Hello everyone
Struan wrote:
>P.P.S Glove. I can assure you that they didn't have perfect pitch all
along, unless they were very
>good liars, and being good friends I doubt it. Your second question
actually brings out my point. I
>don't have perfect pitch so I do have to rely on the'hum.'
Hi Struan
Of course I didn't mean to infer that your friends are liars. There seems to
be convincing evidence supporting both the theory of learned abilities and
the theory of in-born "instinctive" abilities. In virtually all fields, a
vast amount of practice is required before a sort of world-class excellence
appears. The reason some individuals acheived greatness sooner was simply
that they had practiced longer and harder than their peers.
There is an excellent paper here...
http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Py104/howe.innate.html
... called - "Innate Gifts and Talents; Reality or Myth?" which goes into
some of the studies done on perfect pitch and how what we normally think of
as absolute pitch can indeed be learned.
So I will concede your point, Struan. You are right, I am wrong. Perfect
pitch can be learned by those who put the effort into learning it. Yet what
we are calling perfect pitch is actually not really perfect, just very close
to perfect. All those individuals who researchers studied perfect pitch in
were world-class musicians who had put at least 10,000 hours of practice
into honing their skills. It could be argued that these individuals all had
a predilection to music to start with to put the effort that they had put
into their art.
Anyway, back to the original point that I was trying to make with this
analogy, what we call "good" has now been relegated to empirical learning,
yet this is clearly in opposition to where Pirsig is going. He condemns
conventional academia over and over again. Rather than saying "good" lies in
empirical learning, it would be more proper to say that "it" lies in
practice, and those individuals who use right practice.
Right practice means recognizing one's true nature, in essence becoming
aware of the way our physical being interacts with that non-physical part of
our being. Since it seems that naturalistic fallacy manifests only in a
causal universe, and the MOQ drops causality, then naturalistic fallacy only
exists if focused upon.
It seems clear that both innate and learned talents play enormous roles in
all our lives, and that they are so complexly interwoven with each other
that there may be no possibility of ever separating them.
Best wishes
glove
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