Music primer, part two

Half-steps and whole steps

As I mentioned in my last post, the major scale has seven notes in it: if you start on middle C and play up the keyboard, you'll play a total of seven notes before you reach the next C. As I also mentioned in my last post, you will also skip five black keys.

Each of those black keys lies between two white keys. But obviously, if you have five black keys distributed among seven white keys, there are a few white keys that don't have black keys between them. The relationship between adjacent white keys that aren't separated by a black key is different from the relationship between adjacent white keys that are. Adjacent white keys separated by a black key are a whole step apart. Adjacent white keys that aren't separated by a black key are a half-step apart.

The difference between the vibrational frequencies of notes a whole step apart is greater than the difference between the vibrational frequencies of notes a half-step apart. As you might imagine, there is a sense in which the distance between notes a whole step apart is twice that of notes a half-step apart. But it's a rather technical sense that I don't want to get into here. (If you're interested in reading more on the subject, you might start with this Wikipedia entry.)

The relationship between whole steps and half-steps is easier to see on the neck of a guitar than on the keys of a piano. The metal frets embedded in the guitar neck mark off consecutive half-steps. To play the melodic interval of a whole step on the guitar, you have to jump across two frets; one fret will take you only a half-step away.

Finally, the distance between a white key on a piano and the black key next to it is a half-step. So you can see that the octave (eight-note span) from C to C -- on a keyboard or on a guitar -- is actually divided into 12 half-steps. On the keyboard, most of those half-steps are between white keys and black keys, but two of them -- from E to F and from B to C -- are between white keys. (There are in fact good mathematical reasons that Western music divides the octave into 12 equal half-steps.)

The major scale revisited

Armed with the notion of half-steps and whole steps, we can make a little better sense of the notion of a major key.

Play up the major scale from middle C to the C above it (all white notes). There's a black key between C and D, so the first step of the scale is a whole step. Same with D to E. But there's no black key between E and F, so that's a half-step (can you hear the difference?). Whole step to G, whole step to A, whole step to B -- then a half-step back to C. So the pattern of whole and half-steps that gives you a major scale is

WWHWWWH.

That's why you need black keys if you start your major scale on any note other than C. Start on D. Your first whole step takes you to E. But E to F is only a half-step, so your second whole step takes you to F-sharp. Then comes a half-step: G. A, B, no problem -- but now you've found the other white-note half-step, B to C. So your next note has to be C-sharp, not C. And a last half-step will bring us back to do.

Make sense?

The same procedure, of course, applies to the neck of the guitar. You can start your scale on any fret you want. The next note will be two frets (a whole step) up. The one after that will be two more frets up. But the one after that (the first half-step) will be only one fret up. Etc.

The procedure works in exactly the same way no matter what fret you begin on. That's why pop guitarists tend to be less clear on the theoretical differences between keys than pianists: changing key on the guitar is just a matter of starting the same pattern on a different fret; each key on the piano has its own distinctive pattern.

Intervals revisited

The concept of whole and half-steps also lets me clarify some distinctions I elided in my last post. I mentioned that in any given major scale (I hope that the principle of the major scale is now clear enough to you that I can stop using C major as a reference point; C is, after all, just one of 12 major scales, none of which should, in principle, be privileged over any other), the distance from 1 to 6 is a sixth. The distance from 3 to the 1 above it is also a sixth. But they're not the same sixth. The sixth from 1 to 6 is a major sixth; that means there are nine half-steps from 1 to 6. But there are only eight half-steps from 3 to 1, making it a minor sixth. Here's the mapping of total half-steps spanned to intervals:

1: minor second
2: major second
3: minor third
4: major third
5: perfect fourth
6: augmented fourth/diminished fifth
7: perfect fifth
8: minor sixth
9: major sixth
10: minor seventh
11: major seventh

The interval of the diminished fifth (6 half-steps) is commonly called the tritone, or less commonly, the diabolus in musica. For a long time, it was considered a gross dissonance, to be avoided. In the 20th century, it was to some extent rehabilitated, but melodies that emphasize tritones can still sound sharp and spiky to the modern ear.

