Archive for the ‘Temperaments’ Category
Entry 1737 — My Own Little Eurekaplex
Friday, February 27th, 2015
Today I derailed enthusiastically for a while into the following, which I now declare are the result of a Eurekaplex I myself constructed in my little brain:
A Maximally Simplistic Attempt to Describe the Workings of a Eurekaplex
To understand what a Eurekaplex is, one must first understand what a Rigidniplex is. That, in turn, requires one to understand what a Knowleplex is—so that’s where I’ll begin. At bottom, a knowleplex is just a complicated tangle of “molecules” of recorded knowledge (memories, in other words) that I call “knowlecules” arranged in a system of interconnecting “knowleculanes” that are stored in what is in effect an almost endlessly long container called “the Mnemoduct.” (Note: There are many mnemoducts, and thus many different knowleplexes, most of which occupy more than one mnemoduct. For the purposes of this essay, however, I will be considering only one of them. )
Knowlecules provide a person his understanding of small things, knowleculanes his knowledge of larger things, and knowleplexes his understanding of whole subject areas such as “The Author of the Works of Shakespeare” up to “The Science of Physics.” The easy way to think of these is to think of knowlecules as knowledge a single word can represent fairly fully whereas only a sentence or a paragraph can represent a knowleculane effectively while an essay or whole book, or library, is needed to come close to representing a knowleplex effectively.
Now, then, a rigidniplex is a knowleplex that, among many flaws, is excessively impervious to contradiction, irrational, and constricted. Despite all that, it may sometimes validly reflect reality, but most often it does not. The more rigidnikal a person is, the more his knowleplexes will be rigidniplexes.
(Editorial note: it was here that my too-potent accelerance mechanism took over.)
The major difference between normal knowleplex and a rigidniplex has to do with their responses to new data: the normal knowleplex is appreciably more hospitable to it, the rigidniplex sometimes near-impervious to it. It’s pretty simple, really. Let’s imagine a person’s knowleplex as a gated community only allowing entrance to external knowleculanes consisting of certain knowlecules in a certain order. Then imagine an external knowleculane comprised of the argument, “Meres referred to Buckhurst as a great writer of Tragedy but not as a great writer of comedies, or a writer at all of comedies; therefore, Buckhurst was NOT Shakespeare” shows up. If the person involved is normal (and knowledgeable about Elizabethan times), his knowleplex will run through its records of knowleculanes and find strands like “Meres referred to Buckhurst in 1598 . . .” It will allow the knowleculane entrance on the basis of its having a 4-element strand matching one or more of the strands the knowleplex found.
If, on the other hand, the person involved is a rigidnik (who believes Buckhurst was Shakespeare), his knowleplex will run through its records of knowleculanes looking for far longer matches, and refuse admittance as soon as it has found a strand representing, “Buckhurst was Shakespeare.”
* * *
My problem with this, I think, is that it’s too simplistic. I suddenly see much that needs amplification and I see no way to do it without killing its accessibility completely. I have to think about it. But the above is not completely worthless.
.
Entry 1736 — The Eurekaplex
Thursday, February 26th, 2015
The following is from an essay-in-progress I took out of the review I’ve been working on for centuries of Sabrina Feldman’s The Apocryphal William Shakespeare:
Thoughts on How an Intelligent Person like Sabrina Feldman Became an Authorship Skeptic
When, thirty or forty years ago, I first became actively involved in the Shakespeare Authorship Question (SAQ), I had read and thought about it enough to have been convinced that anyone who thought Shakespeare was not responsible for the works attributed for so many years by so many intelligent people who had studied him, his works, and his time were flat-out insane.
But I soon also perceived that many of them seemed otherwise mentally normal, and even more or less as intelligent as I took myself to be (when trying to be objective enough about that to ignore how vastly superior in intellect to anyone else ever born the megalomaniac in me told me I was almost as often as my sometimes endocrinologically-crippled Poorest Self told me I was an irrelevant imbecile . . . and therefore possibly only more intelligent than 99.99% of the world’s population). How could this be? How, for instance, could Charlton Ogburn, Jr., even now considered among the SAQ immortals by anti-Stratfordians, as Shakespeare-doubters are formally known?
