Phainesthai
New member
- Joined
- Jun 7, 2018
- Messages
- 3
The questionnaire I'm using here is one by Entropic, on PersonalityCafe.
1. Is there anything that may affect the way you answer the questions? For example, a stressful time, mental illness, medications, special life circumstances? Other useful information includes sex, age, and current state of mind.
Female, twenty-one years of age, currently very sleep-deprived (and it’s 3AM, so my answers will be incoherent at the beginning, and unintelligible by the end), and a tad stressed. I’ve been diagnosed with clinical depression, and have pronounced obsessive tendencies.
2. Study these two images here and here. Which one do you prefer and why? How would you describe it?
I’m not particularly fond of either one, though I prefer the first, I tend to gravitate towards landscape shots, or abstract photography (although I rather like noir portraits as well). The second image strikes me as rather bland, nothing remarkable about the technique, subject, color, lighting, action, etc; nothing is conveyed through it, or nothing I’d care enough to notice. The second image benefits from the irreducible appeal of cinematic imagery, but doesn't have much else going for it, it “states†the scenery, which is more than what can be said of the first.
3. Please describe yourself as a person if you were to introduce yourself to someone else like in a cover letter. What kind of person are you and why?
I’m unsure of what to list, I’m unsure of what’s relevant, so I’ll simply list some of what comprises the core of my identity, my ego, if you will. I’m inquisitive by nature (and nurture), I devote most of my spare-time to reasoning from first principles, whether trying to grasp the underpinnings of the “map†that necessarily dictates my perception, and reevaluating my basal presuppositions, attempting to get at a fundamental ontological reality (and assessing whether such a thing exists, and is epistemologically accessible), or simply trying out philosophical toolkits. My existence, my self isn't very stable (though i always identify with my current state rather strongly, I constantly camp and decamp), apart from the features I’m naming, which I feel are my steady-state; most of what I do is try to run other minds or foreign constructions in emulation - to borrow from Eric Weinstein - comprehend interconnected sets of ideas, temporarily adopt them as true, test their boundaries, and ultimately rebuild them (and this does extend to minds, I often include linguistic style and emotional content in my experiments, I try to run the full frame of reference). I don’t believe a totalizing system ever could be built by humans (though I’m not disparaging the notion of a unity of knowledge), so although attempting to build one is certainly is in my nature, I try not to devote too much time to making sure my systems are peacemeal (humans weren’t built to represent their environment or themselves accurately, they weren’t built for correspondence-type truth, so funneling all cognition through a rational filter isn’t very effective, or even reasonable), rather, I take the observables of a given subset of things, and try to come up with a working model for it, an effective theory of sorts - and then, reconcile it with all else, if possible (it is very rarely possible, so I keep my observables and theories from mixing in an unruly fashion). An example of my camping and decamping was my recent experimentation with non-representationalist philosophy: I took it upon myself to fully adopt a Richard Rorty style view of things, and write a few essays starting from there. Before that, I did the same with Heidegger brand idealism, before that, James like pragmatism, etc. I should point out, however, that i feel my quests have a relatively stable underpinnings; for as long as I can recall, the ethos of my exploration has been a discovery of that which we call real, and the quality of “being trueâ€. It is also worth mentioning that occasionally, I will half-discover, half-construct a system, and become enamoured with it, adopt it full-time for quite a few months, live with the conviction that it is correct. Regardless of what I'm investigating, I do it with a laser focus, and metally relate all else to it. Though to pursue mathematics professionally, my interests span both the sciences and the humanities, I have a penchant for 19th century literature, don’t go a day without listening to music, adore jungian psychoanalysis, mythological analysis, religious symbolism and schema… I shan’t go on, I’d never be done with this. Though I’ll grant that I possess a marked analytic bent, I also care very profoundly about experience, be it understanding phenomenology and observing my own consciousness, or actually living, seeking the most engaging, challenging, and experientially significant modes of being. Because we are products of Darwinian processes, and we are finite, we’re bound to be optimized for utility and efficiency, not accurate conceptual encapsulation; this tells me that the amount of data that we cannot encapsulate in linguistic systems, let alone formal rational systems is unbelievably vast (not to say that the data wouldn’t conform to the norms of formality, were we capable of operating at that level, I’ve no clue as to the vastness of possible and actual types of information) - therefore, I live through and within narrative, poetry, metaphor, imagery, imagination and intuition as well; in dream-like domains that by virtue of ignorance among other things, seem to us to be magical. My thinking style oscillates between high methodological rigidity, tentative networking, linear (and non-linear) leaps, and fast track, multi-modal approaches. In terms of temperament, I’m generally composed, slightly tense, either attentive in the extreme, or beyond absent-minded, caring, sympathetic without being very empathetic (it isn’t that I live other’s pain, it’s that I try to align myself with the highest ideal possible in aiding them), eccentric in various ways. I’ll move on to the next section as this is getting painfully long.
4. What kind of person would you LIKE to be? Why? What kind of person would you NOT want to be? Why?
I would like to be someone who is fully embodied, so to speak, who’s models translate seamlessly into behaviour and emotion, a cogent “selfâ€. I’d like to carry myself lightly whilst contending with the most pressing and serious of matters, to be a sort of analog interface to living principles. I wish to attain a breadth and depth of culture and thought such that I can produce truly transdisciplinary thoughts. I’d like to listen as though I could at all times be entirely mistaken. I’d like to transcend my temperament, and rise to the ethical heights I can barely touch. I’d like to be a revolutionary in my own field, in posture, and I'm the broad sense. I’d hate to be blind to truth, or to myself, I’d hate to live in comfort or ever settle for what I am, no matter what that happens to be. I hope never to become dogmatic, never to be sure of what I know, or what that means, precisely. I’d hate to be “skeptical copy editorâ€, somebody so attached to verification, accuracy, etc, that they are unwilling to sustain disbelief, and leap into the unknown, bring forth an epistemic rebirth. I find the notion of being overtaken by primal, tribal programs apaling, and fear a lot of what comprises human nature (including fear, vengefulness - mostly because the way I adjudicate what’s just, as a determinist, doesn't gel with retribution - attachment, etc).
