Re:Why on Earth are flowers beautiful? (2018)
by sph on Tuesday December 27, 2022 @06:10AM
(#34147631)
Yes! Synesthesia [1] is one argument for the "interference" theory I mentioned in my comment. Sometimes the wires get tangled and a sense goes to affect a different part of the brain. A strong dose of hallucinogen will surface this behaviour even in people that are usually unaffected.
I have a form of light synesthesia [2], where I intuitively see the concept of time and age as a three-dimensional line, that slowly morphs as I grow older. Whenever someone says "I'm x years old", I subconsciously place them somewhere on that line. (Now that I think of it, years too have a particular three dimensional structure in my mind)
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I think there is something to the idea that low Kolmogorov complexity is pretty.
I've also had a weird esthetic experience commuting by a bus once - it was a sunny winter day and along the road for dozens of kilometers there were power lines with unusually thick wires. There was a lot of contrast between white snow and black wires and they went up and down in a regular but slowly changing pattern that was very beautiful in the moment, but it's very hard to explain after the fact :) I was amazed by it despite commuting that same route 100s of times before and after that and never noticing it or caring about it.