A&O – AMBIGUITY and PAREIDOLIA

 

 

 

	ART AND ORGANISM AMBIGUITY and PAREIDOLIA . . toss a silk veil over a crumbly wall and stare until a picture is suggested: “then ply your brush … and the result will be of heaven, not of men.”   (Sung Ti, 11C Chinese artist)

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ambiguity.  2a(1): The condition of admitting of two or more meanings… 2a(2): looseness of signification or reference; 2b(1): uncertainty of meaning or significance; 2b(2) mystery or mysteriousness arising esp. from a vague knowledge or understanding; (3) the intellectual or emotional interplay or tension resulting from the opposition or contraposing of apparently incompatible or contradictory elements or levels of meaning… (4) the maintaining of two or more logically incompatible beliefs or attitudes at the same time or alternatively… (Webster’s Third…)    ambiguity is unlike vagueness, which occurs when the boundaries of a word’s meaning are not well defined  [Arguably, ALL perception involves ambiguity insofar as our organs of perception are imperfect.  One could almost say that all perceptions are hypotheses that are more-or-less automatically tested and validated using our dual processes of REALITY TESTING]

 

 RESOLVING AMBIGUITY is a bias that ranges in influence from congenital to acquired.  IT can evoke COGNITIVE DISSONANCE, an intrinsically more-or-less stressful phenomenon: The resolution dissonance is often non-conscious but is also undertaken consciously when the non-conscious efforts are not sufficient.–an activity that compares to rationalization).   Like our response to challenges to homeostasis (e.g. maintaining body temperature), its initial workings are virtually automatic and only when these low-level attempted compensations fail are attempts to compensate at higher levels of organization invoked, culminating in conscious problem-solving. 

“Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish, A vapour sometime like a bear, or lion, A tower’d citadel, a pendant rock, A forked mountain, or promontory, with trees upon’t, that nod unto the world and mock our eyes with air.”  (Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, IV, ii)

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GENERALITY  when speaking of behavior refers to the extent to which beliefs about one phenomenon can be extended to or is relevant to another.   Can this be related to HOMOLOGY and ANALOGY in the sense these terms apply in evolutionary theory? 

 

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PAREIDOLIA is a ubiquitous phenomenon noticed especially, seeming independent, phenomenon.   when related to face recognition.  There is a powerful disposition to perceive faces—specific parts of the nervous system that enable facial recognition—that exemplifies the convergence of top-down and bottom-up information: that is unusually sensitive neuronal configurations and experience converging with incoming sensory information.  See Wardle et al 2020).

This disposition has been explored and exploited by artists since at least the 16^th century (read A&O notes on surrealism)

(it may–like Rorschach tests provide clues about clinical presentations of misappreceptions; when taken as reality rather than illusory it is often viewed as apophenia)  

Pareidolia is a way of resolving ambiguity, which generally refers to inadequate information available, sensory detection, or perception that compels us to recruit cognitive resources to try and incorporate perceptions into conception.  That may seem to compromise the accuracy or precision of our extraction of details from nature, but it is a powerful element that evokes the processes that organisms use to impose order—NOT only to cope with vague, ill-defined, or chaotic stimuli, but to extrapolate from the known to the unknown–to try to accommodate information that isn’t easily assimilated. Look at a figure from the notes on DEVELOPMENT to see how assimilation and accommodation work to resolve the microstressors of mismatches between the world as experienced and your representation of it in mind  COGNITIVE DISSONANCE) and enable LEARNING; be sure to check out the FIGURE inked there.   

• At least in general. So, ambiguity may be generally attributed to imperfect language or ignorance of certain facts, but Eddy Chen (2020) argues that it may be “… some genuine indeterminacy in the universe.”  see his essay in New Scientist:  “the-fuzzy-law-that-could-break-the-idea-of-a-mathematical-universe.” 

[but be aware that there is an occasional tendency to go in the other direction—see Gorgias’ radical skepticism, epitomized by ‘Nothing exists; Even if it did, it couldn’t be known; Even if it could be known, it couldn’t be communicated.’]

IN A&O we often visit the question of how OBJECTIVE stimuli become SUBJECTIVE percepts.  Along the path–our organs for the detection of stimuli through sensory pathways to areas in the central nervous system that can integrate the information with implicit or explicit feelings and thoughts and initiate or affect actions.  (it is through actions that are known in the world). 

