Haha, I assure you I am incredibly joyful and a good person. I don't force anyone to turn off their music. I just don't turn it on myself. It's not as uncommon as you think and your immediate judgement is definitely a part of you that makes you less than perfectly good. Not everyone loves music and that is absolutely okay. You might try reading a book for an hour instead of listening to music you'll find yourself becoming good and joyful before you know it!

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But they're not good and joyful, is the point I guess you missed. They're all terrifyingly weird.

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I don't listen to music. And I'm a mathematician. So your response was funny to me. I don't hate it. But I do not listen to it of my own accord and don't have music playing in my car. I am not dead inside. I just think music is so obviously synthetic sound and I prefer the natural sounds of birds and wind and such. It's so weird to me that people can't just pause and listen to the natural world around them. How can you possibly listen to music that much? Do you not have a job, or conversation with humans, or sleep, or a moment to just be?!? When I encounter people who listen to music to this extreme I always wonder why you're constantly trying to avoid having a conversation with yourself and why you are so afraid of the fact that people can be genuinely good and joyful people without listening to a single song all day long.

Good food tastes good. Good scents smell good. A pretty sunset is just that. A soft touch feels good. Good music sounds...good!

It's all about the experience. Enjoy the good.

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In the simplest terms possible: those that are rich are also paying off lawmakers law enforcers. They “grease the wheels” of politics so to speak.

So the brain is just constantly looping its operating system 30 - 50 times per second to scan for changes in the program, like a computer program operating in a loop. That’s cool.

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This reminds me of a weird thing that seems to happen in my head when I get excessively stressed (e.g. uni final exams that I'd drastically underprepared for): I would find myself thinking about various ways of topping myself with a kind of detached curiosity, although I never felt I was actually in danger.

So, I think the real answer is we don't know. There going to be a lot of guesses based on SOME evidence, but there is never going to be anything conclusive because we can't really go back and time and observe the moment when humans first started to make and enjoy music.

Obviously, music can be enjoyed by more than just humans, so maybe the question shouldn't be "why humans" but more like "where did the love of music first start?" and maybe we have a common ancestor with other animals that explains that love.

It might be easier if you think in terms of hearing instead of seeing. If someone is far away from you, you can shout and it might take a second for the sound to reach them. So at this moment, they are hearing what you said one second ago.

Light is the same way, but it travels a lot faster. So if someone is very far from Earth, they will see the light that left Earth some time ago. If they are 32 light years away, they will see light that was on Earth 32 years ago in 1990.

It's important to note that even with the most powerful telescopes we could make right now, the image would be so blurry that you couldn't see the shape of the continents.

Well that's a relief, I've had loads of intrusive thoughts about homicidal shit that really creeped me out moments later. I always feel so guilty afterwards too. (After the thought has passed, not the alternative 💀)

I can see why. I read it as “people who don’t listen to music” not being the same as “people who can’t listen to music”. The first being people who simply choose not to for whatever reason, as opposed to people who have a reason not to.

Not that I think people who choose not to listen to music are inherently odd or that you have to have a reason not to like it, but I would definitely double take at someone who told me they actively choose never to listen to music without a reason other than “I don’t want to.” But then again, I’ve never encountered the concept that people may simply choose not to without another reason, and the more that I think about it the more I’m genuinely wondering if that has more to do with the people I tend to spend time with rather than with the general population.

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That assumption wasn’t made? The first comment was about the three people this person has met. Not a generalization.

The actual “psychopath” statement also wasn’t an assumption, it was a parallel: music serves a purpose in this person’s life, “but so do psychopaths in war”, ie, “just because something serves a purpose doesn’t mean it’s good, so take this with a grain of salt”

edit: a punctuation mark

One reason is that part of our brain looks at the world in terms of how it can interact with it -- for example grasping a handle, pushing a button, or stepping on a stair. There is a sense in which those things prompt those responses by being designed to be used. Stepping off a cliff is partly an extension of the impulse to grab and manipulate.

Not disagreeing, just clarifying. You could look arbitrarily into the earth's past from our reference frame on the planet by viewing it from any distance as long as you did not travel from the earth to get there. When I saw the word travel, that is what I was referring to. If you left from the surface, you could never see anything that happened before you left, no matter how far nor how fast you traveled. That was my point. Which, in retrospect, was not the point you were making.

Sounds nightmarish!

The most basic answer is: "We don't know".

On the level of genres, that's learned. Your genre preference are typically tied to experience; what you remember fondly.

As for music in general tho, it's a bit hazy.

But we know that a lot of animals like it, so it's not specifically human, and we know children still respond positively to it, so it's not an entirely learned behavior.

We just like orderly patterns of sound. It might be as simple as it being an enriching stimulus — like a puzzle — something interesting for your brain to chew on.

I had a mini panic attack once while driving down the freeway one night due to this. I thought "Just one turn of wheel and I could potentially kill myself and others. that all it would take." So then I gripped onto thr steering wheel pretty hard. Kind of "to make sure" that didnt happen. as though some outside force was going to magically make it happen.

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It's accurate in the sense that is how it would work if you could be a light year away, but you're right, there's presently no way to get that far away. You could still go to Mars and look a couple minutes in the past. :)

The Voyagers are about a light day away, so they could see "yesterday" if they had the imaging capabilities onboard.

Stress response that the body experiences during the anxiety that comes with the experience. Humans are wired to do something when feeling anxious like walk around, hunt an animal, fight to defend ourselves or otherwise move.

Modern man sits at a desk and lashes out online to get that dopamine/adrenaline rush because they are not moving and reacting. Same with a car, we are sitting and feeling the anxiety, stress and excitement of moving at a high rate and endangering out lives, and our body has no release so it strains towards an action that releases that built up anxiety and chemicals inside our system.