Archive for the ‘Knowlecular Psychology’ Category
Entry 1758 — My New Blogs
Friday, March 20th, 2015
Today’s blog entry is at my Knowlecular Psychology Blog. Make that was at my Knowlecular Psychologt Blog. As soon as I posted the entry, I realized my new set-up is not likely to work because Pages are not Blogs, they will just go on and on as single pages until, it’s my guess, they reach a limit. I could set up three new real blogs but they’d be too much trouble to operate. So, I’m now shutting down my pseudo-blogs, and poeticks.com will go back to the being the dithered mess it’s been for the past several years. Beginning with what I had in my Knowlecular Psychology Blog for today:
Entry 1746 — A Possible Invention & A List
Sunday, March 8th, 2015
himlli esyaen r txv eee scn tat li o n
An email from Richard Kostelanetz got me thinking about invented moves in writing of the kind he tries for–in everything he writes except his conventional prose works, it would seem. Result: the possible invention above. Its difference from all other such works is very minor, but does distinguish it from all other such works, if I really am the first to make such a thing. The are a great number of permutations of the basic idea possible. Would each be consider a lexical invention, I wonder. . . .
Now the list:
The Knowleculations, or kinds of knowlecular data in accordance with size
KNOWLEBIT smallest unit of knowledge
KNOWLEDOT all the knowlebits in a mnemodot[1]
KNOWLECULE the equivalent of a word’s worth of knowledge
KNOWLECULANE the equivalent of a sentence’s worth of knowledge
KNOWLECUMIZATION the equivalent of a paragraph’s worth of knowledge
KNOWLEPLEX the equivalent of a chapter’s worth of knowledge
KNOWLAXY the equivalent of a book’s worth of knowledge
KNOWLIVERSE a person’s entire store of knowledge
[1] a mnemodot is a single storage-unit in one or another of the cerebrum’s many mnemoducts; it is what all the percepts (i.e., units of perceptual data coming from the external or internal environment) and retrocepts (i.e., activated units or data stored as memories) of the kind the mnemoduct is responsible for that reach it during an instacon, or instant of consciousness [2]
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Entry 1745 — Denial
Saturday, March 7th, 2015
An “argument” far too often used in debates between the impassioned (I among them) is the assertion that one’s opponent is in denial. “Denial,” I suddenly am aware, belongs on my list of words killed by nullinguists. It has come to mean opposition to something it is impossible rationally to oppose. When used in what I’ll a “sweeper epithet” (for want of knowing what the common term for it is, and I’m sure there is one) like “Holocaust-Denial” (a name given to some group of people believing in something), it has become a synonym for opposition to something it is impossible rationally to oppose–or morally to express opposition to! Thus, when I describe those who reject Shakespeare as the author of the works attributed to him as “Shakespeare-Deniers,” I am (insanely) taken to mean that those I’m describing are evil as well as necessarily wrong. Now, I do think them wrong, and even think they are mostly authoritarians, albeit benign ones, but I use the term to mean, simply, “those who deny that Shakespeare was Shakespeare.”
Or I would if not having the grain of fellow-feeling that I have, and therefore recognizing that small compromises with my love of maximally-accurate use of words due to the feelings of those not as able to become disinterested as I am may sometimes be wise. Hence, I nearly always call Shakespeare-Deniers the term they seem to prefer: “Anti-Stratfordians.” But I have now taken to call those that Anti-Stratfordians call “Stratfordians,” “Shakespeare-Affirmers.
(Note: now I have to add “disinterested” to be list of killed words, for I just checked the Internet to be sure it was the word I wanted here, and found that the Merriam Webster dictionary online did have that definition for it, but second to its definition as “uninterested!” Completely disgusting. Although, for all I know, my definition for it may be later than the stupid one; if so, it just means to me that it was improved, and I’m not against changing the language if the improvement is clearly for the better as here–since “disinterested” as “not interested” doesn’t do the job any better than “uninterested,” and can be used for something else that needs a word like it, and will work in that usage more sharply without contamination by vestiges of a second, inferior meaning.)
