This essay has been twelve years in the gestation. I was finally prompted to organize and articulate my ideas after recent experiences, preceded by years of pondering the ways we amateur enthusiasts socialize with each other, the Internet having bypassed the old conventions of face-to-face pleasantness.

My early social experiences in the 1970s and 80s with fellow astronomer- mentors, and in astronomy club activities, were very rewarding and positive ones, but Internet socializing has been less so, becoming even more stress- inducing over time. A repeated pattern has seemed to emerge on forums and usenet (in my opinion) in which there is a growing tendency of expert hobbyists to turn to rebuttal, rather than mutual sharing and constructive synthesis. There is less and less tolerance of individuality. No subjective opinion -- particularly those that are a little odd, unexpected, out of the ordinary, or idiosyncratic -- is 'allowed' to be expressed, it seems, without being shouted down, the mildest way being condescending "correction" from some respondents, but other bolder ones resorting to personal insult as the only argumentative response. This standard logical fallacy does not promote the increase of knowledge.

Furthermore, personal opinion and subjective feelings and convictions are often treated by other readers as "assertions about objective facts that have to be tested." They aren't that. Individual experiences, gained by sight or hearing, are sometimes "denied" by others, who either don't think they happened, or weren't at all possible. (And, we're not talking here about "UFO sightings", but merely what colors or shapes or range of contrasts have been perceived by telescopic observers, or which eyepieces or telescopes yield certain optical nuances, and how they should perform -- opinions of individual users.) There seems to be a growing intolerance of allowing others to express their own legitimate, honestly formed opinions: they do so at their own peril, for each one -- and the observer -- is subjected to such withering criticism, skepticism, and condescension that the result is discouraging intimidation that only a very strong, stubborn person can withstand. Some of us give up, and keep our ideas to ourselves, which does no good to persons who might benefit from contemplating them.

Can public Internet intercommunications media serve the improvement of knowledge when fallacious argument crowds out almost all other means of communication and sharing? Have people who are now using forums and usenet been "selected" for disputatiousness, and an intolerance of diverse opinions, having driven off all less aggressive souls? It would seem so.

A reaction of some has been to develop their own private thoughts into webpages, rather than to argue them interactively and withstand the withering debate. Others who are dedicated amateurs have possibly succumbed to the temptation of "showing off" by super-achievement and self-promotion, a form of intimidation by asserting a fallacious argument-from-authority: presenting themselves as objective researchers who have thoroughly exhausted the possibilities of their amateur hobby, bridging the gap and entering the realm of professional scientists. Have they really achieved that? Are their articles scientific, following the Baconian process, and Popper's method of falsification? Or are they instead really large-scale idiosyncratic psychological accounts of their own nuanced abilities? The following essay conveys what I have come either to suspect, or to believe, after pondering more than a decade of my own discussions of amateur astronomy and musical record collecting on the Net.

Analogy between Investigative Processes in Science and Art

Presumably, readers of an amateur astronomy website who encounter this present article will know much about observing celestial objects with a telescope. But, permit me to present an analogy about learning processes, derived from my own field of music, compared to the practices of scientists: specifically astronomers. I would like to discuss how one "knows" something about a physical entity, comparing a celestial object to a work of art. The two examples are the well-known gaseous nebula in the constellation of Orion, Messier 42, and the monumental masterpiece, Symphony No. 4 by Brahms. Each is a favorite of respective scientific and musical enthusiasts.

Just as the scientists -- professional and amateur -- have their various ways of investigating and learning about the objects of their interest, the artist/musician can use different approaches to the understanding of art music. Some of these investigative techniques have remarkable parallels to those used by scientists.

The subjects under study by the professionals are "real" physical entities: the professional astronomer studies the energy radiated by a celestial object. The professional musician studies a document: a printed score, whose notations 'encode' the musical contents of a work of art, within the instructions given to performers, that the composer created. Every astronomer can have access to data, recorded impartially by mechanical devices. Every musician can access an identical copy of the printed score.