We have hints about how this works from looking at how the troubling nature of AMBIGUITY is resolved: most of it is virtually automatic, but some aspects have been identified: APOHPHENIA (connections and meaning where there is none; a “type-1 error” in statistics, a “false positive“) and a common version of apophenia: PAREIDALIA. (see below) 

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Ambiguity and Empathy in aesthetic appreciation. was explored by Margulis et al.:

“Ambiguity, or the capacity to sustain multiple interpretations, has been identified as a central characteristic of art [2]–[5]. Studies in the visual domain have produced contradictory findings, some suggesting that ambiguity elevates artistic appreciation [6], others suggesting that a moderate level of ambiguity is preferred [7], and still others suggesting that artistic appreciation increases when ambiguity is reduced or eliminated [8], [9]. …

 

Aesthetic appreciation also depends on expressive interpretation—suppositions about the artist’s emotional and communicative intent [10], [11]. For many artistic domains, such as music and poetry, significant ambiguity can characterize this expressive dimension. In music, certain structural features (fast tempi and the major mode) are known to correlate with perceptions of happiness, and others (slow tempi and the minor mode) are known to correlate with perceptions of sadness [12]–[14]. Hunter, Schellenberg and Schimmack [15] demonstrated that by mixing these cues (pairing fast tempi with the minor mode, or slow tempi with the major mode), excerpts can elicit mixed emotional responses—higher happiness ratings and higher sadness ratings for the same piece. In poetry, such expressive ambiguity is commonplace [5], [16]. How might expressive ambiguity of this sort affect aesthetic experience?” (from Margulis et al. 2017)[i]  

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ANCHORING OUR REALITY:  Ambiguity forces us to tell “the best story we can with the best evidence available” (a good motto for all of science).  Typically this is a non-conscious process, responding to a lifetime of experiences in which some connections seemed more likely than others frequently enough to establish expectations and biases.   But occasionally the easy decision or categorization of a sensation (or percept or concept) is challenged –as in the Rabbit-Duck image in the header to these notes.

CONNECTING THE DOTS: I like the metaphor of celestial constellations such as the figures of the zodiac.  But obviously, there are alternative ways to connect these now culturally enshrined designs.  Stars are points of light that have been in different cultures seen as the anchors for different stories. Taken more-or-less seriously, they might be legends or they might be very useful devices (such as pointing out directions, mnemonics to aid navigation) (visit examples)

EVOLUTION by NATURAL SELECTION can be regarded as one of the most powerful stories in science (“nothing in nature makes sense except in the light of evolution”).  Of course “evolution” was frequently used in discourse about change, but the story that utilized OBSERVATIONS (listed in table below), that are obvious to almost all naturalists, can be arranged, like points of light in the night sky, in a particularly satisfying way that Darwin termed “natural selection.”  This is the story that weaves these key observations together in a way that biologists find most satisfying (note: that’s an aesthetic judgement); almost all subsequent observations fit beautifully.  Darwin did not propose a mechanism: the subsequent proposal that genes fit that need quite well (the “neoDarwinin synthesis”) made it even more satisfying at new levels of organization.  The few observations that do not fit would drive research to great lengths of creativity and breakthrough findings such as those of epigenetics. 

 

Order is derived from experience in concert with the current state of an organism, its needs, expectations, and a powerful drive to categorize.  Our perceptions are partly constrained by biology and partly automatized.  When on “automatic,” thinking is “centripetal” and variants are “normalized” at the center of our thinking;  in “centrifugal” thinking we look for the boundary conditions  –exceptions “that make the rule,”  and the most altered form that can still fit a category.  This is when we further resolve stimuli and make finer distinctions leading to additional categories.  Taxonomists so inclined are termed “splitters” (as opposed to “lumpers”).  Also, we may rebelliously try to explore alternatives to what might be perceived as an overly constrained and non-negotiable universe.

 

• I noticed the power of ambiguity in the light of where bottom-up and top-down processing of perceptions converge when I saw the red blossoms (read post).

