Faces from the Chasmas

rderosa
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18 years 4 weeks ago #17439 by rderosa

Replied by rderosa on topic Reply from Richard DeRosa

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Originally posted by tvanflandern
 A second finding that passes those tests is significant, but only to the extent that alternative hypotheses such as chance were excluded by the tests.

The degree to which the hypothesis is placed at risk by the tests determines the degree to which a passed test is convincing for the hypothesis making the predictions.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">I could have sworn I heard you say once that if reasonable people concluded that they "might have made" the prediction, that was equivalent to making the prediction. In the case of the Ranier side mountain, that type of terrain is teaming with faces. So, to me it seems reasonable that someone might have taken a picture with a partial face on the side of it, predicted the rest of the face, and then found it. I guess I don't see how that's any different. And anyway, most of Neil's argument is that they are not being presented with proof of their existence (i.e., no tampering, no etching, etc.) and NOT that they couldn't have been predicted.

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">I am eagerly waiting the results from Dr. Schyn's recent study using faces, instead of Ss.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">I thought we agreed that the results, whatever they might be, would have no applicability to interpreting Mars imagery. The design protocol for the test should, in principle, allow any pre-selected pattern whatever to emerge. I see no reason why face patterns should be different.-Tom<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">Yes, that's right. That's the point. If we think there are faces we'll find them. Pareidoliac proved that over 300 times. I saw that for myself fairly quickly by reviewing old black and white photos of trees. I see no reason why the Martian terrain should be any different. Does that prove Neil's images are pareidolia? No, it doesn't. But it sure as heck shows that they could be, in spite of all the "proof" of artificiality. I guess I don't understand why we would ignore that fact. Although, I can certainly drop this if you think I'm beating a dead horse.

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">By demonstrating how easy it is to find faces, I am suggesting that all faces could in fact be pareidolia, whether found here on Mother Earth, or in the valleys of Mars.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">You need to work on your wording here. Your statement seems to say that Mt. Rushmore and what you see in a mirror could be pereidolia.

I also thought we had agreed that essentially all pereidolia is 2D, even for 3D landscapes. I.e., it is confined to a narrow range of viewing and/or lighting angles. It might be possible to get a 3D pereidolic face in a really noisy background, but certainly not in one devoid of numerous face elements that our minds can use to assemble into our memorized pattern for what constitutes a face.

3D faces against featureless backgrounds should never be pereidolic because they lack the most basic element needed for forming pereidolic images -- lots of shapes that we can mentally piece together into familiar patterns.-Tom<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">I think this is the essence of where we differ in our understanding of this whole issue. Pareidolia has nothing to do with 2D vs. 3D. In the case of faces, pareidolia is simply the finding of a face in vague or random stimuli. It has nothing to do with whether or not it's 2D or 3D (although it's true that pareidoliac's are all 2D). You've brought this up a number of times, but I don't know where you get this from. Also, the face doesn't necessarily have to disappear totally upon close inspection. Basically, pareidolic faces are faces that were not created by man as a face. In alot of cases, pareidolia is used to depict silly faces, like looking at the grille of a car and imagining a face (or the back of the alarm clock), but I dismissed this area of investigation on page one of the Pareidolia topic.

But, I'm dealing mostly with the kind of faces that happen by chance, and am claiming that it's so common, once we start to look for them, that many of them don't go away on close inspection. In fact, they're all over the place, and are monuments in many cases. Neil's objection to the postcard heads is that we don't know the history. That might fly with one or two, but not all of them, and certainly not with the Ranier type faces. It gets a little silly to keep saying everything that demonstrates my point is somehow fraudulent. Also, most of Neil's argument seems to be grounded in the notion that there are no detailed examples of pareidolia in existence. Period. But whenever I post one, he argues that we don't know the history. Even with Fred's artwork. So, we need to get the other side of the argument straight. Is it because artificiality has been proven, or is it because there are no known cases of detailed pareidolia?