Of course, to get back to the word my main topic, “denial,” means the act of denial, and indicates only opposition, not anything about the intellectual validity or moral correctness of it. Except in the pre-science of psychology where it means, “An unconscious defense mechanism characterized by refusal to acknowledge painful realities, thoughts, or feelings.” I accept such a mechanism, but would prefer a better term be used for it. For me it is a probably invariable component of a rigidniplex. Hey, I already have a name for it: “uncontradictability.”
No, not quite. It seems to me it is a mechanism automatically called into action against certain kinds of contradiction: facts that contradict the core-axiom of a rigidniplex, directly or, more likely, eventually. Maybe “rigdenial,” (RIHJ deh ny ul)? For now, at any rate. Meaning; rigidnikal denial of something (usually a fact or the validity of an argument) due entirely to its threatening, or being perceived as a threat to) one’s rigidniplex, not its validity (although it could be true!).
When I began this entry, I planned just to list some of the kinds of what I’m now calling “rigdenial” there are, preparatory to (much later, and somewhere else) describing how it works according to knowlecular psychology. I seem to have gotten carried away, and not due to one of the opium or caffeine pills I sometimes take. I’ve gotten to my list now, though. It is inspired by my bounce&flump with Paul Crowley, who sometimes seems nothing but a rigdenier.
Kinds of Rigdenial
1. The denied matter is a lie.
2. The denied matter is the result of the brainwashing the person attacking the rigidnik with it was exposed to in his home or school
3. The denied matter is insincere–that is, the person attacking the rigidnik with it is only pretending to believe it because the cultural establishment he is a part of would take his job away from him, or do something dire to him like call him names, if he revealed his true beliefs.
4. The denied matter lacks evidentiary support (and will, no matter how many attempts are made to demonstrate such support: e.g., Shakespeare’s name is on a title-page? Not good enough, his place of residence or birth must be there, too. If it were, then some evidence that that person who put it there actually knew Shakespeare personally is required. If evidence of that were available, then court documents verifying it signed by a certain number of witnesses would be required. Eventually evidence that it could not all be part of some incredible conspiracy may be required.
5. The denied matter has been provided by people with a vested interest in the rigidnik’s beliefs being invalidated.
6. The denied matter is obvious lunacy, like a belief in Santa Claus.
7. The rigidnik has already disproved the denied matter.
8. The person advancing the denied matter lacks the qualifications to do so.
9. The rigidnik, as an authority in the relevant field finds the denied matter irrelevant.
10. The rigidnik interprets the meaning of the words in a denied text in such a way as to reverse their apparent meaning. (a form of wishlexia, or taking a text to mean what you want it to rather than which it says)
11. One form of rignial (as I now want to call it) is simple change-of-subject, or evasion.
12. Others.
I got tired. Some of the above are repetitious, some don’t belong, others have other defects. Almost all of them are also examples of illogic. But the list is just a start. I’ll add more items to it when next facing Paul–who has a long rejoinder to the post I just had here.
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.
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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
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Entry 1713 — Biological Determinants of Morality
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2015
Errands and my birthday yesterday, and tennis today and, perhaps, getting over my birthday, have me too out of it to do anything new for this entry, so I’m putting an incomplete blither I blithered a week or so ago and, so far as I know, did not post here:
The Biological Determinants of Morality According to Knowlecular Psychology
Beginning with the moral assumption that the Property Rights of the Innocent Ought to be Inviolable.
The knowlecular basis for this is the Urceptual Property Complex. I believe a person has sensors that activate this complex upon encountering a part or the whole of some objectual complex in the environment that is in tactile contact with the person, and— therefore—with the person’s urceptual self.
Background: To explain what an objectual complex is requires a description of the objecticeptual awareness. (Note: I count my thoughts on this as a theory once removed from my main theory—i.e., less probable to me than my theory of the anthroceptual awareness, for instance.) Objectuality starts with the fundaceptual sensors. They feed into just about all the initial precerebral areas including the initial objecticeptual pre-cerebral area. Mechanisms there filter out stimuli associated with life. That’s an easy more or less near-instantaneous task in many instances, but hugely difficult lengthy task in others. My guess (and this is my first serious thinking about objectuality) is that many stimuli that cannot without significant difficulty be tagged as either objectual or living are ignored—until such a time as the filtering mechanisms have “learned” enough to make reasonably good guesses as to which they are.
