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The Beginning of Art?

#1
Zinjanthropos Offline
From Wiki: 
Quote:Pareidolia (/pɛraɪˈdoʊliə/, /pɛriː-/) is the tendency for incorrect perception of a stimulus as an object, pattern or meaning known to the observer, such as seeing shapes in clouds, seeing faces in inanimate objects or abstract patterns


Just a thought. Makes sense to me. If nature can produce familiar images then why couldn’t we? Did we evolve pareidolia before becoming artists?
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#2
C C Offline
(Dec 11, 2020 10:03 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: From Wiki: 
Quote:Pareidolia (/pɛraɪˈdoʊliə/, /pɛriː-/) is the tendency for incorrect perception of a stimulus as an object, pattern or meaning known to the observer, such as seeing shapes in clouds, seeing faces in inanimate objects or abstract patterns


Just a thought. Makes sense to me. If nature can produce familiar images then why couldn’t we? Did we evolve pareidolia before becoming artists?

In a feral world not yet raped by industry, wandering hunter-gatherers would have encountered far more pareidolic afflicted trees and stone formations than the private property restricted couch-potatoes of today. Some sites doubtless became sacred and filled with significance, visited again on next year's cyclic migration.

So, yeah, imitation. Nature provided the first examples that it was possible to carve and arrange stuff to represent other things, to manipulate them magically. Eventually developed to two-dimensional, temporary etchings in sand and painting on rocky surfaces. Even the latter may have had non-artificial forerunners. No slices of half-burned toast for Jesus to appear on accidentally, but maybe some mineral stain resembled a legendary chieftain that had recently died or a prized animal often hunted.
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#3
Zinjanthropos Offline
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/jesu..._dogs_butt

Had an apartment when I was young and single. Used to look down at the end of the hall and see Christ image on the fire escape/stairway door. Never heard anyone mention it so one day in the hallway I met a neighbor and asked if she noticed anything odd about that door. She said no, so I pointed it out and boom, she could see it. Before you knew it, everybody was on our floor looking at it. 

Don’t know why she couldn’t see it unless pointed out. Only thing I can think of is that pareidolia comes in a different dose for each person. I’m no artist but all 4 of my brothers are. One of my two daughters is very talented artist. I have no problem recognizing images I’m familiar with, just by observing nature. That’s what makes me think it’s entirely genetic, thus an evolved trait.
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#4
C C Offline
(Dec 12, 2020 04:06 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: https://dangerousminds.net/comments/jesu..._dogs_butt

Had an apartment when I was young and single. Used to look down at the end of the hall and see Christ image on the fire escape/stairway door. Never heard anyone mention it so one day in the hallway I met a neighbor and asked if she noticed anything odd about that door. She said no, so I pointed it out and boom, she could see it. Before you knew it, everybody was on our floor looking at it. 

Don’t know why she couldn’t see it unless pointed out. Only thing I can think of is that pareidolia comes in a different dose for each person. I’m no artist but all 4 of my brothers are. One of my two daughters is very talented artist. I have no problem recognizing images I’m familiar with, just by observing nature. That’s what makes me think it’s entirely genetic, thus an evolved trait.


You gave her the concept that enabled her to finally cognize it. Not the general knowledge of Jesus, which she already had -- but the refined idea that his appearance could apply to random blemishes (or whatever) on a door.

Wilfrid Sellars - MoJ, P1: ... Stepping back from the Myth of Jones, here are some of the significant points. The thesis of Psychological Nominalism claims that to be aware of something, x, one must have a concept for x. But there is a flip side to this. If one has a concept of x, one can be aware of x’s. With the concept of x in hand, that is, you can notice all sorts of things you didn’t notice before you had that concept. For instance, a physicist looks at a puff of smoke in a cloud chamber and sees an electron discharged. She comes to have non-inferential knowledge of something we might not, as she has certain concepts we don’t as laypeople, as well as an ability to apply them directly to her experience. In other words, perception is concept-laden, and depending on what concepts you have, you can perceive different things. (Sellars wasn’t the first to articulate this connection, but his development of it made for a revolutionary understanding of thinking and perception).

As a result, once we acquire the concept of an inner episode (as we saw for Jones’s peers), we can come to experience those episodes directly, though we were unaware of them before we had the concept. Non-inferential knowledge of the private is now possible, and so provides for a first person authority, as we sought. We are simply in a better position to report on our own thoughts (and sensations) than others. We can report on our own thoughts, for instance, because we have the concept of thinking. But others have that concept too -- it is a public concept after all -- and as such are in a position to also make judgments about our thinking. We may be in a better position than others, but others aren’t precluded from knowing our inner states. The skepticism that gave rise to Behaviorism can be avoided.