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">And since all faces could be pareidolia, probably are pareidolia, it would seem that the logical approach would be to assume pareidolia<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">Again, this is ground already covered. What you say is the logical position in the absence of proven artificiality elsewhere. But once one feature is proved artificial, then pereidolia and artificiality are on a level playing field, with neither entitled to a presumption before inspection of the particulars.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">I'm not going to argue this point again, either, because you're right we covered it with the Cydonia Face. But, really all I can agree with is that it "might be" artificial, and that we need 10 times greater resolution to prove anything convincingly (jrich's argument).

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">I agree with you that some of Neil's images are pereidolic. And if you were just trying to persuade him of that, you would have an ally here. <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">Believe it or not, that's how I started out. It was only later that I started to come to the realization that it's all pareidolia.
<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Moreover, this process does not work backwards because it is not the particular odds that made the result significant, but the reality of a genuine prediction. In fact, the whole argument is undercut if the predictor has any hints of the actual outcome before making the prediction, or argues after the fact that something could have been predicted (unless a neutral party is prepared to concede that the prediction was obvious and compelling).<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">See my argument above. The more likely faces are, the more likely you could predict one.
<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Going forward, let's try harder to avoid so much repetition. Decide whether you want to argue with me about first artificiality, or with Neil about his standards for secondary artificiality vs. pereidolia in the context of first artificiality as a given.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">You're right, I have a hybrid point of view on all this. Since I'm not totally convince anyone can know artificiality has been proven, I'm simultaneously arguing both points of view. For me to stop doing that would be a concession that I'm totally convinced. Since the proof is tied up in the Cydonian Face, there's really no reason to go down that path again, until we get better images or ground proof, or something. But, I get your point about tackling the standards for secondary artificiality.

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Neil seems to be having fun, and I see no reason to start blocking his posts just because some of the images are far fetched. <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">I agree.

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Fred's stuff reminds all of us how easy it is to be fooled. But I don't see how it is helping us develop objective criteria. -|Tom|-<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">Yes, it is tough to tell. Counting features doesn't work, I think it's much more subtle than that. If you spend some time looking at the thousands of illusions on the internet, you realize what strange things are going on with our vision, so to quantify what makes something real vs. pareidolic (or better yet "man made" vs. pareidolic) almost seems impossible to me.

rd

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tvanflandern
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18 years 4 weeks ago #17452 by tvanflandern

Replied by tvanflandern on topic Reply from Tom Van Flandern

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Originally posted by rderosa
 I could have sworn I heard you say once that if reasonable people concluded that they "might have made" the prediction, that was equivalent to making the prediction.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">Not exactly. I said the prediction did not have to be written or verbalized, but only if reasonable people are prepared to concede that the prediction is obvious and follows in a compelling way from the hypothesis. By contrast, common claims that “I predicted that” or “I could have predicted that” aren’t worth the imaginary paper they were never written on. The essence of the power of the a priori principle is prediction success without knowledge or even hints of the actual outcome. Anything that casts doubt that the hypothesis was really at risk to be falsified takes away most or all value in the prediction’s success. For example, if the person who predicted your 13-card hand had unwitnessed access to the deck beforehand, you are not going to be impressed by the success of his “psychic” prediction of your hand.

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">In the case of the Rainier side mountain, that type of terrain is teaming with faces. So, to me it seems reasonable that someone might have taken a picture with a partial face on the side of it, predicted the rest of the face, and then found it. I guess I don't see how that's any different.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">Here’s how. To take an arbitrary number, let’s say that one in every 1000 pareidolic half-faces will turn out to look like a pareidolic full face. Then you could go around finding half-faces and predicting full faces, and one time in 1000 your prediction will be successful. Also, one time in 635 billion, you will guess another person’s 13-card hand successfully by random chance.

