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Eva Silvertant
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What are examples of apophenia leading to genuine insight?
Caleb Beers states:
Apophenia is when you see relations between unrelated phenomena, so by definition it’s
an erroneous perception.
[1]

Contextualization of apophenia
The above statement is generally true, but the perception is only erroneous when seen within the
context of apophenia; apophenia is by definition an erroneous perception as it regards the seeing of
relations between unrelated phenomena, but this makes it an erroneous perception given that
context, and not necessarily as a whole. In other words, the apophenic observation is not true as a
whole, but elements within the apophenic way of making sense of what is perceived are not
necessarily erroneous.
For example, seeing a face in a cloud says nothing in terms of clouds having some human property,
and in this regard I fully agree with Caleb that apophenia has a tendency of revealing more about
the perceiver than what is being perceived. After all, the tendency to see faces in clouds says
something about human perception, more so than the tendency of clouds to emulate human faces.
But this is not to say that there is no insight to be gained from the observation that indeed clouds
seem to resemble human faces sometimes. What is the physics behind that, and what is the
neuroscience and evolutionary background behind the tendency to see faces in faceless phenomena?
The seeing of faces is trickery, but the form that looks face-like is a natural phenomenon.
It is important to note however that apophenia is the perception of relations
between unrelated phenomena, rather than the perception of intrinsic relations; whereas perceptions
of relations has a correlate in reality—that of phenomena genuinely related—the perception of
relations between unrelated phenomena is only in the mind.

Insight from unrelated phenomena

With that being said, I think if apophenia results in genuine insight that directly pertains to the
events observed, that may take the notion of apophenia in that instance into question. Like Caleb
states:
There probably are cases where something seems like apophenia but then turns out to be
a totally legitimate observation. For example, we may chuckle knowingly at finding that
a primitive tribe thinks that drinking tea made by boiling a particular plant will treat
 malaria. However, we may also be surprised to find out that that plant contains quinine,
which is, in fact, helpful for treating malaria.
Regardless, whether or not one can—in hindsight—speak of apophenia or genuine relationships, I
think the absence of intrinsic relationships does not necessarily undermine genuine insight. The
observation of a face in the clouds is not insightful in itself, but in connecting certain data points,
new insights can be derived. Whether the insight is genuine would still have to be verified, but I can
in principle observe patterns in data points that are not connected within the framework in which I
observed the pattern, but the pattern itself may still be genuine within a different framework.

Psychosis/apophenia or insight
In 2011 I experienced a period of psychosis, and I started seeing patterns everywhere. Trams started
arriving and departing at oddly specific times, where, in periods they would either arrive at the time
I walk up to the tram stop, or depart right when I arrive—regardless of at what time I left the house.
So many things seemed connected to such a degree that I felt the universe could have a
consciousness, and it was testing me. I experienced periods where my hard drives broke down, my
USB drives broke down, other electronic equipment stopped working, or I lost yet another USB
drive. I experienced a lot of these “cluster events”, where one particular thing would occur at a
curiously high frequency within a short time period.

Guided events
I also observed events that connected in ways that seemed most logical if you were to think of
reality as a written story; certain events didn’t seem to occur based happenstance, but because for
good or for bad, the events connecting in that way at that time produced the most meaning. These
events seemed “guided” towards climactic moments where the events would not be wasted upon the
perceiver. I am not talking about mere coincidences, but seemingly coincidental events that come
together in a way that is meaningful. This bears some resemblance to Carl Jung’s Synchronicity,
which he defined as Jung defined synchronicity as an “acausal connecting (togetherness) principle,”
“meaningful coincidence”, and “acausal parallelism.” The kind of examples Jung offers are very
weak in my opinion, however, and I think whereas synchronicity are events from which meaning
can be derived, I would say guided events carry meaning in themselves. This is assuming the right
perceiver, but my assumption has been that guided events are guided toward that perceiver. I have
documented over hundred of such events.
What I describe as guided events may just be a dynamic interplay of probabilities and an inherent
necessity for certain events to connect in certain ways, but it’s an interesting question why some
events connect that way and not in a different way. You might call this tendency to identify guided
events an obsessive form of aphophenia, but the question as to why the combining of certain events
carries so much meaning is interesting in itself.
Now, I don’t know if this has been insightful in itself, but I was surprised to read about Jung’s
synchronicity approximately six years after I coined the term ‘guided event’. If guided events are in
some sense real, then—psychosis-induced or not—I have observed something real, rather than
having had an apophenic experience.
Philosophical framework
I am not absolutely convinced of the reality of guided events, nor do I want to argue for their
existence. But what started as a psychosis-driven experience, gave me a philosophical framework of
sorts; it became a new perspective on reality, and a platform from which insight—in principle—
could be derived. Whether those insights are genuine, I don’t know, but it got me thinking, anyway.
For example, I hypothesized that perhaps there is a direction to nature, in the sense that there is a
slight statistical preference to certain events occurring rather than not, which gives reality a
progressive quality. This could be a contributing factor to biological evolution, where certain
mutations are more likely to occur than others and which, in combination with natural selection,
drives change.
In a paper entitled Statistical physics of self-replication physicist Jeremy England hypothesizes that
biological organisms emerge from the production of entropy; when a group of atoms is driven by an
external source of energy (like the Sun) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or
atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy.
[2]
This tendency towards a higher efficiency of heat dissipation is what ultimately drives atoms
towards the kind of complexity from which organisms can emerge, as self-replication is a way of
heat dissipation. Though speculative, England offers an account of what ultimately drives biological
evolution as well.
Whereas England deals with reality at the small scale, guided events could follow a similar
principle on a larger scale. What if events themselves follow a progression towards complexity? Or
what if reality is “quantized” so that events fall into a “grid”, making some events more likely to
connect in meaningful ways?

Conclusion
Okay, so probably none of these insights are genuine, and none of these thoughts are formalized
into proper hypotheses. But I do appreciate the framework that apophenia offered me. Whether the
patterns I observed were genuine or not, it got me to see reality in new ways, with the potential of
ultimately arriving at genuine insights. Whether the acquisition of data points has a correlate in
reality or not, I do think there is potential for insight with an increase of data points to connect.
Footnotes
[1]

Caleb Beers's answer to What are examples of apophenia leading to genuine insight?
[2]

A New Thermodynamics Theory of the Origin of Life | Quanta Magazine