Noesis

 

The Journal of the Mega Society

Number 68

March/April 1992

 

EDITORIAL

Rick Rosner

5139 Balboa Blvd #303

Encino CA 91316-3430

(818) 986-9177

 

Again, my apologies for the inordinate length of time it's taken to get these issues to you.  Though my fecklessness is partially to blame, much of the delay is due to low-tech problems with high-tech equipment.  The old modem system, which I'd used for about a year to transmit edited material to Chris Cole for publication, grew increasingly balky, knocking me off-line at decreasing intervals & forcing me to spend large amounts of time logging on and reentering lost material.  Cole, Dean Inada and I could never figure out exactly what was causing the degraded signal, so Chris finally provided me with a PC.  Now I just enter everything into my system and send him a disc with the finished? issues.  I think this will work better (though my first display screen burned out after a week & had to be replaced), and I plan on resuming? a monthly publication schedule.

 

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Hughes Gervais, Chris Langan, and Daryl Inman--I received your letters.  They will be printed in the May, '92 Noesis.

 

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Considering the current attacks on and defenses of abortion law, I thought it would be interesting to solicit your opinions.  Do you have strong sentiments one way or the other, and do you have sets of arguments which support those sentiments?  I'm pro-choice, feeling that a first-trimester fetus isn't a sensing, thinking being to any great extent.  (If you're pro-life, don't consider this an attack, consider it an opportunity to present your opinions and arguments.  On either side of this or any issue, remember your readership and offer concise (meaning short, short, short) and well-reasoned statements.

 

Secondly, what do y'all think of the death penalty?  I used to have a knee-jerk stance against it, and I'm certainly against it in its current, media-bathed, circus atmosphere form, but my opinion is wavering, which leads to a third question:

 

Do you find, as you age, that you grow more conservative?  I worry that this is happening to me, and that, if I reach Reagan's age, I will think like him.

 

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Unlike the old system, this editing setup lets me create simple graphics, so you can now include diagrams in material submitted to Noesis.

 

 

TWO LETTERS AND AN ARTICLE ON INTELLIGENCE FROM CHRIS HARDING

 

Dear Rick Rosner,

 

Thank you for Noesis No. 65 and 66..  Since I'm overdue please find attached 60 Aust D.  I can't get to a bank right now and I want to square up quickly: you may adjust the (number) following my name--I don't know  how far--I'll leave that to you; suffice to say I must maintain my membership with due alacrity!

 

I hope we will not squabble amongst ourselves.  Ron H. and Kevin L. are both good men.

 

May I say I am fully aware of the shortcomings of the MULTIMAX test.  It is too short for one thing.  But it was only intended to be one of a number of sets I was to develop and norm.  There is much to be said for a test devised by multiple authorship: eradication of personal bias for one thing!

 

My own aim in developing the Multimax and others in the last two years has been to devise tests which were loaded on the insight end of the scale with less call on the skill processes.  Only this kind of test is going to pick real Genius.

 

Further--in order to present a convincing proof to the world at large such a test ought to be normed by several independent reviewers.  I own a suitable computer for norming purposes i.e. 10 meg of RAM and capable of over 30 mips in a recent test of its performance so I hope I can be in on this work.

 

The General Theory of Relativity aimed to overcome the "twin paradox" of the Special Theory.  I fail to see that it does.  Perhaps someone can show me the error but it appears to me that a space vehicle having accelerated away from Earth in launching a lifeboat that accelerates back towards us recreates the problem.  The one doing the accelerating does the contracting etc.  Does that mean that standing still in space to us Earthlings it has undergone multiple contraction etc.?

 

Please note:  (1) I did not found the Omega Society.  (2) It's now moribund if not defunct.  People keep writing to me about this.  I have heard from no one in years and don't now count myself as a member if it.

 

I am happy to remain a member of the Mega-Noetic complex if I can call it that.  Florit Mega!

 

On the matter of ISPE may I say this: I apologized to Clinton Williams in private before and have now gone public in the case of John Kormes.  I have been subject to shabby dealings at the hands of the ISPE.  I AM IN A POSITION TO KNOW THE FACTS IN RELATION TO MYSELF IN A WAY THAT CANNOT BE CONTESTED.  In retrospect I now realize that it was inevitable that they would in time get round to me!  May I say further that it is by now well known that I have never held what could be called power within the Society and have had a backseat now since the early eighties.  May I say further that ISPE is a lesson we all need to learn.  The original object of the board of governors was to lend stability to THE AIMS of the organization.  This presupposed that the members had the ability and will to live up to the avowed standards--something I've yet to see.  The tragic downside is that the overstructuring of the organization has ensconced authoritarianism with all that it breeds.  I am ashamed to have others note I am the Founder of it.  MY IDEALS ARE BETTER THAN THAT.  I mention all this since the matter has once again been raised in passing and will not go away.

