Saturday, February 02, 2008

making connections where there are none PART 2

Part 1

Apophenia
- "in psychology, the perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things." - medterms.com

OOOPS,
looks like I waded into some contentious territory with my last post. Apopohenics wade in where angels (valid ones) fear to tread.

OK, so maybe my identification of a connection between "making connections" and "intelligence" was dubious. Apophenic. Invalid. And that's exactly it - the Missing (L)ink - the VALIDITY of the connections.
Yeah, and on this revised graph an Apophenic is round about on the same level as a chimpanZeee. By way of the fact that her connections are not valid (making them where there are NONE).

But beofre you think I'm going to roll over in submission and say "Kick me, Kick me", I have a new question to ask:

"What validifies a vaild connection?"

Laboratory Tests?
Psychiatrists?
Irrefutable empiric evidence?
Consensus of the majority?
God?
National Geographic?
Wikipedia?
The Oxford Dictionary?
The United Nations?
Google?
Buddha?
A jury of 12?


I'm all ears...

1 comment:

  1. Connections are only truly valid to the person who makes them. Nothing can ever truly dispute the validity of somebodies belief.

    I have met people who felt they could fly, where being followed by MI6, were the last King of Scotland, built a perpetual motion machine.

    In the end what does it matter? It only truly matters when the connections destroy that person's life.

    ReplyDelete

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