with that.

So this branch of proto-humans finds that having a wider range of noises they can both make and distinguish gives them a unique ability to coordinate with other member of their species that other animals can't. As so it was that speech was selected for. We probably made different pitches of grunts, whistles, hums, and so forth. Over time this became so useful that we started developing physical structures to aid in the creation of these unique sounds.

At a certain point, this evolution of noises hit a tipping point where the ambiguity of what we were conveying was replaced with codified languages. Why have to distinguish between a high pitched noise and a low pitched noise when we can agree on logical operators which can literally convey anything (math, science, religion, emotion, etc.).

So what does it have to do with music? I like to think that music was a skill which allowed our proto-human ancestors to get better at both the making and distinguishing of sounds. I can almost imagine groups of proto-humans dancing around in circles stamping their feet in rhythum and making coordinated sounds not all that dissimilar from music. The species which practice music and had an appreciation for it were able to better recognize subtle differences and relationships between sounds that non-musical minds could not. There may well be different paths to speech that don't involve music, but I think music was a very obvious and simple tool to enable the evolution of speech.

And this never went away. But will it? We have a robust set of communication techniques available to us. Different spoken languages, art (which may have similar roots as it relates to other centers of the brain), math and logic, sign language, facial expression and so on. As far as developing a patter of making noises to communicate with other members of our species, we're pretty much “there”... right Well there's two answers I think are plausible (actually more than that, but these are the broad categories). An optimistic view and a pessimistic one.

First the pessimistic. We really have gotten about as much out of the tactic of making music as we can get. Music is nice, but it's vestigial and has served it's purpose. Over time, we may lose the ability to care about music. As we use complex languages born out of a musical background, the need for that skill will just fade away. Perhaps not completely, but it will no longer be a powerful driving evolutionary force as it was in the past leaving it to be overwritten with more applicable software.

Now the optimistic. We have very little insight into what traits actually drive our future evolution. It's reasonably easy to look at our history and see why we evolved one trait over another. But predicting where we will evolve next? There are just too many factors at play to know which one will dominate others, especially with something as complicated as the human physical and emotional reaction to beauty. Doesn't that sound optimistic? Our profound ignorance in the forces at play guiding our evolution? Well the optimistic part is that we've had complex language for a long time, and we still have music as well. It should be obvious to anyone who loves music that the parts of the psyche that are touched when listening to or creating music are deep and meaningful. Regardless of what it may have started out as, we have incorporated it into how we as humans think. It's quite possible it serves a different purpose now. Maybe more along the lines of why we dream. Or how we connect emotionally with others. Maybe it's still fine-tuning how we connect with people. It's a form of communication; of poetry. When we hear a touching lyric in a song, we contemplate it's meaning. We act on those emotions. Music may be more central to how we think than we even realize.

Kaleidoscopics

I got to thinking about brains today, which as any person with an overactive imagination knows, is sort of a black hole. But regardless, my thoughts shifted to consciousness, understanding of the world around us, and psychedelics (specifically DMT and other chemicals which occur naturally in the brain).

I'm not one to believe that much (if any) real astounding wisdom can be derived from the use of drugs, but it does raise the question of why such chemicals naturally exist in our brains, and why adding more of them (or sympathetic chemicals) has such a profound effect on us, perceptually, spiritually and emotionally.

As I started to think about the problem from a programming perspective, I wondered what their role could be and I came up with the idea of "kaleidoscopics". Really this is just a made up word that I though sounded cool, but the idea is that it's an agent which casts doubt upon normal inputs.

 It's difficult  to design a system which is both deterministic and "intelligent" in the sense which humans typically ascribe to the word. A simple system would be an if-then statement. More complex systems introduce more and more variables, until you have a system, which, like a brain, or an ant colony, takes on emergent properties. There's obviously a lot more going on than the simple interaction of one method or another, but to some extent after a time a system (we'll use the brain as the example from here on out) reaches a state of relative homeostasis.

So I'm rambling a little bit. The point is, how do you program something which can learn any language, lie, love, play, laugh, calculate, trust and kill? You've got to have some pretty flexible rules around what defines reality.

So my hypothesis (like most of the hypotheses I make, being grounded in absolutely no scientific study) is that these chemicals, or if not them, some other set of chemicals in the brain, has the job of turning things on their heads; randomly flipping bits, and presenting the mind with alternative interpretations of what's going on. As a child, when the brain is young and the neurochemical soup of  grey matter starts to solidify into a brain and consciousness, benefits greatly from the ability to try out theories and discard them at a moments notice.

As we get older, we start to know what the flipping of a bit will do (what if I COULD put my hand through the wall), and some of our experimentation, sadly, ends.

It also brings up the somewhat terrifying concept of The Singularity, in that to program a mind with the same ability to perceive reality as flexibly as we do, we would have to take the safety off, and really give the program the ability to come up with whatever it wants. It's pretty cool when you see it on the scale of Conway's Game Of Life, but scale it up to (super)human intelligence and allow the possibility for it to veer off in a direction like Skynet, and the human race would be in trouble. Or we could end up with something closer to Peter F. Hamilton's concept of the singularity; a more benign entity whose motivations are beyond our comprehension.

Again, I'm rambling. But if I can try to tie a nice bow on this, is that reality is highly subjective. If you think about how YOU would try to program something to "perceive" reality, it cascades into all sorts of deliciously complex issues. But one of them I'm sure is a mechanism for self doubt. It plagues us and drives us at the same time, but always has a profound effect.