I want to use hardware filtering to smooth out colors in texels of a texture when I'm accessing texels at coordinates that are not directly at the center of the texel, the catch being that the texels store 2 bands of spherical harmonics coefficients (=4 coefficients), not RGBA intensity values.

Can I just use hardware filtering like that (GL_LINEAR with and without mip mapping) without any considerations?

In other terms: If I were to first convert the coefficients back to intensity representations, than manually interpolate between two intensities, would the resulting intensity be the same as if I interpolated between the coefficient vectors directly and then converted the interpolated result to intensities?