5. Do you think there are any differences to how you described yourself and how people actually perceive you? How do you think others would describe you? If there are any discrepancies between these two that are you are aware of; do you know why exactly that is?
I’m very private, so most of my peculiarities aren’t visible in “social†contexts; my personality probably collapses into a parody of itself when displayed at a low resolution. I’ve been told I come off as very stiff, a tad cold, - but polite - self-contained, awkward, overly formal, snobbish, pretentious, and overly rational - this last one probably comes from the fact that though I embrace very neuro-atypical pathways to insight, this isn’t evident in a twenty-minute conversation in which the participants have widely disparate working-definitions of concepts and terms (so I just come off as either disengaged, or oddly anal). Close friends, however, have told me that I’m very comforting in times of distress, that I have a sort of unaffected, steady warmth that’s soothing, and that I am, in such circumstances, very compassionate and understanding, and they don’t feel I’m judging them - I am, in most every sense of the word, I communicate this to them, that that’s why I can be of use to them, it's just that I'm not condemning them for the sins of their very humanity. Friends have told me that I’m very quiet in social settings, but quite talkative and humorous in more private contexts, even telling me I have a proclivity to go on philosophical or “informative†monologues. As a person, I've been described as argumentative, a bit dry, a good listener, curious to a fault, simultaneously arrogant and unsure of the ground I stand on, "stubbornly esoteric", “annoyingly abstract†or “far too specificâ€, disconnected… I’m often perceived as amoral, which isn’t a very accurate description, but I’m always orbiting around amoral stances, so it isn’t without truth... I think most discrepancies between my self image, and the perceptions others tend to have of me (that i know of) boil down to regulated expression, I’m not all that I am at all times in all circumstances.
6. What in life do you find to be of importance? Why? If you are unsure you can always take the Value Test and post the results here. Do note that it helps if you narrow it down to 20 or ideally 10 values as suggested at stage 2.
The values I hold dearest are truth, meaning, complexity, and adaptive fitness. When applied to human affairs, all of these necessarily trade off against each other, and all presuppose quite a lot of cognitive horsepower, so I’d have to say they’re grounded in a love for high-order information processing as well. For life in particular, I hope to live so as to expend myself entirely, to die knowing that the process I am was as fully realized as possible, that I achieved what I could, experienced what I craved, feared and needed, that I understood all I had the capacity to know; to die being dead already, spent and exhausted, not wishing for a re-do; knowing that I navigated all the potential before me thoroughly, that none was squandered. I hope never to settle into what I’ve built or end up building, never to let my crystalline structure suffice - this is part of the reason why I elected to pursue mathematics, no proof is like another, there isn’t an algorithmic procedure one can simply repeat, there’s no way to escape the leap, the effort, no way to flee the creative process.
7. How do you react to new situations in your life? Can you describe an event in your life where you were in an unknown situation? How did you deal with it?
Usually I learn as much about it as possible, and try to plan for it, - with varying degrees of success - something which I’d actually like to correct in myself, I wish to deal with the entirety of a situation, have my structure suffice, not pre-categorize the circumstances I’m expecting in order to defend myself from flaws in my own cognition - doing so prevents me from confronting the unknown, and benefiting from the fact of my insufficiencies. A recent example would be the month I spent abroad: It was the first time I left the country on my own, and I did so to attend a workshop of sorts on computational sciences. In preparation for this, I read up on almost all the topics that would be covered, began learning the local language… My strategy is just that, build a mental foundation, become proficient, face the opportunity. I should say, I do this with situations where intellect is a factor, not others, those I tend to embrace, take the fear to mean I’ve discovered an underdeveloped facet of myself.
8. Please describe yourself when you are in a stressful situation. How do you act and why? Real life experiences are welcome.
In stressful situations that are public, I appear very calm, my strategy is to gain control of the game I’m in by setting up the game myself. In other situations… Well, it depends very much, though my answer to this question resembles the one I gave to the question above. I try to focus enough on what the situation is so as to excuse myself from it, (I engage in quasi-mindfulness, but make the focus external) I simply ration my attention differently, I don’t monitor myself as closely as I monitor the circumstances, tasks, problems, tragedy, or people at hand. In situations where I was tested, my agony ended the moment the test itself began, so all my anxiety was brought on by projection… Most of my anxiety comes from being confronted with a “judgemental idealâ€, generally my own, it comes from what I believe a moment will reveal to me about myself. To take a different example, when a family member had a suicidal episode in my presence, the anxiety was only manifest mentally when I was neither engaging with them, problem solving, or taking action, for the grand majority it was only manifest physically. Anxiety comes to me as a desire to modify my current situation, it almost always compels me to act.
9. Please describe yourself when you are in an enjoyable situation. How do you act and why? Real life experiences are welcome.