Other scales

So the major scale goes WWHWWWH. But you could, if you wanted, make your own scale out of some random sequence of whole and half-steps -- WHHWWHHW, or whatever. Twentieth-century jazz and classical composers experimented widely with the whole-tone scale (WWWWWW) and the octatonic scale (WHWHWHWH), but by far the most common scale other than the major is, unsurprisingly, the minor.

The minor scale

The basic minor-scale pattern is WHWWHWW. (It has variants, but I'm not going to get into them.) The distinctive thing about it is that the interval from 1 to 3 is not a major third; it's a minor third, the interval between "dead" and "and" in the schoolyard incantation "pray for the dead, and the dead will pray for you". Music written in minor keys tends to have a more melancholy, or brooding, or ominous, or menacing feel than music written in major keys: recall Nigel Tufnel's sage observation that D minor is "the saddest of all keys." Play any peppy tune you know on the keyboard with the third scale degree knocked down a half-step, and it will come out much less peppy*. The Christmas hymn "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" spends a lot of time in a minor key -- as does Britney Spears's "Oops I Did It Again". Both songs occasionally slip into major keys, however, for reasons that I hope will come clear in the next section.

The modes

Take a look at the minor-scale pattern of whole and half-steps. The minor scale, like the major scale, starts over again at the octave. So two octaves of the minor scale will look like this:

WHWWHWWWHWWHWW

Trace out the eight-note pattern beginning on the third scale degree of the minor scale instead of the first. That is, knock off the first two and the last five letters:

WWHWWWH

Look familiar? Yes! It's the major scale! The minor scale is just the major scale begun on a different scale degree and wrapped around on itself. The converse is also true: the minor scale is the major scale begun on a different scale degree and wrapped around on itself.

Another way to say the same thing is, if you play an A on the piano, and play up the next seven white keys, you will have played the minor scale. (The white keys give you the major scale only if you start on C; they give you the minor scale only if you start on A.)

Note that starting the major scale on a different scale degree and wrapping it around will not give you the whole-tone or the octatonic scales: they have fundamentally different patterns (the whole-tone scale has no half-steps at all, so of course it can't give you the major scale). But if there are seven notes in the major scale, there must, perforce, be seven different "wraparound" scales (2 to 2, 3 to 3, 4 to 4, etc.). These wraparound scales are called modes. Two of them -- 1 to 1 and 6 to 6 -- are our familiar major and minor scales. Of the remaining five, three have minor thirds between 1 and 3, and two have major thirds between 1 and 3. The ones with minor thirds partake of the minor-scale melancholy; but the ones with major thirds have distinctive flavors all their own, and it's on those two that I will concentrate in this blog.

The two major-third modes (other than the major scale) are the lydian and the mixolydian. These are the scales that arise when you start on F and G, respectively, and play up the next seven white keys. They are also the modes that follow the following permutations of the major-scale sequence of whole and half-steps:

lydian: WWWHWWH
mixolydian: WWHWWHW

Each scale differs from the major scale in only one respect. The lydian mode has a raised fourth degree relative to the major scale. That is, in the lydian mode, 4 is a half-step higher than the 4 of the major scale. This makes the interval between 1 and 4 a tritone, which gives lydian melodies a piquant sound. The mixolydian mode has a lowered seventh degree relative to the major scale, a similarly fateful alteration. In the major scale, you'll recall, 7 is only a half-step below 1. That close proximity gives the 7 a feeling of kind of leaning toward the 1. It's hard to describe but very easy to hear -- it's the sense in which it instinctively brings us back to do. Widening that interval removes that leaning feeling, which drastically changes the color of the scale.

Because all the modes consist of the major scale wrapped around on itself, it requires a certain amount of effort on the part of the composer to keep modal melodies from simply drifting back into the major: our ears, conditioned by so much major-key music (and possibly predisposed by evolutionary adaptations), tend to pull as back to the familiar (or perhaps the instinctive).

