Random Musings
It has been months since I last updated the site with a post. Work on my next book has preoccupied me (written approximately 12.5% of it), so future posts will be limited until further notice, or when I finish. I am hoping to have it done within the year.
The Building an Equation section of the site is complete! Granted, it is only a condensed version of the content, but it covers most of the important things. I will come back and model schadenfreude in August, and possibly pick a few other emotions to map out as well. For now though, I am taking a break from updating till August.
Now that summer has rolled around and I have more free time, it is time to get on the ball with things. Before modeling schadenfreude though, I thought it would be best to briefly describe the functions from my book. So I have added a new section to the website called Building an Equation. The link is on the home page, under the tab “What Is Affect Engineering?” tab, or you could just click the first picture under the slider. It will take a number of posts and some time to present everything more succinctly than the 700+ pages in the book, so some patience will be required.
Wow, two months without a post, time flies, and I have no swatter. I could write about what it feels like to fumble through a hundred mile labyrinth with just a candle, but even I wouldn’t want to read that. It’s more like waiting to ambush words that come near my ears, stalking phrases and syllables, striking, tearing into them to rip out whatever meaning they have, and then disemboweling them across the page . . . thus spoke the vegan poet.
Below is another response to a Quora post I gave that I liked to a question someone who asked me to give an answer. I think I’ve done most of those compulsive behaviors…
Question: What are some examples of compulsive behavior exhibited by people? For example – nail biting, washing hands frequently. Are there any other such behaviors that people generally don’t talk about or are lesser known?
My response:
If you asked this question to a behaviorist (a particular school of thought in psychology made popular in the early twentieth century by rock stars such as Ivan Pavlov, John Watson, and B.F. Skinner), they might say all behavior is compulsive. By compulsive, I assume you mean beyond one’s control, obligatory, or stemming from an irresistible urge. Radical behaviorists would reject the notion of free will, deeming all learning to be the result of environment and that we come into the world with a blank slate (i.e., Tabula Rasa). There would be no need for them to distinguish “compulsive behavior,” as you suggest it, because there could be no other alternative.
For the indeterminists out there, others who have answered this question have already pointed out that the list of compulsive behaviors is near inexhaustible. In line with that, I will add that any action performed by us that seems to undermine our volition could fall under the umbrella term “compulsive behavior.” They could include:
1) Excessive blinking
2) Joint popping
3) Not walking on cracks in the sidewalk, or only walking on cracks in the sidewalk
4) Making a certain number of steps between concrete tiles
5) Licking one’s lips
6) Pacing
7) Tapping one’s finger, foot, or a pencil
8) Checking one’s appearance reflected in every mirror, window, or puddle
9) Adjusting one’s clothing
10) Making sure that every list one makes has exactly ten items on it…
11) … or is a prime number
12) … or has a dozen items so that it can be mapped onto any sexagesimal time system
14) Triskaidekaphobia
“Locus of control,” from personality psychology, is something worth mentioning here. People who have an external locus of control generally believe that external factors, or outside forces, control the events that happen to them. Contrarily, people who have an internal locus of control generally believe that they have control over the events that happen to them.
Someone adhering to an extreme external locus of control would likely be more in line with behaviorists, and some might even believe in destiny or fate and hold that all behavior is compulsive. However, this would become sticky real fast in a court of law if a defendant’s excuse for committing murder was that a ladybug landed on the windowsill, signaled that three people had to die today, and it could not be otherwise.
Contrarily, someone adhering to an extreme internal locus of control would likely flat out reject that compulsive behavior exists, even in situations that appear beyond one’s control, such as controlling the weather or persuading someone to buy something they don’t need. Unless you’re actively engaged in cloud-seeding, or are a salesperson who doesn’t know the meaning of the word no, it’s difficult to maintain that kind of zealotry in the face of so much indifference to one’s every whim.
I saw the question “Why is 1 + 1 = 2?” on Quora, a Q&A site, and I liked the answer I gave to it. I provided three alternative solutions. So here it is, three cases where someone might not consider one plus one to equal two.
My Quora post
If you ask any mathematician, they will tell you 1 + 1 = 2. Straightforward, unimaginative.
If you ask a nihilist what 1 + 1 equals, he or she will likely say the expression means nothing. If they are feeling particularly spirited, then they might say the bolder 1 + 1 = 0. If they are the extremely skeptical type, however, they might hold that 1 + 1 can not be equal to anything beyond itself. This last type type would reject even the notion that 1 = 1, (Aristotle’s “A is A”) on account of the number one on the left being distinguished tempo-spatially from the number one on the right. Even this letter Z being read here is not the same Z it was two seconds ago; at the very least, its pixels have refreshed.
If you ask someone who believes in an omnipresent deity or who holds that all things are united with all other things, he or she might not only say that 1 + 1 = 1, but would likely reject the notion that entities are distinguishable from one another in the first place. For such perspectives, one cannot be added to anything else, as it already encompasses everything. Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation is something they might point towards as well. Does anyone know what the universe plus one is? How does someone add anything to something that already encompasses everything? One does not, it might be said.
“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.” – Chief Seattle
If you ask a Gestalt psychologist what 1 + 1 equals, then they might say 1 + 1 = 3, or 1 + 1 = 4, or quite possibly any positive integer up to infinity. A popular adage in Gestalt psychology is “The whole is more than the sum of the parts.” One such example is Kanizsa’s Triangle. A photographic mosaic (larger picture made up of smaller pictures) is another example. Also to consider are optical illusions, such as the rabbit/duck, and the young lady/old lady. Ten bees spread out in a garden is no big deal; ten bees in a car is a swarm.
It’s a complex world we live in.
