AW: adsr and lfo abolish (Don goes off the deep end again) (LONG)

[Debby and Gene Stopp]

According to a rather interesting book I read coming back from Amsterdam
(and Brussels, and England)yesterday called "Consciousness Explained" by
Daniel Dennet (1991), the human mind is:

A virtual von Neumann machine (serial process responsible for our "inner
voice") running on the parallel hardware of the neurocortex which was never
intended to run such an application, with thousands of memes as well that
have accumulated over the last few thousand years (language being one of the
most important).

The original purpose of the parallel processing engine was for survival,
being capable of several low-level simultaneous processes important for
imagining and planning how to survive, or how to eat, or responding to
threats, etc. A kind of side effect of the extra time given to us due to our
superiority was communication, leading to language, and the rest of
civilisation as we now know it. So, this implies that the hardware of the
ear and ear-brain interface was really optimized by natural selection for
pattern recognition (idenitification for the four F's - fight, flee, feed,
and mate). It would follow that the frequency response cannot be tailored to
speech, since this is a quite recent development in Darwinian terms. More
likely it has been tailored to the frequency range of most vocal tracts of
the animals we would be most likely to eat or run away from, which happens
to be in our size range. Bats have never been either enemy nor food. The
virtual von Neumann machine evolved in parallel with the language and is not
really the ideal thing to run on a wide parallel processing system, but
that's apparently the way things happened by chance.

Anyway I just thought I'd throw that out, mostly because I am so jazzed
about the book and it happens to be relevant to the thread of
psychoacoustics. Any fan of "hard AI" should read it - come to think of it,
any fan of hard AI has probably already read it since it's been out for
eight years. I'm a little slow sometimes. Also my apologies to fans of
Cartesian Dualism or other ideologist systems if I seem to discount their
belief systems.

- Gene

p.s. sorry I did not try to contact any list memebers during my trip - I
really had no time for anything other than the business side.... I didn't
even see the sights...

-----Original Message-----
From: Dr. Jörg Schmitz <schmitz at patho.bonn.com>
To: 'synth-diy at mailhost.bpa.nl' <synth-diy at mailhost.bpa.nl>
Date: Tuesday, April 13, 1999 7:05 AM
Subject: RE :AW: adsr and lfo abolish (Don goes off the deep end again)
(LONG)


>
>Sorry Martin, Don and jbv,
>
>but I think you ALL are wrong and right at the same time.
>
>The inner ear is a kind of a "mechanical" fourier analysis - device. The
>
.
.
.
>Sorry for that Blah blah, but i am an anatomical pathologist.
>
>PS: What the brain does with these frequencies is a field of
>neurophysiology. And very very very complex.
>