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Comment by akomtu | Hacker News Reader

That's a funny thread. Plato distinguishes the world of ideas from the world of matter. The latter is all about magnetic fields, while the former has none of them, as it's the world of archetypes, hilbert spaces and fourier transforms. So mp3 belongs to the world of ideas, it's a concept that expresses a projection of an abstract waveform to a specific basis of functions. Sound represents a particular embodiment (aka a mechanical wave) of an abstract waveform in the world of matter. The fact that this mechanical wave is driven by magnetic fields is irrelevant and is also a tautology, because in the world of matter everything is driven by magnetic fields.

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What do you suppose is frequency content or information? It must principally exist in an analog continuous-time domain before being quantized and cached, correct? So how do these quantities, when processed, not correspond to what is ultimately electromagnetic?

I keep reading by commenters that a purely mathematical space which operates on physical movement has no relevance to physical movement vis-a-vis spectral analysis and particularly in how this analyzer - again embedded with recursive electromagnetic charges (software code) - does not affect the original time-sample. I am aware now that MP3 encoding is capturing more information than the analyzer - by design - but how can electromagnetic resonances not be considered in the discussion to warrant continual downvotes?

(I'd like to remind readers that downvotes are not made available for all users, but only those who meet a certain criteria, i.e. those which reflect the general Hacker News community.)

> but how can electromagnetic resonances not be considered in the discussion to warrant continual downvotes

Because everyone's been telling you the same thing in a multitude of different ways, but you refuse to get the point. Yes, the operation of the software we write can be affected by the physical realities of the hardware we use to execute them, but any time this causes the software to behave differently than it would in a purely hypothetical computer, this is considered an error and the results invalid. We even have hardware that automatically corrects for when rare events such as freakin' cosmic rays cause the value of a bit to flip (ECC memory).

The domain of software engineering is abstracted from physical reality. There's nothing useful to be gained from such discussions, because the whole job of hardware engineers is to enable us to operate at a higher level where we don't have to concern ourselves with the quantum electrodynamics necessary to make the transistors do their jobs.

Thank you for the response. What evidence do you use to support your judgment that the physical system is not affecting the mathematical transformations in the present example? Or is it just an assumption that you do not need to consider “quantum electrodynamic” parameters even though the motion involved is intrinsically natural, eg bird audio?

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