What is music? A unified theory of music and dreaming

Unlike all of the other arts, which express or copy the Ideas (the essential features of the phenomenal world), Schopenhauer affirmed that music expresses or copies the will qua thing in itself, bypassing the Ideas altogether.

Schopenhauer holds that the experience of “absolute” music (music that does not seek to imitate the phenomenal world and is unaccompanied by narrative or text), occurs in time, but does not involve any of the other cognitive conditions on experience. Thus, like the feeling of embodiment, Schopenhauer believes the experience of music brings us epistemically closer to the essence of the world as will—it is as direct an experience of the will qua thing in itself as is possible for a human being to have

Read this full article if you'd like to know more: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer-aesthetics

I'm not sure how you're defining music, but I would consider a bird's song to count. On one hand I don't believe music can be reduced to a mating display, but I'm skeptical that music has a biological root in processing memories/emotional response. Sure, it can stimulate memory/emotional processing, but so do most other social activities. Moreover, I think conversation, games, music, dance, etc. are much more similar to each other in that regard than dreaming is to any of them.

In my experience, dreams are wild extrapolations/interpolations of various waking experiences. When I'm awake, I would call this imagination, but the unconscious mind appears to put the imagination into overdrive in a way that is not possible while awake. It's almost as if the brain is trying to generalize memories, possibly to optimize them for storage space. (or some biological equivalent)

Interestingly, /u/undershirt mentions that it might be that you don't actually experience the dream until you wake up. This would make sense, as this process would be interrupted, leaving you with some bizarre false memories. The unconscious then quickly cleans up it's mess and hands control over to the conscious mind.

On the other hand, I think music is explained fairly satisfactorily as a positive social activity, related to dancing, both of which were ubiquitous and inseparable in ancient cultures. In a world where you have to make friends and be wary of enemies, it's not hard to see how bonding activities that signal friendliness are valuable for natural selection. Even birds sing, humans just have a much more complex songs.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse

"This similarity between music and dreaming suggests that music and dreaming may actually serve similar biological purposes."

This does not follow at all. We don't know why we dream, or why we evolved to make music. It's hasty to suggest the two are related based on the sole observation that both produce feelings.

What's more, there's a big difference between feelings in dreams (which are responses to imagined situations) and feelings in music (which may result from formal qualities of harmony and melody, independent of any imagined situation.) The author explains this away by 1. focusing on music with lyrical and theatrical aspects, and 2. pretending that all listeners are supplementing the music with their own memories and imagined situations. As if nobody ever just heard a pretty tune and thought it sounded nice.

Then the author proceeds to make tenuous connections and meaningless distinctions for the next several paragraphs, based on this flimsy assertion that music and dreaming are alike because they produce feelings. All the while, citing no research to make these connections.

This reads like one of those post-structuralist nonsense papers that people on HN love to hate on. Why are we giving it the time of day?

https://open.spotify.com/album/6lQ9JWrD8tt8iP4hI6Q5eO?si=P5N...

  > Now let us suppose that the person enjoys listening to music.
  >
  > Music enables the person to feel very strong emotions that lie outside the range of their normal everyday emotions.
  >
  > Music lets a person feel these emotions, almost, but not quite, as if those emotions were real.

However, I do have to say that I did disagree with a few assumptions the article made:

>However dreams are never about the strangeness or the alteration of reality.

Many nightmares that I have are actually about the strangeness of the dream itself. I realize that something is not normal, and instead of determining that I am experiencing a dream (and thus start entering a lucid dream state), I start feeling like I must have lost my sanity. This can be a truly terrifying experience when things really go off the rails.

Chopin's Nocturnes. Erik Satie's Gnossiennes. The Tales of Hoffmann which influenced Shumann and Wagner

Franz Liszt - Liebestraum

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpOtuoHL45Y

> If people with bad intentions are chasing you in a dream, > you don't start thinking about why your life changed so > much that now you have people wanting to kill you.

This is false. Such reasoning is very common in my dreams, with explanations a hybrid of dreamed facts and reality.

So I thought I'd return the favor, some humble food for thought. Disclaimer: it's all personal research[1].

