I guess I’m fully in my null zone now—beyond even the help of my hydrocodone pills.  Will return to the review I commented on yesterday, as promised, but only briefly—to take issue with another passage in it:

“Nor is it clear that if we were singling out just two positive feelings, we would choose pleasure and purpose.  Both of these are, of course, umbrella concepts, including moods and feelings with important qualitative differences; consider the pleasure of a good book, a swim in the ocean, a visit to Berlin, a conversation with a friend, or settling down for an afternoon nap.  Each of these might involve purpose as well.  And if the goal is to fasten on what matters most, there are many other possible umbrella candidates, including serenity, passion and commitment.  In the history of the world, only a small percentage of cultures would single out pleasure and purpose.  This does not mean that (singling them out) is wrong, but it does suggests that a sustained argument, not provided (in the books under review) would be necessary to justify the choice.

“But there is a more modest and less contentious version of (the idea of focusing on pleasure and purpose when pursuing happiness). It would put aside the deeper questions and urge that pleasure and purpose are important, and that many people’s lives have less pleasure and less meaning than they might, in part because of how they allocate their attention.  We need not take a stand of the most fundamental issues in order to agree that when people suffer, or feel that life lacks much of a point, one reason is where they choose to focus their attention–and that an appreciation of this point might help the reduce suffering and restore a sense of purpose.”

Okay, I more or less agree with Cass R. Sunstein, the author of the above, that pleasure and purpose can both be parts of an experience of happiness.  To expand on what I said yesterday, what I more exactly believe is that one will pursue purpose in the hopes of the happiness of attaining it.  Let me add that I believe healthy brains make the pursuit of a purpose (scoring a goal in a hockey game, for instance) pleasurable!

With regard to what Sunstein says, I would claim that he is discussing only one “umbrella concept, “Happiness,” or “the attainment of pleasure.”  “Serenity, passion and commitment” are just kinds of happiness.

I’ve already at various times this year bumbled through attempts to list the kinds of pleasure there are.  Any intelligent attempt to figure out how best to pursue a happy life should begin with such a list.  A second need is to recognize that everyone will have (1) a different list of pleasures (and pains) he is sensitive to, and a different level of sensitivity to each item on the list; (2) that context will be extremely important for determining how much a given pleasure or pain is for a particular person;*1 (3) that a person’s reports about the level of pain or pleasure he is experiencing is vastly less valuable than the neurophysiological measurement of it which I believe will be possible before too long, if it isn’t already: (4) that whether a given action will maximize one’s pleasure-to-pain ratio will almost always be in doubt—taking it a gamble; but that reason can help—i.e., knowing exactly what one is doing, how it worked in the past and how it seems to have worked for others; (5) that one should try to trace the possible effect of an action as far into the future as possible, and within every awareness; (6) a list like this will always seem puerile, because so common-sensical, except when not, and never anywhere near complete.

Which is my way of saying I’ve said enough on this topic for now.

*1 I’ve already forgotten what my general term for “feeling of either pleasure or pain” is.  I must have one!

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I cut the following out of the 4 December issue of The New York Review of Books because I wanted to cite the two books reviewed but didn’t feel like doing the necessary typing.  That’s me everywhere now-a-times.

The books sound semi-intelligent and the review seems intelligent and interesting, but my megalomania requires me to state that all three would be 7.6 times better had their authors consulted . . . ME.  Assuming I’d have the energy to answer them.

Note, I have to insert here that yesterday I played tennis in the seniors men’s league I’m in despite being 80% crippled, as far as I’m concerned: I can walk pretty well, but can’t run, unless being able to hobble a yard or two with vigor counts as running.  Just about everyone on my team was injured, so I had to play.  Ridiculously, our captain wanted me to play with him in first court–i.e., against our opponents best team!  I still can’t figure out how it happened, but we won.  So apparently I am capable of energy, when it counts!

Today being another off-day for me, although not one of my worst such days, I just want to deal with one passage from the review previously mentioned: “Many people insist that it matters if people help others, not because it makes them happy to help (it might not), but because the most important thing, or one the most important things, is helping others.”

I’m quoting this because it suggests that people consider other things more important than happiness–or what I would call “pleasure.”  They do not.  Take a person who hates mowing lawns but spends an hour mowing the lawn of a neighbor unable to do it himself and too poor to pay someone else to do it (whom he barely knows).   I say he mows the lawn not because doing a good deed is more important than happiness but (a) to avoid potential unhappiness and/or (b) to enjoy that old white man stand-by, deferred gratification.  In other words, he is motivated entirely to maximize his pleasure to pain ratio . . . in the long run.

