Philosophical essay on samsara, personality, and a dot‑removal experiment

Indian village of Ganeshpuri, called them our samsara. These limit the formlessness of anticipation that underlies sensibility. Our samsara reduces the uncertainty that could serve as grounds for new perceptions and understanding of others. Pre- emptive distortions reduce the bandwidth available for new information. They impair the range of empathic relations with others as well as ourselves. These restrictions in possibilities and choices are expressed in enduring patterns of behavior, thinking and feeling that mental health practitioners call personality and character. When confronted with these constrictions, the self justifying and diagnostically revealing thought about a feature of one’s personality is, “...doesn’t everybody? “ This pride in our shape contrasts with the teachings about emptiness of one of Baba’s favorite Indian holy men, Zipruanna, who sat all day, loin clothed naked in a garbage dump, instructing his students and followers about knowing and being nothing. We quantitate deficiencies in formlessness using statistical measures of entropy. They characterize the system’s behavior as a distance from the state of highest entropy also known as maximal randomness. Professor Karen Selz of Emory University did a study in which her human subjects, after taking a battery of personality inventories, were asked to remove as many dots as possible from a computer screen full of them in three minutes. They were to do so by left clicking on each of them with the mouse key. Two seconds after a dot was removed, it reappeared and became subject to removal again. As they went about the dot removal task and unbeknown to the subjects, the orbit inscribed by their dot removing mouse travels was recorded for later graphic representation and quantification. Most subjects with the usual broad mixture of personality traits inscribed a wide variety of orbital line styles: little wiggles, big wiggles, large and small loops, little smooth slides and big and little jumps. The counter-intuitive coupling of stylistic rigidity and whole system instability (as in non-hyperbolic fixed points described in the previous essay and below) is in evidence at the personality and graphical extremes of her subject group. A fastidious, rigidly organized, severely obsessive-compulsive subject repeatedly removes the same dot, only occasionally moving to a neighboring one to do more repetitious left key mouse clicking. Very little of the large computer screen 24 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013524