 

I shall write a number of pieces for Noesis in due course; hopefully soon.

 

Sincerely,

 

Chris Harding

 

 

Dear Rick,

 

Enclosed an item you may find of interest.  We have made a number of breakthroughs since this was written.  (Even it has so far not been published.)

 

I'm afraid we are getting ahead of ourselves a bit since we are now considering how best to "nest" the code.  (We have a breakthrough here too!)  All our more recent insights are badly in need of writing up in permanent form, and publishing somewhere (for preservation purposes), and we'll try to get 'round to this!

 

Chris

 

ON THE NATURE OF INTELLIGENCE

by Peter Adrian Wone*

 

Aspects of intelligence that have previously not been satisfactorily dealt with are:

 

1) the facility for imagination, and

 

2) the facility for abstraction.

 

These two aspects of intelligence are not disparate, but inextricably allied.  Imagination is the capacity of the mind to generate new symbols (or modify the meaning of old symbols) or groups of symbols to represent non-tangible situations.  Any facility for abstraction depends on that ability.

 

The word mind is defined here as the operation of a mechanism such that it may

 

a) define its own goals and purposes, and

 

b) manipulate abstractions symbolically.

 

Symbolic handling of abstraction permits multi-layer and recursive abstractions.

 

Neural nets, as well as other mechanisms, have been devised which exhibit effective target-seeking behaviour.  Such systems are also known as Stimulus Response Engines.  These systems cannot exhibit intelligent behaviour because their targets must be externally set: they cannot define goals for themselves.  Given a defined goal the more efficient of them appear to display acute intelligence in their quasi-symbolic decompositional treatment of problems.

 

To make a stimulus response engine (SRE) truly intelligent, we must present to it a situation from which the SRE may--preferably MUST--develop as the best solution a self-deterministic universe model.

 

Identity as the Basis of Intelligence

 

Self-awareness (identity) is the cornerstone of abstraction.  It provides purpose (goals) which, by defining target responses allow a stimulus response engine to operate on intangibles.

 

SRE's are simple goal-seeking devices, exhibiting basically the same behaviour as a rat in a maze.  The current crop of SRE's cope with mazes

 

(a) heuristically, and

(b) by rigorous elimination,

 

but simply cannot be APPLIED to abstractions that have not been contrived to suit the heurism/elimination (H/E) approach.  Since the whole point of intelligence is that a sentient can either devise its own plan of attack or re-arrange the problem to suit the H/E technique, a SRE is not intelligent.

 

Identity provides goals, and consequently the capacity to deal with abstraction.  The restatement of a problem in a form susceptible to H/E may be considered as a problem in its own right, and if that is insufficient then nothing prevents the recursive application of this method.  Questions do exist that will not succumb to this approach, but these are known collectively as "Philosophy" and their solutions--if solutions exist--are literally academic, though no less significant for it.

 

The concept of intelligence as the crux of intelligence appears to suggest that humour, love and all the other positive emotions have a definitive function; they improve the coherence of an identity and consequently the integrity of its abstract goal-seeking mechanism.  This agrees with the psychological belief insofar as its obvious corollary is that negative emotive patterns will tend to be disruptive and in the long term destructive to an individual's reasoning faculties.

 

On the Question of How to Impart Identity to a SRE

 

It has been the author's experience that, like infant humans,

 

(a) feral dogs exhibit little self-awareness or ability for abstraction, and

 

like humans raised in an environment full of intelligent, thinking people who treat them as individuals possessing volition,

 

(b) dogs kept by thinking people normally begin to display both of these qualities.

 

The point is that self-awareness is, in a sense, a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Consider a sophisticated SRE (capable of modeling extremely complex--2nd, 3rd and even higher order mechanical relations) homing on the most efficient response mechanism.  Observation suggests that by maintaining an expectation of identity and volition (the required behaviour) in the role of provider (the reward), one may engender a circumstance wherein the above SRE is also homing on a behaviour pattern closely modeling identity: a situation where identity will develop spontaneously.

 

Another example of this occurring in nature is the domestication of dolphins and porpoises.  Prolonged contact with humans has produced countless specimens who are obviously strongly self-aware and whose abstract problem-solving facility has been the subject of wonder and conjecture for quite some time.**

 

Only the inception of identity is spontaneous, though: once established, identity enables abstraction.  Because abstraction permits tremendous simplification of many situation models--and therefore faster response to stimuli--it can therefore be expected to rapidly entrench itself.

 

In conclusion, then it is not necessary (even if possible) construct full-fledged, adult intelligences.  Rather, a sophisticated SRE must be provided with senses of some description, needs (of what variety remains to be seen), and tolerance, understanding, stimulation, guidance and support from one whose role is basically one of parent.