The amateurs, however, are in some ways removed at least by one extra stage of neural-cognitive "interpretation" from the real entity (or from the concrete data.) The visual astronomer does not use a calibrated non-human instrument to collect data about electromagnetic radiation, but employs the eye/brain system, involving neurophysical actions and cognition. The amateur musician listens to a record or hears a live concert of the Brahms symphony, and "takes it in" by means of the ear/brain system. The visual astronomer, and the aural listener to a musical performance, operate "in the moment" as they receive stimulae, and respond to them physically and emotionally. As this is occurring they initiate, and continue afterwards, an intellectual process to ponder and analyze the events that have been witnessed. Both the amateur astronomer, and the amateur musician, probably enjoy repeating the experiences over and over, each time gaining more from them.

What the Study of Learning Processes and Pedagogy Reveals

For a number of years I exchanged an almost daily email correspondence with a fellow music-enthusiast, a full professor of neurophysiology at an east coast university, whose specialty was vision. He was also interested in astronomy, but his main hobbies were high fidelity music reproduction and record collecting. He frequently passed on to me links to professional literature about the neurophysiology of sight and sound perception, and expressed his opinions regarding the work of Penrose and Crick about cognition -- which I've read -- and which the professor and I compared with some my amateur self-observations and speculations. He was particularly interested in my own method of analyzing recordings with metrical measurements, and we often discussed the scientific principles of examining sound and music when in such concrete form. In my business-life, I operate a small home-based music school, the Roper Piano Studio, directed by my wife, Regina Roper: a concert pianist and music teacher, specializing in the needs of beginners. She has studied for many years, on a professional level, the psychological literature related to learning processes and teaching techniques, and I've had many exchanges with her about those subjects, as well as having read numerous resources she's recommended. She is also interested in amateur astronomy and can understand the parallels in the analytical comparison, above.

With that diversity of background, we've developed the point of view that the 'amateur' (being defined as distinct from a professional, in that almost all information is learned experientially rather than from study of concretized objective data) will slowly build a mental conception, or model, of concepts -- or constructs -- based on experience. Our "mental M-42" based on studying visual impressions gained at the eyepiece over time, and our "mental Brahms Fourth" derived from memorizing the sounds we heard passively, repeated many times, are rather similar (at least at the level of brain activity.) They consist of neural connections that were formed and structured as each experience was (partially) retained.

Savant-learning, versus "conventional" memory

Some savants will occasionally have photographic memory: the man who was the model for the "Rain Man" movie character, Kim Peek (who suffers from autism and severe personality disorder), can demonstrate absolute and total recall of names, dates, places, historical figures, phone directories: almost everything he has read. My wife and I noticed, however, that during a television documentary about him, much was made by the uninformed interviewer about his musical skills. Regina and I were both unimpressed. Kim tried at the piano to noodle out a tune from the Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony, and what he played was unrecognizable . He gave an imprecise date for the creation of the work, and for the recording session that yielded his favorite performance (Szell's, which I knew correctly) and in general seemed to be only very vaguely aware of the particulars -- yet the psychologist interviewing him (obviously no musical professional) was HUGELY impressed. So, even a savant appeared to have an ability to 'lock' onto only a certain range of types of information that was taken in through his prodigious reading and listening.

The mental models that both the musician, and the amateur telescope observer, create via repeated experiences using their ears or eyes are -- like Kim Peek's vague conceptions of Tchaikovsky -- inherently flawed. They are NOT concrete and immutable, but diminish with lack of use (as they require 'refreshment'), though they can be built up by subsequent experience.

Personality Drives, Mental Models, and Conviction of "Rightness"

We hypothesize that in some very exceptional, advanced amateurs (really, in most people to one extent or another), the psychological forces driving them may, at a certain threshold, generate a very powerful sense of conviction about 'their models' and the rightness and inevitability of them. Some of them may so powerfully identify with the nature of what they have come to "know" by this information-gathering mechanism, that they simply "can't understand" other people's differing points of view: they seem "illogical" or "inexplicable". "You CAN'T be right!" is the internal reaction, which is often toned down to something less extreme when expressed socially. (On usenet, the trend seems to be in the direction of bluntness, not indirectness.)