Among the possibilities: it makes him happy to win the esteem of those who believe in helping others; it assures him that others who believe in helping others will not make him unhappy by looking down on him for failing to help someone in need.  Maybe he also thinks the exercise will do him good–keep him in good enough shape to enjoy the happiness of beating his brother in tennis, say.  Maybe he wants the good opinion of the neighborhood.

Clearly, he does want his life to have meaning, and believes helping others will provide it.  But that will make him happy.  Perhaps he can’t not have the anticipatory happiness of getting a gold star for helping others.

What it seems to me that those interested how best to achieve happiness should investigate is a given person’s knowleplex (large understanding) of “a meaningful life.”  I contend we instinctively seek to have such a life (most of us, at least)–because “meaning,” whatever it is, makes us happy, by giving us pleasure.  And I admit to feeling like a six-grader writing for fourth-graders for saying this.

More on this tomorrow.

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For around a week, I’ve been starting projects and quickly discovering that I’m in over my head.  At which point I try a different project with the same result.  What happens specifically is that I become aware that what I took to be a single topic had many subtopics–too many for me to organize.  For instance, my latest project is an essay on the IQ.  I thought it’d be easy because I’ve often written about it and thought I had an essay I could simply bring up to date.  Well, I had a very nice summary that I found in a long discussion of intelligence of mine from twenty or thirty years ago:

One more thing: by intelligence (or mental competence) I emphatically do not mean whatever it is that IQ tests measure.  Such tests are only concerned with conformity; speed and “correctness” on problems so trivial as to be almost the antithesis of the kind of problems live minds confront; mistakefree-ness (but so long as one can see & correct his mistakes, what real difference does it make how many he makes?); eagerness to win superficial acclaim; verbal, arithmetical and spatial “reasoning” (at the expense of athletic, musical, social and other forms of equally valid interplay with existence); and quantity of information (while disregarding the quality of one’s use of information which could permit a person with little information to organize it so well that he outperforms a walking encyclopedia).

But nothing else.  I was hoping for an essay of several thousand words.  I felt I could expand on the above but not for more than a thousand or so words.  I also realized there was quite a bit more to be said about the topic.  So I visited Wikipedia, and stole its entry on the Intelligence Quotient.  My thought was to use its data on the history of the IQ test, and maybe the nature/nurture debate.  But I found a number of relevant theories of intelligence, and studies of how IQ correlated with occupation, a little neurophysiology, and much else.  I had no idea how to proceed.

Whereas before when this happened, I just started a new project I hoped would be easier.  But it had become apparent that there weren’t any!  Brilliant solution: to grab something out of all the subjects having to do with IQ that I thought I could handle, and enjoy pontificating about and go with it, without worrying about how it would fit into any final essay about IQ that I might write.

At first I thought I might write about the g factor (theoretical general factor that is the basis of all intelligence).  That I soon found to be too much to chew on due to their being so many different ideas about it.  So I’ll first write about J. P. Guilford’s 3-part g factor (as I see it)–because I didn’t know anything about him or it, and found what Wikipedia said about fascinatingly close to my own ideas:

Guilford’s Structure of Intellect

According to Guilford’s Structure of Intellect (SI) theory (1955), an individual’s performance on intelligence tests can be traced back to the underlying mental abilities or factors of intelligence. SI theory comprises up to 150 different intellectual abilities organized along three dimensions—Operations, Content, and Products.

Operations dimension

SI includes six operations or general intellectual processes:

1. Cognition – The ability to understand, comprehend, discover, and become aware of information.
2. Memory recording – The ability to encode information.
3. Memory retention – The ability to recall information.
4. Divergent production – The ability to generate multiple solutions to a problem; creativity.
5. Convergent production – The ability to deduce a single solution to a problem; rule-following or problem-solving.
6. Evaluation – The ability to judge whether or not information is accurate, consistent, or valid.

