Am I alone in my musical appreciation?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RENk9PK06AQ
It is billed as the world's ugliest music. 

A long lecture by a mathematician explains the principles of Harmony and then argues that it is because of what he calls 'repetition'  that gives all Art, including Music its 'beauty' presumably the only interesting aspect of Art.  Then he explains how something that is not just random, but even more 'dissonant' in that it avoids all repetition must be 'ugly'.  The resulting succession of notes is played on a piano.  No pair of notes have the same interval.

Among all the negative comments attempting to ridicule the music, presumably comparing it to Pop, I wrote:

Dare I admit that I enjoyed it very much. It was the unexpectedness of the progression that delighted me. It must be possible to generate 'harmonies' by this method so the 'music' or 'soundscape' has genuine dissonance. 

Here is an early memory that might make enjoyable telling.

Perhaps randomly, I suffered some traumas in infancy that led to a lot of repressed memories.  Recent counseling has also brought back other childhood memories, and one of them is my astonishment the first time I encountered division.  It was Grade Two, because I remember it was in the classroom where we would be the next year, and that was Grade Three with Mrs Stillman, whose brother Rod Stillman had a rose named after him, as I remember her telling us, and who had eaten some of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Cake. 

I recall a particular moment, because most of my memories are in the form of a snap-shot, like a single frame of a motion picture.  My images are still but not static, perhaps the same way pixels can have a vector quality of motion in a direction.  I do not recall who my teacher was that year, but I still have report cards from Junior School showing I was away sick more days than I attended.  She must have been away, so we were sent to the next room, and shared desks for a short time with those boys.  I was doing subtraction, which I must have only recently learnt.  

Reading was something that I discovered late in my childhood because I was away sick so much, and numbers also revealed their magic to me very slowly.  This particular early memory now stands out from all those empty years and is of seeing the other boy doing something that looked like subtraction but was quite different.  I ask him what it is and he tells me it is division, and I can look forward to learning it next year and then he warned me that it was very difficult.  We never spoke again.

Mathematical Functions have been a continual succession of discoveries ever since.  It was a source of wonder then and has never ceased to be.  I feel sorry for people who don’t see the absolute beauty in Mathematics that requires no eye to behold it, but is inherent beauty for its own sake, like ‘art pour l’Art’.  Tangentially, I think myself lucky now that I started to be interested in computers when they were simple things and it was easy to understand how to make one out of common electronic components and to program it to the limit of its capacity.  In contemporary times, apart from the tiny fraction of the population that writes Apps, most people are in total ignorance of the devices they spend most of their waking hours interacting with.     

My fascination with division (particularly into Primes) was quickly overtaken by the endless consequences of exponentiation, but it is the jump from division to differentiation that truly reveals the Magick.  Perhaps I am also lucky enough to have become expert with a slide-rule, which everyone had, but are never seen lying around in retro movies.  Then there were log-tables, accurate to four significant figures, sufficient for all practical purposes, apart from Rocket Science, while now I can almost instantly calculate a number with more decimal places that the largest known Prime.  What a wonderful world!

Novel Numbers

Here is a new and novel idea about numbers, or I think it is new.  There is some debate about whether numbers, or which numbers, are ontological ‘things’. This is Mathematical Realism.   Perhaps only Prime Numbers have a life of their own, so to speak, as composite numbers can be assembled from them.  Fractions are created out of the prime numbers because they can be represented as a polynomial and even the transcendental numbers can be written as an infinite sum of numbers.  Philosophers from Kripke to Russell and with ever expanding, complex, new Number Theory, have grappled with accepting the ‘a priori’ truth of even the Number ‘One’ and from it the Number Line by assuming that non-existence has the ontological status of a number, called ‘zero’ to which One can be endlessly added.  But nothing is nothing, and we are imagining a continuum that in reality can only approach non-existence from either side but can never ‘not be’ because even the idea of something is a form of existence with ontological presence even if devoid of ‘substance’.  The Prime Numbers do appear to have real-world existence beyond our use of language and the ability to label things in useful ways.  Now, here is my new and novel idea.  It came to me while thinking of the pentagram, the five-pointed star that can be assembled into two different, regular three-dimensional objects.  The square root of five is an important number in this, so it occurred to me that perhaps it is the square root of five that is the real world phenomenon, not the integer five itself.  Then I thought how the square root of two is the length of the diagonal of a square.  That makes it exist in the real world in a fundamental way, as a length that exists for itself.  The number two, on the other hand, is a mental construct by people to count when there are a precise quantity of a multiplicity of single objects.  I say, ‘I have two hands,’ but I just have a hand and have another hand, the ‘twoness’ of my hands, their duality, is all in human imagination.  A similar argument for the diagonal of a cube that are the square root of three.  So, it is the square roots of numbers that are special,and exist in the real world in a way that our counting integers do not.

