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Complex Numbers #1044382 added February 7, 2023 at 12:01am
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Pareidolia
Another entry for "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]. This one can be found here: Faces Everywhere
Pareidolia is popularly known as the tendency to see a face or figure in accidental places. Examples include the Man in the Moon, the Face on Mars (it's not a face), and the ever-popular Jesus toast.
Or, speaking of Jesus, some people find him in a dog butt. I'm not judging. But it does confound the proverbial dyslexic agnostic insomniac, who stays up all night wondering if there's a dog.
In the case of today's prompt image, though... I'm not seeing it. Looks more like a grasping hand to me. Which is a form of pareidolia, but the title of the image led me to expect to see faces. Generally if I go into something with that expectation, I'll see it. Not this time.
This could be related to my partial face-blindness. A while back, I tried to get back into my bookface account so that I could delete it. I'd forgotten the password, so they issued me a challenge: identify the people in these photographs, ripped from my friends list.
Leaving aside the ones who I only knew from online, whose faces I wouldn't recognize anyway, I haven't seen some of my failbook friends in decades. And even absent those, I'm just not that great at identifying faces. Hell, one time I was at a bar doing a trivia contest. I had barely even started drinking yet, and the goal was to identify the famous people in a set of photos. I recognized a couple of them, but one that I didn't was... Bruce Springsteen, circa 1985. You'd think if I could recognize anyone, it's him. But no.
Long story short, this is why I still have a facebuck account: I can't get back in to delete it. And it's also why I don't always see pareidolia.
One thing that occurred to me a while back, though, is that artists rely on pareidolia. That is, I don't mean the examples in the Wiki link above, but, like, cartoon artists. They can throw together a few lines, and it looks like a general face (even to me). That's deliberate, though, and doesn't involve chance formations in nature.
Now, I could go into speculation about why we see faces everywhere, like the late lamented Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire, and make some guesses about how it was advantageous for our ancestors to think they saw faces. But I won't, because that's all it would be: speculation. The facts we know include that we do see faces or figures in natural objects. And sometimes that's fun.
But sometimes, it leads to wild conspiracy "theories," like with the Mars thing. Some alien must have carved it! Well, no, it's just pareidolia.
Which doesn't explain why there's a smiley face on Mars . Do you see it there? That's the crater Galle in the Argyre Planitia. Might be easier to parse in this photo.
Okay, yes, it totally does explain it. Completely coincidental. Just because Mars is the only known planet to be inhabited solely by robots doesn't mean that said robots did that for our benefit.
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