My pareidolia knows no bounds.

rd- Some pareidolia is more personal than others. "Lila" seems to be my least pesonal, meaning everyone sees the same sort of thing in it, not just me. "Einstein," though much more detailed is more personal, many sort of scratch their head about it. We are hard wired from birth to see faces for reasons of survival, according to most scientists.
Tom- i agree with you. My prediction regarding future symetry counterparts is a posteriori. i disagree in part about ignoring the asymetric faces because i just look for at least ONE eye before i shoot. i have some examples of partial faces, and a face overlapped with 3/4 of a cat face etc. One can get beyond the basic hardwiring and rewire/overwire/softwire one's own vision with training.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">what I'm thinking now is that the truly elaborate pareidolia is in our minds. It's personal, like I said on page 1. [rd]
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

I'm predicting that it's all Objective; and not Subjective, or "personal." But what I mean by "Objective" is more than just "quantitative." Psychologists tell us that vague forms "remind" humans of familiar objects of our experience, especially faces. But they are always vague. Where we find detail, etc., (in direct proportion to the amount of detail, etc.), we begin to recognize an intelligent hand, or at least some kind of knowable causality, (such as physical laws), as opposed to random chance.

In the case of the Artificiality vs. Pareidolia debate, I predict that there is a certain threshold of detail, etc., that acts as a borderline between the two. That’s why I thought that Dr. Ressler’s art would be a good test case. If someone could find elaborate, detailed, etc., faces among the shadows, using his methodology; and could document all of the controls used, that would go a long way toward proving that elaborate detailed pareidolia is an Objective Physical Reality—and not “personal.” And <i>not</i> finding them (in the controlled experiment, as I predict) would show that when we do find them, (eg, in Internet pics without the controls), it's not "pareidolia" at all, but Art.

Neil

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by neilderosa</i>
<br />and could document all of the controls used, that would go a long way toward proving that elaborate detailed pareidolia is an Objective Physical Reality—and not “personal.” And <i>not</i> finding them (in the controlled experiment, as I predict) would show that when we do find them, (eg, in Internet pics without the controls), it's not "pareidolia" at all, but Art.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">I have no idea what you just said (the "Uh-huh" response), but one of the reasons why I decided to let this subject drop for now, is because now that I understand the issue better, I know for sure that you and others don't get it, you never have gotten it, and in all likelihood you never will get it. Not to use the "pearls" metaphor, but let's just say some folks have way too many barriers to ever fully appreciate what DaVinci was talking about.

rd

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">I have no idea what you just said [rd]<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

In the event that others had difficulty with the statement too, I'll re-state it. A scientific test with legitimate controlls, using Fred's stated methods, might help answer the following question; Is elaborate, detailed, well proportioned pareidolia that looks like human faces, a common occurrence? Or is it so statistically rare that we will not get positive results from the controlled study (will not see any elaborate, detailed faces). I predict the latter.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by rderosa</i>
<br />now that I understand the issue better, I know for sure that you and others don't get it, you never have gotten it, and in all likelihood you never will get it.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">For someone whose own understanding (as you just said) went up a notch only recently, I think this is way too pessimistic an assessment. All of us are capable of learning new things. It's more often the <i>unlearning</i> of something already learned wrongly that provides us with a greater challenge, and where some people are deficient in the ability to do it.

Perhaps the model that Kuhn said applies to the overthrow of scientific paradigms (science must always maintain the illusion of forward progress, so one must provide a path forward from the old paradigm to the new one) applies to individuals as well. If one can show that accepting a new idea can co-exist, at least in the short term, with a strongly held belief, resistance to the new idea will diminish.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">what I'm thinking now is that the truly elaborate pareidolia is in our minds. It's personal<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Yes, that's a nice insight, but way too simplistic. In may be "in our minds" and "personal", but it is in other minds too. So it has both subjective and objective elements.

I've alluded before to Julesz's random-dot stereograms. This is as pure an example as I can imagine of a highly detailed image that exists only in our minds. Here's the setup. A computer generates a block of numerous small and randomly placed green spots. Then the computer takes an identical set of red spots, and displaces each red spot horizontally by a calculated small amount from its green counterpart so as to create the illusion that that particular red-green pair is farther away (if the pair separation is small) or closer (if the pair separation is larger).

The end result is, of course, still a random-dot pattern. However, by creating displacements that the human mind will interpret as parallax (varying distances), the computer's calculations can ensure that the human mind (after a couple of minutes to achieve fusion of the pairs) will see the detailed and elaborate 3-D image that the computer has told to model in this way. For example, we can arrange that the image seen will be of Mount Rushmore.

The 3-D image we see exists only in our minds, not on paper or screen. But it can be seen by any person with comparable inputs from two eyes who is not red-green color blind. And it can be as detailed as we wish to make it. (If enough people have red-green glasses, I might scan and post a sample random-dot stereogram.)

So when you say that pereidolia is in our minds or is personal, perhaps you can see that the statement still has enough ambiguity that I don't know if I agree or disagree with you. Perhaps you can clarify your meaning, which might help answer Neil's new question as well. -|Tom|-

Neil states "Or is it so statistically rare that we will not get positive results from the controlled study (will not see any elaborate, detailed faces). I predict the latter."
Assuming "Einstein" with 36 features (counting the filtrum) was just the average "fluke" (or slightly more from my experience), and showed up within 3200 hours of looking for such an image in an area of 1500 square feet, one can calculate how common these images must be if one could have access to all the shadows in the world, even for one day. i refrain from getting into "the last supper hypothesis," but one can picture it's feasability. If some experiment could be done connecting facial recognition systems to digital cameras shooting shadows, i know we would all be amazed. This is not mere belief, but an empirical a posteriori hypothesis. (To humbly attempt to couch this in what appears to me, to be, Tom's phraseology).