Again, it depends very much. When alone, I maximize my focus, I tune out all that’s external, I try to heighten my satisfaction by living through the sequence of moments at many levels, I contemplate as I live, there’s a pleasant dissociation that I almost always enter into (unless I’m deriving my enjoyment from something tasking, something that requires all of my attention, which is not infrequent). If It’s a moment I’m sharing, than the dissociation is even more pronounced, I often feel as though I’m watching it play out in front of me, and what I actually experience is the synthesis of what I’m living - this is only occasionally interrupted by my senses. My most fulfilling moments have ranged from those of reaching a critical moment mentally, to sharing a song with a loved one, to being understood - with all that entails- , to exploring altered states of consciousness, to having a fascinating conversation, to reading fine literature, a brilliant essay, or watching great cinema. My behaviour here is entirely dictated by what, if anything, I perceive to be valuable about what I’m enjoying.
10. Describe your relationship to socialization. How do you perceive one-on-one interaction? How do you perceive group interaction?
I greatly value one-on-one interaction, I feel it is the least constrained by personal limitation, the only kind that comes close to allowing for communion, for truth in its entirety to be shared, and people understood. It is the kind that allows for the most joint expansion, that most satisfies my social needs, which primarily consist of being viewed for what I am, sharing the deepest reflection I’m capable of, articulating what I’ve not tapped into before, unravelling mysteries and mystery, and building insight in conjunction with someone else. The people I care for substantially, I “learnâ€, I take a course on that which they are, I seek to know them so fully as to know the meaning of their linguistic artifacts, of their emotional idiosyncrasies… None of this is possible in group interaction, which I mostly find taxing, frustrating, and wasteful - I really only engage in it for the sake of becoming competent in ways I’m currently not. Group interaction can be interesting to observe, but I don’t enjoy participating in it. I find groups mostly produce white noise, what’s palatable to the group as a unit falls short of each individual’s capacities at practically every level - and I don’t see many interesting, exclusive emergent properties to make up for this.
11. Describe your relationship to society. What are the elements of it you hold important or unimportant (e.g. social norms, values, customs, traditions)? How do you see people as a whole?
All society tends towards tyranny, this is a given, as they are hierarchical in nature, by definition built around favoring the majority, and primarily interested in systemic solutions which necessarily neglect anomaly. However, this is entirely necessary, and I’m willing to cede some ground to negotiated social order, provided the kinds of exceptions that are necessary for true shifts have a place(s) to exhibit themselves. Temperamentally, I’m iconoclastic, so the esteem I have for social order isn’t my judgement's natural setpoint. Tradition can never be valuable by virtue of past utility, or having existed for a significant portion of time (other than for providing a continuity of narrative); it can however, be valuable by virtue of what made it a tradition, by virtue of what brought it into being in the first place, and again, I believe this can be the case, at times. Social norms I can recognize as valuable, they are after all, constraints on the landscape of probable outcomes, which tends to be useful, but frankly, I don’t find them particularly profound, useful, or anything of the sort, I think they frequently hobble our capacity to jointly get at (the) truth. People as a whole… Is far too complicated a question for me to answer properly. People are the locus of value, of its very notion, meaning is the fact of subjectivity that brings value into being “objectivelyâ€, and in that, I feel they have some inherent value (paradoxical, but again, cannot delve deeply here), however, my mind is often an uncivilized dialogue between Hobbes and Rousseau. For the purposes of this question, I think people are not markedly virtuous or reprehensible, brilliant or daft, they mostly hover midair in the lowest effort position, defaulting to mostly neutral impulses and instincts, with a latent barbarity accompanied by positive potential. We have the capacity to be practically anything in the continuum of human existence, it is primarily a matter of initial conditions, and circumstance.
12. Describe your relationship to authority. How do you perceive authority? What does it mean to you, and how do you deal with it?
Authority is a byproduct of hierarchy, so that's mostly been answered… I don’t respond well to authority on the basis of nothing but itself, but it is frequently simply the consequence of the interaction of competence, intelligence, grace, etc, with the system in which it exists. Insofar as authority is a marker of something else, a secondary consequence I have no trouble relating to it. I generally don’t accept things on the basis of authority, though I will grant that there is some structural merit to it and will therefore take it into account. Much of what I believe about authority is similar to what I think about tradition, it can never be valuable due to its own nature alone (or at all).
13. Describe your relationship to order and chaos. What do order and chaos mean to you? How do they manifest in your daily life?
quite like the Peterson-esque way of conceptualizing order and chaos, order being the great father, all that is understood, categories themselves, oppressive, always partially blind and stale... Chaos being the mother, the unknown, anomaly, dangerous, but perennially reforming and refreshing. The individual as what mediates between the two. This applies to phenomenology alone, it isn’t a claim about the nature of a third-person, objective realm. I tend to keep myself on (at the edge), my prefered state of existence is one of discomfort, one in which I allow only for the structure that maintains that existence. I think of complexity as a dialogue between the two, each set of orderly constraints making for a new set of possibilities, too much chaos and nothing becomes actual, too much order and nothing is ever born. For me, the challenge is applying enough order so as to be able to perceive, but not enough so as to distort my vision too unforgivably with the oversimplification it brings along. They are just one of many ways to breakdown the constituent elements of experience, but one I find useful. As for how they manifest in my life, just in this way, I cannot define what chaos very precisely beyond this because whatever I belive it to be, content wise, will be precisely what its not; chaos is patent in my life when I know neither where I am, not how to go about discovering that fact, or when what I fear has a place of indeterminacy to inhabitant. Order is probably what I set out to communicate in these answers, what I know, or simply have yet to find fault with - though what happened was likely an exchange between the two.
