Simulacra, Pareidolia and Apophenia

This…

… Is the Eagle Nebula.

The mysterious and quite exciting thing about this picture is that many people seemed to see the face of God in it. Do you see it? If you don’t, then perhaps this highlighted image might make things clearer:

People believed it to be the face of Jesus or whatever… depending on the religion of the people who saw it. In reality, it wasn’t anything but one of those simple tricks of common and random stuffs in nature, for which the minds of many people fall, easily.

This is a simple phenomenon called simulacrum and the tendency of humans to percieve completely random stuff as something that occurs in a pattern or with purpose is called pareidolia. Apophenia on the other hand, is defined as follows:

“a common perceptual phenomenon whereby we spontaneously perceive connections and find meaningfulness in unrelated things. In other words, it involves seeing or hearing patterns where in reality, none exist…. A common example of apophenia occurs when people are in the shower, and mistakenly think that they hear their door bell or telephone ringing. The white noise produced by the shower contains a broad spectrum of sounds, including those that make up ringing bells. The ear picks out certain sounds from the spectrum, and we “detect” a pattern corresponding roughly to a bell”

These three are responsible for a lot of human misconceptions. But they also bring a sort of awe into a person who believes that everything in this world happens or occurs for a reason. Take a look at these pictures for example:

These are photos of atomic bomb explosions. Don’t they look like devils?

But the most common simulacra we observe are in clouds:

For people who believe in omens, simulacra can be one hell of a nuisance.

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You may find this website pretty interesting and informative:

http://www.tarrdaniel.freeweb.hu/documents/Transzhumanizmus/simulacra.htm

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