 

TO BE CONTINUED

 

* This article resulted from discussions held during 1989 and 1990 between Chris Harding, a member of the Mega Society, and Peter Wone, an A.I. aficionado.

 

** My personal opinion is that these cetaceans are intelligent anyway, but possess such alien paradigms that they cannot communicate with men without learning everything anew.  Hence they APPEAR non-sentient.  An analogy is the barrier people have when talking to computer programmers.  If the programmers did not also know how to think and speak in English (possess a congruent symbol set), most people probably wouldn't believe they were intelligent (many don't) except by anthropomorphic association.  There are many paths to enlightenment (sic).

 

 

A LETTER FROM PETER OLIVER

 

Dear Rick:

 

Some time ago you mentioned a very funny book by Paul Fussell, Class.  I'll bet I purchased and distributed to friends at least 10 copies.  The book is a riot!  Anyway, he has a new book out, Bad, which I think you'll like.

 

Another fascinating book--it has just been released, in fact--is Paul Johnson's Birth of the Modern.  In it he examines developments in science and technology, culture and politics from a global standpoint.  I can't recommend this volume highly enough.

 

Sincere regards,

 

Peter Oliver

 

P.S.  Got a big kick out of your setting of an Einstein "thought experiment" in the age of "dereg" and megabankruptcy.

 

 

LETTERS & AN ARTICLE FROM RICHARD W. MAY

 

Dear Rick,

 

On the off chance that there is still a One-Per-Million or Noetic Society and that you are the Editor and that I am still a member (or that we are virtual members) I have enclosed curiosa.  Have I been excommunicated for being politically incorrect or have there been no issues of Noesis for months?  What is/isn't going on?

 

Best,

 

Richard

 

 

Prescript: I applaud your Provisions of the Merger in Issue No. 65!

 

Dear Rick,

 

Thank you for telephoning and leaving the message with my girlfriend.

 

I support Ron Hoeflin's goal of selection of members at the one per million level, regardless of past or future effectiveness at doing this and if need be the discontinuation of members who merely wish to undermine this goal.  However, members should be free to criticize our psychometric effectiveness, I believe.

 

It might be appropriate to also have other, research oriented, problem-solving goals, as I think Chris Cole advocates.  I agree with Chris Cole that Ron Hoeflin's tests are the best, high-level psychometric instruments yet developed.  It might be desirable to have a complete roster of the combined members & subscribers and addresses.

 

Richard

 

 

from Who's Who in the World:

 

MAY, RICHARD WARREN, author, consultant, inventor; b. Marlboro, Mass., Mar. 1, 1944; s. Richard and Lavinia (Crane) M. BS in Psychology, U. Mass., 1968; postgrad. in Philosophy, Calif. State U., Dominguez Hills.  Lic. real estate broker.  Tchr. Boston Pub. Schs., Boston, 1970-89; pres., founder The Aleph (formerly Promethian Pastimes), Boston, 1975--; adv. bd. mem. and research assoc. Point One Adv. Group, Inc.  Author: (games of strategy) Game of the Gods, 1984, TriHex, 1985: patentee game bd. and pieces TriHex, 1988.  Mem. Assn. Advance Ethical Hypnosis, West Orange, N.J., 1974-75, Boston Tchrs. Union, 1984-89, Point One Adv. Group.  Fellow Internat. Soc. Philos. Enquiry (asst. historian 1981-82, sr, rsch. fellow); mem. Prometheus Soc. (past first jour. editor, ombudsman 1984--), Hoeflin Rsch. Group, One-in-Million Soc., Triple Nine Soc. (membership officer 1983-84, regent 1987), Mensa, Cincinnatus Soc., Minerva Soc., Intertel (Lakewood, Colo.).

 

 

METAPHYSICS AND PERSONALITY

 

by Ron Hoeflin

 

[Editor's note: In this paper, as in his paper in Noesis 67, Hoeflin makes a wide-ranging application of the theory of a purposive act and its phases.  Here, he draws parallels between these phases and personality types and disorders.  Some of his discussion of phases and their metaphysical equivalents can be found nearly word-for-word in his Noesis 67 paper.  Thus, to save space and work, I've omitted this part of his discussion from this paper.  Also, as with the previous paper, I've left out his citations of sources.]

 

To set the stage for the discussion that follows, let me begin with three quotes from the writings of Carl Jung.  In Psychological Types he wrote: "The concept of the unconscious is for me an exclusively psychological concept and not a philosophical concept of a metaphysical nature."  In Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious he seems to be elaborating on this point in the following passage:

 

But I am an empiricist, not a philosopher; I cannot let myself presuppose that my peculiar temperament, my own attitude to intellectual problems, is universally valid.  Apparently this is an assumption in which only the philosopher may indulge, who always takes it for granted that his own disposition and attitude are universal, and will not recognize the fact, if he can avoid it, that his "personal equation" conditions his philosophy.

