Re: Synaesthesia

Sally Caves scripsit:

> Ignorant farts! <G>  If this is the case, where you can't distinguish
> sensations, then it is a true disorder.  But that's not what ordinary
> synaesthesia is in the normal human being.
Near the end of Alfred Bester's _The Stars My Destination_, the hero
has gotten into a (pathological) synaesthetic state due to (IIRC) a knock
on the head, and a woman from his future is giving him directions that
will make sense to him in his current confusion, something like
"Then go forward until you see the feeling of falling."

Ordinary (non-pathological) synaesthesia is common but not universal
(I have not a trace of it) and the associations are quite personal.
Vladimir Nabokov among others has written about it in detail.

> It overturns the premises behind
> both the Vulcans and my dear Data of Star Trek.  How can Data function as a
> moral being without emotion?  How can T'Pal of _Enterprise_?
Jean Lorrah, English professor and ST author, rationalizes this a bit
by saying that the notion of "suppression of emotion" is basically a
translation error, specifically Amanda's back when she was working at
the Vulcan embassy on Earth.  A better translation would be "mastery
of the passions", which is far more like Plato than like Data.
She also says that "logic" is really more like "reality/truth".

As for Data, an unemotional robot would suffer from what AI people
call the grounding problem: where do you start to think about a problem?
Emotions provide ends that are not simply means to other ends.

--
Business before pleasure, if not too bloomering long before.
        --Nicholas van Rijn
                John Cowan <jcowan@...>
                        http://www.ccil.org/~cowan  http://www.reutershealth.com