The Heikegani are a species of crab native to Japan, with a shell that bears a pattern resembling a human face which many believed to be the face of an angry samurai.
It is locally believed that these crabs are reincarnations of the Heike warriors defeated at the Battle of Dan-no-uraas told in The Tale of the Heike.
While the crabs are edible, they are not eaten by the Japanese.
Carl Sagan utilizes the Heikegani in the Cosmos series to explain artificial selection:
The locals are superstitious and won't eat the crabs that look like the samurai, so they throw them back at the sea, aiding the reproduction of crabs that increasingly look like samurais and eating all the ones that don't.
Over time, this changes the population to be increasingly more representative of the samurai face.
The pattern reaffirms itself with every new generation.
Confirmation
Unfortunately, it is utilized as a "debunked" statement, dismissing it as "just confirmation", disenchanting it.
But it is the opposite of dismissal.
This is evidence of a power that governs our lives and shapes perception.
This is the rational explanation as to why the world is enchanted.
The world is full of meaning because we embed meaning into it.
The same thing happens with the placebo.
You cannot use the placebo as a dismissive explanation.
The very idea that the placebo works implies more questions. It makes the matter more complex.
There is something very important going on under the hud:
We literally shape physical reality with our stories.
Mind Bends Matter
Too often, confirmation is a bad thing.
In research, in dealing with other people without prejudice, in decision making, doing a logical assessment of anything is affected by confirmation negatively.
Though, when applied to general pattern recognition, it is a compass, a stylus, and a weapon.
After much struggle, my worldview is becoming increasingly symbolic and getting away from the "meaningless coincidence" rationalizations towards a meaningful interpretation of events.
Yes, confirmation causes one to see things that aren't there and trace causal arrows where there are none.
But what I am experiencing is a level of connectivity that I had intentionally ignored after childhood.
In the end, we all have this experience, intentionally or not:
When dialoguing in person, the body language signals information that is not irrelevant, but extremely meaningful. If you ignore it, you can be easily misled, or not be able to comprehend a great portion of the speaker's intention.
We often signal subconsciously much of the content of the dialogue, and others recognize these signs subconsciously as well.
It helps us operate. It is simply a more effective manner of communicating, that's why we communicate like this.
Implicit.
Symbolism is all around us and who chooses not to see it gets lost in the noise.
Like the turkey right before Christmas, he is ignorant of the most obvious signs of what is coming.