  . . . Significantly enough, it is Kant's doctrine of categories, more than anything else, that destroys in embryo every attempt to revive metaphysics in the old sense of the word. . . .  During the century and a half that have elapsed since the Critique of Pure Reason, the conviction has gradually gained ground that thinking, understanding, and reason cannot be regarded as independent processes subject only to the eternal laws of logic, but that they are psychic functions coordinated with the personality and subordinate to it.  [Emphases added.]

 

The third and last preliminary quote from Jung's writings, again from his Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, is the following passage in which he introduces his famous concept of the collective unconscious:

 

    My thesis, then, is as follows: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals.  This collective unconscious odes not develop individually but is inherited.  It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.

    Medical psychology, growing as it did out of professional practice, insists on the personal nature of the psyche.  by this I mean the views of Freud and Adler.  It is a psychology of the person, and its aetiological or causal factors are regarded almost wholly as personal in nature.  Nonetheless, even this psychology is based on certain general biological factors, for instance on the sexual instinct or on the urge for self-assertion, which are by no means merely personal peculiarities. . . .  Neither of these views [Freud's or Adler's] would deny the existence of a priori instincts common to man and animal alike, or that they have a significant influence on personal psychology.  Yet instincts are impersonal, universally distributed, hereditary factors of a dynamic or motivating character, which very often fail so completely to reach consciousness that modern psychotherapy is faced with the task of helping the patient to become conscious of them.  [Here and in the preceding quotes Jung's emphases have been omitted and mine have been added.]

 

My own thesis can be summarized as follows:

 

(1)  Metaphysics may be thought of as an attempt to articulate a (usually rational, well-thought-out, comprehensive) conscious orientation towards reality, although one that may be influenced by the unconscious.

 

(2)  Personality, on the other hand, may be thought of as the expression of a relatively more spontaneous, unconscious orientation towards reality, although one that may be influenced by conscious thought.

 

(3)  If the unconscious can influence one's metaphysical orientation, as it evidently can, then it ought to fall within the purview of metaphysical inquiry, if only to enable the metaphysician to guard against any unsuspected and undesirable biases it might introduce.

 

(4)  If the collective unconscious is concerned with "pre-existent forms" that are "universally distributed," as Jung held, then it is all the more suitable as a subject for metaphysical scrutiny, since universal forms are traditionally among the chief concerns of such scrutiny.

 

(5)  Examination of the structure of a purposive act reveals five fundamental forms or phases that underlie not just instinctual behavior but any conscious or unconscious purposive behavior and that accordingly stamp their impression on metaphysics and personality alike.  In Jungian terms, these phases would appear to be "archetypes of the collective unconscious."

 

(6)  Thus, for example, Kant's categories, far from destroying traditional metaphysics "in embryo," as Jung asserted, exhibit much the same pattern as one of the oldest examples of traditional metaphysics, Aristotle's causes, both evidently conforming to the aforementioned phases or archetypes.

 

(7)  And in the realm of personality, two of the most up-to-date and comprehensive lists of personality types, the DSM-III-R and the 16PF, can be interpreted as exhibiting patterns that, once again, appear to conform to the five-phase structure of a purposive act, as I shall try to show..

 

The present theory originated with a study of the philosophy of the American philosopher, Stephen C. Pepper (1891-1972), who taught at the University of California at Berkeley (1919-1958), serving as chairman of its Art Department (1938-1953) and of its Philosophy Department (1953-1958), and who was the author of nearly a dozen books.  His last book, Concept and Quality (1967), proposed a metaphysical theory called selectivism based on the root metaphor or central guiding concept of a purposive act, a concept explored in depth in his 1958 tome, The Sources of Value.

 

Among his key reasons for choosing the purposive act as his root metaphor Pepper mentioned the fact that "It is the act associated with intelligence" and "can go on in the full illumination of consciousness."  But he was well aware of the importance of the unconscious, remarking that "There is a wealth of qualitative activity going on below the level of consciousness" and adding that

 

    . . . With this discovery [of unconscious activity] we suddenly find we have access to and evidence for a great depth of qualitative material.  Moreover, experimenting with this material open to recall and to being talked about, we discover that it is highly ordered.  It does not come up hit or miss.  It comes up in strings and groups.  Also, it lies in layers, some memories being much deeper than others.  these qualities, incidentally, are not only visual ones, or sensory ones, but also at the same time emotional and drive charged.  What is remembered is wholes and fragments of purposes. . . .

    Next it may be noted that this organized mass of qualitative material constitutes a large part of what is called my personality.  [Emphasis added.]

