Still from the classic silent movie Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902)
Torpedo the Ark means: Take that Man in the Moon!
Pareidolia is the psychological term for the all too human propensity to see ourselves - particularly our own grinning faces - in nature. A well-known example of this is the man in the moon phenomenon.
In other words, pareidolia is the visual form of apophenia or the will to meaning that interprets purely random patterns or events as being in some way significant, thereby displaying evidence of intelligent design, or the hand of God.
It's thus thanks to pareidolia in combination with other forms of apophenia - or what Michael Shermer has termed patternicity - that primitive mankind was able to organize chaos and make the universe not only intelligible, but also loving and divine; a manifestation of the sacred. Even today, there are believers who see the face of Jesus on a slice of burnt toast.
And this is why torpedo the ark means rejecting all forms of correlationism and all attempts to locate agency, whether in heavenly bodies, or loaves of bread. In fact, I'm only half-joking when I say that the philosopher today is obliged not only to cultivate innocence and forgetfulness, but also prosopagnosia or face blindness.
Perhaps then - and only then - will we be able to know objects as fully independent of ourselves.
Note: I am grateful to Azucena Gómez for suggesting this post and bringing some of the technical terminology to my attention.
