Pat,

As usual, your ideas are fascinating.

Something I left out about the "gray lump of matter" is this: It has the power of understanding, not to say that other clever species are devoid of it, but our power is finite, just like theirs. There are things that I believe human minds will never understand. One of these is precisely how music can make people react emotionally. Songs - blasts of air - can make people cry.

The responses show that members recognize a mixture of intellect, emotion and aesthetics in music - with complex interactions between the three. What these interactions are and how they work, is what I'm saying is forever beyond human understanding. The mind lacks the horsepower to understand itself, to say nothing of the more fundamental question of how the soggy gray stuff conjures up the 3-D, technicolor "theatre of the real" that each of us lives in as conscious beings.

To conclude - and I ask readers who have not have this experience to take it on trust - I've heard musical passages (no lyrics) that made my knees buckle, made my heart ache, brought tears to my eyes. Or I might just shake my head, feeling a perfection that cannot be described in words.

Like poetry, music is supposed to express things that cannot be said with mere words. Do you think that one day how these processes work will be thoroughly understood at the neurophysiological level? Here's a simpler problem: Describe precisely - neurophysiologically - what happens just before a guitar lick in your head travels down two arms into the fingers onto the instrument and then out into the world.

Here's when I think any of these will receive answers: Not ever.

Aleck

Sweetwater Creation Station. BIAB 2018, Mixcraft 8 Pro Studio, Izotope Nektar 2, Ozone 8, KEYBOARDS: Kurzweil Artis 7, Crumar MOJO, Hammond XK-3, BASSES (fretted & fretless by Ibanez, LTD, Warwick. GUITARS by Guild, Gretsch, Ibanez, Eastwood (12 string)