Thomas Wulf wrote:

>But you're right: it all happens in the brain, so it is all the same..

That is a question for me.  No doubt due to me limited understanding
of these things, I have never really given much "thought" to the various
processes one finds in the brain.  Is all brain activity thought?  Thought
is conveyed via our nerves and communicated to other nerve endings and
eventually they will trigger images or body movements and/or be stored
in memory.

I wonder at how we try to turn both image and sound into language.  We
can roughly describe a painting, size of shapes, colors, textures, etc.
We can roughly describe music with analysis or prose.  Yet it is curious
to me that somehow it is through spoken language that we seem to be able
to achieve some quanification of image and sound.  I can understand why
we seem to need to do that, but yet such quantification does not, at
least from my perspective, make music or the visual arts any better
(whatever that might mean) for having been so articulated.

>Also, I think that all our laguages today are quite evolved and most
>limitations they impose on speakers come from a lack of command rather
>than from the actual language. but have you never experienced the relief
>of learning new words and concepts that gave your thoughts new and
>expanded capabilities? I remember, also decades ago, learning the
>vocabulary of game theory, eg win-win, lose-lose etc.. these
>concepts openend my mind to new thoughts, where before at best there
>was a hunch that somehow something was missing.

Were those notions more "pure thought" before they were articulated?

>And reconsidering what I wrote in my 1st post, I'd say, that without
>doubt we all know that at least sometimes music could speak to us, so
>it must be a language in some sense. Not very elaborate, maybe, but
>sometimes it clearly says: 'DANCE' or 'REJOICE' or even 'Try to work
>this out!' or 'Catch Me if you can!'..  So music can 'speak' to our
>bodies, our pattern matching minds but also to our 'hearts', ie our
>emotions.

What do the late quartets of Beethoven "say?"

Karl