Home Science Page Data Stream Momentum Directionals Root Beings The Experiment
In a bit well explore these correlations in more depth, simultaneously examining a few more theories, but first a brief digression back to the topic of this Notebook, the Experiment. Because of the importance of the Data to the conclusions, let us relate a brief history of the data accumulation categories, the 20 Data Streams that make up our Experiment.
In brief the impetus to perform the Experiment was based upon the desire of our Experimenter to understand the influence of different behaviors upon each other. In order to do this our Experimenter had to arrange for the participation of a Subject, the accumulation of Data concerning this Subject by an Observer, the generation of Correlations, and then the Analysis the Results by a Scientist and then the Production of a Paper by a Writer to formalize the whole process. In the pursuit of this end our Experimenter discovered much concerning the dynamics of behavior.
Not being of great education or means, working as a mere waiter, his resources were limited. Therefore he took a human being, himself, as the subject of the Experiment. We will call him the Subject. (For ease of reference we will create many general terms of this nature. These terms will be capitalized. This indicates that they have relatively precise meaning, based upon definition rather than intuition.) He then hired an Observer, again himself, to observe and record the amount of time that our Subject performed each type of activity on a daily basis. Our Experimenter set this process in motion and then checked back in again every five to ten years to check on the progress of his Experiment. He arranged for a Scientist to analyze the results and a Writer to write them up. This paper that you, the Reader, are presently reading, is the collaboration of the Scientist and a Writer, again himself, to communicate the results of this Experiment to the general Public. Experimenter, Subject, Observer, Scientist, Writer - all different parts of the same Person, emerging, as we shall see, from unique parts of the same Mind.
The Experimenter, not really knowing what to expect, told the Observer to watch the Subject carefully and to record anything that he did that was of interest. The Observer began watching the Subject when he had just turned 20. The first Data that was generated by our Observer had to do with emotions and moods. The Observer rated each hour of the day emotionally on a scale of 0 to 10. The Data was so turbulent and confusing that the Scientist couldnt find anything to correlate or analyze. Although the Experimenter gained insights into the Subject, there was nothing to quantify, correlate, analyze, and write up. Eventually after less than a year this form of Data collection was abandoned.
A few years later, inspired by an intense infusion of Undergraduate Statistics, Physics and Math, our Experimenter directed his Observer to record a different type of Data. While the earlier data had been qualitative, i.e. good and bad emotions, this data was to be purely quantitative. What did our Subject spend his time doing? More specifically, how did the Subject spend the 24 hours that he was allotted each day?
The Observer began by recording everything that seemed significant that the Subject did. The Data accumulation began in July 1975 with how much time he spent Working, in his case waiting tables.
(The real reason for this initial obsessive record keeping had nothing to do with Action Studies. The desire to accumulate this first Data Stream was based primarily upon a desire to know how much our Person, the accumulation of contradictory selves associated with our Body, was making per hour as a Waiter. As a waiter he was not paid an hourly wage. Instead he made most of his money in tips. Our Subject wanted to know how much he was making per hour in terms of job comparison. How could an intelligent choice be made without thorough information?
Ironically we still thought we were our Person at this time. We thought we were in charge. We wanted control. We hadnt reached a state of trust. Much of this initial obsessive record keeping had more to do with a desire to be in control and less to do with experimental curiosity.)
Less than a year later, Exercise was added as an activity, a recordable Action. This was natural as Our Person was an avid beach Volleyball player at this time.
(Again the real reason that this Data Stream began had nothing to do with Correlations or Action Studies. It had primarily to do with knowing how well he did in sports. He wanted everyone know that he was good in sports by showing that he won a lot of games. He didnt want to be thought of as only an intellect. Thru these Books he was trying to hold on to his warrior side. He was still so young - Thinking that this really mattered.
He also thought that by keeping track that he could tell when he was getting better. Another of his misconceptions. Playing the game was all that mattered - The Idea of getting better is a mental hang-up, which will certainly interfere with getting better.)
Just after our Subject turned 26 in 1976, having just finished College for the second time, our Person, a frustrated scholar, sublimated his creative energy in many directions. Each of these Actions became recordable in its own time. Very soon after completing all his scientific deductive left-brain classes, he let his intuitive creative right brain go wild, painting pictures, playing music, doing astrology charts, and even doing a little science as time permitted. As the circumstances dictated, Painting, Science, Music, and Divination were all added to the Data accumulation.
Getting credit for these categories led our Subject to want to get credit for Helping out, Reading, School and Sex. These Action categories were added next. Further with all this Data Accumulation with Actions and also Finances, the Observer also began recording how much time the Subject spent on Records or Books, as the category was to be called later.
(This shows how out of control this obsessive anal-retentive record keeping was getting - An entire category to illustrate what a control-freak our Person was. To be fair the Category was partly created in order to get the books under control. He sensed he was becoming a data-oholic and wanted to rein himself in by just paying attention. This was fairly mature on his part -
Dont do anything - Just Pay attention - And the sunlight dries up the mold - The light illuminates the darkness.)
