Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/11/06

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Subject: Re: [Leica] A Defense of my Dream, and Some Etymology
From: Martin Howard <howard.390@osu.edu>
Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2000 18:57:23 -0500

Douglas Cooper jotted down the following:

> And while I despise Freud (my first novel is mostly an assault on his
> influence), I believe that dreams do have potential significance as symbols.

The brain is a pattern recognition device.  Throw random data at it and it
will strive to recognize a pattern.  In fact, it is such a successful
pattern recognition device that in response to random data, it generates
patterns as hypotheses of significance in that data.  The problem is that we
treat these generated patterns as raw data, which they are not, which
effectively short-circuits any attempts to separate signal from noise --
since we have now elevated everything to the status of signal.

M.

- -- 
Martin Howard                     |
Visiting Scholar, CSEL, OSU       | If you have to drink and drive, make
email: howard.390@osu.edu         | it a latte...
www: http://mvhoward.i.am/        +---------------------------------------