14. What is it that you fear in life? Why? How does this fear manifest to you both in how you think and how you act?
I fear the unremarkable, I fear being unremarkable, as I feel what “isâ€, at any level that I would regard as significant, manifests a series of outliers in our current models, meaning large scale approaches won’t do - and I should very much like to participate in that unravelling, in that informed contemplation. I fear that my natural tendency towards living immersed in possibility alone will mean none of what I might or could be will come to be actual (not even within my own mind, which is what the statement is in reference to). I fear being unable to deal with the truth, and failing to notice that inability. I fear my demise, put simply, though I recognize that immortality makes no sense for beings such as myself (and eternity might even resemble torture), so a second fear emerges, that I will neither come to terms with the finitude that I’m already living, nor be able to envision a hypothetical solution. I fear that my time will be squandered, or that I will invest so much into being correctly aligned with the truth that I will fail to be effective.
15. What is it that you desire in life? What do you strive to achieve? Why? Where do you think these drives and desires stem from or are inspired by?
Again, this has mostly been answered above, but I suppose what I desire is more than what’s against what I fear… So the ones that you can take from the paragraph above are present (being or contributing remarkable things in terms of individual and collective understanding, having most of the layers I inhabit come together, working with, and alongside the truth, whatever it is, always being able to recognize it and embrace it, to die as realized as I could be, etc), in addition to them, I desire sharing some aspects of my existence with another human, and having them apprehend what I am as well as possible - not being entirely alone for the duration of my life -, understanding consciousness, and my own consciousness with its particularities, knowing what questions to ask, and preferring uncertainty to categorical answers, understanding the role of paradox (which appears to me to ultimately be an impossibility, as the existence of a paradox would either mean the world doesn't operate logically, that it does but only locally, that it can’t be mapped, that our map is incorrect, or that logic is incomplete), knowing whether all that is actual is all that is possible, knowing whether efforts to transcend point-of-view in a given theory can amount to anything… Again, I’ll move on, to next question, too many thing sto list, most of them consisting on meta-questions about the validity of what I’m doing.
16. a) What activities energize you most? b) What activities drain you most? Why?
Well the justification for both of the answers I’ll give has to do with my make-up, so in some sense, the explanation has already been reduced as much as it can be. I'm most energized by mentally challenging activities, problem solving of kinds of problems I've only just come into contact with, difficult and novel reading materials, prolonged trance-like introspection, intense sparing or public lecturing… Additionally a very good or personally significant conversation can energize me, though it's tricky, they drain me more often than not, even if satisfactory. A good story can energize me, especially one that lacks visual expression, as I rather like constructing that aspect myself. Some activities involving the expression of the ineffable can energize me, such as painting or dancing, provided they require a good portion of my attention. Repetitive tasks drain me, social settings drain me, routine drains me, obligation, especially cognitive obligation drains me, emotional euphoria tires me, polite or surface interaction exhausts me, things that have no relation to the level at which I'm interested in operating at drain me, which includes things that have no relation at all to essencial questions, highly technical, menial tasks drain me, things that clash very obviously with my current psychic state tire me.
17. Why do you want to know your type? What type do you think you are? Why this/these type(s)? Is there a type that appeals to you, to your self-perception, that you would like to be? Why? If you know your enneagram, please post this here. If you have done any online function tests such as the Keys2Cognition, it helps if you post these results here as well.
The primary reasons why I'm interested in knowing my type are that I'm very interested in that vein of thought, I'm currently reading aeon, and have thought of typology as potentially insightful for quite some time; I hope to discover more about flaws I'm unaware of, and pathways to development I've yet to discover, as well as find out what this system excludes, what it cannot deal with. I’m interested in typology in general because I'm interested in semantic constructions that can partly categorize humans, and I'm interested in this one in particular due to the affinity I have for Jung’ ideas about the collection unconscious. I'm not sure of the type I believe myself to be, I identify strongly with Ti, Ni, and Ne dominant types, but I've never been able to settle on one, as I find most descriptions (even descriptions of the functions) conflate content and structure in ways I find reprehensible, or at the very least, conflate secondary conclusions and the structures capable of bringing them about. I'm mostly split between INFJ, INTJ, INTP and ENTP. I don't identify very strongly with feeling types, but I believe the distinction that's frequently drawn between an ethical focus and a logical focus is a false one, both require axiomatic presumptions of value, they aren't all that distinct, they simply tend to be best suited to different data sets, and different levels of expression and existence, our conceptions of both are incomplete, once that is resolved I don't see why they'd be fundamentally different… I can elaborate on this is it's found relevant. Most N types appeal to my self perception in some way, some Si types as well, but I don't desire a particular one very strongly, this is categorization, not final definition, that which I am I'll be regardless of what I conclude about this matter, or desire. If it is relevant, my big five scores are 25th percentile extroversion, 30th percentile agreeableness, 35th percentile neuroticism, 40th percentile conscientiousness, 99th percentile openness. Keys2cognition score:
extraverted Sensing (Se) *************** (15.4)
unused
introverted Sensing (Si) ******************** (20.5)
limited use
extraverted Intuiting (Ne) ***************************************** (41.8)
excellent use
introverted Intuiting (Ni) *************************************** (39)
excellent use
extraverted Thinking (Te) ******************************** (32.8)
good use
introverted Thinking (Ti) ******************************************** (44.8)
excellent use
extraverted Feeling (Fe) ******************** (20.7)
limited use
introverted Feeling (Fi) ************************* (25.4)
18. Finally, is there something else you find to be of importance you want to add about yourself you think might be of relevance when helping to type you?
Many things, but I'm far too tired to continue writing, so I'll simply respond if inquired.