Ogburn, Wikipedia informs us, graduated from Harvard in 1932 and wrote and worked in publishing. During World War II he joined military intelligence, leaving with the rank of captain. He returned to the US to begin a career with the State Department.
After the success of his story “Merrill’s Marauders”, a Harper’s Magazine cover story in 1957, Harper & Bros. offered an advance for a book and he quit the government to write full-time in 1957 and had a distinguished career as a journalist and novelist. How could anyone term him insane?
Or similarly describe Sabrina Feldman, an anti-Stratfordian whose career, so far, is similarly distinguished, for she attended college and grad school at Cal Berkeley, getting a Ph. D. in experimental physics. Far from one-dimensional, she took a Shakespeare class taught by Stephen Booth, world-class Shakespeare scholar, while an undergraduate, and got the only A+ in the class! She now manages the Planetary Science Instrument Development Office at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory—while doing her duties as a happily married mother of two. Furthermore, among her most eminent friends is: Me (in spite of how opposed to her theory she knows me to be). In short, gifted but more or less normal in every respect, and unarguably knowing enough about Shakespeare and his times for her thoughts about the SAQ to merit attention, although ultimately proving to be wrong. However wrong her theory might be, however, it was clearly even more difficult to call her insane because of it than it was to call Ogburn that.
By the time I ran into Sabrina, though, I had stopped calling Ogburn and others opposing my man insane. I continued to think their SAQ views insane, though, so coined the word “psitchotic” to describe them—they were “psituationally psychotic”—or only crazy about one subject (or, not about so many things to need drugs, electrotherapy, confinement to a nuthouse or the like).
At first, because of Ogburn and many of the anti-Stratfordians I had exchanges with on the Internet (mainly at a site created for unmonitored discussion of the SAQ, HLAS (humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare), I thought that all the formidable anti-Stratfordians were what I termed rigidniks.”
Back in my middle twenties, I had begun my own life as a theorist without credentials, going a bit loonier quantitatively than Ogburn and the others turning out theories about who really wrote the works of Shakespeare with a theory intended to explain the whole human psychology, giving the book I then wrote about it and self-published, An Attempt at a Total Psychology. It included a fairly wide-ranging theory of temperaments that posited the existence of various temperament-types of which the most important—in the present version of the theory—are the “rigidnik,” “milyoop” and “freewender.” I could write a full book about each of these, I believe, but for now will sum them up as being rough equivalents of (in order) David Reisman’s “inner-directed,” “other-directed” and “autonomous” personality-types.
While Ogburn was definitely a full-scale rigidnik, and many I argued with at HLAS seemed as rigidnikal as he, or even more so, I also began running into authorship skeptics that seemed much more flexible and tolerant than they, most of them Marlovians (those choosing Christopher Marlowe as their True Author) but at least one who was an Oxfordian. An easy way to tell them from the rigidniks is that they much more willingly admitted that our side had a case.
Frankly, I wasn’t sure what to do with my outliers, so I merely changed my claim that all serious anti-Stratfordians were rigidniks to the claim that most of them were. Some who were not were easy to categorize: they were milyoops, a trademark characteristic of whom was suggestibility. Because of that, they became rigid anti-Stratfordians because too weak of character to resist the influence of some rigidnikal anti-Stratfordian.
But what about the anti-Stratfordians who seemed to me to have enough strength of character to have their reason overthrown by someone else and were also intelligent enough not to seem likely to fall for, or invent, a highly irrational theory of anything themselves, like several Marlovians I’d met, and then, only a few years ago, Sabrina Feldman?
TO BE CONTINUED
.
Entry 1697 — SAQ Wack-Classification, Cont.
