My pareidolia knows no bounds.

I'll be d*mn*d. I think we actually have made some progress here.

Good work, guys.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by pareidoliac</i>
<br /> In your example above i see it as you are correctly interpreting a pattern that is there as you see it.
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

I agree with this almost entirely. Although, the phrase "correctly interpreting it" is the grey area in the middle of definition pareidolia (modern) and pareidolia (ressler).

I'm not so sure it's possible to 100% correctly identify these patterns, although we usually can come close.

One of the first events that led me on the path of pareidolia (modern) as the root of most of what Neil was doing was when he sent me some images and told me what was in there, which I saw, but only later found out that we were looking at two different things.

Also, I say it's a clown, and my wife says it's a matador. In both cases the pattern is <b>real </b>, but the inferred image is <b>subjective or questionable.</b>

One other point: Look through Neil's "Faces" topics and see how many of them you can "correctly identify". I tried it yesterday, and while I won't say "none", I will say "very few."

rd

<b>[rderosa] "The patterns are real, and we see them, ..."</b>

Real? Yes, tentatively. (See if you also have doubts, about this being the best/right word, after I finish below.) We know this because very often others see the pattern and interpret it in (more or less) the same way.

<b>[rderosa] "... if you're sitting in an all white room, and you see a little green man sitting in the corner, and there really isn't one there, that's a hallucination which falls under the category of pareidolia (original)."</b>

Hmm. (Sometimes you are a really good straight man. With no <u>physical</u> pattern to serve as a 'nucleation site' for the perceived image, I'm inclined to say that we are now dealing with a psychological phenomenon. Like a hallucination. But I get your inference, in that "original" probably saw pareidolia as <s>nothing</s> little more than hallucination.

***

Let me see if I can confuse the issue. The lack of a physical pattern is NOT synonymous with the lack of a real pattern. I make this assertion on the basis of some theoretical work I've been doing on the nature of reality from the perspective of Deep Reality Physics.

Here is the REALLY short summary:
Per DRP, <b><u>Reality</b></u> has three components

1. Things with physical existence.
2. Things with conceptual existence.
3. Things with consciousness.

For sure Rich- i was only attempting to point out that the pattern is there. As Nietzsche says "There are no facts- merely interpretations." We all interpret differently. i am attempting to get the negative apophenia/ psychological/ idiocy out of the definition and have people see it as it is simply- PATTERN RECOGNITION. A simple ordinary phenomena that requires a slightly different way of looking at things. The most simple accurate definition of pareidolia (ressler). Anyone can argue with anything- but i feel PATTERN RECOGNITION. Is the most simple and least able to be argued against definition.

I would encourage anyone who is interested to read this study, which was the basis of the presentation I did earlier in this Topic on what was called "The Superstitious S Study". This paper is a more generalized discussion of what they were doing.

conferences.inf.ed.ac.uk/cogsci2001/pdf-files/0348.pdf

The genius in this can't be overstated. Basically, they are operating in that grey area I just mentioned between what's really there and what is sort of there, but not in the strict sense of the word. There were no "S"s inserted in the samples of white noise, but there were enough patterns resembling "S"s that when the participants results were summed, sure enough, they summed to the "S" they thought they saw.

If any of us looked at any one of the slides, and were not instructed that an "S" was there, we would just see a slate of white noise. This only works because of "psychological" (modern) reasons. It's as if Dr. Frdric Gosselin and Dr Philippe G. Schyns were <b>playing </b> in the realm of Fred's <b>yin/yang.</b>

rd