Epistemology

[i-am-your-idea]

some people are born with it too. my art teacher had mild synnethesia. she saw every letter of the alphabet a different colour, and could taste things just by thinking about them. we were told not to use lots of different colours when writing in our sketchbooks!

 

[i-am-your-idea]

is it spot the difference?

 

[bodach]

Maybe god made jesus for the mushroom.

 

[butchersapron]

some people are born with it too. my art teacher had mild synnethesia. she saw every letter of the alphabet a different colour, and could taste things just by thinking about them. we were told not to use lots of different colours when writing in our sketchbooks!

Aside from the fact that it doesn't exist, isn't this outrageous pre-censorship?

 

[Dillinger4]

Miles Davis wrote an album about synethesia, called Aura.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aura_(Miles_Davis_album)

 

[butchersapron]

The idea of synethesia.

 

[Dillinger4]

Yeh, the idea.

Its fun to try and listen and guess all the colors. I don't know anybody who has got even one of them right. But then I don't know that many people who have listened to it.

 

[butchersapron]

It smells funny.

 

[bodach]

The idea of synethesia.

Is it synaesthesia.

 

[quimcunx]

my flatmate claims to have synaesthesia. and I believe Cheesypoof does too.

 

[bodach]

The idea of synethesia.

Is it synaesthesia.

my flatmate claims to have synaesthesia. and I believe Cheesypoof does too.

Can someone tell butchersapron what it means.

 

[meems]

It doesn't exist? I've heard of it, but i didn't recognise the spelling. Now this is an interesting question.

 

[revol68]

my flatmate claims to have synaesthesia. and I believe Cheesypoof does too.

well if it ddoes exist it is mostly liked to be the result of brain damage.

 

[bluestreak]

I'm not sure I'm confident enough to say something like that doesn't exist. It may be the result of brain damage, yesh, but having suffered visual and aural hallucinations myself during a breakdown, I know that the brain can do some odd stuff to you.

Also, what the fuck are you doing awake at this time revol?

 

[revol68]

I'm not sure I'm confident enough to say something like that doesn't exist. It may be the result of brain damage, yesh, but having suffered visual and aural hallucinations myself during a breakdown, I know that the brain can do some odd stuff to you.

Also, what the fuck are you doing awake at this time revol?

went to bed at 6 o'clock last night.

 

[max_freakout]

Maybe god made jesus for the mushroom.

maybe Jesus IS a mushroom

 

[max_freakout]

I'm not sure I'm confident enough to say something like that doesn't exist. It may be the result of brain damage, yesh, but having suffered visual and aural hallucinations myself during a breakdown, I know that the brain can do some odd stuff to you.

i can say firsthand that it exists, i have experienced it myself, and i know many people who have

the sensory inputs can swap themselves around

 

[max_freakout]

people who experience synaesthesia naturally (like many artists and musicians), are called synaesthetes

 

[revol68]

people who experience synaesthesia naturally (like many artists and musicians), are called synaesthetes

no, they are called petentious bullshitting cunts.

 

[max_freakout]

you dont know it exists until you experience it for yourself, but there are drugs and techniques available for it

 

[Dillinger4]

well if it ddoes exist it is mostly liked to be the result of brain damage.

To go back to Merleau-Ponty, he uses the example of a man injured by shrapnel in the war (schneider) to build his argument for bodily intentionality and the phenomenology of perception.

Schneider lost the ability to perform abstract movements (he could only perform concrete ones), and had a kind of psychological blindness.

Merleau-Ponty used such examples of the body and mind going wrong to highlight our conceptual problems with how we view them both.

 

[Dillinger4]

I don't know if it exists, but there are all sorts of weird conditions that people can have.

 

[Jonti]

no, they are called petentious bullshitting cunts.

Hmmmm, bulshit eh?

I don't know about the folks who've been mentioned, but (afaik) there is at least one other poster on this board who experiences synaesthesia, and he comes over as far from pretentious; much more a down-to-earth scientist.

Thing is, even people who are neurologically typical ("NT") may experience syneasthesia under the influence of psychoactive chemicals.

Here's something from the University of Sussex website

Synaesthesia is a joining together of sensations that are normally experienced separately. Some synaesthetes experience colours when they hear or read words, whilst others may experience tastes, smells, shapes or touches in almost any combination. The sensations are automatic and cannot be turned on or off. People are generally born with it and it runs in families. It is not considered to be harmful in any way. Most synaesthetes could not imagine life without these extra sensations! Studying synaesthesia may help us to understand how the brain segregates and integrates different sensations and thoughts.

Mind you, I think it may be going a bit far to say "many" artists experience synaesthesia. As far as I know, there is little or no realationship between, say, the colours of music as experienced by one synaesthete as compared to another. It tends to be something idiosyncratic; but art needs to speak more in universals.

So yeah, although it may be "trendy" in some circles to pose as a synaesthete, the condition is real enough.

 

[revol68]

I just don't trust the cunts, I mean we can all relate things to arbitrary things, for example for years i thought of wednesdays as brown, but the notion that people actually directly experiance numbers as colours, or smells, whilst no doubt possible sounds is abit to close to the wank about the artist as 'the sensitive soul' feeling or seeing what the rest of us don't. I'd also be interested in how stable these relations are, is red always 7 etc and how does an abstraction such as seven come to be related to narrow spectrum of light, I mean the perception of a number or word is far more complex and abstract than say that of a colour.

Frankly i'm skeptical of what these people claim, how much different is the cross referencing they have than say the everyday relations we lay down between objects, eg farmer = brown, dull = grey?

The fact Cheeseypoof claims to experiance makes me all the more skeptical.

 

[max_freakout]

it's a common effect of taking psychedelic drugs

 

[Jonti]

... I'd also be interested in how stable these relations are, is red always 7 etc and how does an abstraction such as seven come to be related to narrow spectrum of light, I mean the perception of a number or word is far more complex and abstract than say that of a colour...

You may be interested in a book called "Born on a Blue Day" by Daniel Tammet. Mr Tammet is a synaesthete and an "autistic savant" -- but unlike most mathematical savants he is articulate and able to explain the sensations he experiences while performing his prodigious feats of calculation.

I've not read a great deal about the subject, but, from what I understand, the relations are stable for an individual, but are only accidently related to the associations experienced by others. Not every synaesthete would experience Wednesdays as blue (Daniel Tammet was born on January 31, 1979, a Wednesday)!

It seems likely to me that the idiosyncratic nature of synaesthesia makes it more difficult for a synaesthete to produce "art", for art (properly speaking) seeks to speak to more people than just the artist. It would be almost pointless to write a poem (for example) that only rings the right associations for the poet, and no-one else. So, like you, I'm skeptical of artists that claim synaesthesia. That said, trumpets do rather have a golden sound, wouldn't you agree?

 

[max_freakout]

to continue the debate on here:


if you believe that a chair wont break when you sit on it, is it also true to say, that you believe that the chair might break if you sit on it? (since it is a belief and is not known)

and if you know that it is Monday, do you also believe that it is Monday?

 

[cesare]

It wasn't really following on from Jonti's point though, was it max?

It was bumping this thread because your latest one got binned.

What have you got to say in context of this thread so far?

 

[bluestreak]

FFS.

Max is going critical. Any second now he's going to explode and bury south england in bullshit.

 

[max_freakout]

epistemology cant find an answer because it approaches the debate from the wrong angle, by assuming that there must be a difference between believing and knowing


i propose that there is no difference