My pareidolia knows no bounds.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by pareidoliac</i>
<br />The thing to be learned is that these faces are common, detail can be predicted "a priori" and they are pareidolia not man made, and can be captured by anyone.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">But everyone who has expressed an opinion, except Neil, already accepts all those conclusions (with the exception of the "a priori" part -- see below). I hope you guys are not beating this dead horse just for Neil's benefit.

As for "detail can be predicted 'a priori'", you are clearly not using the words in the same sense that science does. Nobody could ever predict specific pareidolic detail in one specific image in advance of finding it. I'm sure you meant only that we can predict that detailed pareidolis must exist somewhere sometime.

But that is not prediction in the sense we use on Mars, where we predict particular features together with their sizes, shapes, locations, and orientations in one particular image with no foreknowledge of what might actually be there, and with no background of randomness from which our minds might be free to spot and visualize familiar patterns. There are no leaves (or their equivalent) to cast shadows on Mars.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">It seems to detract from the artificiality hypothesis of Martian phenomena of similar appearance.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">It has no bearing whatever on the general artificiality hypothesis, because that evidence does not depend on what anything looks like or on anybody's subjective judgments.

But we had a second goal where pareidolia does come into play. Given proved artificiality on Mars in one location, then other images might be either artificial or pareidolic with roughly comparable probabilities of being either. So how do we tell which is which?

My current objection is that this discussion seems to be regressing into arguing primary artificiality all over again, where you and maybe Rich too seem to have forgotten (or never recognized?) that pareidolia is not involved. If so, I think we should stop because that case has been made and I see no prospect for anything new to be said.

OTOH, if you or Rich want to talk about how to tell artificial from pareidolic for secondary imagery, then again I see no point in posting more pareidolic images unless they are going to lead us to some criteria (which I doubt). So if there is nothing new to be said, then let's call it a day, shall we, gentlemen? -|Tom|-

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by rderosa</i>
<br /><blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Zip Monster</i>
<br />This entire thread has become an exercise in futility. Looking for faces in bushes and trees, I agree, can be fun but it has nothing to do with digital images of the Cydonia Face or the tendency of certain geological formations to project “generic” facial profiles.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">I disagree. I think it has everything to do with it. I wouldn't have invested so much time in it, if I didn't.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">I agree with Zip. Rich, you continue to make unexplained declarations that it is somehow relevant, but I can't imagine a basis for that. Both your views and Neil's seem to have become polarized at opposite extremes. Reality as I see it is that some of Neil's images are pareidolic, some are artificial, and we still haven't any new clues how to tell which is which beyond those we started with: a priori predictions, context, and relationships.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">it is NOT staged photography, it is an observation of a natural phenomenon.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">I apologize for that red herring. I was encouraging Fred to provide the "pedigree" for his images so we could get past the "staging" issue. But that was apparently a waste of time because those of us wo think no staging is needed require no further demonstrations, and those who think staging is needed will cry "fraud" if you demonstrate elaborate pareidolia and claim no staging.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Like Fred said, he might be able to capture "The Last Supper".<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">I guaranty Fred will never capture "The Last Supper" or any other specific elaborate target you choose to name. Elaborate pareidolia with odds against chance of billions to one only works because there are trillions of possibilities for it to match by chance.

So when we see something elaborate on Mars, such as "First Family", we haven't yet found a way to prove it isn't pareidolia, but are suspicious that it is artificial because finding things with that level of elaborateness is so easy on Mars and so hard on Earth.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">The whole point is that given the right combination of spacial detail, that's abundant in nature, our minds can fuse faces out of the detail.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Many Mars images occur in non-noisy backgrounds where lots of "detail" for fusing faces is not available. Again, there are no leaves to cast shadows on Mars. -|Tom|-

TVanflandern states "Nobody could ever predict specific pareidolic detail in one specific image in advance of finding it. I'm sure you meant only that we can predict that detailed pareidolis must exist somewhere sometime." If i predict that when i find a pareidolic image with a full face, half the face will match the other half of that face (but of course floped over, as would be a normal human face) and match it feature for feature in size, shape and placement to a 90% degree of accuracy. This seems like it meets a priori prediction to me. The images i've found corroborate this. Respectfully, fred.

Tom, my thinking has changed (evolved) somewhat lately, but I'm not really arguing "first artificiality". As a matter of fact, I recently read the entire "The Enterprise Mission" website, and just started reading Hoagland's book "The Monuments of Mars". Already, I smell a rat. I'm sure this stuff is well known to you, but for instance why was Malin ridiculing the Face and calling it a pile of rocks, on the one hand, while on the other he was secretly photographing the heck out of it. Reminds me of my friend's presentation on UFOs where he convinces the audience that the government believes in UFOs.

Also, I'm intrigued by the fact that if DiPietro and Molenaar (the computer guys) hadn't stumbled across the early Viking images, and did their own image analysis, this whole thing may easily have been swept under the rug back in 1976. So, "intuitively" I start thinking "artificial" whenever I come across things like that.

Regarding my pareidolia topic, I'm starting to see something very clearly now. While I don't necessarily agree with Fred that we're "getting away from science", I do see it as a different science then astronomy or cosmology or any of the physical sciences. I've really gone down a path that's more akin to the brain and behavoural sciences.