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WORDS are always approximations of what they hope to mean: they have meaning in terms of the connections in the minds of those using them. They are, in detail, UNIQUE, and in using them we tolerate more-or-less ambiguity:  For example, “I think… if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.” ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina  (see A&O notes on uniqueness)  (from A&O notes on WORDS)

 

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IS ART a PROJECTIVE TEST?  Projective tests such as the Rorschach (ink-blot) test or the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT, ambiguous drawings),were once thought to be an “X-ray of the personality.”  Ambiguity provides a ground onto which one might project the underlying hopes, fears, and anxieties that influence overt behavior.  Projective tests were immensely popular and influential since the 1930’s but “ . . . alas, the virtues of tests that try to assess personality types are illusory: research shows that a single person’s scores are unstable, often changing over the course of years, weeks, even hours (a subject may be ”a good intuitive thinker in the afternoon but not in the morning,” some researchers have noted). And, worse, there is little evidence of the correlation of test scores with school performance, managerial effectiveness, team building or career counseling” (Sally Satel, 2004)

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 AMBIGUITY and more-or-less evoked selective attention suggests how the brain “makes meaning”  See snip from New Scientist

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What is that je ne sais quoi? that makes everything seem to make “better” sense.

 

SIGN STIMULI (congenital) and ACQUIRED ASSOCIATIONS: “triggers” that evoke the search for adaptive connections.  Sometimes, a very simple stimulus can unexpectedly “organize” other, often disorganized and seemingly unimportant stimuli into a coherent whole (see redintegration ). A relatively “closed genetic program” (resists being altered by experience) and  a phenomenon that may be related to the AHA! experience or epiphany … the sudden pleasurable detection of a previously unseen order… Aha!  Eureka! and read about some brain research indicating how this may be one of the supreme pleasurable experiences of the successful INFOVORE. 

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Complex mental content can apparently coalesce around a key fragment … not unlike an attractor, various ideas are drawn together and formed into a coherent narrative (some of the dynamics of this phenomenon are identified as “attractor landsapes”).  ECPHORY describes the phenomenon whereby a fragment of a memory can trigger otherwise unavailable details a dream or past event. (read about ecphory in a research report that discusses retreival of autobiographical memories)

• ECPHORY resonates with synecdoche and redintegration in that they also involve triggers for collecting enough fragments to create a story … they represent the attractors of hidden dreams, infusing previous experience with new meaning and putting it in the service of coherence, validating a new realization[xii]—recalling, all things are connected—
• SIGN STIMULI – some stimuli have unusual influence on releasing more-or-less specific responses. 
  • a familiar example: Two apparent eyes evoke intense activity to complete a potentially important pattern (such as the face of a predator_   (Look at A&O Notes on Stimuli)  IN ETHOLOGY, a sign stimuli famously act as “RELEASERS” for  FIXED ACTION PATERNS in a perceiver. (classic example, the red dot on a herring gull mother’s beak evokes a peck by a hungry nestling which triggers feeding reflexes by the mother)
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the face on mars, imaged by the Viking Orbiter in the 1970s      NASA’s notes about the face FACES, FACES, EVERWHERE: interesting NY Times blog entry on “face pareidolia”

Sensitive to subliminal cues or gullible: Pareidolia “(from Greek para- amiss, faulty, wrong + eidolon, diminutive of eidos appearance, form) is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (usually an image) being mistakenly perceived as recognizable. Common examples include images of animals or faces in clouds, seeing the man in the moon, and hearing messages on records played in reverse. // Human beings are apparently “hard-wired” to identify the human face. One possible explanation for this is that unresponsive infants tended to be ignored or abandoned, as Carl Sagan speculated in The Demon-Haunted World.… The Rorschach inkblot test uses pareidolia attempting to gain insight into a person’s mental state….”  —   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia             “There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good- will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us. –David Hume   Pareidolia is a type of illusion or misperception involving a vague or obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear and distinct. . . . Under ordinary circumstances, pareidolia provides a psychological explanation for many delusions based upon sense perception.    Under clinical circumstances, some psychologists encourage pareidolia as a means to understanding a patient, e.g., the  Rorschach “ink blot” test.   Astronomer Carl Sagan claimed that the human tendency to see faces in tortillas, clouds, cinnamon buns, and the like is an evolutionary trait. He writes: “As soon as the infant can see, it recognizes faces, and we now know that this skill is hardwired in our brains. Those infants who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents, and less likely to prosper. These days, nearly every infant is quick to identify a human face, and to respond with a goony grin (Sagan 1995: 45) . I think Sagan is right about the tendency to recognize faces, but I don’t see any reason to think there is an evolutionary advantage in seeing replicas of paintings, ghosts, demons, and the like, in inanimate objects. There is, of course, an evolutionary advantage in seeing images of dinner or predators against a varied environmental background. There would be no advantage for, say, a hawk to be dive-bombing shadows on rocks, however. It seems likely that the modern mind is making associations with shapes, lines, shadows, and the like that are connected to current desires, interests, hopes, obsessions, and the like.   Most people recognize illusions for what they are, but some become fixated on the reality of their perception and turn an il lusion into a de lusion. A little bit of critical thinking, however, should convince most reasonable people that a potato that looks like the Hindu god Ganesh, a cinnamon bun that looks like mother Teresa, or a burnt area on a tortilla that looks like Jesus are accidents and without significance. It is more likely that the Virgin Mary one sees in the reflection of a mirror or on the floor of an apartment complex or in the clouds has been generated from one’s own imagination than that a person who has been dead for 2,000 years should manifest herself in such a mundane and useless fashion.”  — from Skeptic’s Dictionary     .

