So let's ask a question that once drove
a man mad.
What is value?
I'm not going to follow Robert Pirsig's
path of trying to define the aspects of the Is that exist prior to
our perception of them, but I am going to talk about what it is that
we find in things that causes us to consider them more important than
others. The concept of value as judgment, of appraisal, of deciding
which of our resources we will spend on what.
And that's what it comes down to. That
which we value is that which we expend our resources on. And we
really only have a few resources on a personal level. We have time,
attention, effort and whatever physical and societal influences we
can bring into play (money and power, in other words).
And of those five, which of those are
the most valuable? To me, time attention and effort are worth
spending carefully. The other two are for implementing my time,
attention and effort. So maybe we don't have five resources, but two
which make the other three useful.
But back to the idea of valuation
itself. What is it that causes one person to value, say, Mozart, and
another to value Joe Satriani? And a third person to find music in
its entirety to be nothing but mildly pretty noises? Each person
experiences essentially the same sensory input, and they come up with
three entirely different reactions. Is that something inherent to
the physical identity of an individual, or to a mentality, or is it
dependent upon experiences with that input and the emotional
associations we have?
It's a little like nature versus
nurture, but I like to think that that argument is largely settled
with the answer as “both”. This gets more complex. And it
probably has something of that same answer in it. For some people,
the neural structures that connect musical input and emotional or
valuation processing and output are built on one side of some set of
critical values, and other people have them elsewhere. This means
that the first group gets some amount of neurotransmitters going,
some pleasure or insight or other kick to the brain that the second
group simply doesn't get.
Then there's the mentality. If one has
a passion for order, then Mozart is much more likely to be valuable
than, say, Jimi Hendrix. If one, like me, found words at a young age
and music much later, that early experience may well have resulted in
a mentality that focuses on words and considers less specific tools
of communication to have been of less value during those critical
formative years.
And the third group may simply not have
terribly discriminitive hearing, or may even have grown up in an
environment that denigrated music.
Who knows? I think this is one of
those questions that is interesting to ask, but more for exploratory
purposes than for ever finding an answer.
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