APOPHENIA.....how has it (how DOES it) affect your perception of the world?

Terry

Apophenia.

Do you suffer from it?

Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.

Do bible readers? Religious believers? Demonized people?

Recent real-world examples: the 'finding' of a cross inside a halved potato, the 'appearance' of Jesus and Mary inside a halved orange, or Jesus' face on a piece of toast or in the frost on a car window, or inside the lid of a jar of Marmite.

Astronomers?

The famous "face" on Mars.

What about this?

Ideas of reference and delusions of reference involve people having a belief or perception that irrelevant, unrelated or innocuous phenomena in the world refer to them directly or have special personal significance.

Is this an apt description of Jehovah's Witnesses?

snowbird

If Fred Franz really believed the 7 trumpets in Revelation applied to JW's, then I would definitely say he was suffering from adophenia.

Syl

mindmelda

Ah, the conspiracy theorists, what would we do without them?

Terry

At the bookstore where I work I see so many people pass all the factual books by and go straight to what I call they "crackpot" sections.

The religious people who waste their time on the endless scribblings of REVELATION "explanations" "commentaries" and such is frightening!

Think how many truly intelligent people have had the temerity to think they UNDERSTOOD the lunatic ravings of the writer of Revelation!

APOPHENIA at work? Or, egotism? Total delusion?

Something worth considering is this (and I keep harping on it because--dang it--it is important!......

Once you shut off your rational thinking (demanding non-contradictory evidence) you open yourself up to irrational thinking (accepting on faith, intuition, suggestion and authority.)

Your mind gets stolen from you because you've shut off the burglar alarm!!

It all starts when you substitute "faith" or "belief" for non-contradictory evidence that what you are reading or learning matches reality.

gubberningbody

""I don't mean to sound bitter, cold, or cruel, but I am, so that's how it comes out." — Bill Hicks

Deputy Dog

Terry

Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.

You mean like when people make a connection with atheism and DNA?

Terry

You mean like when people make a connection with atheism and DNA?

How does that one work, Dep?

BurnTheShips

Advanced pattern recognition may produce false positives, but it is still one of our most powerful cognitive abilities.

Apophenia is very much in the eye of the beholder.

I will decide what is a meaningful pattern, and what isn't, for myself.

With one breath, with one flow

You will know

Synchronicity

A sleep trance, a dream dance

A shared romance

Synchronicity

A connecting principle

Linked to the invisible

Almost imperceptible

Something inexpressible

Science insusceptible

Logic so inflexible

Causally connectible

Yet nothing is invincible

If we share this nightmare

Then we can dream

Spiritus mundi

If you act, as you think

The missing link

Synchronicity

We know you, they know me

Extrasensory

Synchronicity

A star fall, a phone call

It joins all

Synchronicity

It's so deep, it's so wide

Your inside

Synchronicity

Effect without a cause

Sub-atomic laws, scientific pause

Synchronicity......

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMBufJmTTSA

BTS

Terry

Sigh....

BurnTheShips

Burp...

'scuse me.

BTS

APOPHENIA.....how has it (how DOES it) affect your perception of the world?

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