This is reminding me of a time after therapy when the spacial relationships in the bus I was on suddenly got very weird, and I was wondering if there was something odd at my end...… it turned out to be one of those buses that bend in the middle.
However, your story also reminds me of what I call color beyond color. One time, I was doing color meditation, and when I was visualizing red, it became a red more vivid than anything I’d ever seen.
One of John Chilton Pearce’s Magical Child books mentions doing that sort of thing with all the senses—I don’t know whether it can be made permanent. It seems to me that it would add to quality of life if it wasn’t overwhelming.
I’ve also seen a description of that sort of visual experience in one of Disch’s later novels.
I’m inclined to think that there’s some sort of intensity regulation for sensory experience, and it may generally be set lower than it needs to be. Corroboration: I’ve seen accounts by anorexics of sensory overload which suggests that the stepping down process takes resources, and malnutrition might mean that sensations aren’t buttered.
The usual question about qualia is “What if what is red to me is blue to you?”, but as far as I know there’s no evidence for that sort of switch. What there’s plenty of evidence for is that some people notice things vividly that scarcely register on other people. I’ve talked with a couple of men who can see color, but find it not interesting—but they’re vividly aware of shape and motion.
Did the rock stay as bright?
This is reminding me of a time after therapy when the spacial relationships in the bus I was on suddenly got very weird, and I was wondering if there was something odd at my end...… it turned out to be one of those buses that bend in the middle.
However, your story also reminds me of what I call color beyond color. One time, I was doing color meditation, and when I was visualizing red, it became a red more vivid than anything I’d ever seen.
One of John Chilton Pearce’s Magical Child books mentions doing that sort of thing with all the senses—I don’t know whether it can be made permanent. It seems to me that it would add to quality of life if it wasn’t overwhelming.
I’ve also seen a description of that sort of visual experience in one of Disch’s later novels.
I’m inclined to think that there’s some sort of intensity regulation for sensory experience, and it may generally be set lower than it needs to be. Corroboration: I’ve seen accounts by anorexics of sensory overload which suggests that the stepping down process takes resources, and malnutrition might mean that sensations aren’t buttered.
The usual question about qualia is “What if what is red to me is blue to you?”, but as far as I know there’s no evidence for that sort of switch. What there’s plenty of evidence for is that some people notice things vividly that scarcely register on other people. I’ve talked with a couple of men who can see color, but find it not interesting—but they’re vividly aware of shape and motion.