Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenologist and philosopher known for his work in the field of embodied cognition and perception. While Merleau-Ponty did not specifically discuss record players playing mind-uploaded beings, his philosophical perspective can offer some insights into how he might approach such a concept.
According to Merleau-Ponty, perception and consciousness are inseparable from our embodied existence. He emphasized the notion of the lived body (le corps propre) as the foundation of our experience and understanding of the world. Our perception of the world is not merely a passive reception of sensory information but an active engagement that involves our body, senses, and lived experience.
Applying this perspective to a record player playing mind-uploaded beings, we can speculate that Merleau-Ponty would emphasize the embodied aspect of sound perception. In his view, the experience of sound would be intimately tied to our bodily engagement with the world, including our physical ears, the resonance in our body, and the lived context in which we encounter the sound.
Considering mind-uploaded beings, if we assume that these beings retain some form of consciousness and subjective experience, Merleau-Ponty might argue that their experience of being played on a record player would not solely be limited to sound but would involve a much richer multisensory and embodied experience. Their perception of the "sound" would be intertwined with their overall conscious experience and the phenomenological qualities of their uploaded existence.
However, it's important to note that this interpretation is speculative, as Merleau-Ponty did not specifically address the concept of mind-uploaded beings or record players playing them. His philosophy provides a framework for understanding perception and consciousness in relation to the lived body, but the application of his ideas to hypothetical scenarios like this requires some extrapolation and interpretation.