I ask that you provide your reasoning for typing me in whichever manner you do. Additionally, I'm interested in knowing my enneagram type, if you have a guess as to what that might be.
1. Is there anything that may affect the way you answer the questions? For example, a stressful time, mental illness, medications, special life circumstances? Other useful information includes sex, age, and current state of mind.
Female, twenty-one years of age, currently very sleep-deprived (and it’s 3AM, so my answers will be incoherent at the beginning, and unintelligible by the end), and a tad stressed. I’ve been diagnosed with clinical depression, and have pronounced obsessive tendencies.
2. Study these two images here and here. Which one do you prefer and why? How would you describe it?
I’m not particularly fond of either one, though I prefer the first, I tend to gravitate towards landscape shots, or abstract photography (although I rather like noir portraits as well). The second image strikes me as rather bland, nothing remarkable about the technique, subject, color, lighting, action, etc; nothing is conveyed through it, or nothing I’d care enough to notice. The second image benefits from the irreducible appeal of cinematic imagery, but doesn't have much else going for it, it “states†the scenery, which is more than what can be said of the first.
3. Please describe yourself as a person if you were to introduce yourself to someone else like in a cover letter. What kind of person are you and why?
I’m unsure of what to list, I’m unsure of what’s relevant, so I’ll simply list some of what comprises the core of my identity, my ego, if you will. I’m inquisitive by nature (and nurture), I devote most of my spare-time to reasoning from first principles, whether trying to grasp the underpinnings of the “map†that necessarily dictates my perception, and reevaluating my basal presuppositions, attempting to get at a fundamental ontological reality (and assessing whether such a thing exists, and is epistemologically accessible), or simply trying out philosophical toolkits. My existence, my self isn't very stable (though i always identify with my current state rather strongly, I constantly camp and decamp), apart from the features I’m naming, which I feel are my steady-state; most of what I do is try to run other minds or foreign constructions in emulation - to borrow from Eric Weinstein - comprehend interconnected sets of ideas, temporarily adopt them as true, test their boundaries, and ultimately rebuild them (and this does extend to minds, I often include linguistic style and emotional content in my experiments, I try to run the full frame of reference). I don’t believe a totalizing system ever could be built by humans (though I’m not disparaging the notion of a unity of knowledge), so although attempting to build one is certainly is in my nature, I try not to devote too much time to making sure my systems are peacemeal (humans weren’t built to represent their environment or themselves accurately, they weren’t built for correspondence-type truth, so funneling all cognition through a rational filter isn’t very effective, or even reasonable), rather, I take the observables of a given subset of things, and try to come up with a working model for it, an effective theory of sorts - and then, reconcile it with all else, if possible (it is very rarely possible, so I keep my observables and theories from mixing in an unruly fashion). An example of my camping and decamping was my recent experimentation with non-representationalist philosophy: I took it upon myself to fully adopt a Richard Rorty style view of things, and write a few essays starting from there. Before that, I did the same with Heidegger brand idealism, before that, James like pragmatism, etc. I should point out, however, that i feel my quests have a relatively stable underpinnings; for as long as I can recall, the ethos of my exploration has been a discovery of that which we call real, and the quality of “being trueâ€. It is also worth mentioning that occasionally, I will half-discover, half-construct a system, and become enamoured with it, adopt it full-time for quite a few months, live with the conviction that it is correct. Regardless of what I'm investigating, I do it with a laser focus, and metally relate all else to it. Though to pursue mathematics professionally, my interests span both the sciences and the humanities, I have a penchant for 19th century literature, don’t go a day without listening to music, adore jungian psychoanalysis, mythological analysis, religious symbolism and schema… I shan’t go on, I’d never be done with this. Though I’ll grant that I possess a marked analytic bent, I also care very profoundly about experience, be it understanding phenomenology and observing my own consciousness, or actually living, seeking the most engaging, challenging, and experientially significant modes of being. Because we are products of Darwinian processes, and we are finite, we’re bound to be optimized for utility and efficiency, not accurate conceptual encapsulation; this tells me that the amount of data that we cannot encapsulate in linguistic systems, let alone formal rational systems is unbelievably vast (not to say that the data wouldn’t conform to the norms of formality, were we capable of operating at that level, I’ve no clue as to the vastness of possible and actual types of information) - therefore, I live through and within narrative, poetry, metaphor, imagery, imagination and intuition as well; in dream-like domains that by virtue of ignorance among other things, seem to us to be magical. My thinking style oscillates between high methodological rigidity, tentative networking, linear (and non-linear) leaps, and fast track, multi-modal approaches. In terms of temperament, I’m generally composed, slightly tense, either attentive in the extreme, or beyond absent-minded, caring, sympathetic without being very empathetic (it isn’t that I live other’s pain, it’s that I try to align myself with the highest ideal possible in aiding them), eccentric in various ways. I’ll move on to the next section as this is getting painfully long.
4. What kind of person would you LIKE to be? Why? What kind of person would you NOT want to be? Why?
I would like to be someone who is fully embodied, so to speak, who’s models translate seamlessly into behaviour and emotion, a cogent “selfâ€. I’d like to carry myself lightly whilst contending with the most pressing and serious of matters, to be a sort of analog interface to living principles. I wish to attain a breadth and depth of culture and thought such that I can produce truly transdisciplinary thoughts. I’d like to listen as though I could at all times be entirely mistaken. I’d like to transcend my temperament, and rise to the ethical heights I can barely touch. I’d like to be a revolutionary in my own field, in posture, and I'm the broad sense. I’d hate to be blind to truth, or to myself, I’d hate to live in comfort or ever settle for what I am, no matter what that happens to be. I hope never to become dogmatic, never to be sure of what I know, or what that means, precisely. I’d hate to be “skeptical copy editorâ€, somebody so attached to verification, accuracy, etc, that they are unwilling to sustain disbelief, and leap into the unknown, bring forth an epistemic rebirth. I find the notion of being overtaken by primal, tribal programs apaling, and fear a lot of what comprises human nature (including fear, vengefulness - mostly because the way I adjudicate what’s just, as a determinist, doesn't gel with retribution - attachment, etc).
