On Strong Inference,

[Brotep]

We can still find patterns in that though.

Certainly. I was pointing out that there is more than one universe to explore in such a case as music, while agreeing with you.

Think about instrument form, history of instrument design. We can track down the roots of different instruments and infer an instrument "phylogeny" based upon congruence of characters and historical information. We can, for example, track the modern acoustic guitar back to the torres classical and folk guitars of the 18th and 19th century, and further track those back to the vihuela. We can find a geneology of styles, "mutations" and novel creativity, etc.

Also, although music is abstract, there is a level of abstraction involved. We can, say, trace the idea of a melody, and how that broke down over time within North American music movements such as Jazz, where the level of abstraction from melody increased.

We can see these patterns, and we can ask these questions, regardless of the field. I think that's amazing, there really IS a unity of knowledge.

Yes. We're talking about coherent systems that follow rules and thus may be explored through inference.

Knowledge is dependent on inductive reasoning, on the ability to form associations--something even the simplest of biological neural networks is capable of to an extent.