Faces from the Chasmas

Thanks very much to everyone who responded to my questions. The responses were enlightening, at least for me.

I have long felt that the "natural origin" proponents have been badly under-represented in this forum. This is probably because it is something of a haven for "artificiality proponents" because we don't allow ad hominems or personal attacks here. And in part it is probably caused by my own public stance, which is that we have ruled out natural origin in a small number of cases such as the Cydonia Face. But I am not at all persuaded that most of the images in the several threads on artificiality this year enjoy anything more than a presumption of artificiality, given essentially certain artificiality elsewhere. And some of them don't even merit that much, in my personal opinion.

However, if this forum is to become more than a "couch" for those of us convinced of some artificiality to lie back on and tell our stories to other eager listeners, we need some strong proponents of the "it's all (or mostly) natural" school. One such is Richard DeRosa, who has also spent some time in the "artificiality" camp and is therefore in a position to empathize, but who now feels differently. Rich has some interesting things to say, and I hope he will rejoin us soon and say them.

Even our Moderators have been impressed by how well people on this MB get along even when discussing strongly held and opposing viewpoints. We certainly do not want to change that. Even more, we don't want to censor anyone's viewpoint, and views opposed to anything in Meta Science have always been welcome here.

The Moderators are unanimous that we want to hear the best scientific, impersonal arguments that both sides have to offer. But as always, they will be quick to press the delete button, possibly followed by the lockout button, on anything that crosses the line from a scientific argument that one might see in a printed journal, into any kind of personal remark, however well-disguised.

So as a reminder, ideas are fair game here. "This idea is wrong (or questionable) because..." is going in the right direction. But giving ideas attributes that can only apply to persons, such as "stupid", is ad hominem. That tells us nothing about what is wrong with the idea, but only insults the idea's presenter.

I'm hoping my remarks here are so unnecessary as to be patronizing to our readers, for which I apologize. But if the ongoing discussion stays on track and on point, my expectations are high that it will contribute in a material way to our understanding of these important questions, and enable all of us to learn new things of value to us here and in many areas of life about distinguishing between what is part of objective, external reality and what is all in the mind. -|Tom|-

[jrich] " ... one way to objectify the process would be to measure the rate of recognition ... "

I guess I'm going to side with Neil on this one. It seems to me that your plan is more likely to be measuring something important about pattern recognition error mechanisms in neural nets than something about the patterns themselves. And while that is very useful and important knowledge, it won't help us determine the Answer To The Question.

[Neil] " ... this is one of the best faces we have for the following reasons: This is one of the very few faces large enough to see the details, which possesses bilateral symmetry and excellent proportions and orientation. Both eyes are visible, including irises, whites, ... "

I agree - it is a good candidate for artificiality. Uh ... do you have a comment about the half dozen or so other face images in this picture? One of the things that drives my skepticism is the enourmous number of face and body images that I see when I look at pictures like this.

LB

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">I agree - it is a good candidate for artificiality. Uh ... do you have a comment about the half dozen or so other face images in this picture? One of the things that drives my skepticism is the enourmous number of face and body images that I see when I look at pictures like this. [LB]
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

I do a lot of thinking about Pareidolia, as a matter of fact I just spent a little time reviewing a well known web site on this subject.

thefolklorist.com/Pareidolia%20Project/index.htm

Since philosophy inerests me as much as science, I'll say this (breifly): Much of the discussion of pareidolia is based on a logical fallacy. The website I mentioned gives many "known" examples of the phenomenon (some of which my brother posted not long ago.) Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the Cydonia Face and Tom's Slide Show are given as examples of pareidolia. And this is my point. In philosophy one of the great errors is to assume as true (or given) that which we are attempting to prove. So you (a person) can't just show a bunch of examples of "known" pareidolia as an argument or proof. You must take each individual example or specemin and make your best scientific (or logical) case. Some or many of the examples in that website may indeed be pareidolia, but we don't know that. To make their case, they must do what we do and put each item under a microscope. And of course as Tom says you must always consider the overall context. Another fallacy is forgetting that there <i>is</i> a border-line somewhere between pareidolia (the immaginary) and the real thing. The fact that all but the most skeptical of philosophers would agree that we (and George W) have real faces, proves it.

As for the vague faces in the "Curiosity" crop. I barely noticed them (this time), but yeah, I guess they're there. But we have our best chance making the case for artificiality if we can give specific reasons and that's best done with relatively few, best specemins. (I have many "faces" saved in "My Pictures" that I've never posted for that reason.) This was JP's point in wanting to stick to the few well known faces and thus avoiding too much controversy. But controversy doesn't bother me none (as long as I can keep cool).

Neil

p.s. One thing I definately agree with JR on. Always make a back up copy of your message. You know how frustrating it is to type a long note with two fingers and then to lose the whole thing when you press "Post New Reply" ?

[neilderosa] " ...Always make a back up copy of your message."

Definitely. I go even farther than that. I always (honest copy the post to which I am replying into Works WP, compose my replys off line and copy them to the MB's reply window. In addition to providing a back up of everything, it forces me to think about what I'm saying, and about how I am saying it.

Approximately 30% never get published.

LB

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by neilderosa</i><br />Always make a back up copy of your message.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">A simpler technique that is not as safe as Larry's is to press ctrl-A to select the entire draft message, then ctrl-c to copy it to the invisible clipboard. If the message fails to post, a copy remains on the clipboard and can be restored into another message or program (preferably one that does not erase the clipboard when it starts!) with a ctrl-v.

If I'm writing a long message, I may do this sort of "save my message so far" several times. -|Tom|-

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Larry Burford</i>
<br />[jrich] " ... one way to objectify the process would be to measure the rate of recognition ... "

I guess I'm going to side with Neil on this one. It seems to me that your plan is more likely to be measuring something important about pattern recognition error mechanisms in neural nets than something about the patterns themselves. And while that is very useful and important knowledge, it won't help us determine the Answer To The Question.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Perhaps I misinterpreted Tom's query (Tom?), but I understood him to be asking how we might objectively determine whether a particular pattern is likely to be "real" or likely the result of our natural pattern recognition abilities finding a "match" where none really exists.

If one is going to take the position that ANY "art" pattern that anyone might see is a legitimate candidate for artificiality, then one must also concede that at least some of these candidates are actually pareidolia. So it seems to me it might be useful to have a method of differentiating them as objectively as possible. Obviously, to do this one cannot rely on the existing visual evidence itself since that is precisely what is in doubt. So we must examine the response of the human pattern recognition system to the visual stimuli to judge the validity of the patterns. Whether this can actually be done with any validity is another question entirely.

JR