Transcendental Knowledge?

[The Grand Nudger]

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?

Not exactly. Ears aren't equipped to pick out shapes, so any "shape" your ear picks out is much more likely to be a top down imposition of abstraction. The idea of rewiring ears so that they "see" is meh. Plenty of creatures do "see" with their ears...but this is an artistic flair of language (and it's usually not their ears doing to seeing...though that seems to be the way we conceptualize it, the way we can describe it). They aren't actually "seeing", it's just a way to express a dissimilar function leveraged for a common effect (I could tell you how plants can see, and hear, and feel, and smell, and taste - but I'd be taking liberties with language in most cases, eh?). I would doubt, for example - that anyone could "hear" a square had they never "seen" a square to begin with. How would you go about "hearing a square" in the first place? What experience could you be having that would be reducible to "hearing a square"? Or, to put it another way. I could "see" a square in a vacuum - but could I "hear" one? I think that your thought experiment could only play with the meanings of sense words - not with the actual processes or apparatus, and without really diving into how our sense apparatus constricts our abstractions and experience I don't think that any insight can be gained from the thought experiment (which sort of brushes all of that aside from the get-go anyway). At least not much insight in the area of what may exist exterior to - though sure, probably plenty of fun to be had regarding our internal world in that one.

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.

We could point a spectrograph at an apple and see if it gives us a range of 400–484 THz, 620–750 nm. I'd say that would be a resounding yes, it would, and so yes, it does. Inasmuch as anything "has color". I could explain to you why an apple is red via botany as well.....if you'd like. They are red whether you are there to view them or not. They are red even if you saw them as blue.

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).

I don't think that we could use an eye - which is a somewhat shady device just for seeing.....and then intentionally jimmy with the wiring to add yet more error and abstraction - and then claim that we'd be aight, or just as good as we are now, using it as an ear. It's like saying. "How about we took the wheels off cars, and replaced them with cinderblocks? The car would be fine." The complexity is irrelevant, just as an incredibly complex cinderblock would be irrelevant. I'd say that specificity is a much more salient category than complexity when it comes to sense apparatus, sense data, and sense abstraction.

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?

Yup. I doubt it would matter to him if I did say that though, and if he saw dark yellow in his minds eye when he struck a d-minor, then good for him. Doesn't mean that dark yellow is actually there (any more than a person being colorblind actually means that red is green, or green is red). If dark yellow were present when a person struck d-minor I'd know about it, and it would be a pretty easy experiment for any of us to run (assuming Mozart didn't have a 6th sense). Plenty of fun little tics when it comes to our senses and our brains. Obviously, I;m with you in a way..because we have plenty of reasons to doubt that our senses give us any sort of absolute truth or perfect representation. There are problems with abstraction, sure. That doesn't mean that anything is fair game though - that we can play so loosely with our sense data or that we could throw it all out in principle, rearrange it as we see fit for a thought experiment, and then conclude that this and thus (via our thought experiment) must be so. The accuracy of any individuals abstractions does not have a modifying effect on whatever it is they have abstracted. You thinking that an apple is blue will not make the apple blue. Someone thinking that a sound is a circle will not actually make the sound a circle. Our thoughts don't seem to have that ability, or, at least, mine don't. Our abstractions aren't always accurate - but this doesn't mean that they are always inaccurate. Removing an apples "redness" because of some imagined failure to percieve it, or an ability to percieve it as something else is massive error - because you aren't really talking about the apple, even though you're making conclusions about the apple.