Okay, I think that's gonna do it. I may want to say more about harmony at some later point, but then again, I may not. The distinction between different keys may be as much of a harmonic distinction as I'm going to need to make.

* I'm sure that the popular Boston band the Dresden Dolls has some tunes in minor keys. I don't really know their music, but years ago, when Amanda Palmer was still busking in Harvard Square as the 12-foot bride, I saw her play some of her songs, solo, and without makeup or carved eyebrows, at the original Zeitgeist Gallery on Broadway in Cambridge. After she'd played about four or five songs in a row in minor keys, I yelled, "Play something in a major key!" She thought for a minute and said, "Hm, I don't think I've written anything in a major key since I was 17," and I said, "Back when you could still believe in major keys."

Music primer, part one

Before I make any music-themed posts on this blog, I want to explain a few technical terms that I expect I'll occasionally want to invoke. They're not difficult, but some readers may be unfamiliar with them or have only a vague notion of what they mean. I assume a passing familiarity with the layout of the piano keyboard. If you don't have a keyboard handy and find any of the descriptions below difficult to visualize (or "auralize"), try playing with the little Flash keyboard here. (If you don't have Macromedia Flash installed, there's also a Java piano here.)

The major scale

Most people, I think, know how to find middle C on a keyboard and know that, if you play the next seven white keys in sequence, up the keyboard, you'll spell out the do re mi scale familiar from The Sound of Music ("Do, a deer, a female deer, re, a drop of golden sun," etc.). The last note in that eight-note sequence is another C -- not middle C, but the C an octave (a span of eight notes) above middle C. That is, the do re mi scale -- a.k.a. the major scale -- has only seven notes in it; with the eighth note, you're starting the scale over again, only higher ("that will bring us back to do").

In this blog, I will refer to the notes of the major scale by number. So do is 1, re is 2, mi is 3, etc. Ti ("a drink with jam and bread") is 7, which brings us back to do, or 1.

If you play middle C, and then play the next four white keys, up the keyboard, in sequence, you'll get to G, or 5. But if you play middle C and then play the next three white keys down the keyboard, you'll also get to G, or 5. For every 1, there's a 5 above and a 5 below. There's also a 4 above and a 4 below, etc. And for every 5, there's a 1 below and a 1 above. Etc., etc.

Intervals

An interval is the distance between two notes. We call the distance from 1 to the 5 above it a fifth: the total number of white keys you have to press to get from middle C to the G above it is five. The distance from 1 to the 5 below it, however, is a fourth: the total number of white keys you have to press to get from middle C to the G below it is four. Conversely, the interval from 1 to the 4 above it is a fourth, while the interval from 1 to the 4 below it is a fifth. The interval from 1 to 6 is a sixth, from 1 to 3 is a third, etc.

What's the interval from 5 to the 3 above it (from G to E)? Well, if middle C is 1, how many white keys do you have to press to get from the 5 below middle C (G) to the 3 above it (E)? If you can't figure the answer out in your head, try actually pressing the keys, and then check your answer against the one at the end of this post.

Key

It so happens that the first line of the Christmas carol "Joy to the World" traces out the major scale -- from 1 back down to the 1 below it. Sing it to yourself: "Joy to the world, the Lord is come." You sing the word "joy" on 1, "world" on 5, "lord" on 3, and "come" on 1 again. If you play the eight white keys from the C above middle C back down to middle C in the right rhythm, you'll play the opening line of "Joy to the World."

But let's say that, instead of starting on a C, you start on the next white key above C -- i.e., D. Now, if you just play down the white keys, the tune will sound completely wrong. In order to make it sound right, you'll have to throw in some black keys -- specifically, at "to" and "lord".

If, instead, you started playing "Joy to the World" on E, you'd need four black keys to make it sound right, and if you started on B, you'd need five!

