I'm responding to this here because it is after all at least partly a "philosophical discussion" thread. and I also don't want to clog up the EE thread.
At the outset I want to say that I feel this topic is very vast & multi layered-- I'm going to do my best to present some of my thoughts as best I can...a lot of "thinking out loud" will follow...I find this topic very fascinating to ponder.
I would agree that it is perhaps poorly defined but IMHO there is very much a distinction to be drawn
somewhere between two distinct, shall we say, ideologies, approaches, temperaments, or underlying philosophical persuasions in this hobby that have to this point been been (perhaps poorly) conceived as the "objective/subjective" distinction. Not only that but I would go further and argue that there is at play here a fundamental ideological/temperamental divide that is rooted in the bedrock of human nature.
The best characterization I've heard so far of what might be described as the "fundamental battleground of human intellectual discourse" was given by Ralph Waldo Emerson in the following quote (which I'm pretty sure that I shared some time ago in the Objective/Subjective discussion thread over at the Headphones.com forum):
"As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture."
In this hobby I think this distinction translates to a more analytical/intellectual approach (objectivist/materialist) on the one side, to a more emotive/heart-centred approach (subjectivist/idealist) on the other. It is no coincidence that another word for "subjectivist" in Holt's glossary is "mystic".
This was an interesting statement to unpack.
Fundamentally, what people consciously "believe" is of very little relevance here I think. It's not a question of what any of us believe-- what we should we should be concerned with is what is
true. (In this sense I am very much an "objectivist".) Furthermore very few people have a well defined consciously formulated worldview. That is to say, most people have not sat down and taken stock of their beliefs and tried to assemble them into a well-defined or coherent structure. I would agree that most people, if pressed, would not deny that "their experience is caused by something external to them"-- but it's just as true that the vast majority of people would say this without really putting much thought into what "experience caused by something external to them" really means or implies. For example, I will admit that it certainly appears as though there is a world external to me that is impressing itself on my mind (the materialist perspective) however after only a little reflection it becomes apparent to me that the only thing I have ever had direct experience of is my own subjective consciousness (the idealist perspective)-- everything I have ever experienced has come to me through the medium of this subjective consciousness. It's not even remotely clear to me at this point what "external to me"
exactly means. At root, the purely subjective element of my experience appears to me to be at least as fundamental as that which is external to me (whatever that means).
All of this has, I think, profound implications in audio where the level of perception involved (in describing things like soundstage, timbre, the changes in sound brought about by a cable swap) are often incredibly subtle. It's not altogether clear to me that people's mental attitudes or expectations can't influence the listening experience in a non-trivial way. For example, someone who is pre-disposed to find differences in sound when changing cables, due to their inherent mental bias...may exagerrate in their minds the differences they do hear. On the other hand it's just as true that someone who, say, based on measurements was convinced what there was no sonic difference between two cables, due to their inherent mental bias may
not hear subtle differences that are in fact there.
Maybe they are, maybe they aren't-- I don't think this is the relevant point. What is relevant is where someone's inherent bias is, which is largely informed by their temperament. Speaking for myself, I'm not altogether opposed to the idea that every aspect of my experience is measureable somehow-- but my subjectivist bias leads me to trust my ears and experience
first, and measurements
second. In the ultimate sense this "objective/subjective" distinction is as much about differences in inherent temperament than it is about differences in belief structures around metaphysical reality. Beyond that, it's not clear to me that even if it were true that there is some "measureable property" responsible for all of my experience, that one will be able to actually discern the specifics from reading the measurements. A classic example of this would be with our thoughts-- I might grant that one could hook up enough wires and apparatus to my brain that they could detect some measureable corollary to my entire thought processes...but I would still maintain that the actual content of my thoughts and the sum total of my experience is fundamentally asymmetrically accessible. Detecting the existence of thoughts is not the same as reading the specific content of said thoughts.
In a similar way I often think of looking at an FR curve as akin to looking at a reflection of a building on the ground-- you can discern the dimensions of the building but not its substance.
I don't think anyone is making this claim-- but I do think there is a line somwhere between objective reality and one's subjective experience...and where this line resides is not altogether clear at this point.
Fair enough. However regardless of what is said of this topic generally, one of the most common "disputes" I see is between those who, for example, believe that all aspects of sound can be discerned in the FR, and those who maintain that the FR is just one piece of a multi-faceted puzzle. Perhaps crudely, it does seem to me that the line dividing these two camps is in many ways consistent with the objectivist/subjectivist temperaments I've thus far been trying to describe.