On to the meat. Forgive the imperative tone sometimes, it's all in good spirits and for brievety.

> The processing of feelings often includes thought processes

That's possibly idiosyncratic imho.

Feeling and thought evolved, in this order, as general processing systems for the bodymind (feelings originate simply as "the language of the body", neither good nor bad in nature but mostly communication of internal states; thinking is more correlated to sensory perception it seems — literally could have just been selected initially to process signals e.g. visual or auditory, then evolved from there).

They both now work in concert but there is no definite telling which dominates "generally", it seems to differ a lot between individuals; e.g. men seem to have a stronger awareness of their internal state ("thinking their emotions") whereas women tend to require strong physical states to reach awareness, and conversely report much more about "feeling their thoughts", their mental state. This is just one statistical example among probably many variations of that order.

Stephen Covey in the famous 7 Habits conveys this point: “Between stimulus and response there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Great advice in itself, it hints at the fact that untrained people tend to respond without thinking, thereby promoting their emotions from "guidance system" to "decision-making system".

I think that "letting go" and "being spontaneous" — what we do to dance well, emotionally — are positive modes (or rather balancing acts, responses) that strongly suggest a need to prefer emotions over thoughts at time. It's certainly necessary on the way to survival (mating, hence dating, seduction; but also politics from the house to the office, etc.).

So I humbly suggest:

- everytime you framed analysis implying thought after or in response to emotions, it's worth investigating a "thoughtless" direct response (note: in this context everything is a response, even in inaction we make a choice, e.g. to "keep on listening").

- De-correlate the two poles of thought and emotion, seen independently as different types of parallel processing, different "kinds" of machines (different I/O too).

- Consider operating modes where "emotions ≥ thoughts" in the final output, in full agreement with one's thoughts, to voluntarily "stop thinking".

> To fully understand how this could be possible, we need to analyze all the differences between music and dreaming.

Actually I would look into testing physiological responses first (and notably not neglect the long-term benefits, the lasting psychological qualia (or its consequences, like soothing, or energizing) over hours, days, months even (as possibly counter-evidenced by cases of severe deprivation of dreaming).

> Dreaming is Much Older than Music

I think it speaks to the evolution of brain structures indeed, it seems that interpreting "music" is a rather advanced feature. It's also largely possible that other species would hear "music" that sounds like random gibberish, noise to us — and vice-versa. We know almost for sure that other species don't recognize human music, but there's little in the way of telling what could actually be music to their ears.

> Within dreams, the content and the emotions are provided as a single fixed package.

I'm not sure about that. The systems involved in making the images/story, and those involved in their perception and the feelings thereof might be largely distinct structures (assuming the brain keeps working generally the same regardless of wake state).

What I mean is that in both dreams and music, to my perception, the content is provided; whatever I feel or think about it comes after as an internal response/state; finally I respond (whether suppressed or not by the body as when dreaming). Note that this is all in parallel, new data has entered perception by the time I respond to the last input.

I think it strengthens your case: the two processes are even more comparable in this view.

A word about imagination, which as I see it always takes off in-between "processing results" (from inputs) and "call for a response" (our final output) — this even tiny moment of hesitation to validate action before we do, which in some cases is temporally absent from perception, especially in heightened emotional states (e.g. adrenaline has a way of blurring/blinding perception to the limbic low-level, the pains, the fears, etc.)

- For these physiological reasons, music (and any emotion-inducing activity) acts as a temporary 'limbic painkiller' of sorts. Sorta occupies the mind, focus, perception.

- Imagination is both a crude low-level "feeling" about "what could" (be, have been, happen, etc) and rises up to high-level full-fledged "thinking" powerhouse specialized in creation. Again, this feeling-thinking dichotomy. In this I think we may observe how "low-level emotions" are swamping dreams whereas "high-level thinking" of the kind we invoke to process imaginary images upon music is much more controlled, indeed 'aware' of its virtuality — it's almost as if thinking was a higher-level processing system able to differentiate between reality and fiction, which emotions at a lower-level of processing don't seem able to!

