Onduko asked:

"If nerve fibres from our eyes could be crossed with the nerve fibres from our ears, then undoubtedly
we could hear colours and see sounds." Criticize or defend this claim.

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You might concede that (a) if this made any sense whatever, evolution would probably have done it
long ago, and (b) nerve fibres are not lengths of copper, but living fibres adapted to perform a very
specific function with the view to giving their system a fighting chance against the hazards of the
environment. You can perform a simple test by yourself to verify what cross-modal signalling
produces. Get someone to punch you on the eye and then report the pain you saw. What in fact you
saw is commonly called "seeing stars". You can't correlate these "stars" with feeling pain: wrong
modality. Satisfied?

Jurgen Lawrenz

Sydney

All the sensory information that you obtain through your eyes could, in principle, be translated into
patterns of sound. That is not to say that sound space matches the logical structure of colour space,
but only that there is a function which translates patterns of colour into patterns of sound (just as both
can be translated into electrical pulses).

What does this show?

Let's suppose we performed this (unethical) experiment and see what happens:

"The patient reported on the first day after the operation that he could not hear or see anything
around him. Only a chaos of colours and sounds that he could not make any sense of....

"Today, a year later, after the subject's successful completion of a program of vigorous training, the
results of every sight and hearing test that we have been able to devise are normal. Yet the subject
continues to insist that he 'hears' colours and 'sees' sounds."

There's no telling what would in fact happen if the experiment were performed. The question you
should be asking, however, is whether the fictional account I have just given is logically coherent,
and, if it is, what consequences we should draw from that.

Geoffrey Klempner