XV – Cross-Modal Experiences

This paper provides a categorisation of cross-modal experiences. There are myriad forms. Doing so allows us to think clearly about the nature of different cross-modal experiences and allows us to clearly formulate competing hypotheses about the kind of experiences involved in different cross-modal phenomena. Philosophers and scientists used to think about and investigate the sensory modalities in isolation, or at least tried to do so in so far as this was possible. The sensory modalities include vision, audition, touch, taste, smell, and many more besides – some in humans and some in other animals.1 A common assumption was that the sensory modalities were perceptual systems isolated from each other. Each sensory system produced, unaffected by the others, a perceptual experience characteristic of that sensory modality (a ‘uni-modal’ experience) and perhaps other uni-sensory, non-conscious, sub-personal representational informational states characteristic of the modality. For example, visual experiences and tactile experiences are typically different. Thei