Monday, January 19th, 2015
As I was saying:
The fallaciplex a rigidnik crank is victimized by is a rigidniplex. Almost all of a rigidnik’s knowleplexes in his magniscipience (where he is involved with questions outside the everyday like the SAQ) are rigidniplexes due to his innately excessively high basal cerebral energy (while in or mostly in his magniscipience and defective accommodance (i.e., ability to lower the level of his cerebral energy, which is the basis of creativity, among other things). Nonetheless, some of his rigidniplexes are valid: Newton’s understanding of physics may have been rigidnikal, for instance. (I have this suspicion that all the best theoretical mathematicians and physicists are rigidniks.) The SAQ one is not, as I will later demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt.
That is a memory-complex that comes to over-ride any new information contradicting the understanding it generates. Call it a fixation, or a permanent outlook. The result is extreme inner-directedness based not on the interaction of continuing data but on what data was around at the birth of the rigidniplex.
Hence, if Shakespeare becomes important in his life, he must form a Shakespeare rigidniplex. For reasons I’ll soon get into, this will become a delusional system based on some kind of insane conspiracy theory that someone other than Will Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works attributed to Will.
Soundbite definition of a rigidniplex: a mental structure that results in an understanding of some relatively large subject (that is much more often invalid than valid) that one possessing it can’t change his mind about.
The second kind of authorship wack, the milyoop, is a kind of pseudo-rigidnik. His fallaciplex is named after him, too: the milyooplex. It is the opposite of a rigidniplex, for milyoops suffer from a too low level of basal cerebral energy. This causes them to form knowleplexes they are too weak of mind to defend.
The sanest kind of wack is the eurekan. Usually he is the third type of the three my theory of temperaments hypothesizes, the freewender, but he can also be a strong milyoop or weak rigidnik (in real life, just about everyone is a mixture of the three types). He will have a healthy mentality, perhaps even a superior mentality, but been done in by a Eureka moment. A Eurekan moment can occur in almost any intelligent, creative person’s life. What happens is he meets an apparent problem without the background knowledge properly to deal with it, then finds a brilliant solution—which is incomplete but which excites him too much for him to notice that.
His cerebral energy is not naturally too high, but can be driven high by the pleasure of suddenly finding an apparent solution to a difficult problem. In the case of the eurekan, his burst of energy will allow him to build a fairly strong knowleplex, or understanding of the problem he believes he has solved. Moreover, if society considers the subject his solution deals with, and Shakespeare is one of the largest cultural subjects there is for most people in the West with any culture at all, he will be filled with energizing anticipation of fame and fortune.
From then on, he will work on it, each time with the energy of a rigidnik because of the pleasure his brilliant solution is giving him. As a result, he will make the knowleplex he began with into an artificial rigidniplex every bit as immune to reason as a natural rigidniplex.
.
Entry 1568 — Me ‘n’ Riesman, Part 2
Friday, September 12th, 2014
After more reading of The Lonely Crowd, I’ve decided I’m very much inner-directed, according to Riesman’s description of the type. I got him wrong when I though his inner-directed type was similar to my rigidnik. I now an unsure how his autonomous type differs from his inner-directed type. According to Riesman, many of his readers, including colleagues of his, confused the two. I now see why–and Riesman himself seems to consider it a natural mistake. (He is excellently self-critical, it seems to me, but has surprising blind spots: for instance, about the possibility of innate psychological tendencies: he mentions such a possibility every once in a while, but quickly drops the subject, seeming to take social determinism the only important kind of determinism in the main body of his book–or so my impression is after not going very far in it.)
I’m also wondering how Riesman’s other-directed types ultimately differ from his tradition-directed types. Possibly, I just thought, because their memories coincide with their environmental input? They pray to whomever their tribal god is only partly because they’ve been trained to, but mostly because everyone else in the tribe is. The inner-directed person prays to his god because of his indoctrination entirely: he more or less has to because he is part of Riesman’s inner-directed society and thus not sure of having the right people to imitate.
The autonomous person will differ from the inner-directed person only in that he will be much more likely to question his indoctrination.
* * *
Last night while lying in bed hoping for sleep to come, I suddenly had a few ideas for poems, two of which follow:
intuition + reason = moonlight + pond
I’m not sure whether they’re finished or not, or whether, if finished, they’re keepers or not.
.