> This difference may be directly relevant to explaining why music is human-specific – because actively thinking about long-term goals is (as far as we know) a specifically human endeavour.

I'm not entirely sure about this whole long/short-term dichotomy in this case; I think it's more of a consequence of the above physiological systems that we are more immediately concerned with feelings in dreams and more laid back about a non-threatening wake situation — you have to realize how dramatically different both these moments are to the brain, below any form or degree consciousness.

Bluntly put, when survival is at stake, we see the deepest/oldest structures emerge back in full-force (unsurprisingly low-level layers tend to be strongest at "overriding" general functioning).

> Strangeness

Really interesting take! I wonder if it's also a matter of system (low/high level, or thinking vs feeling, or a fluke of perception that switches off in dreams or is too complex to properly work at that level.

I've long identified "familiarity" as one of the big determinants (in humans as in animals, it's one of those really low-level deeply refined mechanisms, that just appears about as soon as memory is possible, even ROM from DNA that produces unaware biological structures). Things just move "towards" the familiar "good", and "away" from the "unfamiliar" or "familiarly bad".

Which, when you think about it, can also be expressed in terms of strangeness, the reversed polarity of familiarity.

Regardless, your observations on strangeness do fit my current model/view quite well[2]. I need to thank you again for the food for thought.

Great read, amazing approach!

____

[1]: My "goal" has always been a general model of the "bodymind" (like "spacetime", I reject the fragmented theory of duality, and include animals in the continuity). So I have a rather 10,000 ft bird's-eye approach, more 'structural' and less 'specific' I guess, however such research as OP's are pure honey to me — they help me inform all the categories I wrestle with in my research.

In all honesty and transparency, I'm not "university-qualified" in those fields — there's too many of them anyway. But I do pride myself on 20+ years of strong transdisciplinarity, always trying to answer this question: "what makes us tick? why do we do what we do?"

[2]: Briefly, the model is graph-inspired with geometric elements, and I have so far identified ~7 nodes or "powers" as I call them (of which thought, emotion and perception are 3). The "unconscious" is yet another (sits below everything else as the proto-mind, the earliest processing system), and what I call "will" or "wisdom" is about the highest-level, most developed (it roughly corresponds to the prefrontal cortex, biologically, and "philosophy" in our ontology). This is where long-term awareness happens, e.g. our ability to delay gratification — a clear case of thoughts totally overriding emotions.

I've observed a sort of "tension" (I really mean both the common term, and the math concept of tensors) between the unconscious and my node of "will/wisdom" — it seems that both act as "impulse drivers", sources of volition and willpower (which is notably in finite quantity for a day and tends to replenish after sleep/dreaming, it also seems about the same for everyone but with significant differences which apparently are rather hard to change, train, de-train).

I'll end it there unless you want more, but in general terms it seems that 'wisdom' is the seat of our 'informed and valued knowledge', that is an integration of emotions and thoughts in a way that "is right and feels right", it's pretty much "system 3: aggregator" if you call the other two system 1 and system 2 like Daniel Kahneman.

That might be an angle worth looking at to frame/model/explore some of your questions.

Edits: typos and clarifications

I posit that both dreaming and music listening (including listening via imagination, like a song stuck in your head) are both actually fundamentally processes of pattern recognition and pattern generation happening together in real-time. In a dream, our mind is generating visual, auditory and mental/emotional stimuli based on the real stimuli we've experience in our waking lives. It's not purely replays of real life jumbled up, because many of us have experienced dreams where we've created passable imagery of imaginary individuals we've never seen before and probably don't exist.

I think music is fundamentally the same thing. We hear a song once that creates mental/auditory stimuli, and our brain is able to recognize the general patterns and compress it into pieces of data we can replay at a later time. We don't listen X different times to a song per X individual instruments being played, but often if we hear a prominent part of an individual the song out of the context we will immediately recognize it as part of another song. For a well-known example, imagine the bass line from "under pressure"/"ice ice baby" and how just imagining that bass line lets you conjure up totally seperate parts from either of those two songs in your memory. You can now sing back those different parts of those songs and people will easily recognize it, even if you are technically singing in a different key, a slower tempo, and you flub some words.

