In the quest of your particular human personality to understand itself, a question worth asking ourselves is: does explicitly trying to outline your own personality help achieve that goal enough to be worth investing a non-trivial amount of energy in doing so?
Well, I don’t know the answer, but I have some hunches, so let’s use this article as an excuse to think them through.
My first observation would be: in trying to understand ANYTHING–literally, anything–trying to outline it, to define its bounds, to model it, helps you in the process of understanding it.
You want to understand how coffee changes you body? Okay, here’s a great way: let’s try to model what coffee does. Let’s do some experiments. Drink some and track how you feel. Drink some under different circumstances (full or hungry?), and see the differences. Ask your friends to the same. Building a model will help you understand what coffee does.
Of course, you can also understand the chemical composition of coffee beans, the process through which coffee is made, the different types of coffee and what distinguishes each, and so forth.
(To jump to the end: are we merely coffee beans with consciousness? I’m not looking forward to the day I’m crushed to make ground coffee.)
I would put for the hypothesis here that this applies to everything under the sun. Indeed, making a predictive model of anything–this type of coffee, made in this way, drunk under these circumstances, by a person with the following characteristics, will lead to that person getting a burst of energy!–is the single best way to understand it. Who understands the stock market better than the person whose model is so good, they know exactly how it will change tomorrow (I want to be that person!)? Who understands music better than he who knows that precisely this combination of notes in that sort of way with this sort of rhythm will create an endlessly hummable song guaranteed to be a hit or at least loved by those in the target who know it?
Indeed, I’d even say, fuck school. You want to learn a subject, don’t go and read textbooks. Just try to build a model of it. Who is doing to understand building software or desks or whatever better, the academic whose been reading about it for 25 years, or the guy who has been getting his hands dirty building and doing it at the most complex and advanced levels for the last 25 years? And which one of those two groups is more likely top have ideas about the field that is in outer-space, far disconnected from any sort of reality? As a strong advocate of professionalism, my answer is with the do-er over the thinker every time–and of course, I laugh at the self-reflection, as someone who liked to define himself as a thinker for all my childhood and early adulthood. (Don’t you dare imply I’m not still in my early adulthood. Only a Jew can refer to another Jew as a Kike!)
One question implied by this is: are humans really THAT predictable? The publicly-acceptable answer has to be: it remains to be seen. The not-publicly-sayable answer has to be: “Do you really want to know what technology intelligence agencies have that you don’t have access to? Even if you trust me in nothing since you don’t know me and I’m a random name on the Internet, I would put forth that you may want to trust me when I tell you: you really don’t want to know the answer to that question.”
Or I could say the same point in a more fun way. My scientific side wants to model everything and turn everything into a perfectly predictable formula. My spiritual side wants to model nothing and be touchy-feely on everything. Maybe the answer is in the middle between the two? Or maybe the middle is a fallacy (hello, Overton Window!) and the answer is really far over on one side but the answer will never be accessible to you.
And here’s the silver lining of it all–and the cliche is perfectly appropriate, because golden lining may not exist here, or if it does, it is what you have to discover yourself–that perhaps the key to all isn’t the model itself but the act of going through and building the model. It’s not the destination, it’s the journey. The process of asking yourself who you are and what defines you and what characterizes your behavior and why, and how do you act under stressful situations and what do you do that’s far from ideal and so forth–merely asking and investigating these questions gets you very far. So maybe it’s not about perfecting the model, but about perfecting yourself and the model merely is a tool to ask yourself the key questions to do so.
Said more simply, perhaps by making the implicit explicit, you bring yourself closer to understanding what’s implicit in you at a deeper level.