Examples from Everyday Life and the Media

One hears this on talk radio every day. Certain opinionated hosts, and their callers, constantly express dismay, bewilderment, and utter frustration when they contemplate the opinions of "others". The others who upset them have built up entirely different 'logical, inevitable' mental models of society, politics, religion... and those with strong, disparate models can't begin to comprehend how these "wrong ideas" were formed. Their next step is often to insist that our system of education, and our social structure, have to change so that this can be prevented in the future!

It is important to step back from such disputes, and to try to see how each party's mental construct of the situation -- held so firmly as a totally-imbued personal conviction -- came into being. On the level of brain activity, each person on radically different sides of an issue is behaving normally. Neither is disordered or aberrant. They have, however, through entirely different life-experiences, created different mental constructs, with they interlink to form "their point of view". Since the subject on talk radio is usually politics, many of us share a universal interest in it, and have experienced the results: constant contention and anger, expressed between people of the "left" and the "right", who can't appreciate each other's point of view, and who don't find it practical, or even conceivably possible, to try to make accomodations.

(Parenthetically, as a 'weird' person myself, being an ardent secularist- classical music devotee- telescope-totin'- scientific evolution-believing- sports-averse- largely-apolitical person in an uncomprehending world, I am already sufficiently alienated from "normal" society to have lost much hope of having any influence, one way or the other: so I tend to live my life as a sort of "stranger in a strange land", looking on my own society as a cultural anthropologist from Mars might do.)

Politics is different from science, where there is a constant flow of information and synthesis. Individual scientists, being human persons, have the same psychologies and often feel just as shocked at the "illogic" of those with whom they disagree strongly. However, the scientific process overcomes this problem by allowing for testing and synthesis, rather than promoting only division and dissolution.

The Pitfalls of Distortion in Subjective Investigation and Analysis

But, what of the areas of concern in life where there is NO scientific process in play? We'd postulate that in "visual amateur astronomy" and in "aural amateur musicality" there is a parallel situation in which virtually all information-gathering is done through the senses, the intellectual analysis being added later, involving mostly the process of an individual person trying to interpret, understand, and explain his or her personal mental models. The data have not been concretized in a way that can be examined equivalently and directly by all.

Furthermore, these kinds of data consist of mental models of individual investigators, and can only be shared when rendered into linguistic explanations, another process where distortion is introduced. Next, in the communication process, another form of distortion may be added (when the recipient of the information does not fully understand the essential meaning that the language was INTENDED by the writer to convey.) Finally, an intellectual examination and comparative analysis is undertaken by the recipient, measured against not a concrete standard, but against her own 'mental model'; the end result -- carried to others by the shaky process of forming a linguistic explanation -- conveying an opinion. There is nothing exceptional, then, about the large incidence of failure of diverse persons to agree. So much of the entire process of data-taking, storing, analysis, communication, and internal comparison forming opinions, is fraught with ambiguities and distortions that, frankly, it is really remarkable that we DO agree, from time to time!

Probably that has happened because of the common factors that we all share through evolution. Though we differ as unique human personalities, even those -- at the level of brain activity -- are developed following the possible routes afforded by our brain structure. Persons who are savants, or who suffer from severe brain damage, don't even have those general, similar structures in conventional working order. Other 'normal' people do; but the multitudes of options that each of us confront results in a different pathway at each junction, adding up to "a totally different way of looking at life." Those of us who agree, have probably shared some significantly common learning and social experiences, and guidance. Then, when we "do our astronomy" or "play our records", we follow a similar, ritualized practice.

How Musical Artists -- Professional and Amateur -- "Learn" a Work of Art

Returning to my analogy above, since we all know about amateur astronomy but not necessarily about studying a work of art, let's now talk about my 'parallel examples' in the world of art and music. There are several ways of "knowing" a piece of art music: let's use the Brahms Symphony No. 4 as an example. A trained classical musician can learn to read the score, which is a very complex document. (My wife, a concert pianist, has told me that she has certain difficulties following orchestral scores and watched me doing it, and concluded that I -- not a pianist but originally trained to play percussion instruments -- could do it more easily than she could.) So, even in this one method of learning to know a piece of music, two musicians have different competence in following the composer's original document: his multi-stave score (pianists are used to looking at merely two staves at a time, not a whole page of them.)

