The hypothesis that music is caused by a "glial illusion". That is, glial cells observe the activity of neural activity responding to music, and glial cells falsely perceive certain aspects of that neural activity, which results in dysregulation of neural activity in "downstream" neurons, which causes the emotional intensity we experience when listening to music.
The results of these experiments indirectly tell us something about our chances of ever meeting aliens:
* No physical collapse => Everett interpretation AKA "many worlds"
* Many worlds gives us the Anthropic Principle for free
* The Anthropic Principle explains the origin of the first living organism, or, to put it another way, the observed existence of the origin of our first living ancestor does _not_ set any lower bound on the probability of the first living organism developing from non-living molecules.
* A very low probability of the origin of life implies the non-existence of any other life in the observable universe.
* Therefore, no aliens.
(The aliens do of course exist in other parts of the total Universal Wave Function, but we never get to meet them.)
>"The status quo provides marginal individual benefit to the person making the decision while also causing marginal harm to society as a whole. Doing the right thing doesn’t really provide much tangible short term benefit."
This explains exactly why the majority of people living in a dictatorship don't try very hard to do all the things that they need to do if they want to change their own government.
They need to do things like finding out what is the truth about their government, and telling other people what that truth is. But doing that requires individual self-sacrifice, and most people, most of the time, don't what to do that.
In the bacterial example, each individual tumble chooses a new direction at random, and the effectiveness of the algorithm depends on the smoothness of the chemical density function in the 3D space that the bacteria is swimming around in.
In his human examples, all the "tumbles" are conscious decisions made by the person in response to their circumstances.
If there was some human equivalent of the "tumble", it would have to be something that was change just for the sake of change. Like: "I'm bored and/or frustrated, so I am going to do something stupidly different".
All definitions of the word "music" that anyone has ever come up with are wrong.
We only know what the word "music" means from our own subjective experience of listening to specific examples of music.
At most we can observe common features of musical items, and include a description of those features in a definition. But such a definition will fall way short of accurately separating what is music from what is not music.
There are other subjective phenomena that we have words for, but for most subjective phenomena we have _some_ objective understanding of what is going on.
Music seems to win the prize for being both very familiar _and_ very mysterious.
In the Speech-to-Song illusion, recorded speech is altered so that there are one or more exact repetitions. These exact repetitions are something that never occur in spontaneous conversational speech.
It's been such a struggle to get anywhere near to making it do something useful.
But what if, one day, it actually works?
What could happen if we all had access to enormous amounts of very cheap energy? Have we thought even a little bit about all the bad things that might happen as a result?