Remember, I didn’t say that prediction success proves anything. I said it falsifies competing hypotheses such as chance at the odds against chance that existed when the prediction was made. So it you know in advance that one time in 1000 a pareidolic half-face will become a full face when more is seen, then it is unlikely (at 1000-to-one) that the first one you examine will turn out to be a full face unless someone with foreknowledge “rigged the deck” and knew in advance that the presented case was a full face.

Moreover, a skeptical scientist would challenge the estimate of 1000-to-one odds because there are uncountable ways in which the completion of the face might occur, with no way to make a serious estimate of how unlikely that is to happen by chance.

So picking a pareidolic full face and arguing that seeing half of it would lead to a successful prediction is an a posteriori argument, the equivalent of arguing that the first example one comes upon is “too unlikely to be chance”, which is invalid reasoning. It isn’t the odds, and it isn’t the details (e.g., what it looks like). Only the power of a genuine prediction when no foreknowledge of its outcome exists can make a success significant by falsifying the chance hypothesis at the pre-determined odds.

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">[tvf]: I thought we agreed that the results, whatever they might be, would have no applicability to interpreting Mars imagery. The design protocol for the test should, in principle, allow any pre-selected pattern whatever to emerge. I see no reason why face patterns should be different.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">Yes, that's right. That's the point. If we think there are faces we'll find them.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">No, we have a disconnect here. In the experiments in question, there aren’t any real or pareidolic faces. There are only truly random black and white pixels. But if we have an image in mind, we can select random images that are slightly more like our mental picture in any way, and reject those less like our mental picture. If we sum enough of both the "like" and the "unlike" images and take the difference between the two sums, the result should be a crude-to-good approximation of our mental picture, depending only on how many images are used to build the result. It’s not pareidolia because a computer could make such selections with more accuracy than a human, and build a good replica of a starting pattern of any complexity much faster than a human could. Yet a computer knows nothing about the nature of the pattern being matched. It is literally just pattern-matching without bias.

So this experiment is not an example of seeing pareidolic faces.

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">I can certainly drop this if you think I'm beating a dead horse.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">It’s more like you’re beating a live horse, lacking the means to either put it out of its misery or make it do what you want. Whether the horse is eventually going to die or get healthy, the beating doesn’t seem to serve any purpose.

Lacking objective standards to distinguish pareidolia from artificiality, images on a planet known to contain both can be argued either way. And they are being argued both ways. And that is okay because these secondary images are not (properly) being used to argue that artificiality exists on Mars, but rather to search for evidence of context, relationships, or in general functionality for images judged (subjectively for now) as more likely to be artificial than pareidolic.

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">[tvf]: I also thought we had agreed that essentially all pareidolia is 2D, even for 3D landscapes. I.e., it is confined to a narrow range of viewing and/or lighting angles. It might be possible to get a 3D pareidolic face in a really noisy background, but certainly not in one devoid of numerous face elements that our minds can use to assemble into our memorized pattern for what constitutes a face. 3D faces against featureless backgrounds should never be pareidolic because they lack the most basic element needed for forming pareidolic images -- lots of shapes that we can mentally piece together into familiar patterns.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">I think this is the essence of where we differ in our understanding of this whole issue. Pareidolia has nothing to do with 2D vs. 3D. … I don't know where you get this from. <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">Right, pareidolia has nothing to say about 2D vs. 3D or about color per se, but the number of dimensions and colors have a lot to say about pareidolia. It is a question of complexity. Pareidolia does not ever give us high-resolution, full-color, photo-quality faces, nor does it show us mirror-like faces, because the complexity of these kinds of images is too great to arise by chance. 3D is another example of complexity too great for common pareidolia to simulate under normal circumstances.

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">we need to get the other side of the argument straight. Is it because artificiality has been proven, or is it because there are no known cases of detailed pareidolia?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">Both, provided “detailed” is defined as I did above, meaning so detailed that we have no experience at finding pareidolic imitators anywhere, ever.