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One step further: DREAMS (link needs repair):

 

All we know are our memories –we may be more or less confident in their “truthfulness” but in the brain, memories of experiences in the real world and those of fantasies or dreams are INDISTINGUISHABLE.

 

Some dreams are SO realistic!  Some experiences are SO dreamlike.  Could we (do we) ever get mixed up ?  . . .  How do we KNOW!

 

DREAMS:  At some level of our being, it is perfectly possible that dreams mean NOTHING beyond what we impose upon them.  The psychoanalytic view (that we associate with Freud) is that dreams emerge from our precociousness and that the weirdness they often manifest is our minds best attempt to disguise subconscious ideas we would rather repress. The “action synthesis” model (associated with Hobson & McCarley) suggests that the information originated in random neural processes that are mere artifacts of brain activity during sleep in the absence of external or conscious input.  The meaning (if any) of the imagery we experience may be picked up as the information passes through the various lenses of our brains.  In other words, we do our best to extract order from chaos based upon our repertoire of past possible associations.  We extract meaning from ambiguity.  Review notes on AMBIGUITY.  

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WE CAN USE THIS QUALITY OF MIND:

“a new method of assisting the invention, which, though trifling in appearance, may yet be of considerable service in opening the mind, and putting it upon the scent of new thoughts; and it is this.  IF you look upon an old wall covered with dirt, or the odd appearance of some streaked stones, you may discover several things like landscapes, battles, clouds, uncommon attitudes . . . etc.  Out of this confused mass of objects, the mind will be furnished with abundance of designs and subjects perfectly new.”  (Leonardo, Treatise on Paintings)

 

Leonardo’s smudges.  In Mallarme’s Symbolist theories (“It seems to me that there should  only be allusions”), Leonardo’s sfumato(veiled form such as the blurs around Mona Lisa’s eyes), Titian’s “crude daubs,” the broadening brush  strokes of Rembrandt’s maturity, in all these, the power of ambiguity  has  been harnessed to help the artist penetrate more deeply into the recipient’s mind in order to engage more complete participation.  This is the secret of the Bhagavad Gita‘s allegory, Christ’s parables, and the Oracle’s riddles.    (SFUMATO – from Italian sfumare, “to tone down,” or “to evaporate like smoke”), in painting or drawing, term designating fine shading that produces soft, imperceptible transitions between colours and tones. It is used most often in connection with the work of  and his followers, who made subtle gradations, without lines or borders, from light to dark areas; the technique was used for a highly illusionistic rendering of facial features and for atmospheric effects. (Britannica Online) —  Also: Leonardo’s term (“dark smoke”) for using intermingling veils of translucent color to create atmospheric perspective, depth, volume, and form. These interdependent, interacting veils echoes and exploits the way the mind constructs perceptions from raw stimuli.  “In a way sfumato is a signpost to a paradox. To describe a thing by boxing it in, by drawing a line around it, which would seem to be the quickest route to accuracy, is in actuality the least accurate means of description. No depth or volume or form is communicated this way. Far better to first develop a fuzzy, hazy concept of the thing which is slowly fleshed out, with lines, or harsh defining strokes as the final touch. Indeed is this not the way the human mind comes to understand anything it comes into contact with?” (Ben J Armstrong (downloaded Jun15, 2001), portfolio pages at  http://pages.prodigy.net/sfumato/pages/whatissfumato.html).  Related to  fumage  A method of making an image with smoke fumes. Fumage was invented by Wolfgang Paalen, whose first fumages were made with a kerosene lamp. When surrealist painter Salvador Dali (Spanish, 1904-1988), made a fumage, he called the method sfumato; and some have spelled this term “sfumage”. Very few artists have worked in fumage. Also see , , , , , parsemage, and photomontage