In the beginning we asked the question, "can pareidolia really be that elaborate?" I would rephrase that now to, "how elaborate an image can the brain perceive, when viewing a random or vague stimulus?" And I think the answer is: it has no bounds. Fred brought up the quote from DaVinci where he talks about gazing at a stucco wall and the like, and seeing marching armies and all sorts of things, and then paints them. Well, it seems fairly obvious to me, that if DaVinci tried to point out the armies to any of us, we'd have thought he was nuts. Not too many people would see them. <b>But he did. </b> The question "can pareidlia really be that elaborate?" implies that the images exist in and of themselves, and we are the observers of these chance occurances. This would imply that anyone can see them, once they are pointed out.

But, that's not really what's happening. They are only partially there, and we're filling in the blanks. Without belaboring the point of which of the Martian art crosses the threshold from pareidolia to artificiality, I can say for sure that in <b>some </b> cases we're dealing with the same phenomena, whether or not we're talking about Martian terrain or shadows of leaves and branches. There's no doubt in my mind, but I don't know if or how someone could prove that.

I suspect that the path Dr. Schyns and his people are on represents some of the current day science of this phenomena, but I also suspect there have been thousands of studies in various disciplines that have touched on the subject.

I saw something the other day that actually freaked me out a little. A face in the shadows of leaves and branches. At first, it was just vague, but as I sat there and gazed, all of a sudden it became crystal clear. Not a pseudo face, or cartoon character, or "web-face" but a real head of a man the size of the whole board (when I took the picture, the head would have been roughly 25 inches high by 16 inches wide or so). Now, obviously if I analyzed the secondary features, they don't look so convincing, and also obviously if you zoom in on any one feature, it's going to look like Zip suggested, but it's like the Dalmation. When you "see" it, it's real, but when you analyze it, they're just a bunch of black and white blobs.

The big difference between the flat Martian art and the shadow art is that in the case of the shadow art (Fred said this a month ago) <b>we know it's pareidolia </b> so we know it's our minds filling in most of the blanks. We can easily flip back and forth from the imaginary face to the shoddy details and back. We know we're dealing with pareidolia, so we can run with it.

With the Martian art <b>it could in fact be real art made by Martians</b> so we don't have the same liberty. We have a question: is this real or pareidolia? And it's almost impossible to know for sure.

With shadow art, we have a question also, but a different question: what the heck is going on in our brains to allow us to see these images?

I think I'm going to take some time off from posting, because what I'm thinking now is that the truly elaborate pareidolia is in our minds. It's personal, like I said on page 1.

rd

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by pareidoliac</i>
<br />If i predict that when i find a pareidolic image with a full face, half the face will match the other half of that face ... This seems like it meets a priori prediction to me.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Just the opposite. In science, a prediction is a priori only if no one has any advanced knowledge of what the result will be at the time the prediction is made. Its power comes from the fact that the predicting hypothesis will be falsified if the prediction fails, so it is critically important not to amend the prediction after the result is known.

Your example is called "a posteriori", where you see the result and start estimating how unlikely it is to arise by chance. Such after-the-fact calculations are significant only for the next instance of the identical phenomenon, because chance alone can produce a reasonable approximation of many extremely improbable things, given a large-enough number of samples. What makes one improbable thing significant while another remains non-significant is a detailed prediction of the specifics made in advance, combined with <i>only a single opportunity for the prediction to be correct.</i>

The particular phenomenon you describe is called a selection effect. Although nature makes many more asymmetric faces than symmetric ones, our eyes and brains are hard-wired to ignore the asymmetric ones and notice mainly the symmetric ones. -|Tom|-

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by rderosa</i>
<br />why was Malin ridiculing the Face and calling it a pile of rocks, on the one hand, while on the other he was secretly photographing the heck out of it.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Malin's attitudes were dictated by Caltech's Prof. Arden Albee, who awards or retracts the annual funding for MSSS, and who is an obsessive fanatic on the subject of the Cydonia Face because Hoagland accused him of orchestrating a conspiracy to hide the truth from the public.

The reason for the numerous photos anyway is simple: Following SPSR's initiative to NASA, former NASA Chief Goldin ordered that the Cydonia Face be photographed on every opportunity to satisfy public interest. That's when Malin began saying publicly that the photos were "a slap at the integrity of the scientists and a waste of public funds".

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Also, I'm intrigued by the fact that if DiPietro and Molenaar (the computer guys) hadn't stumbled across the early Viking images, and did their own image analysis, this whole thing may easily have been swept under the rug back in 1976.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">The Face was discovered by Walter Haines in 1976. (Not sure I have his name right.) D&M achieved fame by reporting the discovery to the astronomers at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society at U. of Maryland in 1980, which got it discussed in public circles. Hoagland and I were both in attendance, although we did not meet until a decade later.

It might have remained a low-key issue, but when NASA/JPL declared it a "trick of light and shadow", many people objected because it was no such thing. (Being 3-D, its face-like appearance does not depend on lighting or shadows.) So protests of the premature dismissal of a possible artifact led to books by McDaniel, Carlotto, and Hoagland decrying the unscientific attitude.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">The big difference between the flat Martian art and the shadow art is that in the case of the shadow art (Fred said this a month ago) <b>we know it's pareidolia </b> so we know it's our minds filling in most of the blanks.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">The <i>big</i> difference is the abundance of elements (leaf shadows) available to form images for Fred, and the absence of component parts other than the ones that make the face or other image for many of the Mars images.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">I think I'm going to take some time off from posting, because what I'm thinking now is that the truly elaborate pareidolia is in our minds.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Speaking for myself, I very much appreciate your contributions to the discussion. I can imagine this whole discussion being of value to future scholars, regardless of who is "right" about pareidolia vs. artificiality. -|Tom|-