[1] But, where I differ with my critics is that you all appear to think that there can be be such a thing as perfection, eg a perfect transfer of information.
[2] This I cannot agree with. ... Everything in the universe is subject to entropy, information loss, a digital signal is no exception, ...
[3] But ultimately there is also a matter of what my ears tell my mind.
1. Then you have to discount/ignore both your own experience of printing your word documents and the hundreds of millions/billions of people and countless exabytes of data which has been transferred perfectly. And, not just music and word documents but critical data like schematics for buildings, vehicles, weapons and military data, medical technology/data, civil infrastructure, etc. We live in the digital age, how would that even be possible if the perfect transfer of digital data were not just a theoretical possibility but a trusted and completely expected reality? Indeed, it's hard to think of any fact which has been practically demonstrated more than the fact of perfect transfer of digital data! How can you logically rationalise this most demonstrated of facts with your assertion that the perfect transfer of digital data is impossible?
2. I only see two possible avenues of response to the previous question; Either your assertion is false and you have to question your knowledge/information upon which you've based that assertion or you have to respond illogically/irrationally. In part you've already unwittingly answered this question, with the statement I've quoted which indicates a serious hole in your knowledge, it indicates that your knowledge/research ends in the 1870's with the development of the second law of thermodynamics (Entropy). Your situation is analogous to someone whose knowledge/research ends with Newton's law of gravity in 1687 and therefore ignores the C20th work of Einstein which revolutionized our understanding of gravity. The C20th genius apparently missing from your knowledge/research is Claude Shannon, whose seminal paper in 1948 (
A Mathematical Theory of Communication) mathematically proved that entropy can be manipulated to preclude information loss! It provides a mathematical proof of a communication system with a limit below which information will definitely be lost and above which it can be perfectly preserved. Shannon's paper is describing the digital system, although the term "digital" does not appear in his paper and wouldn't be coined for some years. Shannon has been called the father of the digital age because without this paper and it's proof of a method to preclude information loss, there would be no mass digital technology and no digital age! Your statement that "there are IT protocols to deal" with information loss is therefore not entirely correct, the protocol to deal with information loss is the digital system itself!!
3. No, because ultimately you have almost no idea what your ears are telling your mind! Information from the ears (to the mind/brain) is prioritized, most of it discarded and what's left is combined with other information (sensory and stored in memory) to produce an image of the sound which has essentially been created by your brain. This interpreted/manufactured sound is the ONLY thing of which you are aware. There is an entire field of science which specifically researches the difference between what enters our ears and how our ears and brain ultimately modifies and interprets this information, it's hard to believe that a uni prof specializing in the philosophy of scientific knowledge could apparently be ignorant of the existence of the field of science primarily concerned with the claims he is making?! That the brain is making a highly flawed representations/interpretations of what the ears are actually "hearing" is completely indisputable and is what allows us to manipulate what people hear ... or rather, what they think they hearing! Furthermore, this is hardly some new or contentious discovery, in fact the exact opposite, it's both ancient and ubiquitous and the vast majority of the commercial audio content you hear absolutely depends on it!! For example, there's a music genre called counterpoint which relies on what's called "implied harmony", harmony which isn't actually there in the music but which the brain predicts/invents itself, hence "implied" harmony. JS Bach was the master of counterpoint and he (and all other composers) was manipulating/fooling what listeners were certain their ears were telling them 300 years ago! I often hear the audiophile cry of "I trust what my ears tell me", which ultimately is nonsense because if they really could trust what their ears were telling them then pretty much all music (not just counterpoint) and indeed just about all commercial audio content in general, would sound like meaningless semi-random noise. When I hear audiophiles say of a recording that it sounded real, had a realistic sound stage, was like being there or lamenting that it doesn't sound real, I find that amusing as an audio content creator because it's complete nonsense. There was no "there", there was no real sound stage and most of the time there wasn't even a performance! If audiophiles were visiophiles, they would have to say that they believe what their eyes are telling them. In which case they must believe that Pandora is a real planet and that James Cameron must have taken a film crew there to shoot Avatar!
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