Your personality?

[Adrianis]

Tried to keep it short because ultimately we're never going to resolve the discussion, as I lack the hard evidence to back up my argument (incidentally, if you are drawing from source material I'd quite like to know what it is)
It's also turning slowly but surely into an argument of semantics, which is never fun for anyone.

Spoiler below!

I don't see split-second instinctual actions as a by-product of the unconscious, since that wouldn't make any sense to me. There may be bodily reactions that occur independent of the conscious, but i wouldn't place these reactions on the same level as instinct-based actions. I take it that the main reason why you take issue with my statement is perhaps because you may not see the conscious as something that exists. Though, i'd rather not get into a deep discussion on whether mind is over matter or matter over mind. (Maybe some other time, perhaps in some other thread.)

No, I definately believe that there is such a thing as 'conscious', as well as 'sub-conscious' - it makes sense to me that that is where the decision making for instinctual actions takes place, but that is my opinion. I also concur that we should not get into that, this discussion has already spilled way out of it's origins in personality tests and why they do/do not suck.

Humans are limited to how they receive information and also on how they can react to that information. But the reason why they chose to react is do to desire to respond to the input. Personality would be what prioritizes the desires people have. Indeed, over time someone who wasn't normally in tune with other people's feelings (a.k.a. a strong Thinking type) may learn to take better notice of other people's feelings or needs. Nevertheless, i don't see this as a change in how one processes information and reacts to that information. Change in personality? I'm inclined to say, no--simply because i never believed that people were incapable of any one personality, even though they prefer certain personalities over the other (even though this may further confuse things).

That makes a lot more sense. I see where you are coming from now - am I right in saying then, that you think that there is no change in personality because everyone is capable of all of those personalities anyway, and its therefore just a preference of one over another at any given time? That pretty much explains my position on it anyway - now when you look at it in terms of these tests, which take a static one-time slice of this system of preference, it appears that over time your personality 'changes' because the percentages shift, which is why I use the term.

I realize that some people consider that doing nothing is doing something--regardless of how self-contradicting that may sound--, like sitting. But i'd rather not play loosely with these terms. For now, consider anything concerning action involves effort. Anything that doesn't require effort is not an act. I don't see it impossible to sit down without requiring any effort to maintain their position (since a lot of chairs are designed to carry the body), therefore essentially doing nothing (a non-action).

When I'm sitting in the dark, no music, staring into space, I am not doing nothing. I am thinking, this is very distinct. I don't want to play loosely with the term either, which is why i think the notion that a human can be doing nothing is ludicrous, I don't think we are capable of doing nothing. In terms of what we are discussing, thinking is very much something that factors into personality types - indeed the reason I do just sit and think is because I'm an Introvert. Perhaps action is the wrong word to use, but the problem is that as 3rd parties we can only observe actions - we cannot observe thinking, and yet it is a critical 'action' that someone can perform that factors into our observations on personality

We would know that they thought their actions were logical because they reveal it to us after the fact. Failure to prove that their actions were indeed logical doesn't discard the previous fact. If they thought that their actions were logical, it should therefore be made known that they had at least one reason for attempting the act. This and any other reason they may have had would (should) be enough to workout the internal thought process (assuming any information shared is in fact true).

I'd go as far as to say that any research done on particle interactions that accumulate to physical, human action will never show any real information on any decision-making process of the human mind. If anything, the only thing i feel it can reveal is what is already known, one of them being that there can only be a limited number of actions.

People are not always aware of how their desires and motivations affect their actions. I think you are probably right, but that doesn't discount the fact that we cannot know this for certain until we can fully quantify motivation, desire, emotion and the chemical balances in the brain that constitute them.

This is why I say we can know it once we can fully simulate the brain, body and all it's workings. At that point, we will be able to draw clear conclusions from watching the chemical and electrical changes in the brain and how they correspond to certain actions, and once we can simulate memory and any other brain functions that may factor into 'desires' and 'preferences' for certain things. We will be able to test it and recreate it millions of times in order to get accurate, reliable data based on quantifiable evidence - without with, the results remain up for debate.
Thats also why I say we may not have to simulate it ALL, right down to the sub-atomic level, because much of this is being done now, just in a limited way