Kant was very specific about the difference between a Phenomenon and a Noumenon. The perception of sonic information creates the phenomenon of music. I find this an initially clear view of the dichotomy. One could name the waves buzzing from my near field monitors the noumena, but they lack interpretation. To confound the issue, an oscilloscope, though distant from intelligent machines to come, interprets these noumena quite differently than our brains. The sensory apparatus of the machine is not unlike our eardrums, but the brain of the machine translates incoming waves into organized vector graphs. This phenomenon itself is a noumenon on a different level. Our eyes interpret it into a different phenomenon - that is, a representation of a sound wave as we know it with light. In this sense, there are endless tiers of phenomena interpreted from noumena. Is there a base noumenon from which all springs? I’d like to believe it’s an infinite recursion.
