RE: Transcendental Knowledge?
October 16, 2014 at 10:08 pm
(This post was last modified: October 16, 2014 at 10:15 pm by bennyboy.)
I propose a thought experiment.
Let's say you rewired all people's brains so that part of their visual neurocircuitry fed into parts of the brain responsible for hearing. Let's say that through experience, these people learned that a particular tone or sound represented a particular color or shape. They'd then say "A rainbow sounds like a C-major chord played by harps" or whatever. (remember, we're taking all this as a given). They could say, "That's a particularly 'D' apple," and this statement would have meaning for the people they talked to.
Sounds silly, right? But isn't this really what the brain does? It takes discrete inputs of photons, channels them unprocessed to parts of the brain, and creates what is essentially a symbolic experience. Does any apple really "have" the subjective quality of redness, any more than it does of D-ness? I don't think so.
How about form, smell, etc? We could rewire all of these ot other sensory apparatuses, and have consistent sense impressions around which ideas and consistent communications could form, but they would be completely unlike an apple as we see it now; and yet, so long as the complexity of information was preserved, we should still be able to interact with the universe as completely as before (with a lot of learning, and assuming brain plasticity-- I guess we'd have to do it to a child).
Many people, including famous artists and musicians, have conditions in which they DO get this kind of crossover, so this is not a purely hypothetical example. If Mozart claims d-minor is a dark yellow, and this informs his construction of a great piece of music, are you really going to tell him he's full of shit, and sound is just vibrations in air and nothing more?
Let's say you rewired all people's brains so that part of their visual neurocircuitry fed into parts of the brain responsible for hearing. Let's say that through experience, these people learned that a particular tone or sound represented a particular color or shape. They'd then say "A rainbow sounds like a C-major chord played by harps" or whatever. (remember, we're taking all this as a given). They could say, "That's a particularly 'D' apple," and this statement would have meaning for the people they talked to.
Sounds silly, right? But isn't this really what the brain does? It takes discrete inputs of photons, channels them unprocessed to parts of the brain, and creates what is essentially a symbolic experience. Does any apple really "have" the subjective quality of redness, any more than it does of D-ness? I don't think so.
How about form, smell, etc? We could rewire all of these ot other sensory apparatuses, and have consistent sense impressions around which ideas and consistent communications could form, but they would be completely unlike an apple as we see it now; and yet, so long as the complexity of information was preserved, we should still be able to interact with the universe as completely as before (with a lot of learning, and assuming brain plasticity-- I guess we'd have to do it to a child).
Many people, including famous artists and musicians, have conditions in which they DO get this kind of crossover, so this is not a purely hypothetical example. If Mozart claims d-minor is a dark yellow, and this informs his construction of a great piece of music, are you really going to tell him he's full of shit, and sound is just vibrations in air and nothing more?
