Fledermäuse und Gefühle

This just confirms the incommensurability between what things actually are like and what they feel like (via any sense). Why should a seen distance (or form) be “shaped” differently from a heard distance (or form)…?

The correlation between the shape of things and what we can do with them is real enough. And their felt shape certainly accompanies (and in that sense correlates with) the viewing and doing.

But (to repeat myself, with other words), apart from that, a sphere no more (nor less) “resembles” what it looks like than it resembles what it sounds like…

And the point of the “What [does it feel] like to be a bat?” question, I take it, was — or ought to have been — to highlight that incommensurability (not to try to feel the way a bat feels: I suspect that in its essential features all feeling is pretty much of a muchness: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting are all varieties of feeling, just as seeing red vs seeing blue are; we can talk to a congenitally blind person about the world, because although he cannot see, he can feel — and of course all the rest of his correlations are intact).

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