5. Do you think there are any differences to how you described yourself and how people actually perceive you? How do you think others would describe you? If there are any discrepancies between these two that are you are aware of; do you know why exactly that is?
I’m very private, so most of my peculiarities aren’t visible in “social†contexts; my personality probably collapses into a parody of itself when displayed at a low resolution. I’ve been told I come off as very stiff, a tad cold, - but polite - self-contained, awkward, overly formal, snobbish, pretentious, and overly rational - this last one probably comes from the fact that though I embrace very neuro-atypical pathways to insight, this isn’t evident in a twenty-minute conversation in which the participants have widely disparate working-definitions of concepts and terms (so I just come off as either disengaged, or oddly anal). Close friends, however, have told me that I’m very comforting in times of distress, that I have a sort of unaffected, steady warmth that’s soothing, and that I am, in such circumstances, very compassionate and understanding, and they don’t feel I’m judging them - I am, in most every sense of the word, I communicate this to them, that that’s why I can be of use to them, it's just that I'm not condemning them for the sins of their very humanity. Friends have told me that I’m very quiet in social settings, but quite talkative and humorous in more private contexts, even telling me I have a proclivity to go on philosophical or “informative†monologues. As a person, I've been described as argumentative, a bit dry, a good listener, curious to a fault, simultaneously arrogant and unsure of the ground I stand on, "stubbornly esoteric", “annoyingly abstract†or “far too specificâ€, disconnected… I’m often perceived as amoral, which isn’t a very accurate description, but I’m always orbiting around amoral stances, so it isn’t without truth... I think most discrepancies between my self image, and the perceptions others tend to have of me (that i know of) boil down to regulated expression, I’m not all that I am at all times in all circumstances.
6. What in life do you find to be of importance? Why? If you are unsure you can always take the Value Test and post the results here. Do note that it helps if you narrow it down to 20 or ideally 10 values as suggested at stage 2.
The values I hold dearest are truth, meaning, complexity, and adaptive fitness. When applied to human affairs, all of these necessarily trade off against each other, and all presuppose quite a lot of cognitive horsepower, so I’d have to say they’re grounded in a love for high-order information processing as well. For life in particular, I hope to live so as to expend myself entirely, to die knowing that the process I am was as fully realized as possible, that I achieved what I could, experienced what I craved, feared and needed, that I understood all I had the capacity to know; to die being dead already, spent and exhausted, not wishing for a re-do; knowing that I navigated all the potential before me thoroughly, that none was squandered. I hope never to settle into what I’ve built or end up building, never to let my crystalline structure suffice - this is part of the reason why I elected to pursue mathematics, no proof is like another, there isn’t an algorithmic procedure one can simply repeat, there’s no way to escape the leap, the effort, no way to flee the creative process.
7. How do you react to new situations in your life? Can you describe an event in your life where you were in an unknown situation? How did you deal with it?
Usually I learn as much about it as possible, and try to plan for it, - with varying degrees of success - something which I’d actually like to correct in myself, I wish to deal with the entirety of a situation, have my structure suffice, not pre-categorize the circumstances I’m expecting in order to defend myself from flaws in my own cognition - doing so prevents me from confronting the unknown, and benefiting from the fact of my insufficiencies. A recent example would be the month I spent abroad: It was the first time I left the country on my own, and I did so to attend a workshop of sorts on computational sciences. In preparation for this, I read up on almost all the topics that would be covered, began learning the local language… My strategy is just that, build a mental foundation, become proficient, face the opportunity. I should say, I do this with situations where intellect is a factor, not others, those I tend to embrace, take the fear to mean I’ve discovered an underdeveloped facet of myself.
8. Please describe yourself when you are in a stressful situation. How do you act and why? Real life experiences are welcome.
In stressful situations that are public, I appear very calm, my strategy is to gain control of the game I’m in by setting up the game myself. In other situations… Well, it depends very much, though my answer to this question resembles the one I gave to the question above. I try to focus enough on what the situation is so as to excuse myself from it, (I engage in quasi-mindfulness, but make the focus external) I simply ration my attention differently, I don’t monitor myself as closely as I monitor the circumstances, tasks, problems, tragedy, or people at hand. In situations where I was tested, my agony ended the moment the test itself began, so all my anxiety was brought on by projection… Most of my anxiety comes from being confronted with a “judgemental idealâ€, generally my own, it comes from what I believe a moment will reveal to me about myself. To take a different example, when a family member had a suicidal episode in my presence, the anxiety was only manifest mentally when I was neither engaging with them, problem solving, or taking action, for the grand majority it was only manifest physically. Anxiety comes to me as a desire to modify my current situation, it almost always compels me to act.
9. Please describe yourself when you are in an enjoyable situation. How do you act and why? Real life experiences are welcome.