There's a fundamental principle here, one that I've found is not intuitive for nonmusicians. Of everything I've said on this page, it's the most important thing to remember (if you don't know it already): no two major scales use the same notes. If you start your major scale on C, you can use all white keys -- but that's not true for scales begun on any other note. If you start your scale on G or F, you need only one black key -- but it's not the same black key. That is, if you play "Joy to the World" starting on F, you'll need a black key at "the" -- B-flat; but if you play "Joy to the World" starting on G, you'll need your black key at "to" -- F-sharp. (Try it.)

So, a few definitions:

a melody is a set of notes played in sequence;
a chord is a set of notes played simultaneously;
music written in a particular key is music all of whose melodies and chords use the notes of a single scale.

If you play a piece that's entirely in the key of C on the piano, you'll use all white keys. If you play a piece that's entirely in the key of G, you'll use one black key: F-sharp. If you play a piece that's entirely in the key of F, you'll use one black key, but not the same black key: B-flat. Etc., etc.

If you play middle C, then play the next six notes up the keyboard (stopping just shy of the next C), you will have played seven notes total: each of those notes determines a unique major scale, so each of those notes determines a unique major key. You will also, however, have left out five black notes. Each of those notes also determines a unique major key. So there are 12 major keys total.

An experienced musician can tell from a handful of notes what key a particular piece is in. Indeed, she can tell from only three notes what key a piece is in, if they're the right three notes. For instance, there are seven different major keys that contain the note C: C, D-flat, E-flat, F, G, A-flat, and B-flat. But five of those -- the ones with "flat" in their names, plus F -- contain the note B-flat instead of the note B. So if a melody begins on C and moves to a B (not a B-flat), it is in one of only two possible keys: C or G. The C and G scales, in turn, differ by only one note: the C scale contains an F, but the G scale contains an F-sharp. So if a melody contains only three notes, and they're C, B, and F, then the melody must be in the key of C. (Note that, by contrast, if the melody contains the notes B, C, D, E, G, and A, it could be in either C or G.)

This post has taken me a lot longer to write than I anticipated, because I'm trying to be both accurate and accessible. I'll be back with more Music Theory 101 in the coming days.

Answer key: a sixth

Brief dispatch from the front

What did you do with your Friday night? I spent mine drinking the port that my friends Arkadi and Nancy gave me and composing a reply to Charlie Greenbacker's comment on my "Gelernter wrapup" post. If you stopped back here expecting more ruminations on consciousness, you might want to look at what I wrote -- although I should warn you that it's a little, uh, looser in both diction and argument than an official blog entry would be. (It seemed, however, not quite in the spirit of the blogosphere to go back and delete the obscenities and tipsy hyperbole.)

I also think I should mention that the next issue of Technology Review will feature an essay by Daniel Dennett, so both the anticognitivists and the cognitivists are getting a fair hearing in its pages.

Gelernter Wrapup

A few more remarks about David Gelernter's essay in Technology Review, which I hope won't run as long as the ones I made yesterday but probably will.

First, a little terminology, for anyone who hasn't read or has only skimmed the essay. Gelernter uses the term "consciousness" to denote the possession of what philosophers call qualia. He's not talking about the differences between the brain states of waking and sleeping animals, and he's not talking about self-consciousness -- an animal's ability to recognize itself in a mirror, or to use the states of its own body (including its brain) as subjects for further cognition.

Qualia are (purportedly -- I'd like to think this post casts doubt on the very intelligibility of the idea) the felt character of experience. When my thermostat registers a certain drop in temperature, it throws on the heat. Similarly, when I register a certain drop in temperature, I throw on a sweater. But unlike the thermostat (the story goes), I feel cold. This feeling is not reducible to either the average kinetic energy of the air molecules around me or the physical act of putting on clothing: it's its own thing. On this picture, every human perception or sensation has an associated quale (the singular of qualia): the painfulness of pain, the redness of red things, the coldness of cold. To be conscious, in Gelernter's sense, is to have qualia.

