When I was talking with my friend Daniel the other day he mentioned that he has particular affection for certain numbers. He 'likes' most prime numbers, through prefers 19 and 23 to 17. He's not that keen on 2. It turns out that he spoke about this with our mutual friend, Giles, who also likes certain numbers and they discovered that their likes and dislikes aligned closely.
Daniel is very good at Mathematics, though it wasn't his specialisation, and he's actually not very keen on logic. IMcG does seen numbers as a right-hemisphere speciality and logic as a left.
I have no feeling for numbers and in fact I have a slight numerical dyslexia. I have to focus on them hard to see them in the right order. They merge and blend. Unlike Daniel,I have to work out times tables and so on laboriously.
So, when Daniel sees a number, he has a feeling and it has a context - its factors and events connected with it, for example. For me, numbers are dry and sterile.
Of course, were either of us synesthetes, this would be on another level. The numbers could have colours and sounds affiliated with them. How different reality would be if a doorbell was maroon and a car passing aquamarine.
Apparently, 2-4% of the population have synesthesia. Imagine if it were reversed and 96-98% of us had this condition. We would assume that there were some metaphysical connection between things. Right now, they are the oddballs, with a mistaken view of reality. As are the colour blind. But what if the synesthetes, in some other form of evolution, in which life was rich and reality full of immanence and joy came through appreciation of the mystery of things, they were the majority... How different would our art be, and our science?
Given that among humans there are these differences in how reality is made manifest, why grant ontological supremacy to what's most common? I mean, that most of us don't have perfect pitch does not devalue the perfection of pitch? Why conform to the tyranny of the majority? The synesthetes might be the forerunners of a better us.
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