>>11247017I wonder what parts of the mind work that way. When I was a kid, I had a dream that I was flying over a tropical forest,
The only thing I remember was that I started noticing the tree tops were in repeating patterns.
I used to mod a video game. After doing it a while, I started noticing patterns in many things around me. In (older) video games, patterns recur and are only somewhat more obvious. In both reality and the game, the mind generally looks for patterns and yet dismisses them. For example, you will notice a stream of tail lights and yet utterly ignore the grain of a piece of wood.
When Obamas presidential portrait came out, I was at least one of the first people who noticed something was odd about it and couldn't figure out what was triggering me to stare at it. Eventually I and others realized there was a stencil pattern in the leaves. Much like video games, the pattern changed angles and masked itself, but was still there if you looked. So we noticed it even though it wasn't obvious.
Pattern recognition is itself a strange thing. Patterns themselves are almost but not quite an invention of imagination. They sort of exist and dont exist at the same time. Our perception seems to be what assigns relevance to it. Just think about all the strange things we imagine from patterns that arent there. Like how people remain convinced that the natural "order" exists for man, not that man exists because of the "order" when technically, neither is true. People remain convinced that a changing climate is somehow 'bad' or 'good', or that the universe must have some objective quality of 'size', or that evolution has a 'direction'...
