i do believe that i am defined by my CD collection. first, there is the fact that i have a CD collection–most college students these days seem to owe their musical tastes to whatever mp3s they can get off kazaa. these people are like the mp3s themselves–tinny, with the tops and bottoms of the audio spectrum cut off. the sound is in-your-face, shallow, and lacking in life. there is the related fact that you download a song, a two-or-three-minute pick-me-up, in lieu of buying an entire album–the artist’s mind and soul for the space of months or years. offensive to me is the radio culture of ‘hits’, and the subsequent ignoring of the album in pursuit of the popular single.
second, there is the size of my collection. it is, relatively speaking, large, consisting of nearly 200 discs and corresponding artwork. a substantial size is necessary for the definition i wished to show. imagine, to the contrary, a person X with only 20 CDs. the chances that there is some person Y with the same 20 CDs is, on balance, high. much higher than the chances that there is some person Y with the same 200 CDs as me. each CD i buy is added information about myself…added specificity that becomes exponentially harder to randomly duplicate. here is an analogy: say you have a certain number of words with which you can describe yourself. if you have to describe yourself in 5 words, chances are that someone else would use those same 5 words. however, if you allow yourself the thousands of words that make an autobiography, it is inconceivable that someone else would unknowingly describe herself in exactly the same way. thus with each purchase of burned plastic i add telling lines to the sketch of myself.
lastly, and most importantly, there is the extension. “extension” is a word used very precisely in set theory to refer to all the objects in a particular set. so, the extension of the set of letters in the english language is simply a – z. likewise, the extension of the set of my CDs is defined as those specific CDs which are in the set. obviously, this is what matters most in the whole dialectic, since it is the fact that i have one CD and not another that most exactly defines who i am. as before, each new CD says something about who i am and about what my personality is. for, what is personality save the union of all our choices past and present, which influence strongly even future choices? of course, we must assume here that in buying CDs i do in reality exercise a power of choice according to a certain axiom, namely that of only buying what ones likes, or thinks one will like. immediately, however, we run into a problem: what of old and no-longer-loved CDs? i certainly have some that i would no longer proudly display as part of my collection. in this case we can simply stipulate that the person may define his collection in light of the aforementioned axiom, thus ruling out disliked CDs from the outset.
in the end, we can form the set JLCD to contain those CDs which i own and like. and, all that is required for this set to uniquely refer to me, and not anyone else, is that the extension of JLCD is unique among all sets of CDs in the world. more formally, the intersection of JLCD with any other set S of CDs cannot be such that JLCD is actually a subset thereof. if this result obtains in the world, and i believe that it does, or at least that there is an extremely high probability that it does, we are assured that i am correct in asserting that JLCD uniquely determines me.
you might think that the added claim that the previous result is sufficient for describing the totality of my person is unwarranted. unfortunately there is no way to logically demonstrate the truth of such a claim, but i’ve no fear here of stepping back from first-order logic and stating something without proof. music is my soul, and my soul is music. that is who i am, and so if anything is to be the embodiment of the sum total of me, why not the music that drives me in life? i suppose a better analogy would be that my music–the music i listen to and the music i write–draws a maze of arrows, all of which, pointing beyond nature at the forms which are actually the building blocks of my nature, trace where i come from and where i’m going.
virtual song on spin: “almost there” | pedro the lion