Because of our Subjects feeling that he was getting credit for the above Actions, he pressured the Observer into giving him higher Data readings for these productive activities. Note that the feeling of getting credit was a purely internal reward, a completely mental construct. There was not a shred of external reward. However the Data for the productive actions was probably skewed upward while the Data for unproductive Actions was probably skewed downward so that our Person could feel good for getting more credit.
Our Subject took a Meditation class in early 1978 and added this as an Action category. Having these Actions under control statistically it was no effort to add Sleep as a recordable Action in mid 1978.
In line with what we were saying above about skewed results - if anything there would have been a tendency on the part of the Observer to underestimate Sleep Time, because he wanted to reward the Subject for getting less Sleep and he didnt want to discourage him for not living up to the expectations of the Experimenter. Trying to please may have distorted the Data, but this would have had no effect upon the results, which were exactly opposite of what was expected, as previously mentioned.
At the end of 1978 our Person wrote a novel and Writing was added as a category.
A few years later in 1981 our Subject was offered a secondary job as Controller of the restaurant he worked in. This started the Consult/Management category. With this infusion of intellectual energy he also added in Viewing, and Talking. Soon after his first child was born and Baby was added as a recordable Action.
Our Subjects wife started a career as Jeweler in 1979. Initially this did not involve our Subject much and he included the time spent in different categories, Books or Helping out. During the mid 80s our Subject spent an increasing amount of time on his wifes Jewelry business. She was accepted at the prestigious Renaissance Faire in 1986 and he had to spend 6 weekends a year Helping out. In addition to helping set up her jewelry display, he spent a great deal of time analyzing his wifes Jewelry business as a business manager, Books. By this time he had a personal computer and so much of the Jewelry time went into the box of Computer Time, which had merged with Science. In 1989 he finally started a Jewelry category. This completed the Action categories.
(This is why our Modern Data Sets begin in 1989. From this point all the Data Streams are accumulated separately. Before this point many streams merged and separated.)
In April 1994, 18 years after the beginning of Data accumulation, our Scientist was called in to do some Correlations and analyze the Results. Afraid of the purity of earlier Data he confined his study to the 4 years of 1989 -> 1992. He based all his correlations upon the complete 24-hour day. Because all of the Action categories didnt add up to 24 he created another category, the Emptiness or the Void, which was the time that was unaccounted for in a 24-hour period. This was the 20th category - a non-Action category to balance all the Action categories. He came up with some amazing results based upon correlations between these 20 categories, which are partly written up.
Our Scientist was disturbed by a few of the Action Categories, which included parts of other Actions. He was afraid that this mixture would distort his results. Aware of the tenuous nature of his Data, he wanted to insure that it was as accurate as possible, within the parameters that had been set up. An initial data purification was done in 1994. This was completed in 2002. This mainly had to do with separating the Actions of Jewelry, Books, Writing, Computer, Helping out and Consulting from each other. While it was done as best as could be done, much of the purification was based upon guesstimation of Data Accumulation that was up to 20 years old. This is another way that the Data is flawed.
The point is that the Data accumulated by our Observer over many years is quite fuzzy. (See Fuzzy Data Notebook for the supporting theory.) Categories have emerged and merged and broken into parts. More importantly in terms of fuzziness, the notions of the Action categories have changed subtly and imperceptibly since the Observer began his task. What might have been Books at one time might be Science at another time. These flaws, however, are nothing compared with the fact that our Observer would many write down time guesstimations of Action Time up to 3 weeks after the event. As if these factors arent enough of a problem, the Observer is the Subject, which gives his Data collecting abilities a decidedly biased nature. Most experiments require a certain amount of objectivity to be considered reliable. This whole Experiment is based upon entirely subjective Data Readings on only one Subject, accumulated irregularly, based around guesstimations, with shifting categories over more than 20 years.
On first thought one might find the Data fatally flawed and unworthy of consideration. Our Scientist said as much and threatened to walk out on the job. However the Experimenter insisted on proceeding forth. The results are bold. Some of the results have been suggested and more are included on the following pages. While our Data is on shaky foundations it reveals so much about the working of the Mind that the analysis could be said to be a glimpse at some underlying truths about dynamical behavior that could be explored under more controlled conditions by more competent Experimenters.
On the bright side of the Data Accumulation: Because the Experiment was run over 20 years and because the Scientist was only called in briefly to analyze the Data and propose some theories, the Data Collection was not tainted by projected Scientific theory. Indeed the Scientist, after analyzing the Data in 1994 proposed many theories. Once these formulas were finalized the Scientist began pressuring the Observer to take the Data readings with his theories in mind. Luckily the Observer had some integrity and told the Scientist to get lost and go to sleep for a few more years. Thus our Scientist went into hibernation until 2002 allowing the Observer to collect his Data independently of pre-conceptions. Thus the Data collection while flawed in many ways is not flawed by scientific preconceptions. There were no theories formulated until 1994, after 18 years of Data collection. Then these theories were put to sleep, i.e. forgotten until 2002, until some new theories were formulated. Thus the Observer collecting the Data and the Scientist proposing theories after correlating and analyzing the Data were almost entirely separated.
