Post by Ruchi Trivedi on Sept 14, 2015 23:20:48 GMT
Apophenia/patternicity is the tendency of humans to see patterns in events or a sequence of events that are completely unrelated. Patternicity is our tendency to project our personal experiences and meanings onto the world around us. I believe that we engage in this sort of activity to give ourselves more importance. Humans are creatures that look for meaning because if we accepted that our lives are meaningless, our society would crumble. Often times, the problem with patternicity is that we do take into account for all aspects that led us to believe that we are seeing a pattern or a false meaning. It is easy to disregard the outliers that indeed would affect our perception because of what seems so magnificent. I believe that humans thrive on hope and disregarding the negative in order to see meaning in life is what keeps us going.
I liked the example of Littlewood’s Law in the readings. It is eye opening (pun not intended) that every blink is seen as a new event and that in a month you can have over one million “new events” which increases the number of chances that you will encounter a miracle. Even though the objective definition of a miracle is one in a million, the event of a miracle is still subjective and the product of our projections.
I grew up in a practicing Hindu household.
Every year, during a festival in October called Navratri, it is customary to participate in a partial fast for 9 days so the rest of your year will be prosperous and essentially all your needs and wishes will come true. I’ve realized that there are probably other scientific reasons for this fasting, but this reasoning is due to patternicity. We believe that fasting and pleasing a higher power will give us a step up on our happiness and wants or needs whether it be good health, a surplus of income, or even college admissions.
It’s explained in the readings that humans seek meaning in these random chaotic events because we are pattern seekers. It is evolutionarily engrained in us and has arguably led to not only our survival but also our flourishing nature. I also think that aside from this, we are knowledge seekers. We inherently love learning and gaining experiences that lead us to understand ourselves and better understand the world. Because of this, I think we are naturally pattern seekers- always wanting to make sense of a world or universe that we will probably never fully understand. It is too perplexing to us to accept that we will never know what our universe truly is and so we seek and accept patterns and “miracles” that are actually just projections from our experiences that lead to biased and skewed visions of the world. These projections are not a bad thing and even so cannot be altered. They are the sole reason for the way we think and we are all plagued and maybe blessed with different perceptions. It’s pompous to think that any one of us is an exception to our own projections and perceptions and are void of patternicity. For survival purposes and just the fact that humans love to know and understand, we are pattern seekers and give meaning to our surroundings even if it is essentially meaningless if we were never here.
I liked the example of Littlewood’s Law in the readings. It is eye opening (pun not intended) that every blink is seen as a new event and that in a month you can have over one million “new events” which increases the number of chances that you will encounter a miracle. Even though the objective definition of a miracle is one in a million, the event of a miracle is still subjective and the product of our projections.
I grew up in a practicing Hindu household.
Every year, during a festival in October called Navratri, it is customary to participate in a partial fast for 9 days so the rest of your year will be prosperous and essentially all your needs and wishes will come true. I’ve realized that there are probably other scientific reasons for this fasting, but this reasoning is due to patternicity. We believe that fasting and pleasing a higher power will give us a step up on our happiness and wants or needs whether it be good health, a surplus of income, or even college admissions.
It’s explained in the readings that humans seek meaning in these random chaotic events because we are pattern seekers. It is evolutionarily engrained in us and has arguably led to not only our survival but also our flourishing nature. I also think that aside from this, we are knowledge seekers. We inherently love learning and gaining experiences that lead us to understand ourselves and better understand the world. Because of this, I think we are naturally pattern seekers- always wanting to make sense of a world or universe that we will probably never fully understand. It is too perplexing to us to accept that we will never know what our universe truly is and so we seek and accept patterns and “miracles” that are actually just projections from our experiences that lead to biased and skewed visions of the world. These projections are not a bad thing and even so cannot be altered. They are the sole reason for the way we think and we are all plagued and maybe blessed with different perceptions. It’s pompous to think that any one of us is an exception to our own projections and perceptions and are void of patternicity. For survival purposes and just the fact that humans love to know and understand, we are pattern seekers and give meaning to our surroundings even if it is essentially meaningless if we were never here.