Entry 194 — The Knowleplex
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010
I’m still in my null zone but with enough zip to do the one thing I seem always ready and able to do: make up new Knowlecular Psychology terms. Not new is my term for any more or less interconnected body of knowledge, or inter-related group of knowlecules, the Knowleplex. The Knowlecule, in my theory, is the smallest datum, or bit of knowledge, in the context of whatever subject holds sway in a given mind: New York City, say, if the person is thinking about and/or discussing, the sociology of urban living (which would be a knowleplex); Broadway theatres if the knowleplex involved is The Culture of New York City.
Also not new is the term, Rigidniplex, for “irrational knowleplex formed and insanely or near-insanely adhered to by a rigidnik,” one of my temperament types. There are, so far, three other faulty knowleplexes in my system, each with a new name: the Indoctriplex, the Neurosiplex, and the Enthusiaplex. These are irrational fixation systems that act like rigidniplexes but have different causes.
The Rigidniplex comes about because of its owner’s charactration (mental energy) , which is too unalterably high for the flexibility required to recognize flaws and correct them. The Indoctriplex comes about because its owner’s charactration is too low for energy to revise flaws that the knowleplex contains due to intense, early indoctri- nation. It is the Milyoop’s equivalent of the Rigidnik’s knowleplex. The Neurosiplex can afflict anyone. It is an irrational knowleplex that comes about due to emotional trauma. A child who have never seen a dog, is nipped by one, and over-reacts, perhaps partly because the child’s mother over-reacts, and so much pain is attached to the event that the child develops a neurotic fear of dogs. “Neurosis” would be a good near-synonym for Neurosiplex. with Freud’s account of neuroses coming close to defining it, except for its neurophysiological basis.
Similar to the Neurosiplex but its etiological opposite is the Enthusiaplex. What forms its initial kernel is not emotional trauma but emotional ecstasy: the dog licks the child, the mother laughs, and the delighted child starts an irrational knowleplex concerning how wonderful dogs are. I found myself in need of such a knowleplex while trying to figure out how people who seemed reasonably sane could believe something as insane as the idea that Shakespeare did not write the works attributed to him. That they were rigidniks forced to believe as they did by their rigidniplexes explained the dominant anti-Strat- fordians, as they are called, as far as I was concerned, but there were others who were as nuts as the rigidnikal anti-Strat- fordians, but who showed few or no evidence in real life of being rigidniks, such as an insane reverence for formal education, a lack of aesthetic sensitivity, an incapacity for accepting anomalies in the historic record as due to anything other than some kind of official cover-up, etc.
I come to the conclusion that such people were freewenders who had come up with a seemingly rational counter-argument to the belief that Shakespeare was Shakespeare that was so enchantingly clever, and seemingly likely to be accepted by others, which would have all kinds of wonderful pay-offs (the way I felt about my theory of knowlecular psychology, in fact) that too much pleasure got attached to the initial insight for the freewenders ever thereafter to retract it.
The last of the knowleplexes my theory so far recognizes is the Verosoplex, which is a rational knowleplex (like all mine, needless to say); one, that is, which is based on fundaceptual data only (what our senses tell us) and the use of logic.
What does all this have to do with poetry? Well, I would say that the Poetry Establishment is dominated by people who have formed very narrow rigidniplexes about what poetry is. Ideas contrary to their set beliefs bounce off their rigidniplexes. Etc. Many of their milyoopian followers go along with them because of their indoctriplexes.
Certain freewenders develop idiosyncratic enthusiaplexes for poets who really aren’t very good, because they personally connect to their work–as someone from the working class might connect to Bukowski (actually, I like Bukowski, but not as loonily as his craziest fans), or a feminist to Anne Sexton.
The person who developed a neurotic fear of dogs might irrationally loathe any dog poem. Some, exposed to the crap some schools force on them, might form a neuroiplex against poetry.
The luckiest will form a verosoplex that allows them to at least tolerate almost any kind of poetry, and admire a wide range of poetry–more than the Wilshberian end of the poetry continuum.
Needless to say, all the above is a sketch. In real life, all is much more complex.