 

Although Pepper makes no mention of Jung's distinction between the personal and collective unconscious, here at least is one philosopher who made personality and the unconscious integral to his metaphysics.

 

Let me begin, then, with the following slightly modified version of Pepper's schematization of a typical purposive act:  [See Noesis 67}

 

  . . . The five types of metaphysics just discussed I call narrow-gage metaphysical perspectives because each emphasizes a specific phase of a purposive act.  There are also broad-gage metaphysical perspectives, however, notably Aristotle's causes and Kant's categories, that encompass nearly all of the five phases.

 

After a lucid exposition of Aristotle's causes in Concept and Quality, Pepper makes the comment that, although he likes the breadth of Aristotle's approach, he nonetheless regards the structure of Aristotle's metaphysics and his own as "quite different."  I find, however, that there are remarkable parallels between Aristotle's causes--formal, material, efficient, and final--and the structure of a purposive act.  According to Aristotle:

 

there are three principles--the form, the privation, and the matter . . . e.g., in color they are white, black, and surface, and in day and night they are light, darkness, and air.

 

These examples suggest that by formal cause Aristotle had in mind qualities such as white and light, and qualities, as previously indicated, are of principal concern in the fifth, aesthetic phase.  Similarly, the examples suggest that by material cause Aristotle had in mind the spatial substrate of objects, surface being a two-dimensional substrate and air a three-dimensional one.  So I associate material cause with the fourth, deductive phase, since it is in that phase that we locate, arrange, and otherwise deal with objects spatially, and even in Aristotle's day, slightly prior to Euclid, the science of spatial relations, geometry, was preeminently deductive.  Aristotle says that efficient cause is exemplified by "the man who gave advice" or "the father . . . of the child," examples that suggest that by efficient cause Aristotle meant an agent of change.  Note that my second-phase question, How should I do it?, can be reworded, By what agency can I do it?  Note also that Pepper's root metaphor for mechanism, "a machine," is a sort of agency, as is an anticipatory set, the former being a mechanical agency and the latter a biological one.  And Aristotle says that by final cause he means "purpose" or "that for the sake of which."  My first-phase question, What should I do?, can be reworded,  For what purpose (for the sake of what) should

I act?, which links final cause to the first phase.

 

Such commentators as Jonathan Bennett, C. D. Broad, John Kemp, Norman Kemp Smith, W. H. Walsh, and even Henry E. Allison, who is generally quite sympathetic towards Kant, all express considerable doubt and perplexity concerning Kant's two methods of  justifying his categories.  The so-called metaphysical deduction, which correlates the categories with a supposedly comprehensive list of logical forms called a table of judgments, is compared by Bennett to the "Social Register [which] purports by its mere existence to prove something about the status of its contents," while the so-called transcendental deduction, which apparently seeks to justify the categories by considerations of space and time, is described by Bennett as a "jungle," "dreadfully confused," "not a patchwork but a botch," and even "neurotically inept."  I believe that at least the four main category headings--quantity, quality, relation, and modality--can be roughly justified by correlating them with four of the five phases of a purposive act.  Quality can immediately be correlated with the fifth phase in view of my previous remarks associating this phase with aesthetics and considerations of quality.  Regarding quantity, Kant discussed what he called intensive quantity and extensive quantity, considering under the former heading whether there can be an absolute vacuum and under the latter whether the universe is bounded or not.  Thus, Kant's concept of quantity seems preoccupied, like Aristotle's material cause, with spatial issues, leading me, for similar reasons, to classify it in the fourth phase.  Under relation Kant included the categories of "cause and effect" and "reciprocity between agent and patient," which seem to correspond best to my third phase, where second-phase agents grapple with fourth-phase goal objects.  Last, modality concerns the concepts of possibility and necessity, which I would classify in the second phase, since it is through anticipatory sets that we envision the possibilities and necessities of a situation.

 

The results so far are summarized in Table 1.

 

TABLE 1

PROPOSED PHILOSOPHICAL CLASSIFICATIONS

Phase numbers

Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

Phase 4

Phase 5

Segments

D to A1

A1 to An

An to Gn

Gn to G1

G1 to Q

Common-sense questions

What should I do?

How should I do it?

Will my anticipations bear fruit?

What will be the consequences?

Will I be satisfied?

