Interview:

Music is one of humanity’s greatest sources of profound emotional experience, along with our ties to each other, and the intricate wonders of the world revealed by our senses, and by science. But there are no spirits involved. Thoughts happen in living brains, and there’s no need for some sort of parallel supernatural world. It’s good enough to be a fantastically complex creature evolved on this earth, made from the stuff of exploding stars. Like our other abilities, music is rooted in inheritances from ancestral, pre-human creatures, amplified by our unique brains and the social structures that evolved along with them. Every year evidence mounts that we are purely physical beings, that our thoughts and emotions originate in specific places within our bodies and brains, and that supernatural imaginings are social products: myths that take hold because of our justifiable desire to avoid death. Good luck with that. “Spiritual” is a useful shorthand for the countless sparks of emotion and neural world-modeling going on within us. But there’s a moral price for this convenience: millions have been murdered in the names of those bodiless notions we call gods, whom we carefully arrange, puppet-like, into postures that tell us what we want to hear. The comfortable illusion of guidance has consequences that go beyond the positive actions we congratulate ourselves on, or the sublime feelings we enjoy. There’s no loss of human dignity in embracing our life as a fragile and astonishing confluence of matter, with evolved capabilities for pleasures like love and music that belong to us by nature, not by supernatural decree.

“Music is one of humanity’s greatest sources of profound emotional experience, along with our ties to each other, and the intricate wonders of the world revealed by our senses, and by science.”
– Scott Johnson, composer and guitarist