Gelernter divides artificial-intelligence theorists into two camps: cognitivists and anticognitivists. Cognitivists believe that, if human beings have qualia (an important if!), then a robot that behaves exactly like a human being (even if its body is vinyl and its "brain" is a huge Rube Goldberg machine made of tinker toys) does, too.

Okay, so armed with these distinctions, let's take a look at a couple of Gelernter's initial claims:

(1) "This subjectivity of mind has an important consequence: there is no objective way to tell whether some entity is conscious."

(2) "we know our fellow humans are conscious"

Amazingly, these claims occur in immediate succession. How are we to reconcile them? Are human beings not "entities"? Let's assume they are. It follows that Gelernter is defending some form of "knowledge" that stands in no need of -- indeed, does not even admit of the possibility of -- objective justification.

What are we to do with claims to such knowledge? Are we under any obligation to take them seriously? Do they even require rebuttal? If they aren't anchored in any objective criteria at all, how could they be rebutted? Indeed, they can't. They can simply be denied.

And this is the position in which cognitivists and anticognitivists find themselves: simply denying each other's unfounded knowledge claims. The anticognitivist says, "We know our fellow humans are conscious." And the cognitivist says, "No we don't -- at least, not in any way that we don't also know that a perfect behavioral simulacrum of a human is conscious."

Gelernter refuses to acknowledge, however, that he and his disputants have reached such an impasse. He insists that the consciousness of his fellows is something he deduces. "We know our fellow humans are conscious," Gelernter says,

but how?...You know the person next to you is conscious because he is human. You're human, and you're conscious--which moreover seems fundamental to your humanness. Since your neighbor is also human, he must be conscious too.

If there is an argument here, however, it is entirely circular: the sole criterion for ascribing consciousness to our fellow humans is -- they're human!

Gelernter then moves on to the Chinese room, which I discussed yesterday. After rehearsing Searle's argument, however, he adds that

we don't need complex thought experiments to conclude that a conscious computer is ridiculously unlikely. We just need to tackle this question: What is it like to be a computer running a complex AI program?

Well, what does a computer do? It executes "machine instructions"--low-level operations like arithmetic (add two numbers), comparisons (which number is larger?), "branches" (if an addition yields zero, continue at instruction 200), data movement (transfer a number from one place to another in memory), and so on. Everything computers accomplish is built out of these primitive instructions."

The obvious cognitivist rejoinder, as I mentioned yesterday, is that neurons just relay electrical signals, faster or slower, and emit higher concentrations of this or that neurotransmitter. Everything brains accomplish is built out of these primitive operations. If consciousness can emerge from the accumulation of mechanistic neural processes, why can't it similarly emerge from the accumulation of mechanistic computational processes? Again, Gelernter responds by simply identifying consciousness and humanness, without any argumentative support:

The fact is that the conscious mind emerges when we've collected many neurons together, not many doughnuts or low-level computer instructions.

I.e., the sole criterion for ascribing consciousness to collections of neurons, rather than collections of logic gates, is -- they're neurons! QED.

If Gelernter were to read these posts and conclude that, in fact, his essay consisted entirely of non sequiturs and circular arguments, neither of which I think is likely, I would nonetheless expect him to maintain his anticognitivist stance. While cognitivist arguments can, I believe, show that anticognitivist arguments prove nothing, neither do they prove anything themselves. But as a Wittgensteinian pragmatist, I take this to show that the distinction between cognitivism and anticognitivism is meaningless. I agree with Gelernter's assertion that "there is no objective way to tell whether some entity is conscious", whether, ultimately, he himself does or not. And I think that the upshot is that the very idea of consciousness -- in his sense, consciousness as the possession of qualia -- is one on which we can get no intellectual purchase.

Uplift the bytecode!