Branches of philosophy

Ethics

Inductive logic

Epistemology

Deductive logic

Aesthetics

Narrow-gage metaphysical perspectives

Pepper

Contextualism

Mechanism

Selectivism

Organicism

Formism

Perry

Pragmatism

Naturalism

-----

Idealism

Realism

Broad-gage metaphysical perspectives

Aristotle

Final cause

Efficient

-----

Material

Formal

Kant

-----

Modality

Relation

Quantity

Quality

 

 

Turning from the metaphysical to the personality portion of this discussion, let me begin by proposing a classification of Freud's four familiar stages of psychosexual development; the oral, the anal, phallic, and genital.  The oral stage is preoccupied with breast feeding and hence, by extension, other types of immediate gratification and therefore should be classified, I believe, in the fifth phase, where the central issue is "Will I be satisfied?"  The anal stage is focused on the proper handling of feces and hence, by extension, other objects and thus should be classified in the fourth, "goal object" phase.  The phallic stage is concerned with masturbatory and hence, by extension, other sorts of anticipatory behavior and hence should be classified in the second, "anticipatory" phase.  Last, the genital stage is concerned with the mature harnessing of the sex drive and hence, by extension, other drives and thus belongs in the first, "drive" phase.  Although not itself a "psychosexual stage" for Freud, the so-called latency period between about the age of five and puberty might be construed here as a period of growing object awareness that accordingly belongs in the third, epistemological phase.

 

Jung held that there are eight basic personality types, formed by the fusion of extroversion or introversion with each of four fundamental "psychic functions."  He said, "I can give no a priori reason for selecting these four as basic functions and can only point out that this conception has shaped itself out of many years' experience."  But I believe these psychic functions, like Freud's psychosexual stages, can be given a firmer underpinning by linking them to the phases of a purposive act.  The easiest function to classify is sensation.  Jung asserts that "Concrete sensation is always mixed up with ideas, feelings, thoughts," whereas "Abstract sensation . . . might be termed 'aesthetic' in that it detaches itself from all contamination with . . . thought and feeling."  [Emphasis added.]  Thus sensation evidently belongs in the fifth, aesthetic phase.  Jung asserts that feeling may be "in every respect independent of external stimuli," which suggests the voluntary or potentially voluntary, and "When the intensity of feeling increases, it turns into an affect, i.e., a feeling-state accompanied by marked physical innervations," which suggests action or potential action.  Voluntary action, as mentioned before, is conduct, and conduct is the subject matter of ethics.  Hence, feeling should apparently be classified in the first, ethical phase.  Jung says intuition is "neither sense perception, nor feeling, nor intellectual inference" but "presents itself whole and complete, without our being able to explain or discover how [it] came into existence," which suggests the inductive generalizations we leap to in the second phase.  And thinking evidently means the "intellectual inference" just mentioned.  If intuition is inductive inference, then thinking must mean deductive inference, which places it in the fourth phase.  Introversion and extroversion, although evidently not "psychic functions" for Jung, I classify in the third phase since they concern how we relate to (human) objects.  If this relation is obstructed, an introverted (or schizoid) personality can result.

 

Jung remarked that "a neurosis simply emphasizes and throws into excessive relief the characteristic traits of a personality."  A similar view is taken by John M. Oldham, one of the chief architects of the list of thirteen personality disorders in the third revised edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published in 1987 by the American Psychiatric Association.  In Personality Self-Portrait, a popularization published in 1990 and co-authored by Oldham and Lois B. Morris, each disorder is discussed at the end of a chapter that first deals with the normal variant of that disorder.  For instance, the paranoid disorder is discussed at the end of a chapter on the "vigilant" personality style.

 

Before attempting the challenging task of accounting for Oldham's list in terms of the Phases of a purposive act, I would like to begin with a much simpler list of personality disorders.  In The Aims of Psychotherapy the British psychoanalyst Anthony Storr discusses just four basic personality disorders, which he calls the hysterical, depressive, obsessional, and schizoid, referring to this list as "the conventional psychiatric classification."  by adding the paranoid disorder, we have five disorders that can be associated with the five phases as follows:

 

The paranoid is typically concerned with whether he or she will be treated ethically by others or will instead be unjustly persecuted by them, which clearly suggests that we should classify this disorder in the first, ethical phase.

 

The depressive, or more generally the manic-depressive, is, when in the manic phase, willing to try anything, but, in the depressive phase, is too frustrated by previous errors to try anything.  Since, as previously indicated, trial-and-error activity is inductive activity, this personality disorder clearly should be classified in the second, inductive phase.

 

The schizoid manifests a personality disorder that I associate with the third, epistemological phase.  In The Dynamics of Creation, for instance, Storr says that "For the schizoid person the inability to find any connection between the inner and outer is a perpetual threat."  I associate Storr's word "inner" with the anticipatory sets and his word "outer" with their goal objects, with the relation between them, which the schizoid finds problematical, corresponding to what I call the third phase.  According to Storr, "Laing describes a schizoid man who could only have intercourse with his wife if he was imagining having intercourse with her."  Here the mental image seems to serve as a more manageable goal object than the actual perception.  Theoretical constructs evidently can play a similar role.  Storr argues that such theorists as Newton, Einstein, Descartes, and Sartre were all schizoid.  In The Philosophers Ben-Ami Scharfstein surveys the lives of twenty-two major modern philosophers, from Hobbes to Sartre, and notes that "In only six cases did both parents survive until the philosopher was fifteen," and only eight of the twenty-two [ever] married."  Early loss of a parent, a most significant "goal object," could understandably precipitate a schizoid outcome.