Yet while we do have an authority about our own inner states, it doesn’t follow that we are incorrigible about them, as Descartes held. All things being equal, you are in a better epistemic position to judge your own states than others are. There are times, however, when we aren’t the best judge of our inner episodes, of what we are feeling, for instance, as is well documented by psychotherapy. This weakening of the Cartesian view, however, affords retention of what Sellars sees as viable and valuable in Descartes’ philosophy.


This is why complete consciousness relies on reason and memory as much as manifestation. Even if the furniture of the scientific world consisted of phenomena rather than invisible abstract matter, that universe would still lack evidence or verification of itself because such "experiential events" would not be systematically arranged in a complex circularity of "handshaking" to validate each other as being there.
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#5
Zinjanthropos Offline
CC: Veering off here somewhat...

Does what you're saying apply to kids?

When visiting my grandkids recently I noticed my granddaughter (2.5 yrs) has an Olaf Snowman(from movie:Frozen) plush toy that she adores. In the movie, Olaf is basically killed by various means (melting, head lopped off, etc). Now I thought Looney Tunes cartoons were being pushed aside because too violent Big Grin.  I decided to experiment and I introduced her to Road Runner cartoons one morning on my iPad. She watched Wile E Coyote get pulverized, run over, blown up, crushed etc without batting an eye, in fact she developed an appetite for more. Took her to McDonalds and strictly by coincidence they had Roadrunner/Coyote toys. so we picked them up at same time

I reasoned then that the cartoons were just entertainment for her. Does having toy replicants of cartoon characters that endure catastrophic events provide kids with the concept that somethings are not real? 

It’s Christmas time and before Covid, kids lined up to sit on Santa's knee. If your waiting in line long enough you'll see kids react in many different ways, from comfortable to sheer terror. No doubt these kids have seen Santa toys and images up until that moment. They had the concept that Santa was not real. Suddenly he is. Don't know what that does to a kid's psychological make-up but I'm thinking cartoon characters are for the most part safe for kids to watch, even if their heads get blown off. It's only when reality challenges the notion that the veneer of safety is stripped away. No kids are going to witness real Olafs or Roadrunner/Coyote confrontations as cartoons portray them. 

Remember taking my two kids to a nearby Petting Zoo (Happy Rolf's) when they were about 4 & 6 yrs old. The kids have the preconceived notion that the animals there are harmless. At one station a mother duck was trying to move her & her brood past a couple of swans. A lot of squawking attracted many kids to that area. All the fun was taken out of the occasion when the swan picked up a duckling and swallowed it whole.  Again reality destroyed a concept. I wonder just how many concepts get destroyed for an average individual in a lifetime. What happens when they don't? Does it get harder as we age? Oh yeah, does art as in paintings, sculptures, etc aid in differentiating between real and not real?
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#6
C C Offline
(Dec 12, 2020 09:52 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: [...] Remember taking my two kids to a nearby Petting Zoo (Happy Rolf's) when they were about 4 & 6 yrs old. The kids have the preconceived notion that the animals there are harmless. At one station a mother duck was trying to move her & her brood past a couple of swans. A lot of squawking attracted many kids to that area. All the fun was taken out of the occasion when the swan picked up a duckling and swallowed it whole.  Again reality destroyed a concept. I wonder just how many concepts get destroyed for an average individual in a lifetime. What happens when they don't? Does it get harder as we age? Oh yeah, does art as in paintings, sculptures, etc aid in differentiating between real and not real?


Mostly it's the over-idealized apprehensions or "understandings of" that hurt when they crack, if the individual fully believed their accuracy or claims of absoluteness rather than just indulging those for the sake of tribal harmony, practical reasons, or recreational and aesthetic grounds.

They can be personally invented paragons, not just formal conceptions handed out by community and commercialization. Something as everyday as a teenager generalizing a new boyfriend or girlfriend as "nice, sweet, blah, blah" on the superficial impressions of a few dates, days, or couple of weeks of interaction. The distasteful signs, the incompatibilities, the contingencies and complications, are weeded out by their wishful interpretation filters.

Take Rose McGowan apparently getting all the way up into her forties before the lenses of her particular, rose-colored glasses started decaying.

https://www.scivillage.com/thread-8980-p...l#pid37400

“I used to be a proud Democrat,” the 46-year-old shared. “I used to be a proud American.”

[...] She went on to say that she had been raised on the idea that the Democratic Party “were the good guys” and that she felt “really quite a sense of loss.” McGowan also previously shined a light on her negative experience in Hollywood since the exposure of now-disgraced movie mogul and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein. She previously accused Weinstein of rape and has since become a vocal critic of the industry.
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