Music and Breathing

There is an oscillation in my academic work between thinking about things which are practical and of importance - either in health or education (or both) - and thinking about music. Music, of course, is extremely practical and very important, but few people will support research work into music directly. They should of course. I've found that techniques for thinking about music become applicable to more practical stuff. Most specifically, developing information theoretical techniques of analysis of music is highly valuable across many fields. In addition to education, I'm currently working on the organisational impact of AI, AI and information theory (specifically focusing on my work on diabetic retinopathy diagnosis), and work-based stress. 

Why is music so important? Quite simply because it protects us against hubris in our analytical thinking. Whatever social theory one might have, it has to work for music, or it is no good. Or at least, not good enough. Most cybernetic theories fall short because they can't "breathe" - and that is the key. Much as I admire and find very useful the work of Beer, Luhmann, Bateson, Von Foerster and Maturana, in each case their theories don't breathe properly. Not in the way that music does. The wisest of them (particularly Beer and von Foerster) knew it. 

This is partly why the deep physiological ontology of John Torday, Bill Miller, Frantisek Baluska, Denis Noble and others has attracted me, and music has often been at the centre of discussions with Torday and Miller. By situating consciousness with the smallest unit of biology - the cell - breathing becomes foregrounded because it is obviously biologically fundamental. This is really what my recent paper for Progress in Biophysics and Molecular biology was about (see Music, cells and the dimensionality of nature - ScienceDirect)

Within this biological perspective, there are two fundamental principles: the maintenance of homeostasis and the endogensation of the environment through symbiogenesis (i.e. how cells absorb factors in their environment like bacteria, which become mitochondria). The two principles are deeply related in ways which challenge the conventional cybernetic view of homeostasis. 

Endogenisation turns the cell into a history book - a memory of environmental stresses from the past, for which adaptive strategies can anticipate the recurrence of similar stresses in the future. Cells are anticipatory agents which maintain a deep homeostasis - not only with their immediate environment, but with the entirety of their developmental history. That history is itself a vector which points to some originary state, and through the commonalities of these vectors, a deeper level of biological coordination can be organised. No current AI can reproduce this. If we were to have an AI in the future which could, it's architecture would be so fundamentally different from what we have at the moment: more like biology. 

ChatGPT and the like are clever illusions, behind which lie some deeper truths about nature - not least it's recursive structure, and the anticipatory capability that recursion provides. But it is nonetheless a useful illusion. And it might be able to write great text (although the more I use it, the more I can detect it's hand), it remains rather poor at music. It simply cannot breathe. 

Current social theories, theories about stress, methods of epidemiological study, etc, all have a breathing problem. You can often tell, because the champions of these theories tend to be a bit breathless in the way they articulate them. They desperately WANT to have the answer, for their pet theorists (Beer, Luhmann, Giddens, Bhaskar, whoever...) to be able to blow away the cobwebs of confusion. But it never works and it's always breathless.

This is not to disregard those theories - they are all great. But the high priests of those theories knew the limitations of the theory, where the clergy who slavishly follow them do not. This is why I stay close to music. It is to stay close to breathing amid a lot of breathless exhaustion.