Again, it depends very much. When alone, I maximize my focus, I tune out all that’s external, I try to heighten my satisfaction by living through the sequence of moments at many levels, I contemplate as I live, there’s a pleasant dissociation that I almost always enter into (unless I’m deriving my enjoyment from something tasking, something that requires all of my attention, which is not infrequent). If It’s a moment I’m sharing, than the dissociation is even more pronounced, I often feel as though I’m watching it play out in front of me, and what I actually experience is the synthesis of what I’m living - this is only occasionally interrupted by my senses. My most fulfilling moments have ranged from those of reaching a critical moment mentally, to sharing a song with a loved one, to being understood - with all that entails- , to exploring altered states of consciousness, to having a fascinating conversation, to reading fine literature, a brilliant essay, or watching great cinema. My behaviour here is entirely dictated by what, if anything, I perceive to be valuable about what I’m enjoying.
10. Describe your relationship to socialization. How do you perceive one-on-one interaction? How do you perceive group interaction?
I greatly value one-on-one interaction, I feel it is the least constrained by personal limitation, the only kind that comes close to allowing for communion, for truth in its entirety to be shared, and people understood. It is the kind that allows for the most joint expansion, that most satisfies my social needs, which primarily consist of being viewed for what I am, sharing the deepest reflection I’m capable of, articulating what I’ve not tapped into before, unravelling mysteries and mystery, and building insight in conjunction with someone else. The people I care for substantially, I “learnâ€, I take a course on that which they are, I seek to know them so fully as to know the meaning of their linguistic artifacts, of their emotional idiosyncrasies… None of this is possible in group interaction, which I mostly find taxing, frustrating, and wasteful - I really only engage in it for the sake of becoming competent in ways I’m currently not. Group interaction can be interesting to observe, but I don’t enjoy participating in it. I find groups mostly produce white noise, what’s palatable to the group as a unit falls short of each individual’s capacities at practically every level - and I don’t see many interesting, exclusive emergent properties to make up for this.
11. Describe your relationship to society. What are the elements of it you hold important or unimportant (e.g. social norms, values, customs, traditions)? How do you see people as a whole?
All society tends towards tyranny, this is a given, as they are hierarchical in nature, by definition built around favoring the majority, and primarily interested in systemic solutions which necessarily neglect anomaly. However, this is entirely necessary, and I’m willing to cede some ground to negotiated social order, provided the kinds of exceptions that are necessary for true shifts have a place(s) to exhibit themselves. Temperamentally, I’m iconoclastic, so the esteem I have for social order isn’t my judgement's natural setpoint. Tradition can never be valuable by virtue of past utility, or having existed for a significant portion of time (other than for providing a continuity of narrative); it can however, be valuable by virtue of what made it a tradition, by virtue of what brought it into being in the first place, and again, I believe this can be the case, at times. Social norms I can recognize as valuable, they are after all, constraints on the landscape of probable outcomes, which tends to be useful, but frankly, I don’t find them particularly profound, useful, or anything of the sort, I think they frequently hobble our capacity to jointly get at (the) truth. People as a whole… Is far too complicated a question for me to answer properly. People are the locus of value, of its very notion, meaning is the fact of subjectivity that brings value into being “objectivelyâ€, and in that, I feel they have some inherent value (paradoxical, but again, cannot delve deeply here), however, my mind is often an uncivilized dialogue between Hobbes and Rousseau. For the purposes of this question, I think people are not markedly virtuous or reprehensible, brilliant or daft, they mostly hover midair in the lowest effort position, defaulting to mostly neutral impulses and instincts, with a latent barbarity accompanied by positive potential. We have the capacity to be practically anything in the continuum of human existence, it is primarily a matter of initial conditions, and circumstance.
12. Describe your relationship to authority. How do you perceive authority? What does it mean to you, and how do you deal with it?
Authority is a byproduct of hierarchy, so that's mostly been answered… I don’t respond well to authority on the basis of nothing but itself, but it is frequently simply the consequence of the interaction of competence, intelligence, grace, etc, with the system in which it exists. Insofar as authority is a marker of something else, a secondary consequence I have no trouble relating to it. I generally don’t accept things on the basis of authority, though I will grant that there is some structural merit to it and will therefore take it into account. Much of what I believe about authority is similar to what I think about tradition, it can never be valuable due to its own nature alone (or at all).
13. Describe your relationship to order and chaos. What do order and chaos mean to you? How do they manifest in your daily life?
quite like the Peterson-esque way of conceptualizing order and chaos, order being the great father, all that is understood, categories themselves, oppressive, always partially blind and stale... Chaos being the mother, the unknown, anomaly, dangerous, but perennially reforming and refreshing. The individual as what mediates between the two. This applies to phenomenology alone, it isn’t a claim about the nature of a third-person, objective realm. I tend to keep myself on (at the edge), my prefered state of existence is one of discomfort, one in which I allow only for the structure that maintains that existence. I think of complexity as a dialogue between the two, each set of orderly constraints making for a new set of possibilities, too much chaos and nothing becomes actual, too much order and nothing is ever born. For me, the challenge is applying enough order so as to be able to perceive, but not enough so as to distort my vision too unforgivably with the oversimplification it brings along. They are just one of many ways to breakdown the constituent elements of experience, but one I find useful. As for how they manifest in my life, just in this way, I cannot define what chaos very precisely beyond this because whatever I belive it to be, content wise, will be precisely what its not; chaos is patent in my life when I know neither where I am, not how to go about discovering that fact, or when what I fear has a place of indeterminacy to inhabitant. Order is probably what I set out to communicate in these answers, what I know, or simply have yet to find fault with - though what happened was likely an exchange between the two.