The second bright side of our Data is that the theories proposed by our scientist were more complex than the Observer ever imagined. There is no way he could have fudged the Data to fit the observed patterns because he didnt know what the patterns were. Further even after discovering the patterns, the Observer had no idea how to create this type of pattern no matter how much he was bribed by the Scientist. It was like the king demanding the girl to spin straw into gold because he had heard she could. The Observer heard from the Scientist about the correlations but had no way of duplicating the findings.
When there are only a few variables and one is seeking causal relations between them, it is easy to fudge the Data to fit preconceptions. Simply augment the readings that are supposed to causally connected and diminish those that are not supposed to be connected. In this case the conclusions of the Scientist were so much more complex than the Observer had ever imagined, the Observer couldnt shape his Data collection to the scientific theory. Too many variables over too much time.
One thing more about our Observer: he is in no way a Scientist. He and the Subject conspired to slightly exaggerate the achievements, but this had nothing to do with correlations. Indeed the main motivation of the Observer and Subject was to graph his Activities because they looked pretty and gave our Person a sense of achievement. This connection of Observer and Subject had nothing to do with confirming or disconfirming scientific theory. Indeed the Subject would forget for years that he even had scientific side. For over a decade he thought his Scientific side had been lost in the waves of time. Our Subject became so lost in his Painting or Writing, fiction and histories that he wondered how he could ever done anything scientific. We will understand the mechanism behind this a little better when we begin examining the Data.
Indeed the impetus behind the Data Collection for years was merely the desire to see what the Subject had accomplished visually over time in graph form. The Subject would go into a Painting or Writing frenzy. He would wake up from his trance a few months later, burned out from his Creative frenzy. The Subject emerging from personal hibernation having woken up from Divine Possession wanted to see a visual picture of his transformation. The Observer would call up a Graph of the time spent on his Creative side based upon his Data. These graphs had no underlying correlations or analysis. They were merely line or bar graphs of how much time our Subject spent monthly upon his creative obsession.
The Scientific explosion of 1993 and 1994 was uncalled for and unexpected. The conclusions were far different and more complex than ever expected. Going into the analysis our Scientist was merely attempting to discover some significant correlations between specific Actions. He had no idea that the Actions organized themselves as complexes of activities, each unique unto itself. Our Scientists choice of the four years of activities to analyze was based upon his perception that the rest of the data was hopelessly corrupted and unworthy of analysis.
The Scientific explosion of 2002 was also uncalled for and unexpected. Due to advances in technology our Scientist was able to extend his previous analysis. Because of a more powerful computer - able to handle more computations more quickly, our Scientist decided to extend the correlations back to the beginning of the Data Collection. He just ran a test run for kicks, assuming that the Data Collection was way to fuzzy to generate any clear cut conclusions. He was shocked and surprised to discover some clear-cut correlations. Indeed he just ran the correlations as a lark, just for fun.
Our Subject felt that he was in the midst of finishing off a third draft of his novel, when he was stunned by these miraculous correlations as he called them. He had written off his scientific side as hopeless, jousting with windmills thinking they were dragons; spinning his wheels in futile activity; fluttering his fingers before his eyes as the autistic children do. Our Subject resisted his Scientific urges as unrealistic dreaming. But then these incredibly unexpected correlations were dropped in his lap.
His first urge was to run far away. Oh No! Why me? Im done with my scientific side. Im over that. Done and gone.
Realistically I am a Writer, not a Scientist, his Deductive Left Brain piped in, thinking unrealistically that he was the Subject. Having created a conception of his Person, he began to identify with it and attempt to control it.
The Mind Brain continued his babble: My therapist told me to stay away from this delusional side. It will only get me in trouble. He said that my fathers alcoholism was passed down to me as out-of-control creative obsessions, which unbalance my life. I need to be realistic.
Luckily for us, especially right now, or we wouldnt even exist, our Subjects Right Brain was in control. Well maybe just a little taste of chocolate. Just one. Ill just do a few days of research and then back to my novel.
Intuitive Right Brain. Yes!! Ive got him hooked now. Once hes taken the first sip its all over. Hes a create-oholic you know. He cant just take one drink. Hell go on a binge, waking up months later, wondering what happened while he was away.
The Left Brain put up some weak objections: But what about your novel which will help so many people to dispel personal delusions.
Right Brain/Little Voice: I appreciate your input, but in
emerging from the Void, this is all our Person can do right now. For whatever
reason, he cant even comprehend writing anything else. His Scientific Brain is
switched on. It will take a while before it burns itself out and shuts do?Cne|3t}w7 m,³)%)cUp2ONjDw<,`Hv@JądfH;oOӄ={[2Zﬥos#N**4ߤv;/3]J3xmÐߤk l}q