Then, there is another and more typical way of knowing the Brahms Fourth, the one that is used by almost everybody, musician and non-musician alike: hearing it, over and over. You needn't know how to read, or play, a note of music. Some non-performers have such good musical memories that they can mentally run through much, or most, of the piece, bar by bar. They can stand in front of their stereo systems and "air conduct". They can differentiate the interpretative nuances of many different conductors, and develop strong preferences -- and aversions -- for different recordings. Arguments about the "superiority" of Maestro Toscanini's version, over Maestro Furtwängler's version, have been thrashed out on usenet for years; they're never resolved and there's no consensus. Yet all participants "know" the Brahms Fourth. Neither professional musicians and music critics, nor amateur dilettantes, have ever managed to persuasively construct an argument that holistically, uncontrovertibly establishes a point of view that dominates, to which every interested party simply has to accede.

The process of listening to and "understanding" the complicated aural event-structure of such a monumental art work as that Brahms Fourth probably, I'd argue, involves multi-dimensional processes of both physical response and mental cognition. The connoisseur who evaluates the interpretative distinctions may come to know much about the historical development of orchestral playing, including the nuances of instrumental section playing: how much vibrato is to be used; what rhythmic rubato effects are considered "tasteful and appropriate" during particular historic periods in which artistic schools of thought have influenced players. (There has been an enormous change of approach as "20th century rational objectivist" interpreters came to power, diminishing the "romanticists" of the 19th century and their preference for indulging in agogics not indicated in the score.) There is even said to be an emotional and psychological effect that can be traced to slight differences of pitch reference: changing the "A" even a few Hertz, as has been done over a century's time, is said to create different "tone color" to the overall sound.

When An Artistic Document Becomes "Real" To The Observer

So, what is the "real" Brahms Fourth? It is simply -- outside the concrete form of a printed score -- when rendered in sounds, what everybody experiences "in the moment", whether heard live played by a community orchestra that is struggling, or by the Berlin Philharmonic sailing forth boldly; or from a scratchy old 78, or a sleek modern digital disk. Nevertheless, all listeners have their unique total personal involvement in it, per event, that cannot ever be exactly correlated with another person's.

Data Collection Differences: Art vs. Science

As I show in the chart above, professional astronomers now use carefully calibrated instrumental sensors to collect data, not human sense-receptors. But amateur astronomers who look visually at objects rather than taking pictures use their sense perception to gather impressions and 'visually derived information', not machinery calibrated to certain standards. I would propose that there exists a very similar situation in learning a piece of music by ear, comparable to visual astronomical observing. Since two observers at different times and places have significant perceptual and cognitive differences -- as do any two music lovers who listen to recordings -- it is impossible to assert that "one knows M-42, but the other gets an inaccurate impression, being only anecdotal": no matter how controlled and careful the first observer may seem to be, the ENTIRETY of his or her cognition is filtered, at the moment, through their neurophysical system, and their cognition processes: which are unique to each human being.

How Concrete Examples Affect Perception: In Astronomy

You can work backwards from the evidence gathered by reading all the books, newsgroup discussions, and individual web articles about M-42, and find that by now, having all been "biased" by knowledge of long exposure pictures in color and black and white, many people with similar telescopes share a sort of common perception of what the nebula can look like, given nice sky conditions (which, of course, are constantly varying, everywhere.) But in the 1870s, not even a full decade before the first photo of the object was taken at Harvard, a monumental scientific paper by Holden had collected historic, and then-modern, observations of the object, documenting the enormous range of visual impressions and comprehension of persons who had not a mental conception in mind (based on photos) as a reference, but only fleeting glimpses in their telescopes. As soon as photos were widely known, observers had a more common perception of the arrangement of stars in the Trapezium region, the presence of various types (and even colors) of nebulosity, the range of contrasts, and the overall dimensions of the object: because an unchanging physical model -- a photograph taken by a great observatory telescope -- could be held in the hands, studied, and returned to later and seen again, unchanged: repeatedly.

