Your personality?

[Your Computer]

The terms and percentages are inadequate in the same way - they are both attempts to assign a discrete value to an analogue system. The terms are necessary for us to discuss general themes rather than the specifics, but that's quite common and not really a problem for me.

But how are the percentages that much different than what you said, that how a person acts is relevant to the situation they're in? I don't see a person acting infinitely different to any given scenario (though, mostly since it is physically impossible for them to do so). The conscious is always the starting point for human action. We know that the conscious is capable of human feelings, but we also know that it is capable of avoiding human feelings. We know that a person will not act without the desire to do so. Etc. The personality types imply these things.

I don't believe that a union between the observer and the one being observed would automatically lead to full understanding, because the means of communication between them (and us, as a third party observer to the research) is going to be language, and language is to some degree inherently ambiguous. Something as complex as personality needs something more than that to ensure accuracy. Patterns can give us a glimpse of insight, but again we can only observe certain outward actions, not the thought process running behind it.

Patterns can be observed in the way humans interact with each other and the world, yes, but as with my above statement the actual observations we can make are extremely limited even in direct observation of a living person. Consider how reliable our sources actually are in terms of peoples personalities, derived from a loose series of recorded actions from even 100 years ago, let alone 500, 1000 etc. We can make assumptions, but there are few facts to be had.

Human actions are observable, the personalities that contribute to the action are not - they must be derived from the action, and I consider this test to be frightfully incapable of doing this, due to the reasons Chronofox refers to.

Perhaps not an all-encompassing full understanding, but i would assume certainly full understanding on the matter at the time, where both parties are willing to share complete information. Indeed, communication is an issue, but i wouldn't claim any language barrier to be the reason but the unwillingness to share information itself. This communication is what will grant us the knowledge behind the thought process. The fact that a third party may act differently would be irrelevant to the two active parties, since the third party is not the one being observed (except perhaps at a later time). I would figure that over a thousand years of communication would generate very reliable material.

I realize your arguments concern mostly the personality tests, which i would agree suffer from artificiality, since they do not cover every single possibility of human action and simply touch on minor social interactions. However, my arguments do not concern the tests themselves, since it was not these tests that brought about the personality types which these tests themselves are based on.

I think your taking it too far here. It is clear that personalities can be radically changed by extremely traumatic events. I appreciate you may mean, changing of their own accord, but I think all changes to personality, emotion etc are always affected by environment, so suggesting that there is no change at all -from birth til death, regardless of events during life - is inaccurate.

Fair enough. I can't account for your experiences, but mine do not suggest logic is being used at every step of human action. Logic is a very specific structure which draws a conclusion from a set of premises, but the premises must be complete enough for a final conclusion to be arrived at with absolute certainty. I frequently observe people misusing this structure, as well as people using it accurately, but only during discussions - there may be some internal premises being considered for other physical actions, perhaps subconsciously, but I do not know what they are, so I can't comment on whether the action itself is logical or not. Unfortunately, I don't think you can either.

The inability to change that i spoke about is the process that generates action from a person. (You split up that part of my speech, but i had intended it to be taken as a whole.) As i see it there are only two possible outcomes: action and non-action. Since action requires effort, it should be obvious that non-action is the default, preferred choice for people. Non-action is simple, bearing only one possibility: "nothing." Action is complex, bearing a long range of possibilities, but are nevertheless limited--and because they are limited it can only be the same acts. So, what is it that causes people to act? Desire: be it a need or a want. This is unchanging between conscious entities--hence "people don't change at all." Even if a person has many desires, the greater desire will be picked first--yeah, even if it endangers the person's life.

That (the entire paragraph) is the primary reason why i say people act logically. To a much lesser degree, another reason would be because they themselves thought their actions were logical at the time--but this lesser degree can be discarded safely in many cases. However, since we know that what they thought they were doing was logical, we know that it is not impossible for us to figure out what was going through their mind at the time even though their actions, in hindsight, were in fact illogical.