Apophenia (archive/17th) keeps showing up here and there -I wonder if maybe there's a purpose to it, somehow - like somebody wants me to think about it, you know?
Okay.
The theory part is great - theoretically somebody sees things connect in ways they really don't, sees unrelated events combine and produce information that isn't there, draws lines between discrete phenomena and produces an object imbued with substance from the figure those lines describe.
The scorn part is what's fun. The way the sophisticated learn to deride the hysterical. Scoffing at the nonsense. It's fun because the unspoken fundamental is core to the whole, it's part of the overall pattern.
Because it implies an infallible authority to say now and forever there is no pattern.
It's the same authority-worshipping relinquishment of possibility to that superior knowing presence immaturity hungers for in the dangerous and only partially-understood world.
We can't know; so either we find someone who can, or we don't get to know.
If we don't get to know, we may have to waste valuable time on crackpot theories of connections that don't exist or, its inverse, we may have to discard valuable unproven hard-to-discern connections whose recognition will benefit us, to avoid wasting valuable time on the crackpots.
But having a wise and benevolent authority means we don't have to waste any time at all on that stuff either way. The earth is 5,700 years old; the earth is 3.5 billion years old. Either way we know. It's more important that we know than that we be right.
To avoid wasting time on unessential theories we can delegate the somewhat bizarre task of collating paranoid fantasies of pattern and connection to technicians with the appropriate credentials and training.
This is what's so disturbing about crop circles and cattle mutilations. The paternal voice has been silent, as though it wants us to separate into camps of the credulous and the skeptical; and in fact that is what's happened. Father-worshipping cynical adolescents on one side - dazed believers on the either.
That the more important pattern may be that separation, the constant segregation of preterite and elect, that the criteria are meaningless except as catalytic agents, that the pattern is one we can see in bread mold and redwoods as well as the great cats and mankind, that it's about organizing principles whose cause and reason are no more or less truthful than protein strings are truthful, that the patterns here all lead toward that direct confrontation with the transience of carnal existence we all avoid most of our lives, that everything leads us toward mystery, and that fear of that mystery, and/or fear of its discovery, both motivate the paternal voice - well that's kind of paranoid isn't it. Things mostly just happen, randomly, to no purpose.
The alternatives to everything being random are:
Some things are random, some things aren't.
Nothing is.
There's subdivisions like subjective randomness, the chaos of loft jazz or a raging storm surge pounding the beach. It's just that we keep discovering order in places we were convinced there was none.
Nothing is random but some of the larger patterns are beyond our reach at this time. That's more or less where I stand on that.
Devoting limited resources to proving/disproving patterns of connection can be dangerously wasteful. So apophenia becomes a working label, prioritizing, something to help us get the job done.
It should be pointed out consistently and repeatedly, that, like "conspiracy theory" a word like apophenia deepens the shadows around us, and can provide more cover for the wielders of intrigue. The best camouflage is the observer's conviction that nothing is there.
A sensible attitude should suffice for the average Joe - like traffic laws or table etiquette, they help us to not waste time and avoid unnecessary conflict.
But making the scorning of pattern-finders the default social position has as much to with protecting the covert as it does with husbanding resources and guiding the neophyte.
And we need to remember that pattern-recognition has traditionally been one of the main measures of intelligence.
That thing in Spielberg's "Close Encounters" where he puts the kid's block numeral "3" on the turntable and watches it go around and become first an "W" then an "E" then an "M".
There's a pattern there.
Finding the pattern-makers, and putting motives on them, is the uncharted territory words like apophenia are coined to warn us away from.

Here's a word I think should get bandied about more than it does:

astonied

put here 4:38 PM

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