In any case, the brain will allow what the initial objecticeptual pre-cerebral area considers objectual knowlicles (or objecticeptual units) into the secondary objecticeptual pre-cerebral area. Here, mechanisms will sort out the urceptual objecticeptual knowlecules—i.e., the objecticeptual knowlicles that form one of the unified wholes that we innately consider an objectual complex. I hypothesize that there are many of these such as tree, body of water, sun, cloud, rock. The one I’m first concerned with here, however, is the urceptual property complex, which, as already mentioned, is any non-living thing a person comes into tactile contact with.
Make that anything a person comes into contact with because I believe that the early life form that first developed a sensitivity to property may have considered its prey to be its property once captured, and therefore fought off members of its species to keep possession of it. Something along those lines would have been biologically sensible.
Wait. Before all this, the first property-owning organism would come to consider its own body to be a property-object. Something to be defended automatically when touched by something not-it, and eventually when something not-it comes close enough to touch it.
The further reflex of recognizing prey once taken as (1) not not-it and (2) as a property-object will evolve a reflex helping it to protect taken prey from being stolen from it.
Meanwhile, the reflex of considering simply the space around it to be its territory, or part of the body it owns will surely evolve. The territorial instinct. It seems to me that, however simplistic all this sounds, that nothing would stop the evolution of the urceptual property complex that would continue till our version of it: owned prey would become any object an organism touched and wanted to keep, and eventually any such object on his spatial property—i.e., his personal space.
Related urceptual reflexes would naturally develop concerning recognition of the property of those of his species, and not of other species. Except enough of a reflex about the latter to warn him away from the cave some bear owns, say.
Result: an innate moral belief in the sacredness of a person’s body, personal space, and objects in that space or extending from it, and the evil of another person’s trying to take or damage any of these owned things. The empathy drive, also basically urceptual, will combine with this to make healthy people share another’s fear of having property taken from him, and unhappiness whenever it is. This is where one of mankind’s oldest written moral laws comes from: thou shalt not steal. Natural Law, in my view. But not supernatural law.
Ownership of a spouse and children makes sense, too: they are property a person is driven biologically to defend. Of course, they are special kinds of property, so one’s ownership is very complex—in ways combined with a person’s being owned in certain respects by what he owns. This, right now, I have thought long enough about to say anything more about.
I think most everyone would agree that everyone, including communists, believes—albeit, sometimes without conscious awareness—in simple property rights to one’s own body, house, and family—even when the house technically might belong to the state. Difficulties crop up when concerned with economic property like a store or barn or mine. Here I distinguish personal property like one’s own body from economic property, the former being what one has for survival and simple comfort, not to make money or the equivalent, the latter primarily to get beyond mere survival and simple comfort.
Direct and indirect property. Some of the indirect property would become direct when its owner is in direct possession of it, like a store-owner inside his store. But that would be the same as his house, which he won’t always be in.
Another question (and about all I have in my understanding of what I think is my present subject are questions) is partial ownership—of an employee, for instance. A person can sell time shares in his body. Rent his body, that is. Similarly, if you rent a room from me for a week, you wholly own that room until the week is up—except what your rental agreement might say, and what might be understood such as your not having the right to smash a rented computer. You have bought its effectiveness for a given length of time, so must return its effectiveness at the end of the rental period—with some unavoidable deterioration allowed.
When you rent something, you’re paying for its effective and the unreturnable time you are in possession of it. This is something many economists (all economists?) seem not to understand—the ones who talk about unearned income. Which brings up an important problem in the study of morality: what about items in our moral code not directly due to some urceptual complex like the question of the morality of taking money for rent. This is where logic comes in, the principle involved being that anything not directly moral because of some innate moral reflex like the one that property is sacred is moral if logic can show it step by step to be the necessary outcome of the application of the moral reflex. Call the action of the moral reflex the pronouncement of a moral axiom.