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">It was only later that I started to come to the realization that it's all pareidolia.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">Unusual. Most of us start from that POV, and some of us find reasons to conclude otherwise. What argument or evidence do you see to justify a conclusion that it’s all pareidolia? My recollection is that you found so much that met your previous artificiality criteria that your mind rebelled at the implications, leading you to throw it all out. But in what way is that opposite extreme any more logical?

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">The more likely faces are, the more likely you could predict one.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">Irrelevant because chance is only ruled out by a successful prediction at the known odds against chance. If those odds are 1000-to-one, and you examine 1000 half-faces, chances are you will find that one full face predicted by chance. Of course, if someone finds a full face first and presents you with a half-face version of it, then the true odds (unbeknownst to you) of a full-face prediction being correct are 100%. But this is like stacking the deck of playing cards.

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">[tvf]: Decide whether you want to argue with me about first artificiality, or with Neil about his standards for secondary artificiality vs. pareidolia in the context of first artificiality as a given.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">You're right, I have a hybrid point of view on all this. Since I'm not totally convinced anyone can know artificiality has been proven, I'm simultaneously arguing both points of view.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">I understand that, but you are not sticking with the premises in the logical syllogism I outlined. When you argue with me about first artificiality, you are free to revert to the default hypothesis “it’s all pareidolia”. But when arguing with Neil about secondary artificiality, you must concede primary artificiality elsewhere, or your argument with Neil becomes illogical because Neil is arguing for secondary artificiality, not primary. So “it’s all pareidolia” is not a valid premise for a discussion about Neil’s images because primary artificiality must be a given there.

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">For me to stop doing that would be a concession that I'm totally convinced.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">Hardly. It just means the conversation has reached an impasse, so a pause to regroup and think of new arguments (as opposed to more examples of old arguments) is needed.

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">to quantify what makes something real vs. pareidolic (or better yet "man made" vs. pareidolic) almost seems impossible to me.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">For secondary images, we have some ideas about this (context, relationships, true predictions). For primary artificiality, maybe your new post in the pareidolia thread will lead somewhere. It should be possible to objectify the decision about whether, for example, the Cydonia Face's west eyebrow feature exists or not, and whether or not any other feature that could have qualified as an eyebrow exists with any other location, orientation, size, or shape anywhere on the mesa or its immediate surroundings. It should be possible, that is, if you are willing to continue examining this in depth and willing to work on overcoming any biases about either outcome that might exist in either of us, because there is nothing quite like a bias to produce a LIE (your clever acronym for the light-inversion effect that once had you swearing the “T” was a mound). -|Tom|-

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rderosa
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18 years 4 weeks ago #17456 by rderosa

Replied by rderosa on topic Reply from Richard DeRosa

Tom, I only want to take on two points right now, in this thread. One is your notion that finding faces in that Ranier scene has odds of 1000 to 1 against. I know you picked that number for illustrative purposes, but it's a weak link in the chain of your argument. Go back and look at that scene again, where I doodled in the faces. Any photo at that scale hardly has odds of 1000 to 1 against a partial face being at the edge of the photo. 10 to 1, maybe, but even that's a stretch.

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">It is a question of complexity. Pareidolia does not ever give us high-resolution, full-color, photo-quality faces, nor does it show us mirror-like faces, because the complexity of these kinds of images is too great to arise by chance. 3D is another example of complexity too great for common pareidolia to simulate under normal circumstances.--tvf<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">The other point is that I'm still not sure your buying my definition of pareidolia (see other thread). You and I could drive up to Mt. Tamalpais Ca and go visit Pompador Rock. We could walk around it, on it, take pictures from any possible view imaginable. Touch it, kick it, pour water on it, view it in the morning, noon or night.

And it's still pareidolia. Unless there was human intervention in its creation. Like I said, that's possible with some, but not all of the monuments all over the Earth.

