Patternicity

Henry Gonzalez
Professor Lane
Philosophy 8
September 6, 2015

Apophenia/Patternicity

     Apophenia is perceiving patterns or connections in a random or meaningless information. Humans have formed the ability to recognize patterns from early man because it was helpful in survival. The ability to make out an animal about to prey on him from endless patterns of a forest meant humans could recognize and perceive dangers and give him time to escape. Humans evolved and have instilled the ability of patternicity and later forming into apothenia. Patternicity, according to Michael Shermer in Patternicity, it is the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Having this tendency of pattern recognition, humans don’t have much need any more for survival but in though and everyday curiosity. I remember being a kid looking at those autostereogram posters in a toy store trying to figure out what I was supposed to see. I could never make out anything in the patterns, I would be there for a while and could never see it. All I saw was random noise of patterns of colors, dots, or waves, but the apophenia in me wanted to see, so it made it important for me to find some pattern so I could move on. I not for my brother, who knew from the toy store clerk that I was supposed to see a ship, I started to make out the ship. I otherwise would have starred and never have saw anything or swear to see something else where my mind probably would have perceived through the patternicity. So did it really exist? Or I make the pattern in my head from what my brother had said it was? I think both, there probably was a hidden image in the patterns but I only perceived it by knowing what it was. At first the patternicity was a type II when I knew there was an image but couldn’t perceive and not believing that there truly was an image when I couldn’t make out anything.
     But with unknown and unpredictability of the world around us, we become more skeptical and curious and seek out patterns for truth. As they say traditional science deals with predictable phenomena and what we don’t know we put in patterns that we think are the truth. So with humans we strive for knowledge that patternicity helps satisfy the unknown. Like conspiracy theories that we never went to the moon, we seek out information that supports that we didn’t. Like how the flag waves on the moon when there’s no atmosphere and the shadows angles are not how they are supposed to be with the time and light of the sun. So people make up patterns even though there’s strong evidence that we did go to the moon with evidence of the real truth like the pictures, the people, artifacts, and the money spent to go. Especially the technology that came from the Apollo program.
     Apophenia and patternicity is what drives humans to seek the knowledge of the unknown and put it in a perspective that we could grasp and understand even though it could be false or true. From our origins of survival to recognizing patterns creating theories of gravity. But it also allows for what we might never know to be true such as miracles and belief of a higher beings like God. But humans are full of fallacies, our reality is a collection of our senses, patterns of information that our minds puts together to form what it perceives is reality. But there’s a conundrum, patternicity is a pocket full of chaos that serves a direct contradiction to the belief that the world can be made sense of it all, so there are always going to be conspiracy theories, superstitions that our minds could only try to comprehend to be true.