Yet, even now visual astronomers working with a wide array of equipment, can have entirely different experiences at each viewing. Years ago, the author and his associates conducted some double-blind tests of nebular filters, establishing some limited formal controls. During our double-blind tests, M-42 was an object that we observed with different filters, using eyepieces of identical brand, model, and focal length, rapidly alternated without the observer knowing which was which. A large number of differing impressions was gathered from many tests with four observers. Little consensus was achieved: not which filter type was always "best", nor even which filter brand.

We were back to Square One, in the pre-photography days, to a certain extent. The view in a telescope is not an unchanging physical model, like a photograph. It is experienced differently than when one sits under a bright light, looking at a photographic print or a half-tone illustration in a book. The eye darts back and forth, using peripheral vision, averted vision glimpses, and direct vision scrutiny when using a telescope; this is not done similarly while simply staring at a picture. Different physical eye mechanisms are in use: photopic vision versus scotopic vision. Different cognitive processes may also be employed when comparing a "live eyepiece view" versus "studying a photo". And, we know that different observers -- not only amateurs, but also, as documented in historic literature in the days before photography, professional astronomers -- have diverse skills and different perceptions.

Can We Establish Concrete Objective Facts, Based on Investigation by Subjective Neurophysical/Cognitive Processes?

In amateur telescope observing, WHO IS "RIGHT", establishing that others are wrong? Which observer is definitively "superior" to others? Which one total experience of M-42 is "definitive"? These questions cannot be answered, and it is simply because the concepts in this context of "rightness" or "superiority" are unfalsifiable: we have no way at present of totally recording, documenting, and comparing the entire brain processes and cognition of any observer, in concrete form, to compare with similar data from another observer. So, by definition, I would assert that with respect to visual observation of celestial objects with telescopes, there is no means of measuring, objectively, the performance of any one, or group, of persons. The best we can do is to collect imperfectly described impressions, which vary enormously due to differences of individual ability to use language to convey their inner thoughts and feelings. All visual observing experiences are anecdotal; none are objective.

How Do You Move From "Amateur" to "Professional" Status?

Finally: one cannot 'jump the division' in my table given above, illustrating the practices of amateurs and professionals, by becoming a "super amateur". You cannot learn to play the piano competently and professionally by listening over and over to Rubinstein or Horowitz records, even though you have memorized the note patterns. Kim Peek illustrated that, when he could only clumsily 'noodle around' at the keyboard; though the interviewing psychologist was impressed, Regina Roper the concert pianist was NOT. Similarly, the "super amateur visual observer" cannot, by dint of constant practice looking into a telescope and detecting what she perceives as varying nuances, become by this means a working professional scientist.

A single investigation, not done by a scientific process, does NOT 'become scientific' by repeating it a hundred times, with certain variances. Many amateurs who reach a high level of attainment often, in my way of thinking, seem to convey in their reports on usenet and in their articles to be suggesting that they may believe themselves to have "attained scientific competence". But, have they? Would the professional scientist, trained to apply Popper's method, find evidence that has been gathered in a controlled process; is falsifiable; and that has been falsified; has been given proper peer review and criticism; and has been elevated from hypothesis to theory? Sadly, when measured against this process, very few examples of amateur science reporting seem to conform.

Conclusion: A Suggestion for Amateurs

The lesson learned is to enjoy what you are doing; learn from it; share it; but don't expect or insist that others have to accept it as having established objective fact.

Most everyone would probably agree that beginners benefit from being mentored by people with sound ideas. But beware of discouraging better- informed and more experienced investigators and mis-applying scientific criticism standards to non-scientific subjective observations, being intolerant of what other persons "perceive", or their experience-based opinions. 'Deniers' and 'reactionary arguers' may often lack a sound scientific basis for their points of view, if they have been derived by means of subjective, untestable processes.