Author: Andi

How about this for a definition of emotion?

From Power, M. (2010, pp. 18-19) [Emotion-Focused Cognitive Therapy, Wiley-Blackwell]:

“Emotions are mental and bodily states that typically comprise a constellation of physiological, behavioural and psychological processes that follow the appraisal or evaluation of a situation or event as relevant to the individual’s goals. These goals range from basic drive-based survival goals to higher-order interpersonal and aesthetic goals. There are a limited set of such emotion states that include fear, sadness, anger, disgust and happiness, all of which have come to signal in a multitask multilevel system shifts in the priority of goal-based functioning and from which an infinite range of more complex emotions are derivable. These emotion states are normally short-lived in nature and need only last a matter of seconds or minutes; when they become more chronic, they are normally referred to as “moods” for which the instigating situation or event may have been forgotten. The conscious aspect of an emotion is referred to as its “affect” or “feeling”, though under many circumstances emotions can be unconscious and have no reportable affect state.”

John Cleese on creativity

Here’s the gist of what John Cleese thinks helps creativity (video long gone, so you will have to take my word for it):

  1. We don’t know where we get our ideas from. But probably not from our laptops.
  2. If you’re trying to create something late at night and get stuck, go to bed. You might have a solution by the time you wake up.
  3. It can be useful to lose stuff.  Reconstructions from memory are often better than the original.
  4. Find a space where you’re not interrupted.
  5. Give yourself a starting time and a finishing time to play.
  6. People who aren’t very creative often don’t realise this, and might not recognise creativity in other people.
  7. Stay away from egotistical people. They want to claim credit for everyone’s ideas and be in control of everything that goes on. They will actively discourage creativity in other people.

On the inseparability of intellect and emotion (from 1933)

“[…] Imagine that we are engaged in a friendly serious discussion with some one, and that we decide to enquire into the meanings of words. For this special experiment, it is not necessary to be very exacting, as this would enormously and unnecessarily complicate the experiment. It is useful to have a piece of paper and a pencil to keep a record of the progress.

“We begin by asking the ‘meaning’ of every word uttered, being satisfied for this purpose with the roughest definitions; then we ask the ‘meaning’ of the words used in the definitions, and this process is continued usually for no more than ten to fifteen minutes, until the victim begins to speak in circles—as, for instance, defining ‘space’ by ‘length’ and ‘length’ by ‘space’. When this stage is reached, we have come usually to the undefined terms of a given individual. If we still press, no matter how gently, for definitions, a most interesting fact occurs. Sooner or later, signs of affective disturbances appear. Often the face reddens; there is bodily restlessness; sweat appears—symptoms quite similar to those seen in a schoolboy who has forgotton his lesson, which he ‘knows but cannot tell’. […] Here we have reached the bottom and the foundation of all non-elementalistic meanings—the meanings of undefined terms, which we ‘know’ somehow, but cannot tell. In fact, we have reached the un-speakable level. This ‘knowledge’ is supplied by the lower nerve centres; it represents affective first order effects, and is interwoven and interlocked with other affective states, such as those called ‘wishes’, ‘intentions’, ‘intuitions’, ‘evalution’, and many others. […]

“The above explanation, as well as the neurological attitude towards ‘meaning’, as expressed by Head, is non-elementalistic. We have not illegitimately split organismal processes into ‘intellect’ and ’emotions’.”

Reference

Korzybski, A. (1933).  Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics Institute of General Semantics.

Solomon Kullback: Oral History Interview

Read about Kullback on Wikipedia.

The oral history is on the NSA website over here.

Loads of cryptanalysis anecdotes therein (if you’re into that kinda thing), e.g., (p. 119):

There used to be coke machines, the Army version of the coke machines, I guess. You put in a nickel and a cup would come and you would get a coke. Well, it wasn’t long before the people discovered that the machine, when you dropped a coin in, would turn on. But if you pull the plug out, the mechanism which turned it off failed to operate. So people would go in there and put in their nickel and get a cup, pull the plug out and everybody in the wing would go get their cup of coke. So after a while, the vendor who filled these machines sort of looked at it and began to complain to General Corderman about the fact that here is a machine at the end of a day, all of the cokes and so on were used up and gone but he only finds a couple of nickels in it. “What gives?” I guess eventually Corderman checked and found out about the fact that people had found out that if you pull the plug once the machine got started then the mechanism which shut it off would fail. So he sent out a very cute notice to everybody in the Arlington Hall Station. It said, “Now that we have solved the machine and have enjoyed some of the fruits of that solution, I think we ought to provide the vendor with a nickel for each cup of coca cola.”

 

Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices item taxonomies

There are classifications galore.  Below is a comparison of one by DeShon, Chan, and Weissbein (1995) with one by Styles (2008):

DeShon et al
Styles ? Analytic Both Either Visual
? 1 0 0 0 0
D/T 0 1 0 0 0
Distribution 0 2 0 0 0
Equation 0 1 3 0 8
S/D 0 1 0 0 0
S/D/T 0 3 1 0 0
S/T 0 0 0 0 1
Seriation 0 1 2 4 3
Transformation 0 3 0 0 1

Pretty good agreement between DeShon and co’s “visuospatial” and Styles’ “equation” (both what does and doesn’t fall into these buckets).  The “equation” items concern those with “overlapping elements” – seems pretty visuospatial.  Also neither classification codes item 15: DeShon and co say it violates the task instructions.  The rest is a bit of a mess, but then Styles peeked at a higher resolution into the analytic items.

References

DeShon, R. P., Chan, D., & Weissbein, D. A. (1995).  Verbal overshadowing effects on Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices: Evidence for multidimensional performance determinants. Intelligence, 21, 135-155

Styles, I. (2008).  Linking Psychometric and Cognitive-Developmental Frameworks for Thinking About Intellectual Functioning.  In Raven, J. & Raven, J. (ed.), Uses and Abuses of Intelligence: Studies Advancing Spearman and Raven’s Quest for Non-Arbitrary Metrics. Royal Fireworks Press.

Authority

“… In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.

“I bow before the authority of special [people] because it is imposed on me by my own reason. I am conscious of my own inability to grasp, in all its detail, and positive development, any very large portion of human knowledge. […] there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subbordination.”

—Mikhail Bakunin, What is Authority?

Direct action

“Proceeding with the belief that in every situation, every individual and group has the possibility of some direct action on some level of generality, we may discover much that has been unrecognised, and the importance of much that has been underrated. So politicalised is our thinking, so focused to the motions of governmental institutions, that the effects of direct efforts to modify one’s environment are unexplored. The habit of direct action is, perhaps, identical with the habit of being a free [person], prepared to live responsibly in a free society.”

David Wieck (1962), The Habit of Direct Action (quoted by Colin Ward, 1973)

Kropotkin on philosophy

“… in what respect does the philosopher, who pursues science in order that he may pass life pleasantly to himself, differ from that drunkard there, who only seeks the immediate gratification that gin affords him? The philosopher has, past all question, chosen his enjoyment more wisely, since it affords him a pleasure far deeper and more lasting than that of the toper. But that is all! Both one and the other have the same selfish end in view, personal gratification.”

(From An Appeal to the Young by Pyotr Kropotkin)