Also, as Neil would say, you're using the point of contention as part of the proof of your argument when you say that: "Pareidolia does not ever give us high-resolution, full-color, photo-quality faces, nor does it show us mirror-like faces, because the complexity of these kinds of images is too great to arise by chance. 3D is another example of complexity too great for common pareidolia to simulate under normal circumstances."

That's what we're debating.

rd

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tvanflandern
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18 years 4 weeks ago #17560 by tvanflandern

Replied by tvanflandern on topic Reply from Tom Van Flandern

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Originally posted by rderosa
 I only want to take on two points right now, in this thread. One is your notion that finding faces in that Ranier scene has odds of 1000 to 1 against.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">I intended "1000-to-one" to be just a talking number, not an actual estimate. However, it was supposed to represent the odds against a half-face turning into a full face, not the odds against seeing faces at all. The former is surely nowhere near your "10-to-one" figure.

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">You and I could drive up to Mt. Tamalpais Ca and go visit Pompador Rock. We could walk around it, on it, take pictures from any possible view imaginable. Touch it, kick it, pour water on it, view it in the morning, noon or night. And it's still pareidolia.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">That's a given, so why is it still being brought up as if new?

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">[tvf]: Pareidolia does not ever give us high-resolution, full-color, photo-quality faces, nor does it show us mirror-like faces, because the complexity of these kinds of images is too great to arise by chance. 3D is another example of complexity too great for common pareidolia to simulate under normal circumstances.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">That's what we're debating.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">I did not realize there was anything to debate over my contention. It seems self-evident to me based on my experience of the world. However, a single counter-example will shoot it down.

In the meantime, I thought what we were debating was criteria to distinguish real 2D pareidolia from real 2D artificiality, and whether or not the Cydonia Face is an example of detail so great that the pareidolia hypothesis is falsified as an explanation at rather enormous odds. -|Tom|-

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rderosa
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18 years 4 weeks ago #17687 by rderosa

Replied by rderosa on topic Reply from Richard DeRosa

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Originally posted by tvanflandern
 <blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">You and I could drive up to Mt. Tamalpais Ca and go visit Pompador Rock. We could walk around it, on it, take pictures from any possible view imaginable. Touch it, kick it, pour water on it, view it in the morning, noon or night. And it's still pareidolia.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">That's a given, so why is it still being brought up as if new?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">
Hunh? It's a direct refutation of this statement:
<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">3D is another example of complexity too great for common pareidolia to simulate under normal circumstances --tvf.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">
We're starting to talk by each other. Either you lost me, or I lost you somewhere along the way. I'm going to take a break for awhile.

rd

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tvanflandern
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18 years 4 weeks ago #17463 by tvanflandern

Replied by tvanflandern on topic Reply from Tom Van Flandern

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Originally posted by rderosa
 It's a direct refutation of this statement:<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">[tvf]: 3D is another example of complexity too great for common pareidolia to simulate under normal circumstances.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"><hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">One does not repeat caveats with every sentence. Customarily, we say them once and assume they will be remembered. In this case, here is the full statement with caveats for the sentence you quoted. This is from my Spet. 30 message at 19:45:35 PT:

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">[tvf]: I also thought we had agreed that essentially all pareidolia is 2D, even for 3D landscapes. I.e., it is confined to a narrow range of viewing and/or lighting angles. It might be possible to get a 3D pareidolic face in a really noisy background, but certainly not in one devoid of numerous face elements that our minds can use to assemble into our memorized pattern for what constitutes a face. 3D faces against featureless backgrounds should never be pareidolic because they lack the most basic element needed for forming pareidolic images -- lots of shapes that we can mentally piece together into familiar patterns.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">That should remind you what I meant by "2D" in a 3D landscape -- confined to a narrow range or viewing and/or lighting angles. All known pareidolia is 2D, either because it is flat or because it is confined in angle to be essentially flat even in a landscape with depth. -|Tom|-

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