MIT's Technology Review magazine has published a long essay by Yale computer scientist David Gelernter that addresses some of the best-trodden arguments in the philosophy of mind with somewhat less aplomb than you might expect from a bright 11-year-old. This is mildly distressing to me, both because the central topic of the essay -- the possibility of conscious machines -- is one to which I've devoted a lot of time and energy and because in my day job, I'm a copy editor at Technology Review. So what follows may be treasonous. On the other hand, I've read the essay carefully, several times, so I'm intimately acquainted with all its flaws. (I should add that Gelernter appears to have been delightful to work with, and that for all I know, he's a brilliant computer scientist. But if he is, then his susceptibility to circular argument and non sequitur suggests that there may be more to the notion of philosophical training than we Wittgensteinians/Rortians tend to think there is.)

Gelernter appears to swallow whole what I'll call the Original Statement of John Searle's "Chinese room" thought experiment. The Original Statement should be distinguished from succeeding restatements because it, unlike them, is transparently fallacious. (I think that the restatements also fail to make the point Searle and others hope they will, but I agree with Rorty that their proponents and opponents beg all questions against each other. Or almost all.)

In the Original Statement, Searle asks us to imagine that someone has devised a computer program that can pass the "Turing test" in Chinese. That is, a native Chinese speaker typing questions and remarks into a computer and receiving replies generated by the program would be unable to tell whether or not she was actually instant-messaging another person. Now suppose that, instead of executing the program on a computer, Searle executes it by hand. He's locked in a room -- the Chinese room -- and sets of Chinese symbols are slid to him under the door. According to instructions in a thick manual, he correlates the symbols he receives with another set of Chinese symbols, which he slides back under the door -- the program's output.

Searle doesn't understand a word of Chinese; he's just lining up symbols with symbols (a process that may require a few pencil-and-paper calculations). And from this he concludes that the room doesn't understand Chinese either.

Now, I would have thought that the fallacy of that conclusion was obvious, but history has shown that it isn't. Who cares whether Searle can understand Chinese? He's just a small and not very important part of the system -- what Dan Dennett has called a "meat servo" -- and it's the system that understands Chinese.

Searle's role is analogous to that of the read/write head in the magnetic-tape memory of an old computer -- or perhaps the laser diode in the CD tray of a modern-day Dell. His job is just to fetch data and shuttle it where he's told to. Saying that the Chinese room can't understand Chinese because Searle can't is like saying that my computer can't play chess because the diode in the CD tray can't.

In the paper in which he proposed the Chinese-room thought experiment, Searle actually anticipated this objection (which might make you wonder why he bothered with the Original Statement at all), which he sensibly called the "systems response". I don't find his rejoinder to the systems response convincing, but for present purposes, that's irrelevant. Because Gelernter doesn't even get that far.

After declaring, "I believe that Searle's argument is absolutely right", Gelernter goes on to propose a thought experiment of his own, one that runs, in part, as follows:

Of course, we can't know literally what it's like to be a computer executing a long sequence of instructions. But we know what it's like to be a human doing the same. Imagine holding a deck of cards. You sort the deck; then you shuffle it and sort it again. Repeat the procedure, ad infinitum. You are doing comparisons (which card comes first?), data movement (slip one card in front of another), and so on. To know what it's like to be a computer running a sophisticated AI application, sit down and sort cards all afternoon. That's what it's like.

Well, no, Dave, that's not what it's like. Again, that's what it's like to be the CPU. But the CPU, like Searle in the Chinese room, is just a small part of the system.

Gelernter's argument is analogous to saying, "The corpus callosum shuttles electrical signals between hemispheres of the brain. You want to know what it's like to be a corpus callosum? Well, imagine standing next to a computer with a USB thumb drive plugged into it. When the computer sounds an alert, you take the USB drive out and stick it in another computer. When that computer sounds an alert, you stick the USB drive back in the first computer. That's what it's like to be a corpus callosum. Therefore humans can never be conscious."

Notice that I am not here making the standard argument that neurons and neuronal processes, taken in isolation, are every bit as mechanistic as logic gates and binary operations. (I'll take that one up tomorrow.) Instead, I'm reproducing what we might call the synecdochal fallacy, common to both Searle and Gelernter, of substituting the part for the whole.