 

The obsessive, or obsessive-compulsive, seems to be thinking, "I know how to find my way among the objects in my life along only one path, to deviate from which would probably lead to failure." In other words, this type is apparently preoccupied with following an unvarying pathway through the goal objects, which suggests that it ought to be classified in the fourth phase.

 

Last, the hysterical, or histrionic, type seems to be thinking, "What interests me most are my (aesthetic) satisfactions, and if these are obstructed I will throw a fit (or the like) until someone sets things right."  This attitude seems to place this type squarely in the fifth, aesthetic phase.  This type seems especially common among performing artists, whose aesthetic sensitivity stands them in good stead onstage but may transform into maladaptive irritability offstage.

 

Table 2 summarizes the psychological classifications arrived at so far and anticipates some of those to follow.

 

TABLE 2

PROPOSED PSYCHOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATIONS

 

Phase numbers

Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

Phase 4

Phase 5

Freud's stages

Genital

Phallic

[Latency period]

Anal

Oral

Jung's functions

Feeling

Intuition

[Introversion-extroversion]

Thinking

Sensation

Normal personality types

Oldham

Vigilant

-----

Solitary

Conscientious

Dramatic

Cattell

Suspicious

Tense

Reserved

Conscientious

Affected by feelings

Abnormal personality types

Storr

-----

Depressive

Schizoid

Obsessional

Hysterical

Oldham

Paranoid

-----

Schizoid

Obsessive-compulsive

Histrionic

 

Returning to the problem of classifying the thirteen Oldham/DSM-III-R personality disorders, my proposal is summarized in Table 3.  The basic idea is to consider the one or two most dominant phases. 

 

TABLE 3

PROPOSED CLASSIFICATION OF PERSONALITY DISORDERS

 

One Dominant Phase

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another

Dominant

Phase

Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

Phase 4

Phase 5

Phase 1

Paranoid

Sadistic

Avoidant

Self-defeating

Passive-aggressive

Phase 2

Sadistic

[Manic-depressive]

Antisocial

[Workaholic]

Borderline

Phase 3

Avoidant

Antisocial

Schizoid

Schizotypal

Narcissistic

Phase 4

Self-defeating

[Workaholic]

 Schizotypal

Obsessive-compulsive

Dependent

Phase 5

Passive-aggressive

Borderline

Narcissistic

Dependent

Histrionic

           

 

 

 

The five "pure" types that have just been discussed are shown in Table 3 along the diagonal from upper left to lower right, since they are the disorders in which only one phase predominates.  When two phases predominate and the order of predominance is irrelevant, there are ten additional disorders that occur in the five-by-five array as "mirror images" of one another, at upper right and lower left.  I have inserted names for two missing disorders in brackets.  There would be unexplained gaps in the five-by-five array if these disorders were omitted.

 

There is a personality test, the 16PF, devised by Raymond B. Cattell and his colleagues, that does have the fifteen personality factors called for by my theory.  The sixteenth "PF" is intelligence, which is not commonly treated as a personality trait.  According to Cattell, the 16PF was "not artificially created to fit a priori concepts" but was one of the first personality tests to be devised after years of "factor analysis" based on "ratings and questionnaire data."

 

I attempted to correlate the Oldham/DSM-III-R list with the Cattell/16PF relying solely on my understanding of the meanings of the terminology.  I report my conclusions in Table 4.  The match up is bolstered by the fact that the two factors missing from the Oldham/DSM-III-R list but present in the Cattell/16PF have just the characteristics that my theory "predicts" for them.  Specifically:

 

The manic-depressive (or depressive) disorder was apparently omitted from the Oldham/DSM-III-R list because it was regarded as a mood disorder rather than a personality disorder.  I associate it in Table 4 with what the 16PF labels Q4, "ergic tension," which the Handbook for the 16PF says is "especially high in manic-depressives (apparently in both the manic and the depressive phases)."  Being tense seems appropriate for a predominantly anticipatory (phase-2) personality.

 

There is also no DSM-III-R personality disorder corresponding to the 16PF letter code Q2, designated "self-sufficiency."  I call this the workaholic disorder and construe it as a mixture of the phase-2 and phase-4 modes.  A person with this personality would tend to think up ideas through trial-and-error (phase 2) but also would tend to follow through obsessive-compulsively on the development of that discovery (phase 4), as by starting a business to manufacture one's own invention.  The Handbook for the 16PF states that the Q2 factor is "significantly associated with coronary attacks," and "is a constant and very significant contributor to scholastic success,"  descriptions that both seem consistent with the workaholic label for exaggerated manifestations of this factor.

