Wikipedia says: "Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data." I think this is one of the most salient features of human psychology, and a defining characteristic of postmodernity as well. Or perhaps I'm just seeing patterns in random data?
One of the most amazing novels, Pornographia, by Witold Gombrowicz (a Polish-Argentine writer), deals with this phenomenon. The somewhat embarrassing-to-cite title is in fact misleading – and part of the apophenic game that goes on throughout the whole novel, as it leads the reader into making all kinds of efforts to see meaning where none is to be found. The title's relation to the novel is in fact the first apophenic movement of the novel, which continues in the same mode throughout.
Actually, the thing that made me think of apophenia might seem surprising. I was thinking about macroeconomics, the relationship between command economies and truly market-based ones, and all those gray areas in between. This was prompted by a recent short article in The Economist (May 31st, 2008) that was explaining the recent government-mandated "restructuring" of the massive and fast-growing Chinese telecoms industry. To quote the line from the article that got me thinking: "Each time the government has arranged things to mirror the outcome produced by market forces in the West."
First, I thought, "how clever." They get the best of both worlds (from their point of view): command economy as well as the presumed efficiencies of market capitalism. It's like if the proposed God of the ID (intelligent design) people had a little (or not-so-little) Darwinist laboratory running somewhere "on the side" where He (yes, He – we're talking IDers, right?) that can give Him ideas, and then He imitates it and makes it even "better."
But then I started thinking. First – just how random and/or market-driven is what happens to e.g. telecoms markets in the West? And second, is it really proven that the patterns that emerge in terms of how markets are structured represent some kind of best-rises-to-the-top principle? We presume that market economics is Darwinist and necessarily leads to efficiencies, but why would it? Maybe the patterns we see in truly unconstrained markets (to the extent they are, in fact, unconstrained) are just manifestations of apophenia?
I think I want to add the title of "Apophenist" to some of my others. It's a neologism, although google makes clear it won't be mine, as it's already out there.
