A digital sampler executes its task several thousand times a second. Nowadays about 48 000 is quite standard. Sample too infrequently and you get aliasing—the sound becomes jagged in various ways.
Aliasing and Anti-Aliased LetterSample enough and the sound is smooth—enough. This means that what you hear coming out of a computer is perforated to say the least. Then of course it's compressed in various ways to become AIF, MP3, or whatever.
This is one reason why some people still swear by vinyl that's been recorded using analog techniques. They prefer the sound of the analog medium to the non-sound of the perforations. Many of us however have grown accustomed to what is in effect a kind of sonic pointillism in which each bit of sound is precisely regular.
SeuratDigital sound technology has given rise to confusion. My uncle, for instance, got into an argument with me about CDs. Now he's a very smart guy who just retired as as biochemistry professor at the University of London. But for the life of him he couldn't figure out how a CD player, or even a CD, could tell in advance whether the sample was an oboe sound or a cello sound. “How does it know?”
Aren't we in general asking the very same kind of question about minds? This isn't about materialist or reductionist theories of mind vs. qualia or whatever. It's about the perfectly straightforward OOO idea that the mind is a sensual object that consists of samples other objects. Versus the idea of mental maps or some mysterious mechanics of intentionality. True Brentano style intentionality would, in my lingo, be a sample.
Given that I have a hunch that causality works through sampling, the issue is even bigger than thinking about mind.