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NancyLebovitz comments on The benefits of madness: A positive account of arationality - Less Wrong
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This relates to something I've been arguing hereabouts since before the founding of Less Wrong. Basically, if you reduce all of your decision-making to a mathematical algorithm, then you're limiting the power of your decision-making to those parts of your brain that can do math. But our brains can do amazing things if we let them, and are mostly not very good at math.
I want one!
I would wonder if something like that actually happened - it might have been an unfamiliar trick of the light or electrical malfunction...
Once I was walking down the back of West Rock at twilight and suddenly noticed everything was done up in strange, bright colors - the rocks were teal and purple, the leaves were emerald green, etc. After several minutes, the experience didn't go away, and so I picked up a representative purple rock and brought it back to civilization, thinking that would dispel the clearly hallucinatory magic. I immediately asked a passerby, "What color is this rock?", to which the response was indeed "purple". I resolved thenceforth to pay a little more attention to my surroundings.
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.