I'm sure that at this point I've taxed the patience of anyone who's not as much of a phil o' mind nerd as I am, so I'll stop for now. But tomorrow I'll address a couple of Gelernter's fallacious arguments that are all his own.

AMENDMENT (6/28/07, 5:20 p.m. ET):

A correspondent (who shall remain nameless) objects to the following line:

"He's just a small and not very important part of the system -- what Dan Dennett has called a 'meat servo' -- and it's the system that understands Chinese."

The objection is this:

"It's no good saying, 'The system understands,' because that's what's at issue."

It's a good point and may suggest that philosophy, which demands an incredibly high level of linguistic precision, should not be undertaken in blogs. But I plan on ignoring that suggestion, in the hope that my readers will read me with charity.

What I should have said, instead of "it's the system that understands Chinese", is

"It's the system's ability to understand Chinese that's in question."

The point was just that the Chinese-room thought experiment falls prey to the synecdochal fallacy. I didn't mean to imply that the refutation of the Chinese-room argument proves the possibility of conscious machines.

Title: Title

The name of this blog comes from a poem by Philip Larkin, the conclusion of which Virginia Heffernan reproduces here. As Ginny points out (does anyone call her Ginny? I don't know; I don't know her. But "Virginia" sounds too formal for a blogospheric cross reference, to say nothing of "Heffernan".), Richard Rorty made much of the phrase "blind impress" in his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, which is why it lodged in my mind (although I had my own Larkin fixation before I started reading Rorty, thank you very much). Before my band, the Hopeful Monsters, fell apart recently, we had planned to cut a new album, and I'd been secretly scheming to call it Blind Impress. Maybe I'll still use that title if I ever make another CD, but in the meantime, thanks to my friend Tim, I guess I've found another way to use it as a personal slogan.

Rorty used "blind impress" to describe collections of his titular contingencies -- the biases, beliefs, obsessions, and convictions that a person acquires over a lifetime. His point in using the word "contingency" is that the forces that shape us are arbitrary and historically conditioned; he hoped the idea of a "blind impress" would replace that of an "intrinsic nature", just as the notion of a "historically conditioned bias" would replace that of "apprehension of ahistorical truth/virtue through the uniquely human faculty of reason".

So there are several reasons that I think Blind Impress makes a good title for my blog. The first, obvious one is that I'm going to be writing about, among other things, philosophy and literature, and I'm sympathetic to both Rorty's philosophical stance and Larkin's aesthetics. Another is that Rorty's notion of contingency spares me the trouble of trying to find something common to music, literature, film, and philosophy that lets me rope them off from the rest of culture -- from, say, painting and economics. There is no such common feature: these just happen to be the things I'm interested in. (Actually, I'm interested in painting and economics, too. I just don't feel I have the authority to address them. In the four areas I'm restricting myself to, I think I know what I'm talking about.)

Another reason is that I want to emphasize that, in making the aesthetic and philosophical judgments that I am surely going to make, I am aware that I'm simply indicating my own historically conditioned biases. (If I hadn't wanted to be thought smart, I probably wouldn't have fought my way through Ulysses for the first time; if I'd been better at sports in junior high, I probably wouldn't have placed so much value on being thought smart; etc.) That of course raises the question of why I would consider it worthwhile to attempt to broadcast those judgments in the first place. All I can say is, I've profited from engaging with other people's attempts to justify their own arbitrary biases, and I hope other people will profit from engaging with mine.

Finally, there's the reason that I wanted to use "Blind Impress" as an album title in the first place. This may not end up having a lot to do with this blog, but the songs that I've been writing for the last couple years adopt, I think, a slightly removed perspective on their subjects. They pull back a little from the immediate passions or contending systems of values that they describe and attempt to locate them in a larger ecosystem of contingencies. Some people may consider that a defect, but whatever. It's the stance that I've been historically conditioned to adopt.

Tim told me to create a blog

I'm just doing what I'm told.