Perspective Snippets are on the home page, and are short one-liners. Perspective Snips are just a bit longer, and so have more explanations. Perspectives are longer still. Nutshells are attempts to cover the whole subject, generally fail, and should be renamed Perspectives belonging at a previous stage of maturity and view.

Identity

Identity is an umbrella term for the results of an individual’s ‘identity propensity’ (IP), and its ’emergent self’ (ES).

Your identity propensity is the unconscious platform you operate from, in which your perspective and engagement originates. The volume of its response to your environs is your motivation. [Montessori snapshot, EsSample’s Minds Eye].

A principal response is to adopt and accrete from that environs and nurturing sufficiently that ‘self’ emerges. [EsSample’s internal model and reference model]. The relationship of this platform to this emergent self (a relationship with self if you like), and of the emergent self to its environs and others reflects the characteristics of that underlying identity propensity. [e.g. Big Five personality characteristics].

It is this emergent self that forms an ego, coheres within that environs and nurturing to bind into groups, and entitles them as emergent entities in their own right. The emergent self is the base and only origin of most secondary emotions that are not also primary affects [most of the Plutchick’s 27 ‘secondary emotions’]. Strong emergent selves can also co-opt to and trigger primary affects [Panksepp’s 7 of SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, GRIEF/separation, CARE, PLAY].

A compulsive propensity (for an emergent self) will also become central to the owners developed perspective, and will be dominated by secondary emotions.

All of this is unconscious. While the emergent self is more noticeable, especially to others, it is still unconscious to the owner – it cannot be perceived directly by the owner. What enters awareness and the conscious are the more significant discrepancies between and within these things, or changes. Nor can it be sensed directly, because perception itself is from this emergent self.

(Avenues for detection, awareness and modelling your emergent self are described elsewhere in EsSample. They are indirect, and amount to triangulation, detection of discrepancies and deltas, and).

This description is specific, if not unique, to EsSample+.

Conventional parlance has identity mostly as the accretions, occasionally the emergent self, and rarely the propensity (the nearest term being degree of attachment).

Who you are is you is not the accretions and inheritances you have, but the choice 2 inches behind your eyes – how you choose what you choose and unchoose – how you relate to what you have. How you relate to this self speaks more of who you are than your inherited, acquired and innate accretions and capabilities. How you relate to yourself is how you relate to others and their ESs (Albert & Tom).

June 15, 2018

Reading someone’s eyes is modelling

Taking offence is the greatest evidence of the model underlying EsSample.

That’s again not scientific or statistical evidence that the behaviourists (and scientific method) demand. It’s more consistency between EsSample’s model of minds, and first person subjective experience.

It occurred to me that our most cited avenue of empathy by perception delivers a similar level of evidence. In ’empathy by perception’ you proactively perceive the signals with which you recreate what another person must be feeling or perceiving, and the process is active. This is contrasted with ’empathy by reception’ where the signals are actively broadcast by the other person, are often explicit in content, and empathy is passive.

Let’s go with the most frequent answer to the question of what reveals the most about how someone feels, what avenue provides the most revealing information. The answer from a sighted person is usually the other person’s (sighted) eyes. My description below applies to other modes of signalling emission and reception, such as body language, but is less easy to explicitly point to.

Most perceivers are unaware or unquestioning of how they perceive the other person’s state and values from observing their eyes. When questioned further, they come to agree with my proposal that it is timing (of the micro body-language of eye features) that is most revealing – timing between responses and non-responses given.

This perception of another person’s state, shown most overtly in reading the person’s eyes, is firstly cognitive processing that can only be described as modelling. And secondly includes direct first person subjective experience of that modelling process.

When I ask where most people look to sense where somebody is and how they feel, they answer the eyes. When asked further, they haven’t thought or figured out more. When I asked one person, she answered the blinking, the timing of blinking. When I asked another, she answered irises and sizes of pupils. I countered that my conclusions are otherwise, but first suggested they imagine engaging with a blind person, or even more dramatically one with black irises and black corneas. I suggested that (other less imaginative people would not really get over the alienness), but that they themselves would still read 80 or 90% of the conversationist values and state. And I asked how they would do that give my confidence that they would. They stumbled and suggested less relevant features such as voice, etc.

So I answered my view that it is timing between movements of the eyeball and face and micro bodylanguage. The movements indicate when attention shifts to and from the speaker, and the timing (after deducing intelligence and speed of processing) reveals their relationship with, and response to, the item just conversed.

In the person being read and understood, their delay between receipt of a signal or communication, and their response in micro body-language, is the modelling time. This is when the receiver recreates and models the situation before their eyes, and then micro-seconds or seconds later they respond. (On the one hand you could say this thinking time is obvious and contributes nothing to understanding mind. On the other hand, I say that this is a small sphere of human (and animal) cognitive processing best characterised as modelling, which does contribute.)

What else are you doing during that period? It can only be modelling and you can only be responding to discrepancies that are resolved by the resulting movement.

Your process may be invoking mechanisms such as mirror neurones and other lower level mechanisms. But the modelling of the object about which the perceive person is feeling (and its relationship to other objects and perceptions in that emotional landscape), demands more of the equivalent higher level processes belonging to 3d-vector modelling, and less of the low level copying processes of mirror neurones.

(Foraying into EsSample terms, they then conclude their position in an almost 3-D vector model of the situation, and then conceive the almost 3-D vector movement of they deem appropriate or want to resolve the discrepancy or next action in the situation).

One of the first times I asked this of someone, the answer was that our eyes simply react* to the conversationist. I smile because that’s what the behaviourists employ in their science. Their mode and medium of examination is reaction without an internal (subjective) steppingstone (or leg of the journey) in cognition. I smile because the answerer’s transition from unquestioned absence (of cognition in reacting) to comfortable presence (of processing) reflects the same shift required 50 years ago from the behaviourists science (which excluded subjective experience from research and discovery) to the current neuroscience (which includes subjective experience in research and discovery).

(There is no academic discipline to accommodate the minds internal engineering described in EsSample, just as 50 years ago there was no academic discipline in the world of behavioural science for cognitive neuroscience.)

Growth

The definition of growth is that your identity, with which you receive and perceive, changes.

This is usually changing to encompass deeper or more of the perspectives and minds you encountered.

But occasionally the reverse – of less perspectives, if loss and regression is part of the lesson you are receiving. af.

You will never detect this change directly. You will deduce the change from changing choices you made or make in relating, and changing responses you have from them.

Learning that does not change identity is not growth. Expertise is rote learning, repeated experience, even stuff outside the box. Wisdom includes knowing there is a box. af.