The mind is organized around proportions, not absolute values. I’ve already talked about how ancient measurements were like this. Judgements about wealth and status also seem to be calibrated this way. Not by absolute values, but by relative values. So today I want to talk about music.

Music is similar. The tonal scale is fairly universal. Ancient shell instruments have been cleaned and repaired and are still able to play, and essentially play largely the same tones as a modern recorder. Why? Because the notes, however and whoever and whenever we conceive them, aren’t specific sound values, they are expressions of relationship and proportion. And the understanding of those relationships is universal and durable.

After all, in traditional musical structure, found the world over, our twelve notes repeat again and again. Clearly from the perspective of actual harmonics, all those various Cs are all different. They’re different sounds, different frequencies. So what is consistent? Relationships. Intervals. That’s what you play, and why you can transpose the same song into so many keys and hear essentially the same song.

What we hear by nature as tense or resolving or harmonious chords are specific relationships between notes that are universally identifiable, regardless of what time or place you live in. The more harmonious the relationship between two notes, the simpler the mathematical relationship is between them. We hear relationships between frequencies, the structure of ratios between them, as the defining values of musical notes. Not the frequencies themselves. Those are the tokens. But it is at the level of type, relationship and proportion, that we really hear and judge music.

Not that other people in the past and in other cultures and even within Western culture haven’t approached music in ways that are structurally different. A larger tonal scale, more preference for dissonance, sometimes even using overlapping methods for tonal coordination. But we still recognize it as music and it is intelligible to us, if not familiar. Because it still operates according to the same principles.

Compromises, of course, have to be made when you’ve only got two hands and ten fingers and a certain sort of ears. There are limits on what humans can actually discern. Tiny differences slip by unnoticed, so we only define tonal differences within terms of relationships we can easily perceive. You can cover all the really important and obvious tonal relationships with a fairly simple system, the one that most everyone uses.

When people started carving holes into conch shells tens of thousands of years ago, it seemed fairly self-explanatory to them what intervals needed to be covered to be useful for making music. And we’re still using those major intervals today. And that explains the universality of music across time, culture, location, and language.

Enough for now about music theory. The important thing is that the mind is organized around relationships, around abstract conceptions of harmony and disharmony and proportion, rather than specific values. This made enormous sense in a world before standardized measurement. And standardized measurements are still much more arbitrary and relational than we think.

Measuring by relationships allows our judgements to be more broadly applicable across differing circumstances. Because they’re not tied down to a specific value, the values and even the things being measured can change and adapt and be swapped in and out. The tokens change, the language changes. But the underlying structure, the relationships, stay the same.

Different cultures prefer women who are heavier or thinner. But certain things like proportions transcend these specifics and are valid across all these widely differing cases. In language, the words change, the words are the most arbitrary elements; the grammar, the relationship between the words and how we use them, is where the real structure is. So long as the grammatical relationships are maintained, almost any set of arbitrary words can be used. The musical notes are like this. So long as you maintain the same intervals, a song sounds essentially the same played with any set of notes.

Human freedom is like this. The tokens have wonderful flexibility. But the types stay stable and consistent. We fall into them without thinking. They are part of the real underlying architecture of the mind and the world. Reason itself is organized like this. The integers can be switched in and out and change. But the principles are firm and allow us to apply what is actually fixed and intelligible, a kind of ideal of harmonious relationship, to any set of values.

The main way this perspective differs from how many people think about the mind is that it relocates what is fixed and what is the organizing and guiding measure to the level of something more like an intelligent principle than any specific set of rational integers.

This actually has enormous relevance to the problem of how a human brain can be built and how it functions. We tend to think of DNA as a blueprint, and that the way it is used is a concrete and fixed process, a machine, a computer laid out in copper and silicon, with everything in distinct and specified positions laid out by the instructions. But the data contradicts this conception. Even for a functioning brain, studies have shown that the likelihood that the same set of neurons that were activated when a memory was accessed will be activated the next time, given a month’s time, is only one in twenty.

The structure of the brain is constantly shifting, not fixed. Memories aren’t encoded in one specific place that stays fixed for all time. Rather, they seem to drift and reorganize in their actual specific embodiment, while the organizing principles and algorithms persist and remain. So even when you’re dealing with a complete brain with a fixed neural structure, the way it works and processes and encodes information is not actually properly fixed in the way we usually conceive of such things. Our computers wouldn’t work if the function and positions of its elements were constantly in a state of flux. Imagine if books worked like that!

When it comes to building and designing a brain, the problems are even greater. The simple fact is that, as immense as the data storage capacity of DNA is, there just isn’t enough room in it for the amount of detail necessary to build a human brain. And it’s very important that it be built right. It’s immensely complex, complexity built on complexity, from a single cell up to an integrated whole. And the whole human body has to to support it and work properly for it to work. Your brain has more connections in it than there are stars in the universe. And, as we’ve seen, it is a dynamic and evolving, not a static, system.

You can’t store a blueprint of that complexity within DNA. It simply doesn’t have the capacity. It’s not clear, at this point in technology, that anything does. And humans aren’t all identical; we’re enormously variable and adaptable. With so much innate variation and flexibility of brain structure built into our systems, you would need a method for storing all the possible brain structures and selecting one at random. You simply couldn’t do that with any currently existing data storage system. So how does DNA do it? Simple. It doesn’t store a fixed blueprint. It stores a program. A living algorithm that understands brain building. It doesn’t need specific instructions like those of a Lego set. It just needs to know the higher principles of design and have them properly fixed. Then it can build, and even adapt and alter and readjust, whatever it needs to.

Again, it is not the values, the specific positions, that are fixed, it is the principles of design. The harmonious and functional proportions, the intelligence. And the brain figures out these problems and negotiates them by running experiments and simulations, a process equivalent to testing and thought. It interprets the feedback, measures it against the guiding principles, and adjusts the direction of the process. Which is, at a neural level, much the same as what philosophy does at an ideological level. Bit by bit you build an intelligible and functional system simply by following the universal principles. You test, you experiment, you send out test signals, you evaluate the results, you reject certain directions and turn toward others. You follow the principles of reasoning and navigate your way dynamically through the territory.

What this means for us as humans is that life is both freer and more confined than we imagine. It is much more flexible in its actual constitutional elements than we might have imagined. You can build a decent wheel out of rubber, metal, wood, stone, plastic, frozen newspapers, all kinds of things. But you can’t build a very good wheel out of a cinderblock. Not because it’s made of concrete, not because it’s too light or too heavy, but because it isn’t round. Round in the specific manner, in particular, that is germane to being a wheel. And that’s a far more abstract, yet specific, concept than you might suppose.

The principle of roundness is far more fundamental to the concept of a wheel than the material. Not that materials can’t be more or less optimized to a given use, to the principle of function, the teleology of the thing. And that optimization can be of great significance. But if you don’t have the concept and its teleology clear to begin with, you’re going to be hopelessly fumbling in the dark when it comes to optimization. You won’t be able to judge function properly, you will misidentity the nature and powers of the concept, you won’t be able to detect misalignment, you will blame the wrong factors for failure and success.

Teleology is primary, optimization of materials flows from that higher ordering. The ancients like Aristotle knew this long ago, but somehow its been forgotten. So the world, and ourselves and our actions, are much less confined in their details than we might suppose. But they may be far more confined by their teleology, in the necessary shape of their proper relationships and proportions, than we suppose.