Skip to main content

Voyage

 
Did you ever notice how an artistic explanation can sometimes be superior to any scientific or philosophical one, and therefore more enjoyable and fun? This week ABBA published a new album named Voyage, after a forty years long sabbatical, during which me and the rest of the world who admires them could only pray to God for this to happen. 
Although all songs are brilliant, to me Bumblebee stands out for the ecological theme of its lyrics, expressing anxiety about the possibility that humans can cause the extinction of this insect species. I will spare my words by not trying to describe the magic of their music, suffice it to say they are the reason why I love music, and that I will never forget the moment I first heard Super Trouper, forty years ago, played on a brand new stereo device my parents bought so that their children could learn to love music and better socialize through that. The transformation which that beautiful song sung by beautiful ladies produced in me was so huge and inexplicable, so that I started to love life from that moment on.
I will focus on the magic of their texts. I cannot overstate how meaningful is poetry of each and every song on the new album, telling its story clearly and precisely. Every verse of Bumblebee resonates with me, from the pure joy of spending time in a garden, to the worry that future generations might be deprived of it, and it reminds me of another their song, Move On, that has somewhat different thematic. The similarity is the wonder of nature and the wonder of life, but the latter one also asks these interesting questions: “What really makes the difference between all dead and living things, the will to stay alive?“ and “But how can I explain the wonder of the moment, to be alive, to feel the sun that follows every rain?”
Altough this actually just rephrases the question asked by people for millennia, it does this in such an ellegant and unpretentious way, that one can ignore that fact, especially when science is still struggling to give a more concrete answer to these questions than any song is supposed to give. It is the only song I have ever dreamt about that I am listening to it in my dream, at least that I can recall, I felt wonderful in the dream because that music is so great, and after that I woke up with a strong bittersweet feeling of nostalgia for my youth, that irreversibly passed by, as well as the era of making such music delights. Fortunately, ABBA is back, and at least for a moment brought me back to my youth. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Game

Besides information and an intelligent agent, the third fundamental notion in a theory that describes intelligent behaviour is a game. <wikipediaQuote>Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interaction between rational decision-makers. It has applications in all fields of social science, as well as in logic and computer science. Originally, it addressed zero-sum games, in which one person's gains result in losses for the other participants. Today, game theory applies to a wide range of behavioral relations, and is now an umbrella term for the science of logical decision making in humans, animals, and computers. Modern game theory began with the idea regarding the existence of mixed-strategy equilibria in two-person zero-sum games and its proof by John von Neumann. The games studied in game theory are well-defined mathematical objects. To be fully defined, a game must specify the following elements: the players of the game, the information and actions a...
Post a Comment
Read more

More on Chess Explanations

Let me explain my point further by giving an example of what knowledge exactly are we talking about here, that engines and endgame tablebases possess, but in much more concrete form, which raises the question of software possibility to extract it from them in an abstract form, like I will present here, without using software. Pawnless endgames with major pieces, are a good start because some of them are most elementary checkmates, simplest patterns to describe, such as K+Q vs K and K+R vs K. In both cases, the lone king must be forced to the edge (or to the corner) of the board in order to get checkmated, due to a lack of other pieces (its own or its opponent’s) that could constrain its mobility additionally in sufficient way, if they were present. This can always be achieved by squeezing it from the center, by placing our king in opposition (an even simpler concept which also requires explanation/description), and checking it from the side, with the major piece. Actually, this is need...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Constructive Criticism and Critical Thinking

It is a pedestrian observation that people appreciate criticism much more if it is not directed towards something they relate to. In my last essay, I concluded that replicator<-->vehicle is actually very limited paradigm, and received an answer from Mr.Deutsch that ended with conclusion: "Hence the unavoidability of the von Neumann replicator-vehicle mechanism and the futility of attributing evolution to the vehicle." That mechanism may be mathematically provable necessity to describe accurate self-reproducer, but it also may be totally agnostic with respect to mechanism that causes the inaccuracies, ie which drives evolution. Or is it also mathematically/logically provable that inaccuracy in self reproduction must be random in its nature? Is it prescribed by this model what causes variation, or is it open for some other model to give an answer to that question? In fact, already the choice of the term variation vs inaccuracy has different connotations and implies or s...
Post a Comment
Read more