My daughter, Michele Coxon (quid googlet) offers this example of religious pareidolia. Sad FACT: this is MY LEFT FOOT. Pilgrimage tours to Oswestry, Salopia, UK, being planned.
Jansy’s helpful links remind us (or should?) of the impact of SR (Special Relativity), GR (General Relativity) and QT (Quantum Theory) on the central, enduring mysteries relating “physical reality” with “human observation.”
More Nabokovians really should know the historical basics of these three MAJOR 20th century revolutions if they want to understand & diagnose VN’s sporadic allusions and strongly-misplaced strong opinions.
Jim Baggott’s The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments is a highly-readable, popular narrative, with essential biographical insights ... Scientists behaving badly!
Russell Stannard’s Relativity, A Very Short Introduction less so, but adequate.
BTW: I have just checked the index of Brian Boyd’s The Russian Years (never far, with The American Years, from my canonical bed-side designated tomb!). No entries for “Einstein,” “Relativity,” “Quantum,” “Euler,” “Mathematics.” Still, as the Iraqi weapons inspector said, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
The entry on “Popper, Sir Karl” (page 169) is an exciting, unexpected compensation. I anxiously await BB’s forthcoming biography of Popper, where I’m sure my two favourite EX- (later to become ANTI-) Popperians, Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend will enlighten the action! Paul & Imre have left us an intriguing exchange of letters/debates where they disagree with Popper and with each other. The latter is conducted with fun and friendship ... A lesson to all dissenting philosophers.
BTW^2: My Kindle progress-counter indicates that I’m 48% through Barbara Wyllie’s Vladimir Nabokov (Critical Lives). No index, alas but many search/crossref tools peculiar to e-books. I look forward to a careful comparison with BB’s biography, esp. on VN’s Irina Guadanini affaire. I’ll follow up BW’s link to SES’s “Postscript to a Purloined Letter” (The Nabokovian, 29 1992). So many gaps in my knowledge ... So little time.
I can enjoy, but mistrust, VN’s opinions on mathematics and Freud. VN’s opinions on Dostoyevsky and Gorky are more “trustworthy” (grounded on knowledge), but TRUE Nabokovians* will use their own judgements, aware of Popper’s warnings of the dangers of authoritarianISM (one of many ISMs to shun! InductivISM is esp. fatal. I’ve coined SNEERISM as naughty but nice.) Likewise, a lepidopterist taxonomy from Einstein or Dirac ... Yes, there are domains of expertise outside of which all should exercise humble caution. This is NOT easy, or even NATURAL, given our innate reluctance to admit to our LACUNAE!
* Check out Antony Flew’s NO TRUE SCOTSMAN at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
Dmitry (RIP) was dutifully prompt on this Forum in defending pater against my comment that VN occasionally strongly-opinionated outside his (VN’s) proven domains of “authority.” This specifically applied to VN (an appendix to Lectures on Literature) extending “arithmetic” (a boring enemy of the creative mind?) to the vast, wondrous, abstract fields of “mathematics.”
To quote Wolfgang Pauli’s infamous rebuttal “This is not even WRONG!”
Why this GULF between mathematicians and non-mathematicians? Pre-wired Nature or environmental Nurture? My immediate and grand-offsprungs (a sample of 13) offer inconclusive evidence.
Don’t Discuss!
Within all scientific domains, in fact, there’s no end of violent “expert dissent” offering irresistible temptation for “outsiders” to venture their speculative penn’orth.
More, or less, anon. 2013 shows promise ... So far.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 03/01/2013 00:14, "Jansy Mello" <jansybsmello@HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:
Another random find [ with a loose reference to Nabokov and “Signs and Symbols” (only!!!)], thanks to Dr.Temperance Brenner (“Bones”) who mentions the word “pareidolia” in one of her comic/serious episodes*.
Postmodern novelists and film-makers have reflected on apophenia-related phenomena, such as paranoid narrativization or fuzzy plotting (e.g., Vladimir Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols", Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and V., Alan Moore's Watchmen, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, William Gibson's s narrative is one of our major cognitive instruments for structuring reality, there is some common ground between apophenia and narrative fallacies such as hindsight bias. Since pattern recognition may be related to plans, goals, and ideology, and may be a matter of group ideology rather than a matter of solitary delusion, the interpreter attempting to diagnose or identify apophenia may have to face a conflict of interpretations.
Apophenia and Pareidolia - Wiki article
* There are also references to Lolita fashion in Japanese models posing as Poppy’s Puffs... the usual stereotype.