Before moving on, note how in these circumstances we don’t conclude that “only sight is real” and that sound is merely a derivate of it, but simply that the two senses are related (-Academician)
You made this point in a previous post, I think. Not that I’m complaining—it’s well worth the emphasis.
...none of which makes any difference to the question that non-physicalists actually worry about, the so-called hard problem. (-Yvain)
But it lays the groundwork, I think. Comparing our grasp of the same object via different senses reminds us that we have different ways of apprehending a single item. Comparing our grasp of the same property via different senses would be even more instructive. Consider visual and tactile assessments of linearity. We consider these to be two ways of apprehending the same property. But it is just barely conceivable that we are wrong. Conceivably—although not with enough probability to warrant revising the way we now talk and think about linearity—future discoveries will lead us to separate linear(tactile) from linear(visual).
This is important to the “hard problem” because many non-physicalists have argued from the premise that there will always be a conceptual gap between physical and mental descriptions, to the conclusion that these descriptions pick out different properties. “Conceptual gap” here meaning just that is is conceivable that one description could apply and the other not apply. The premise, I think, is true, but the inference is invalid. Linearity is a single property that we can pick out with two concepts, tactile linearity and visual linearity, that have a (very thin—but that’s all we need!) conceptual gap between them. Linearity is therefore a counterexample to the alleged inference principle.
You made this point in a previous post, I think. Not that I’m complaining—it’s well worth the emphasis.
But it lays the groundwork, I think. Comparing our grasp of the same object via different senses reminds us that we have different ways of apprehending a single item. Comparing our grasp of the same property via different senses would be even more instructive. Consider visual and tactile assessments of linearity. We consider these to be two ways of apprehending the same property. But it is just barely conceivable that we are wrong. Conceivably—although not with enough probability to warrant revising the way we now talk and think about linearity—future discoveries will lead us to separate linear(tactile) from linear(visual).
This is important to the “hard problem” because many non-physicalists have argued from the premise that there will always be a conceptual gap between physical and mental descriptions, to the conclusion that these descriptions pick out different properties. “Conceptual gap” here meaning just that is is conceivable that one description could apply and the other not apply. The premise, I think, is true, but the inference is invalid. Linearity is a single property that we can pick out with two concepts, tactile linearity and visual linearity, that have a (very thin—but that’s all we need!) conceptual gap between them. Linearity is therefore a counterexample to the alleged inference principle.