It is often supposed that our experience of sounds is as of things distinct from the material world of sight and touch: reflecting on the character of our auditory experience might seem to confirm that. This paper describes the features of our auditory experience that can lead one to think of sounds in this way. It then describes a way we can experience sounds as being part of the material world. Since this is a kind of experience that essentially involves more than one sense, the paper ends by drawing some conclusions about how we should think about the senses.
Our auditory experience involves the experience of auditory objectssequences of distinct sounds, or parts of continuous sounds-that are experienced as grouped together into a single sound or "stream" of sounds. In this paper I argue that it is not possible to explain what it is to experience an auditory object as such-i.e. to experience a sequence of sounds as grouped-in purely auditory terms; rather, to experience an auditory object as such is to experience a sequence of sounds as having been (apparently) produced by the same source.The tenth variation of Bach's Goldberg Variations is a short four-voice fugue. It begins with a subject in the bass (on G below middle C) which is answered after four bars in the tenor; the soprano voice begins after a further four bars, and the final alto voice begins four bars later. When played at a normal tempo one doesn't hear the variation as a sequence of notes in the order in which they are played. As each new voice begins its notes are heard as a distinct melody-a separate voice parallel to the other voices-so that after twelve bars one hears four parallel melodies playing simultaneously. It is possible to attend selectively to each melody, but difficult to attend to more than one simultaneously; instead, when one attends to one melody it is heard against a background of the others. Although one can hear the order of and temporal relations between the notes that make up each melody, it is impossible to hear the order of the notes that make up the variation as a whole, and impossible to hear the temporal relations between the notes as they are actually played. 1
Suppose that you are looking at a vase of flowers on the table in front of you. You can visually attend to the vase and to the flowers, noticing their different features: their colour, their shape and the way they are arranged. In attending to the vase, the flowers and their features, you are attending to mindindependent objects and features. Suppose, now, that you introspectively reflect on the visual experience you have when looking at the vase of flowers. In doing so, you might notice various features of your experience, for example that individual petals on the flowers are difficult to distinguish. Although in introspection your interest is in the character of your experience, your attention is still to the objects of your experience-to the mind-independent vase and the flowers. Since attending to your experience involves attending to the mind-independent objects and features of your experience, your experience seems introspectively to involve those mind-independent objects and features. 2 In general, then, when we introspect a visual experiential episode, it seems that we are related to some mind-independent object or feature that is present and is a part, or a constituent, of the experience. We can call this propertythe property of having some mind-independent object or feature as a constituent-the naïve realist (NR) property of experiences. It is widely accepted
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