So in this hypothesis, even listening to music is not a passive action because your brain is engaged with recognizing and real-time generating the next parts of it (ie singing along). So when the author says:

> Nevertheless... music is often accompanied by a non-specific desire to engage in some level of active behaviour. Because this desire is very non-specific, and because musical feelings are more strongly bound to things that match the rhythm and/or melody of the music, the end result is that the desire to engage in such activity can be satified either by dancing or by joining in with the performance of the music.

It's clear that dancing and joining in make sense because listening and/or imagining music itself is a generative process of imagination + memories (or perhaps "delusional" to use the term in the article).

As an somewhat interesting aside: I mentioned that I have ADHD in the other comment. One of the interesting, though very under-studied things I've discovered about myself and some others with ADHD is that many of us end up with songs playing in our head constantly (see: https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHD/comments/7tu8jz/music_is_const... ). Some studies talk about getting a particular song stuck in someone's head as an OCD type thing, but this type of "head radio" as I call it, doesn't necessarily stick to the same thing forever and really isn't very mentally distressing. Sometimes even I'll get unique tunes stuck in my head that I end up writing out later. Until high-school I assumed everyone had music playing in the background of their heads at all times, but when I started taking medication I noticed it became less frequent. So I'm of the opinion that the "head radio" was mostly a form of mental fidgeting, part of the hyperactivity component of ADHD.

Dreams can contain strange and altered realities. However dreams are never about the strangeness or the alteration of reality.

If people with bad intentions are chasing you in a dream, you don't start thinking about why your life changed so much that now you have people wanting to kill you. All you think about is what you need to do to prevent those people catching up with you and killing you, which might involve running, or attacking your attackers, or perhaps calling out for help.

Given that dreams are often seem very strange when we wake up and remember them, but don't "feel strange" when we are dreaming them, it is plausible to suppose that our sense of "strangeness" is actively suppressed when we are dreaming.

End quote.

This is correct. During REM dreaming the executive functions on the brain are shut off. Why is this?

We can remember some of our dreams, and in our dreams we behave. This means we get to examine our unconstrained behaviours and judge them for their suitability to the situation.

The situations our brains construct during REM dreams are formed in incredibly neurologically biased conditions. Norepinephrine levels, a stress related neurotransmitter, are 85% below base waking levels during REM dreaming (Norepinephrine levels spike after a stressful event, but it's 85% below resting levels!). And there is plenty of evidence to show, low Norepinephrine levels mean a relaxed mind.

Think of the fantasies that the brain creates during moments of fear when awake. Say you have a fear of flying, the fantasies all urge avoidance - 'the plane will crash', 'the wheels will fall off before we land', etc... That is how the brain builds fantasies when Norepinephrine levels are high. When they are low fantasies urge the opposite of avoidance - they urge action. You are being attacked -> you need to fight back. Someone is trying to steal your things -> stop them. Someone has upset you -> tell them.

So we find ourselves in situations in our dreams which demand action, and we get to see how we behave on a solely emotional level (because executive functions are off). If we are not behaving in accordance to what the action-demanding situation requires, then we have learnt something about a fear we have. Something present at an emotional level which is stopping us from taking useful action.

Correcting that is a matter of consciously breaking this pattern in your waking life. Taking action when you were previously scared to and discovering you are ok, and did not need to be scared.

From my experience working with dreams in therapy (mine and with others in theirs), good dream analysis acts as an incredibly astute method to diagnose unconscious anxieties.

I got very interested in dreams after their usefulness in my therapy, so wrote a paper on the above with 13 examples of dreams in (5 are mine if I remember correctly). The paper: https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz HN discussion of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590

Music is the shadow of spoken language syntax, ornamented with mathematically recursive patterns, enigmatic suggestions, and all of the other various cerebral plumage humans are attractive to, all for one simple evolved purpose: “you gotta get down with the get down.” ;)

Dreaming has much more to do with core memory processes which remain a deep mystery. Nobody has put forward even a plausible explanation of how memory actually works on a physical level.