 

 

 

 

The word: Ambiguity (From issue 2527 of New Scientist magazine, 26 November 2005, page 52):   “OFFICIALLY it’s to do with uncertainty or inexactness of meaning, or a lack of decisiveness or commitment resulting from a failure to make a choice between alternatives. Yes? But there’s much more to ambiguity than that. New brain imaging studies shows that visual ambiguity, at least, may be the exact opposite: a state of too much certainty, where we have to distinguish between equally correct interpretations. By studying ambiguity, researchers may find how, in the face of equally good choices, our brains “decide” what we are seeing. They may even catch a little glimpse of consciousness at work. So what does visual ambiguity look like? A classic example is the Kanizsa cube  . . .  an optical illusion in which a two-dimensional set of lines suggests a three-dimensional cube. The illusion is created because there are two ways to see the cube: either it seems to come out of the page with its closest side pointing down and to the left, or with its closest side pointing up and to the right. At first, you only see one position: stare at the cube long enough and it will suddenly flip to the other one. Keep staring, and it will switch back and forth. What’s going on? Neuroscientists such as Semir Zeki of University College London and Andreas Kleinschmidt of Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main used functional MRI scans to probe our brains when we view these ambiguous, “bi-stable” images. Zeki found that as the cube seems to switch position, different brain regions are activated, flashing back and forth between neural clusters. How does that help us? Ambiguous images such as the Kanizsa cube may be useful in that most difficult of tasks: finding out what the brain’s physiology is doing as it makes sense of the world “out there” – and how well that sense fits with the “real” world. This is a key problem in consciousness studies. Kanizsa images seem to avoid these problems because we know that while the brain perceives different images, the stimulus remains the same: we see the cube in one position or the other, but never both at once. Isn’t that a bit quantum? Not really: it’s more like binocular rivalry, where each eye is presented with a different image at the same time, say of a house and a bike. Intriguingly, we don’t blend the two images but perceive alternating single images: house then bike, back and forth, because different clusters of neurons are fighting for attention, rather than working together. These studies help confirm the notion of the brain as a “meaning machine”. If the brain faithfully represented the world as it is out there, we would see the Kanizsa cube as a bunch of lines on a page, and the house and bike as a strangely blended scene. Instead, we select information and construct interpretations. When no one interpretation is most likely, we alternate between possibilities. How amazing that something so ambiguous could give us some clear insights?”  ––  Printed on Wed Dec 21 23:11:15 2005 .

 

 

 

 

. One the great scenes in cinema: At the end of “Queen Christina,” after she has abdicated as Queen and is exiled from Sweden, her lover Don Antonio dies in her arms. Christina stands as a silent figurehead at the bow of the ship, the wind blowing through her hair, as the camera zooms in on the blank, enigmatic expression on her face. What was the thinking at the time?   Director Rouben Mamoulian told her to think about  “nothing… absolutely nothing…..I want your face to be a blank sheet of paper. I want the writing to be  done by everyone in the audience.”  .

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Is ambiguity in the stimuli or in us? (does it help to remember Talmud: “we see the world not as IT is but as WE are”).

Those physical/physiological constraints (what we are full of) are often associated with a technique termed, “critical paranoia”

which brings to mind a key question:

 

WHAT is MORE REAL that REALITY?

answer

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NEXUS

• A&O notes on AMBIGUITY. (Apophenia, pareidolia)
  • READING: excerpts from The Ambiguity of Artworks  by Hayn-Leichsenring (2017)

• KNOWLEDGE, TRUTH, BELIEFS, and REALITY-TESTING

• LOVE and TRUTH
• NATURAL HISTORY of TRUTH (MetaNexus lecture, Phoenix, 2009)
• TRUTH in the BRAIN Beijing (Consciousness Reframed lecture, Beijing, 2004)
• BEAUTY AND TRUTH IN SCIENCE (Overby 2002)
• TRUTH and BEAUTY in ART and SCIENCE  
• SURREALISM