BAMJO

It has been quite a while since I’ve last written here. Anyways, I’m finally a functional member of society again and can begin to act like one. For starters, as I am currently majoring in Psychology now, I get to have proper Philosophy classes for the first time in my life.

Needless to say, I was incredibly inspired, and for my first assignment I went a little too ham and introduced too many technical ideas. I digress, it was a much needed release from the depths of Engineering hell.

So! As of now, I’ll probably be posting my class work here as to document my journey through understanding the history of philosophy and psychology by extension.

Greek Philosophy: Socrates, Inductive Definition, and AI Art

It is quite humorous to imagine a balding, older person with a beer belly frolicking around in the ancient fields of Athens, every often bombarding the youth busy in their menial tasks with hard-hitting questions such as, “Who are you, really?”

“Uh-my name is Plato,” said the young Athenian, clearly startled by the bumbling man.
“No, that’s your name. Who, what, and why, is Plato?”
And young Plato’s mind was blown.

At least, that’s how I pictured what happened back then. Some truth is evident in the fictional exchange I wrote above. The pursuit, of essence. In contrast with the superficial, what Socrates sought was the nitty-gritty of things, delving into commonalities between ideas to figure out what some thing truly is (or to use the academic term, inductive definition). The relationship of the superficial vs. the essence is what I’d consider truly relevant in this fast digitized society we live in. After all, everyone asks, “Where is Waldo?” but nobody asks, “How is Waldo?”

To explain, let’s take a look at Dall-E, or really any machine-learning AI program designed to synthesize an idea. Quite simply, what it does is exactly what inductive definition is. Put the program through rigorous training exercises consisting of looking at a million of pictures tagged with their descriptive keywords. Below are 2 images that show the weakness of not having enough information to define a thing. On the right, we have the prompt ‘jakarta’ generating a picturesque panorama of Bundaran HI and what presumably is Monas, painted in an almost fish-eye perspective that brings to mind the architectural works of Egon Schiele. On the left, I combined ‘jakarta’ with an old horror game ‘silent hill’ and what we got instead is a dark hallway leading up to a pair of doors illuminated by moonlight shining from a staircase. There’s also the ominous bloody silhouette of a black-haired woman on the bottom-left corner.

What is to be learned from this? We can see that ‘jakarta’, being the mononymous term it is and popularly queried as a city in search engines and the World Wide Web, could generate a believable, albeit artistic depiction of a city with the likeness to Jakarta, the city itself. However, combined with a relatively niche term ‘silent hill’, it lost what ‘jakarta’ is generally known to look like. There’s a glaring hole in this analysis though, as ‘silent hill’ is a prompt with a unicode ‘space’ character in it, which in programming usually lead to unintended consequences. One could also argue that the dark hallway looks like the interior of some old market buildings in Central Jakarta. The fact remains that, without enough necessary information, an AI program (as of now), could not generate a believable enough recreation of the original thing.

Compare the above example with the one below of Bill Evans, a famous jazz pianist. Note the white man, hunched back, glasses, slicked back hair, and formal attire, captured in black-and-white photography common for the time. These would become the essence of ‘bill evans’ according to Dall-E.

For clarification, Bill Evans have never been seen holding a guitar in his documented life. Due to both prompts, ‘bill evans’ and ‘playing guitar’, describing a general and widely understood thing, Dall-E Mini could generate an accurate idea of ‘bill evans playing guitar’. It is much evident here that more popular prompts lead to better results. Thus, Dall-E Mini, equipped with knowledge of the patterns that every ‘bill evans’ and ‘playing guitar’ on the World Wide Web show, could define the essence of Bill Evans playing a guitar in a picture.

The idea of AI artists are something I’m deeply interested in, exceptionally so due to fear, and I will probably be returning to this topic in the following weeks if I can find something to connect it with the taught lessons.

Roman Philosophy and the Dark Ages: Occam’s Razor in Jazz Harmony and Galileo’s Objective and Subjective Reality

A common principle in scholastic writing is what came to be known as Occam’s razor. “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances,” wrote Isaac Newton. With God, the simplest is always the best, so too mathematics and sciences. So too, with jazz.

Music exists within the realm of physics, with measurable dimensions of space and time. These are primary qualities, those that constitute an objective reality. The sound emitted from a café’s sound system playing the same droll cookie-cutter jazz playlist is the same, whoever you are and wherever you are in that café. The ‘droll cookie-cutter jazz’ part is, in contrast, the secondary quality, which constitutes subjective reality. This is subject to my own experience of the sound emanating from the speakers, and my perception of the music itself.

Tastes, odours, and colours are not exclusive to material objects. Synesthesia proves that certain individuals could perceive shapes and colours from the sound they hear. In music theory, we study intervals between notes and attach emotions to them. I will be discussing basic jazz harmony through the lens of Galileo’s objective and subjective reality.

Jazz harmony is derived from modern Western harmony, based on triads (a combination of 3 notes with specific intervals) with an added ‘blue note’ or extension note. Triads are built from intervals, with emotions agreed upon by consensus by the modern music institutions. For example, the major third interval, spaced 4 semitones from its root note, of a C (the root note), is an E. The perfect fifth interval, spaced 7 semitones, is a G. These 3 notes create the C major chord, a sound known to be affirming and safe. The major third is ‘happy’, the minor third is ‘sad’, and the perfect fifth is ‘firm’.

The technicalities of those intervals are the primary qualities of harmony. The affirming and safe feeling from a C major is the secondary quality. Back to jazz harmony, a ‘blue note’ is a note that doesn’t necessarily fill the criteria for a proper interval according to the rules. A ‘blue note’ could be anything, but to put into context, I’ll add a major third interval above the perfect fifth of a C major chord. 4 semitones above G is a B. B and C are dissonant since they are only a semitone apart. However, due to the position of B being above the C in the chord, we instead create an illusion of an E minor chord (E being the root, G being the minor third, and B and the perfect fifth), within the C major chord.

We achieve happiness and sadness at the same time (subjective truth), through the power of jazz harmony (objective truth).

Now, Occam’s razor state to prefer the simplest explanations over the more complicated ones. We will be returning to Bill Evans for this one. Bill Evans is known to voice his chords in a way that ‘shaves’ the unnecessary notes from a chord. In jazz, the perfect fifth is expendable due to it sounding the same whether a chord is major or minor. A root note and a perfect fifth is ambiguous enough to avoid major or minor qualities (also known as a power chord in rock music).

In a recording of “My Foolish Heart” from 1961, Evans begins the performance by playing the first A major chord in the beginning with only a G# (blue note), B (blue note), and C# (the major third), instead of an A, C#, and E. Scott LaFaro plays the root A on contrabass, providing a strong foundation for Evans’ piano. Using exclusively blue notes in the major chord, Evans effectively shaved the implication of an A major chord down to its most important colour, the major third interval. In this short amount of time, the trio was able to create a fleeting moment of ‘home’, but the home is not truly clear due to the blue notes.

To put simply, the exclusion of the perfect fifth is an example of Occam’s razor in jazz harmony. However, jazz harmony expands on the effect, by instead ‘murkying the waters’, denying a clear indication whether if it is truly an A major chord or not. In conclusion, Occam’s razor in music does not prevent more interpretations and questions, but rather encourages more of them. This is the opposite effect of that in the sciences and of what we have learned in class.

In retrospect, I feel bad for my instructor.