 

According to Oldham, "At this writing, it seems questionable that Sadistic personality disorder will appear even in an appendix of the DSM-IV, due out in the mid-1990's, [but] the debate about its validity is certain to continue."  Oldham describes the normal variant of the sadistic disorder as "aggressive" (see Table 4), which I believe matches the 16PF factor E, labeled "dominance" and described as "assertive."  I construe this type as involving a preoccupation with ethical (or when abnormal, paranoid) concerns (phase 1), which are typically dealt with by acting out manically (phase 2) by domineering or abusing the objects of concern.

 

I interpret the other mixed modes similarly.  The avoidant type handles paranoid concerns (phase 1) by withdrawing (phase 3).  The self-defeating type, whose normal variant Oldham calls "self-sacrificing," handles them by adopting an overly conscientious (phase 4) strategy.  And the passive-aggressive handles them by adopting and exaggerated leisureliness (phase 5).  The antisocial type, whose normal variant Oldham calls "adventurous," combines a solitary style (phase 3) with an exploratory approach (phase 2).  The schizotypal, whose normal variant Oldham calls "idiosyncratic," combines a solitary style (phase 3) with obsessive ideation or compulsive behavior of some type (phase 4).  The narcissistic type combines self-absorption (phase 3) with self-gratification (phase 5).  The normal variant of the borderline personality is called "mercurial," and Oldham says that "Mercurial women and men yearn for experience, and they jump into [it] with both feet."  I take the word "experience" to indicate a phase-5 preoccupation, and "jump[ing] into" something to connote an exploratory, phase-2 attitude.  Last, the dependent personality seems to involve an obsessive devotion to another (phase 4) plus an exaggerated focus on the gratifications that that other is thought to provide (phase 5)--"I'm happy if you're happy," as Oldham puts it.

 

TABLE 4

PROPOSED CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN THE DSM-III-R AND THE 16PF

 

My phase classi-

fication

                   Oldham/DSM-III-R

Personality       Normal            Descriptive

disorder             type                  phrase

                           Cattell/16PF

Letter               Technical        Descriptive

code                  term                   adjective

 

1 only

Paranoid

Vigilant

The Survivor

L

Protension

Suspicious

2 only

-----

[Manic-

-----

depressive]

-----

Q4

Ergic tension

Tense

3 only

Schizoid

Solitary

The Loner

A-

Sizothymia

Reserved

4 only

Obsessive-compulsive

Conscien-

tious

The Right Stuff

G

Superego strength

Conscien-

tious

5 only

Histrionic

Dramatic

The Life of the Party

C-

Affectothy-mia

Affected by feelings

1 and 2

Sadistic

Aggressive

Top Dog

E

Dominance

Assertive

1 and 3

Avoidant

Sensitive

The Homebody

O

Guilt proneness

Apprehen-

sive

1 and 4

Self-

defeating

Self-

sacrificing

The Altruist

Q3

Self-concept control

Controlled

1 and 5

Passive-

aggressive

Leisurely

California

Dreaming

M

Autia

Imaginative

2 and 3

Antisocial

Adven-

turous

The

Challenger

H

Parmia

Venture-

some

2 and 4

-----

[Work-

-----

aholic]

-----

Q2

Self-

sufficiency

Self-

sufficient

2 and 5

Borderline

Mercurial

Fire and Ice

F

Surgency

Happy-go-

lucky

3 and 4

Schizotypal

Idiosyn-

cratic

The Different Drummer

Q1

Radicalism

Experi-

menting

3 and 5

Nar-

cissistic

Self-

confident

Star Quality

N

Shrewdness

Shrewd

 

4 and 5

Dependent

Devoted

The Good Mate

I

Premsia

Tender-

minded

Note:  Cattell divided each of his factors into a positive and a negative aspect, each with its own technical term and descriptive adjectives.  I felt that the A- and C- factors match Oldham's schizoid and histrionic personality disorders better than the A+ and C+ factors do.  In all other cases I employed Cattell's positive factors along with their technical terms and chief descriptive adjectives.  Although Cattell uses "affectothymia" as the technical term for the A+ factor, I felt that it works better as a technical term for the C- factor, where it matches perfectly Cattell's descriptive phrase, "affected by feelings."

--------------------------

Cattell says that other personality factors will be added to the 16PF.  The present theory might accommodate them by considering clusters of three or more dominant phases.  Intelligence, for instance--Cattell's sixteenth personality factor, designated factor B--might be construed as the harmonious interplay of all five phases.  Recall that Pepper called the purposive act "the act associated with intelligence."