Saturday

Musicals and the Mind

Abbreviated blogging today. It's musical weekend. Abbie has the role of Jo Jo in Seussical. Last night was excellent. I look forward to seeing it again.

The high school musicals seem so much higher in quality than they were, say, 15 years ago. The problem is, I don't know whether it's because my daughter now has leading roles in them (in other words, my opinion has no basis in objective fact, but rather is merely a reflection of my subjective enjoyment) or because they are, indeed, better. Or maybe it's a combination.

There is, incidentally, a basic philosophical problem in this question: Can your mind out-think itself? In order to determine whether I'm merely projecting my subjectivity onto objective fact, I'd need to determine the level of my subjectivity and its interaction with reality, but the thing that makes such determinations (my mind) is the same thing ensnared in the subjectivity.

If we have only a material brain, we could never get out of this problem without extrinsic evidence. The brain couldn't think its way out of the problem any better than you can kiss your own face. The only option would be to resort to outside evidence: ask others what they think, order VHS recordings of the 1990-1993 musicals and compare them to today's musicals, etc. Even then, there's a good chance that subjectivity would sneak in and warp the results, but you could get a little closer.

But if you have no such extrinsic evidence, is there a way to get an answer? There is, and it's related to the ability of abstraction. We can abstract ourselves from our material surroundings and reflect on them. When we do this, we are engaging the spiritual properties of our mind (the soul). It works best in calm waters, where material things don't ruffle its operation. By engaging the spiritual element of the mind, you detach yourself and see things differently, thereby escaping to some degree the subjective problem.

I would think an effective analysis of whether today's musicals are objectively or subjectively better would need to engage both methods: extrinsic evidence and abstraction. I don't fancy that I'll do either. I'm simply happy that the musical was great . . . or at least seemed to be.