14. What is it that you fear in life? Why? How does this fear manifest to you both in how you think and how you act?
I fear the unremarkable, I fear being unremarkable, as I feel what “isâ€, at any level that I would regard as significant, manifests a series of outliers in our current models, meaning large scale approaches won’t do - and I should very much like to participate in that unravelling, in that informed contemplation. I fear that my natural tendency towards living immersed in possibility alone will mean none of what I might or could be will come to be actual (not even within my own mind, which is what the statement is in reference to). I fear being unable to deal with the truth, and failing to notice that inability. I fear my demise, put simply, though I recognize that immortality makes no sense for beings such as myself (and eternity might even resemble torture), so a second fear emerges, that I will neither come to terms with the finitude that I’m already living, nor be able to envision a hypothetical solution. I fear that my time will be squandered, or that I will invest so much into being correctly aligned with the truth that I will fail to be effective.
15. What is it that you desire in life? What do you strive to achieve? Why? Where do you think these drives and desires stem from or are inspired by?
Again, this has mostly been answered above, but I suppose what I desire is more than what’s against what I fear… So the ones that you can take from the paragraph above are present (being or contributing remarkable things in terms of individual and collective understanding, having most of the layers I inhabit come together, working with, and alongside the truth, whatever it is, always being able to recognize it and embrace it, to die as realized as I could be, etc), in addition to them, I desire sharing some aspects of my existence with another human, and having them apprehend what I am as well as possible - not being entirely alone for the duration of my life -, understanding consciousness, and my own consciousness with its particularities, knowing what questions to ask, and preferring uncertainty to categorical answers, understanding the role of paradox (which appears to me to ultimately be an impossibility, as the existence of a paradox would either mean the world doesn't operate logically, that it does but only locally, that it can’t be mapped, that our map is incorrect, or that logic is incomplete), knowing whether all that is actual is all that is possible, knowing whether efforts to transcend point-of-view in a given theory can amount to anything… Again, I’ll move on, to next question, too many thing sto list, most of them consisting on meta-questions about the validity of what I’m doing.
16. a) What activities energize you most? b) What activities drain you most? Why?
Well the justification for both of the answers I’ll give has to do with my make-up, so in some sense, the explanation has already been reduced as much as it can be. I'm most energized by mentally challenging activities, problem solving of kinds of problems I've only just come into contact with, difficult and novel reading materials, prolonged trance-like introspection, intense sparing or public lecturing… Additionally a very good or personally significant conversation can energize me, though it's tricky, they drain me more often than not, even if satisfactory. A good story can energize me, especially one that lacks visual expression, as I rather like constructing that aspect myself. Some activities involving the expression of the ineffable can energize me, such as painting or dancing, provided they require a good portion of my attention. Repetitive tasks drain me, social settings drain me, routine drains me, obligation, especially cognitive obligation drains me, emotional euphoria tires me, polite or surface interaction exhausts me, things that have no relation to the level at which I'm interested in operating at drain me, which includes things that have no relation at all to essencial questions, highly technical, menial tasks drain me, things that clash very obviously with my current psychic state tire me.
17. Why do you want to know your type? What type do you think you are? Why this/these type(s)? Is there a type that appeals to you, to your self-perception, that you would like to be? Why? If you know your enneagram, please post this here. If you have done any online function tests such as the Keys2Cognition, it helps if you post these results here as well.
The primary reasons why I'm interested in knowing my type are that I'm very interested in that vein of thought, I'm currently reading aeon, and have thought of typology as potentially insightful for quite some time; I hope to discover more about flaws I'm unaware of, and pathways to development I've yet to discover, as well as find out what this system excludes, what it cannot deal with. I’m interested in typology in general because I'm interested in semantic constructions that can partly categorize humans, and I'm interested in this one in particular due to the affinity I have for Jung’ ideas about the collection unconscious. I'm not sure of the type I believe myself to be, I identify strongly with Ti, Ni, and Ne dominant types, but I've never been able to settle on one, as I find most descriptions (even descriptions of the functions) conflate content and structure in ways I find reprehensible, or at the very least, conflate secondary conclusions and the structures capable of bringing them about. I'm mostly split between INFJ, INTJ, INTP and ENTP. I don't identify very strongly with feeling types, but I believe the distinction that's frequently drawn between an ethical focus and a logical focus is a false one, both require axiomatic presumptions of value, they aren't all that distinct, they simply tend to be best suited to different data sets, and different levels of expression and existence, our conceptions of both are incomplete, once that is resolved I don't see why they'd be fundamentally different… I can elaborate on this is it's found relevant. Most N types appeal to my self perception in some way, some Si types as well, but I don't desire a particular one very strongly, this is categorization, not final definition, that which I am I'll be regardless of what I conclude about this matter, or desire. If it is relevant, my big five scores are 25th percentile extroversion, 30th percentile agreeableness, 35th percentile neuroticism, 40th percentile conscientiousness, 99th percentile openness. Keys2cognition score:
extraverted Sensing (Se) *************** (15.4)
unused
introverted Sensing (Si) ******************** (20.5)
limited use
extraverted Intuiting (Ne) ***************************************** (41.8)
excellent use
introverted Intuiting (Ni) *************************************** (39)
excellent use
extraverted Thinking (Te) ******************************** (32.8)
good use
introverted Thinking (Ti) ******************************************** (44.8)
excellent use
extraverted Feeling (Fe) ******************** (20.7)
limited use
introverted Feeling (Fi) ************************* (25.4)
18. Finally, is there something else you find to be of importance you want to add about yourself you think might be of relevance when helping to type you?
Many things, but I'm far too tired to continue writing, so I'll simply respond if inquired.
I ask that you provide your reasoning for typing me in whichever manner you do. Additionally, I'm interested in knowing my enneagram type, if you have a guess as to what that might be.