Empathy will always be part of the determination of the morality of an act not directly based on a moral axiom. With that, I’ve spread my thoughts as far as I can right now without losing all idea of where I am.
* * *
It may be that the empathy instinct accounts for all other morality, natural empathy. Perhaps just about all more complicated is just a matter of evaluation of priorities: which come first, security or freedom, for example.
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Entry 1708 — HSAM
Thursday, January 29th, 2015
What does HSAM stand for? HSAM stands for Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory. I recently read about it in Steve Mirsky’s Anti Gravity in the November 2014 issue of Scientific American. Mirsky didn’t say much about it, so I looked it up in Wikipedia where I found an excellent article about it here (which terms it “hyperthymesia,” and connects it to the super-memory abilities of the autistic, as well as to obsessive compulsion disorders. It resembles the latter inasmuch as it seems to cause those with it obsessively to remember their personal pasts.
Mirsky mentions that the uncinate fasciculus may be involved in HSAM, so I looked that up in Wikipedia, too, stole the following from it:
The uncinate fasciculus is a white matter tract in the human brain that connects parts of the limbic system such as the hippocampus and amygdala in the temporal lobe with frontal ones such as the orbitofrontal cortex. Its function is unknown though it is affected in several psychiatric conditions. It is the last white matter tract to mature in the human brain.
Needless to say, I immediately began forming a knowlecular psychology understanding of HSAM. Does is indicate I’m right that the brain records everything that its sensors bring to it about the environment? Actually, my quick processing of the Wikipedia article left me thinking that those with HSAM don’t fully re-experience previous moments or days in their lives, although perhaps do fully re-experience portions of them, but mainly remember them the same way all of us remember vivid durations of our pasts; they just bring to mind many many more such durations.
I wondered if the anthroceptual awareness occupies the uncinate fasciculus. I think too little is known of it to be sure, although it either contains at least a portion of the awareness or connections to it. The existence of HSAM seems to me to come close to proving the existence of the anthroceptual awareness. Similar, various autistic persons’ abilities indicate the existence of certain sub-awarenesses like the matheceptual awareness.
I am also wondering if I should add a new awareness to my theory, the chronoceptual awareness. I’ve thought about some kind of urceptual mechanism that tags memories throughout life with day-indicators: day 1, day 2, etc. I haven’t gone anywhere much with it. HSAM got me thinking about it because people with HSAM seem to date the records of the past: if given a date, they can tell you what happened to them on that date. If there is a chronoceptual awareness, it could explain HSAM as the result not of an anthroceptual awareness with high charactration but a chronoceptual awareness with that. In the latter case, the chronoceptual awareness would pretty much co-exist (i.e., be simultaneously active) with the anthroceptual awareness.
* * *
I’d love to have a map of all the areas of the brain like the ones above, with a list of what each one has been implicated with. This, of course, is a point against my being mostly an autodidact rather than someone properly trained. Which makes me immediately think that someone with HSAM may remember the specifics of his past life because he lacks the ability to generalize–by which I (vaguely) mean the ability to form knowleplexes in which repeating data of significance merge into understandings of . . . things like kindergarten–as, say a jungle gym, a particular teacher (mine was Miss Sherman), drawing, the schoolyard where we played during recesses) instead of a series of days.
A healthy memory would form a hierarchy of memories–not the name of every kid in one’s kindergarten class, just the names of the few important ones. Ergo, another possible explanation of HSAM would be an inability to increase or decrease the brain’s ability to activate a given memory, so no memory would be too available to keep one from easily remembering smaller details from one’s past. I strongly feel animportant characteristic of one with high cerebreffectiveness is the ability to remember essences–at the expense of details.
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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.
