Ghosts - 3

(Continued from Ghosts - 2...)
What we miss is that all meaning is arrived at in just the way I have been describing. Let me try to illustrate this further. We have all seen that slightly silly internet mystery “Secrets of the Twenty Dollar Bill”. I have reproduced it for you, below. Let’s take another look at it.

Is it possible to fold a twenty dollar bill in such a way as to show both the Twin Towers and the Pentagon after the attacks on 9-11? Take a look below and decide for yourself.

Step 1:

Take a new-style $20 bill and fold it in half lengthwise so it looks like this. 

 

Step 2:
Fold the left side away from you and up, making a diagonal crease on the corner of the "D" in “UNITED”, as shown here.

Step 3:
Repeat the fold with the right side (make sure the crease is on the tip of the "F" in “OF”)  and the Pentagon will emerge.

Step 4:
Then if you flip the bill over you can see what appears to be the smoking WTC Towers 1 and 2.

A remarkable coincidence, or something more...?

Want another amazing illusion?

If you fold a $20 note as the picture below demonstrates you can cause it to spell 'OSAMA"!

And so on.  No-one presumably supposes that these images of an actual event were conspiratorially embedded in notes designed before the event even happened. But even to call them coincidences also misses the point. The images are not in the notes at all. They’re in your head. They are ghosts. If 9/11 had never happened, would anyone have found them? I think we can say with a great degree of certainty that they would not. The word “found” would have no meaning in this context had there been no 9/11. Shown them we would cheerfully have dismissed their creator as a nutter, on the reasonable grounds that he was pointing to shapes that had no meaning in the “real” world.

What other images of future events lie embedded in banknotes, we might otherwise ask, waiting to reveal themselves once the events themselves have occurred and we have a reference point to which to anchor our imaginations? Again, the question is nonsensical. No such images exist. All that can happen is that an event occurs which causes us to find images of that event thereafter wherever our brains can match up a pattern. That recognition lies in us, not in the world “out there”. 

A face apparently embedded in a satellite image of the landscape of Mars was found, you will recall, among the photographs radioed back from the first Viking orbiter, in July 1976.

  

 

                           

                                         

There it was, not in a cloud of vapor, but apparently etched into the Martian surface - a collection of smudges on our planetary neighbor irresistibly crying out to us “face!”. For a while it gave rise to theories of a now-extinct Martian civilization, signaling to Earth across the vastness of space. But these speculations were quickly squashed by the scientific community, because… well, because there wasn’t other evidence to support them, and so the image must be, like the cloud image, “just a plain oddity”.  If more evidence comes in to support the face interpretation then it will acquire more respectability as a bona fide image; that is, it will gradually become the “real” representation of a face, even though its features will not alter one iota during the transition from fantasy to reality. And so it goes. Reality is in our interpretation of the data, not in the data themselves.  There is no meaning in the so-called objective world.  We have to put it there.