Entry 354 — A Few Further Thoughts on Taxonomization
First, another thought about taxonomy: an effective taxonomy will have lacuna that its structure makes readily fillable. The Periodic Table of Elements is a prime example.
And an anecdote in support of the high value of taxonomization. It concerns one of my many small possible discoveries while working on my knowlecular psychology. It was that despite the standard view of certified psychologists, there is no such thing as “short-term memory,” there is only “memory.” In other words, we don’t store recent events in one section of the brain for some short period than release the unimportant ones, and shift the important ones to another section of the brain devoted to long-term memories. I always had trouble with this because I could see no way of evaluating short-term memories–how, for instance, could the brain pick out some memory that might be crucially important ten years down the road however irrelevant at the moment? Where taxonomization came in was that I was at the same time driven to make my taxonomy as compact as possible. Limit the number of classifications. That’s a prime goal of any taxonomist. So I worked to eliminate the short-term memory and long-term-memory as subcategories of “memory.” It was many years before I found a very simple, elegant solution–a way the brain could tag all incoming data in such a way that one’s faculty of remembering would tend to choose recent events before older events (of equal contextual attractiveness–i.e., if you just met someone named Mary and your wife is named Mary, the name Mary will probably still more likely bring up a memory of your wife than of the new Mary you’ve met, but if your wife’s name is Judy, than the name will bring up a memory of the new Mary faster than it will bring up some other acquaintance of yours who has that name, to put it very simply).
I claim that taxonomization significantly helped me to my breakthrough this time, and many other times. If my psychology proves invalid that may seem a so what, but I also claim that taxonomization is similarly helpful to successful theorists.
I think the reason I’m such an advocate for taxonomy is my work throughout the years to construct a full-scale psychology. Reflecting on it, I realize that what I’ve mostly done has been taxonomization–defining items and systematically classifying them. Such informal taxonomization is essential for any serious full understanding of a versosophy (any verosoplex, that is), including ones more respected than mine. I’ve read about some of the research that’s been done in this area, by the way, and don’t find any of it to contradict my theory; in fact, the researchers seem to me empiricists without little idea of what they’re doing. They’re certainly not concerned with a big picture.
When I have more pep, I hope to be a little more specific about how I’ve worked out my theory, beginning with the universe, the activity of the brain, which I divide into perception, retroception (memory) and behavior.