Andy Norman says that our brains are ‘pattern recognition engines and will generate many false positives’. they are talking about astrology and the fact that people believe in it.
my use of this would be two suggest that the ‘payoff’ is in the generation of positives, false or otherwise and maybe the entertainment of the existence of something suggested by our visual experience was a thing that contributed to our survival and thus was so important to us that it was accompanied by positive feelings in order for us to keep doing it. we get pleasure from the examination of things in our visual field particularly where they allow for the generation of ‘many false positives. precisely because this ability to generate ideas false positives, possibilities of what was there in our environment was a strong adaptive feature
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