Content dimension

SI includes four broad areas of information to which the human intellect applies the six operations:

1. Figural – Concrete, real world information, tangible objects — things in the environment. It includes visual: information perceived through seeing; auditory: information perceived through hearing; and kinesthetic: information perceived through one’s own physical actions.
2. Symbolic – Information perceived as symbols or signs that stand for something else, e.g., Arabic numerals, the letters of an alphabet, or musical and scientific notations.
3. Semantic – Concerned with verbal meaning and ideas. Generally considered to be abstract in nature.
4. Behavioral – Information perceived as acts of people. (This dimension was not fully researched in Guilford’s project, remains theoretical, and is generally not included in the final model that he proposed for describing human intelligence.)

Product dimension

As the name suggests, this dimension contains results of applying particular operations to specific contents. The SI model includes six products, in increasing complexity:

1. Units – Single items of knowledge.
2. Classes – Sets of units sharing common attributes.
3. Relations – Units linked as opposites or in associations, sequences, or analogies.
4. Systems – Multiple relations interrelated to comprise structures or networks.
5. Transformations – Changes, perspectives, conversions, or mutations to knowledge.
6. Implications – Predictions, inferences, consequences, or anticipations of knowledge.

Therefore, according to Guilford there are 5 x 3 x 6 = 90 intellectual abilities or factors (his research only confirmed about three behavioral abilities, so it is generally not included in the model). Each ability stands for a particular operation in a particular content area and results in a specific product, such as Comprehension of Figural Units or Evaluation of Semantic Implications.

Guilford’s original model was composed of 120 components (when the behavioral component is included) because he had not separated Figural Content into separate Auditory and Visual contents, nor had he separated Memory into Memory Recording and Memory Retention. When he separated Figural into Auditory and Visual contents, his model increased to 5 x 5 x 6 = 150 categories. When Guilford separated the Memory functions, his model finally increased to 180 factors.

Criticism

Various researchers have criticized the statistical techniques used by Guilford. According to Jensen (1998), Guilford’s contention that a g-factor was untenable was influenced by his observation that cognitive tests of U.S. Air Force personnel did not show correlations significantly different from zero. According to one reanalysis, this resulted from artifacts and methodological errors. Applying more robust methodologies, the correlations in Guilford’s data sets are positive.  In another reanalysis, randomly generated models were found to be as well supported as Guilford’s own theory.

I hope to post a discussion of Guilford’s structure in my entry for tomorrow, comparing and contrasting it to my own theory.  The latter, I think, has mechanisms that may repair what I think is wrong with Guilford’s.  It is also much simpler . . . well, perhaps not simpler, but having fewer elements.

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My latest Important Discovery about the Human Intelligence is that each of us has two consciousnesses, or one with two departments: the cerebral consciousness and the cerebellar consciousness.  We each also has two kinds of intuition.  One is an understanding that feels right but has not yet been validated by reason due to lack of full confirmation by data.  The other is an understanding so strongly confirmed by data that it has become “unconscious.”  I put the latter in quotation marks, because a person acting on it is consciously aware of it, but only in his cerebellar consciousness.  That means he is not verbalizing it, among other things, one of which is that he is using it so smoothly and effortlessly that he doesn’t hold it in mind long enough to be more than momentarily aware of it.  He has automatized it.

It will not lead to creativity but make creativity easier.  Cerebral intuition is the kind of understanding that leads to creativity.  Warning: the creativity it leads to may be defective, seriously defective.  Indeed, it will lead to error (which is why it’s an important part of my poem of yesterday’s entry), error which reason must evaluate before it can be considered worthwhile creativity, preferably one’s own reason, but often someone else’s, and eventually the world-as-a-whole’s.  Which is fine, too.

When one is in what some psychologists refer to as “flow,” one’s brain pretty much shuts down one’s cerebral consciousness, but one is still conscious!  A minor terminological point, perhaps not even worth mentioning, since calling the cerebellar consciousness “the unconsciousness” works more than adequately.  But it is incorrect, I’m strongly convinced.  The true unconscious mind, in knowlecular psychology, is simply the brain’s collection of mnemoducts that, I claim, hold all our memories.  Are retroceptual warehouse.  It doesn’t do anything.

I contend that one is always aware, at least while it is going on, of one’s creativity-in-progress, although rarely aware of it as that.  In dreams, for instance, pivotal connections are being creatively made that one is briefly aware of without having any idea of them as contributing toward the creative solution, or attempted solution, of a problem important to one.    Intellectual creativity of all kinds is carried out by the cerebral consciousness in many ways that I have covered in my writings but lack time to cover at this time here.

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