A Game for a Mensa Dinner

Sitting round the Dinner Table, one person starts and is Zero.  The next person in One, going clockwise. The numbers increment in integers, but after Two and Three comes Two Squared, because only the Prime Numbers are 'real' and Composite Numbers must be express in terms of their factors.  So Five, Two Threes or Three Twos, Seven, Two Cubed and so forth.  It gets interesting with higher powers and patterns can emerge.  It is an interesting exercise to do alone, for mental training or recreation, but I am lazy and have not gone very far.  It is a nice way to think about numbers.  It may also be able to be done with diminishing fractions, but that is too much for my brain.

Hierarchy of awareness.

My new arithmetic.

1 + 1 = e

We have had exponential measuring scales, like dbs for ages, but they were empirically devised and used because they worked, without any fundamental understanding of why they worked, except that growth rate for almost everything is proportional to size.  The principle was not derived ‘a priori’ (by thought alone) from the fundamental theorems of logic. 

Mathematics has been at fault since Frege in the belief that integers have an ontological existence in the “real world” of aware sense experience equal to physical objects like rocks or pencils

Things exist or do not exist, so the concept of mathematical unity must exist, but zero does not exist in the real world as nothing is nothing.  It is reasonable to believe that the numbers e and pi are also “real” as their influence in the ways that energy-systems and “things” relate is obvious.  Most other integers are compounds or agglomerations of single things, not entities in themselves, not even the much loved Prime numbers and certainly not the fractions including irrational numbers.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  Two separate things together in a pair has a much higher level energy-system than merely the arithmetic, or vector sum of the separate energy systems.  The example that is most evident to all people is the idea of two people becoming a “couple”, or the business success of Partnerships compared to just a lot of people working on the same project. One anything, paired properly with another is not two of them but “e” of them, for surely it is this astonishing number that is the result, which is why everything grows at that rate when it grows naturally.

That is why married couples pop out babies; they have more energy in their system than two people can maintain with stability, so produce offspring. 

This theory can obviously be extended to more than two, when it becomes a subject for micro-sociology and small-group theory.  But the complexity becomes challenging, like taking a mathematical concept to other higher dimensions and probably has little real-world significance.

Hierarchy of awareness.

It is possible to postulate a hierarchy of awareness.  Aristotle and the ancients did this, believing that people were the most aware creatures, but all living animals had a lower type of “soul” that extended down in degrees till it reached plants, and thence to inanimate objects themselves, like crystals and rocks, and even molten metal.

When it was first seen that all “knowledge” was everything that had been thought, but even before any person thought of something, it seemed to have existed, which is why the “mind of God” became a necessary part of “Creation” because without it there was no one to know all the things that were not yet (at any time) known by any people.

If Consciousness is a propert y of all “energy-systems”, then even simple systems must be self-aware, though the simple sense of being that a rock might hold is unimaginably basic, though possessing mass, there might be some sensation of acceleration though space-time.  Indeed, we experience it and believe it is a higher property of our advanced biology, but perhaps it is intrinsic in our physical existence.  
"Reality" only exists because it is known to exist by itself.  No "mind of God" is needed if we believe that matter itself is what is self-aware and hence can know of its own existence.

Much more interesting that looking downwards in this hierarchy is looking up.  We see ourselves as the pinnacle of the development of Consciousness.  If we accept the concept of the hierarchy, we see ourselves as having morphed or evolved out of lower forms, and have now reached the apotheosis. 

It is more logical to expect that the future will proceed with continued development instead of stagnation at the present level for ever.  In other words, our human consciousness and self-awareness might eventually be superceded by a higher level, that is as much above us as we are above the great apes and other “animals”, and they are above plants, etc.  These things are surely quantified in some way, so there are shells of stability at some order of magnitude and the next level is a vast jump away.  We, people, will not gradually develop our consciousness, but will all stay within the same range for many generations, then a new parallel form of higher consciousness will emerge.

Or, perhaps it already has and we just cannot yet communicate with it?