My pareidolia knows no bounds.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by tvanflandern</i>
<br />In schizophrenia, or when normal persons use LSD, we see things indistinguishable from reality that are not there. <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Is this really true? Or are they distortions (or embellishments) of things that are there, as if a filter was removed.

Or, to boil it down to a simple question: would a normal person, on LSD, who is sitting all alone in a little all white room, with no random or vague stimuli whatsoever (no lines on the wall, no nothing) be capable of conjuring up a little green man?

I say no.

rd

<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 />it all goes back to that first proof of artificiality done on the Cydonia Face (see: www.metaresearch.org/solar%20system/cydo...roof_files/proof.asp )

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I would point out the link to "Evidence of planetary artifacts" as even more relevant because it fills in the details that are merely summarized in the link you provided. Click on "Solar System" tab, then "Cydonia" sub-tab to find directions to the fuller article, a 6-author paper by members of SPSR.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">[tvf]: In schizophrenia, or when normal persons use LSD, we see things indistinguishable from reality that are not there.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Is this really true? Or are they distortions (or embellishments) of things that are there, as if a filter was removed? Or, to boil it down to a simple question: would a normal person, on LSD, who is sitting all alone in a little all white room, with no random or vague stimuli whatsoever (no lines on the wall, no nothing) be capable of conjuring up a little green man? I say no.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">The answer is yes, it is true. Schizophrenia and LSD hallucinations need no more stimulus than the person's imagination.

According to our present understanding, most people have (at least) two mental screens -- one to display the subconscious mind's rendering of images coming in through the eyes, and the other to display one's thoughts. Normally, these two differ greatly in intensity so that there is no confusion between a thought image and a "reality" image. But the action of Schizophrenia and LSD is to so intensity the thought imagery that the person loses the ability to tell which is which. So one can conjure up monsters and see them with the same intensity that one sees real objects.

[As an aside, this supposedly explains why "left-brain-dominant" people seek out vivid imagery (their thought screen is so dull that they rely on their visual screen for stimulation), whereas "right-brain-dominant" people tend to avoid excessively vivid imagery (because their thought screen is already so intense that they are constantly over-stimulated and need to minimize additional stimulation from the visual screen).]

For our purposes here, this is why we need to carefully examine what our minds are doing to our imagery in cases where subtle differences in vision matter, or where heavy biases may cause alteration of the raw data before it is presented to our conscious mind.

I had also hoped we might follow up on the west eyebrow feature as a kind of "reality test", to see if my mind is adding the eyebrow or your mind is subtracting it from our respective reality screens. -|Tom|-

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by tvanflandern</i>
<br />I had also hoped we might follow up on the west eyebrow feature as a kind of "reality test", to see if my mind is adding the eyebrow or your mind is subtracting it from our respective reality screens. -|Tom|-<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote"> We should get back to this, eventually. I don't think it's there.

rd

One other point (at the risk of repeating myself). The "Flikr" faces, and "Anthropomorphisms" (as in: showing any human attribute, not just faces) do NOT disappear on close inspection, any more human features disappear on close inspection. For examples, see links to "5 Flickr Groups" a couple of pages down: www.pareidolia.us/

So, the notion of "disappearing" features is valid only with one small subset of pareidolia, specifically those types of objects whose humanlike features are the product of light, shadows, or viewing angle, (with less emphasis on viewing angle).

Personally, I think the Flickr Groups are somewhat frivolous, and do not add much to my basic argument, other than to point out the wide and varied defintion that Pareidolia is taking on.

rd

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by tvanflandern</i>
<br />For our purposes here, this is why we need to carefully examine what our minds are doing to our imagery in cases where subtle differences in vision matter, or where heavy biases may cause alteration of the raw data before it is presented to our conscious mind.

I had also hoped we might follow up on the west eyebrow feature as a kind of "reality test", to see if my mind is adding the eyebrow or your mind is subtracting it from our respective reality screens. -|Tom|-<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">I'm glad you brought this up, because this is what I was trying to get at when I started to post the Cydonia Face a couple of weeks ago, and asked the question: can anyone tell me where the <b>west side </b>of the mouth was. That's one of the strongest so-called features (aside from the west eye) and it was all but invisible in those highest resolution images. Unfortunately, no one took the bait. I was hoping someone might say that was because the lighting was different, to which I was prepared to respond, "I thought that was a characteristic of pareidolia."

Ok, so instead let's do it with the westside eyebrow. Specifically, where is it?

I see some kind of smashed in blob above the eye (which is good, BTW - the eye itself, that is), but smashed in blobs don't quite thrill me, for the reason that Alexander Boe expressed when he said, (paraphrasing) "faces with at least one damaged or missing feature are common." Another good example of how missing features let's you "fill in the blanks" was Barbara on another topic.

I forgot to mention, this is from E2001532's raw data, saved to NASAView. E2001532 is one of the better resolution images of the face.

rd

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Ok, so instead let's do it with the west side eyebrow. Specifically, where is it? [Richard]
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

It's over the eye, but if you're looking for a depiction of hair you won't find it. What we see is the sculpted form of an eyebrow above the eye as would be expected in a rendition of a human-like face, with some damage in the form of a flat spot and small crack in the brow area, the result of an apparent impact. But this is all of secondary importance.

For my money the thing that that trumps this discussion by a mile, (or a very big number), is the detailed eye. Many people might not be aware that in the original Viking images, we could not see the eye at all, just a shadow resembling an eye socket.

If the whole artificiality hypothesis for Mars had to rest on a single fact, (which it does not), I would choose this one. In a natural formation, the odds against a detailed eye being under that shadow would be virtually infinite. We can evade this issue all we want, but the mind that can understand the implications of this one fact, and still is open to reason--must accept the artificiality hypothesis based on this one fact alone.