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Entry 1696 — Some New Coinages
Sunday, January 18th, 2015
I’m hoping to do Important Work elsewhere today, so this entry will be short (unless I get inspired). Currently one of the essays I’m working on concerns the kinds of people who become Shakespeare cranks–i.e., people who are pretty much permanently certain that someone other than the rube from Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works of Shakespeare. So far there are three major kinds of Shakespeare cranks on my list: the rigidnikal, milyoopian and eurekan cranks. According to my wholly uncertified “knowlecular” theory of psychology, each of these cranks is the victim of a closely related but not quite identical group of inter-connected brain-cells in his cerebrum called a fallaciplex (fuh LAY shih plehks).
A fallaciplex is one of the brain’s two kinds of “knowleplexes,” or sets of brain-cell’s involved with a person’s understanding of some fairly large portion of reality (astronomy, say, rather than the moon as simply a bright object in the sky). If the understanding of a given knowleplex is obviously wrong (i.e., demonstrated to be invalid by rigorous logic applied to nothing by the known relevant facts of the subject of the knowleplex under analysis–in the view of an overwhelming majority of people with knowledge of the subject involved), it is a fallaciplex. The opposite of this is the validiplex. This, as should be obvious, is a knowleplex that logic and all the facts have shown–for an overwhelming majority of those with relevant knowledge–to be valid beyond reasonable doubt. All other knowleplexes can be considered validiplexes-in-progress until are shown to be maxilutely (i.e. as close to absolute certainty as any understanding can come) valid or invalid.
The crank’s fallaciplex is activated whenever he encounters the Shakespeare Authorship Question (SAQ (more than briefly). It then fills his mind with a delusional system concerning the SAQ that he is almost completely unable to free himself from–although he’s unlikely to want to.
The fallaciplex a rigidnikal crank is victimized by is a rigidniplex. Almost all of a rigidnik’s knowlexplexes in his magniscipience (where his involvement with questions outside the everyday like the SAQ) 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.
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 fallaciplex a milyoopan crank is victimized by is the opposite of a rigidniplex, for milyoops, as I classify those who tend to form milyooplexes, suffer from a too low level of cerebral energy. This causes them to form knowleplexes they are too weak of mind to defend.
To be continued tomorrow, I hope. Right now, I suddenly need a nap–or a shot of cocaine, and I don’t know where to get any.
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Entry 1689 — Musings on Thought
Sunday, January 11th, 2015
I’ve been . . . discussing philosophy, you might say, with Karl Kempton the past day or two. He and I have been at it about his brand of Eastern spiritualism versus my brand of Western materialism for twenty or more years. Needless to say, neither of us has budged from his position. Right now we are at it about what the swami below said.
Here beginneth my knowlecular psychology blog.
This has been up for a day or so and has had three visitors! I wasn’t sure anyone was interested in my totally uncertified theory. Anyway, I think the three of you, even though you may all just be students of abnormal psychology. (Actually, I think you’re all academics stealing ideas from me. No problem. Although I would like getting credit for them, I’ve gone too long without any recognition for even one of them to be able any longer to care much.)
Entry 1 — Plexed and Unplexed Data
This won’t be much of an entry, just some notes from another bedtime trickle of ideas. Two nights ago, I think. It is just a return to the presentation of my theory of accommodance. I’d been thinking of it as retroceptual data versus perceptual data, or a person’s memory versus the external stimuli he’s encountering. It’s not an easy dichotomy, though, because it’s really strong memories versus perceptual data and random memories. So I split the data involved into assimilated versus unassimilated data, or fragmentary versus unified, or unconsolidated versus consolidated. Later I got more rigorous: there are, I now posit, plexed and unplexed data, or data consolidated into a knowleplex and “free” data, mostly coming in from a person’s external or internal environment but sometimes containing retrocepts (bits of memory) that have not yet been consolidated into a knowleplex.
I had a second thought: that some plexed data could come from the environment. This would occur when a person encountered a complex of stimuli that quickly activated some knowleplex he had and accompanied it. Ergo, there were two kinds of plexed data: retroceptual and perceptual; there were two kinds of unplexed data, too: retroceptual and perceptual. I think of perceptual plexed data as “preplexed,”
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Maybe when I’m not in my null zone, where I am now, I’ll come up with a better idea for improving my blog.
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