Happy Hannukah! Apropos of nothing, what do you all think about visual-tactile vs visual-auditory integration? As far as I can tell just from my own experience, only visual-auditory integration is *really* a thing./1

Visual-tactile integration seems to be, basically, "visual experience about body parts where I know that's *my* body part". But there's no combination of the two, none that I can tell./2

Meanwhile, when a sound comes out of something I'm looking at, the sound seems to be *there* in the visual thing. When you speak, it feels to me like your voice is there, blaring right out of your face./3

Any example I can think of, experiences of sounds are woven into visual experiences if possible. Sure, I can experience sounds without their being integrated into a visual experience - sometimes I hear a sound and don't know where it is./4

Sounds can be detached from vision, easily. But otherwise, the thing we call V-A integration seems literally like integration of visual and auditory experiences, they get interwoven./5

I can have, and regularly have, visual-auditory experiences of this sort. Now then, isn't it clear that nothing like this is happening with V-T experiences? Sure, obviously my visual experiences are coordinated with my body experiences./6

I feel where my hand is; I see a hand; and the hand I see and the hand I feel seem to be the same hand. But isn't this "just" (not that it's simple) registration of two modal spaces? My visual space is aligned with my body space./7

But my body sensations don't feel like they're in the visual scene. They feel like they're... in my body. For example, I watch as my finger is pricked with a needle. It hurts, I feel the pain - but the pain is there in my finger;/8

there's no sense in which the pain seems to be in the image of the finger that I experience visually. Pain is in no way woven into the visual field. I can't even conceive of what that would be like./9

I know, you can also talk about auditory and visual spaces as being aligned or registered, and that supposedly is all you mean by "visual-auditory experience". But come on, there is no such thing as auditory space./10

Any way I try to imagine what auditory space could be, I come up with something visual or somesthetic. And anyways, isn't it just simply clear that a sound is *there* in the visual object, while a pain is *here* in my hand?/11

Sound is actually quite like a a visual quality or object of its own, albeit one that can be detached from its visual location - but then it has no location at all (but the location inside my skull)./12

Can we all agree that something fundamentally different is meant by the terms V-A and V-T integration? Like really there's V-T *alignment* and V-A integration. Or am I suffering from some kind of V-T agnosia or something?/13

To sum up, visual-tactile, or visual-somesthetic generally, integration isn't really a thing, but visual-auditory is. And there's no such thing as auditory space./14