Welcome to a new version you.
The you that has checked out the fascinating Wikipedia article to Pareidolia. Seeing faces in clouds, the Führer teapot, hearing 'music' in static noice. Pareidolia shows how our meaning detectors are tuned. As if they are dialed up just a notch.
Leonardo da Vinci Talks about a way to make art:If you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see divers combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate and well conceived forms.
Experiment - Setup
Start some Music, any music.
Refresh for best results. Or visit the fullscreen version.
I also have a Youtube Video from developing this.
Why shouldn't it decide to dance with the music?
Note: A typical reaction to these is thinking there is some signal between music and picture. Let me reveal a kind of magic trick, there are only random timers nothing else.
I want to call this rhythm pareidolia or something.
Experiment - Self report / Reflections
When I watch the picture while listening to music, I feel as if the circle-triangle-square knows when to move, and it does it with a joyful character.
It is like there are small little stories in the fabric between the notes, the movement, the colors. Or perhaps it is sort of like additional music. The rhythm is the common language between visuals and music, they are polyphonic voices, contributing to a Gestalt, made from more than either the visuals or the music alone. It's made from their relationship, their dance.
At times, the picture seems to play with us. As if to feign a move. Then perhaps reluctantly, then perhaps all in, then again dipping or then 'deliberately' out of sync.
It is the fact that the relationship is weaved by the rhythm of the movements, together with this 'character' that I perceive the picture to have, it's non-zero 'expressiveness', that licenses me to describe this as a 'dance'.
Character Detection
If there is a dance, there is a dancer. A non-zero character having entity.
During the Heider-Simmel Illusion, the user perceives the shapes to be characters that follow a kind of storyline. 'Big triangle is angry', 'small triange is scared', and so on.
Our perception of character, and 'personhood' is not tied to sensor data corresponding to humans nor animals. We readily attribute mind to shapes moving on a screen. It is as if we have another pair of eyes in our minds, that see not the visual scene but that see animal-like or person-like, goal-having, feeling-having, relationship-having 'agents'.
Hyperactive Agent Detection
Dawkins mused in one of his books:
From all animals that perceived rustling of savanna grass, the ones that erred on the side of caution and perceived a tiger were better off.
A false negative (real: wind, perceived: tiger) makes you anxious and jumping around a little to much. A false positive (real: tiger, perceived: wind) makes you tiger dinner, statistically speaking.
This is empirical. A bias of animal and human cognition towards agentness exists: Hyperactive Agent Detection.
(Incidentally this is a beautiful example of theoretical evolutionary biology contributing to the explanation of an aspect of the psyche).
Interpretation
My interpretation is that we can attribute music to static noise and see faces in random clouds (Pareidolia).
So too, we can perceive 'agentness' in random movement. 👈
(This is the main outcome of this blog post).
Just like our 'internal agent eyes' see characters in the Heider-Simmel Illusion, and just like our 'sensor' eyes see faces in clouds. Our 'internal agent eyes' can also see 'agents' in random noice.
That we have some kind of 'agent-perceiving' machinery lies at hand.
Just like the machinery that detects faces, even in clouds, the machinery that detects agents is 'on', and perhaps it is 'eager' to contribute to the story-line we use to make sense to the world.
There is also the concept of auditory pareidolia. I forget the details, but many people reported they hear 'a Christmas carol' when prompted to listen for it in static noise. Very eerie isn't it? There is something ghostly and perhaps insubstantial to it. Not to mention the association with the voices of the psychotic. It is the price we pay for the kind of perception we are endowed with. That weaves the fabric of the world by stories and the ideas that are not there. We see ideas, not sensor data. That much is certain.
Seeing the minds everywhere?
The spirits, memes, software agents that animate the world are having certain comebacks in computational science, cognitive science and cybernetics.
Perhaps it is exactly this agentness-detector that allows us to perceive (and make ad-hoc models of) information processing systems.
This would be a psychological basis for animism. Animism just stretches the idea a little further, into the 'non-living' world. I have sympathy for such a view, when I consider my animals. The happy little triangles on the screen.
Josha Bach: Cyberanimism
Steven Wolfram: Some people say 'The weather has mind of it's own.'
Intelligence might be everywhere, don't make assumptions.
Stuff like 'biological systems have a kind of psychology'. And 'development is a collective intelligence problem'.
Valentino Braitenberg: In his philosophical book 'Information, Der Geist in der Natur', the talks about the spirits in the world. Gestalt is a Synomym for 'Form' in German, the arrangment, the 'form' in 'information'. The spirit is the 'organisation principle' of a thing. It is very similar to Joscha Bach's recent view. The world is 'animated/inhabited' by software agents.
Since I am inspired by Dawkins, Dennett, Deutsch, Marletto and Blackmore, the meme people, I want to make that a memetics. What are genotypes, vehicles, phenotypes, extended phenotypes of software animals? The meme-view would emphasize adaptation, design, compositionality, 'good tricks that are hard to vary'.
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