Conversation with Anonymous High Range Tester on Life, Work, and Views: High-Range Test-Taker (1)

Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Publisher Founding: March 1, 2014

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com

Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Journal: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Journal Founding: August 2, 2012

Frequency: Three (3) Times Per Year

Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed

Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access

Fees: None (Free)

Volume Numbering: 12

Issue Numbering: 3

Section: A

Theme Type: Idea

Theme Premise: “Outliers and Outsiders”

Theme Part: 31

Formal Sub-Theme: None

Individual Publication Date: July 15, 2024

Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2024

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Word Count: 8,679

Image Credits: None.

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885

*Updated November 6, 2024.*

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*

Abstract

Anonymous High Range Tester recently received a top score of 181 S.D. 15 on Test of the Beheaded Man, an experimental high-range intelligence test by Paul Cooijmans. He discusses: family stories; family culture; the reception of geniuses; genius vs. high intelligence; myths surrounding genius and giftedness; religion; ethics; science; metaphysics; meaning; the purpose of intelligence testing; a model of the self; and love.

Keywords: challenges faced, experiences growing up, instinctual subpersonalities, overall direction of ourselves, profound sense of meaning, psychological contour of my family, psychological development and attitudes, various elements of love.

Conversation with Anonymous High Range Tester on Life, Work, and Views: High-Range Test-Taker (1)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When you were growing up, what were some of the prominent family stories being told over time?

Anonymous High Range Tester: Over the years, I’ve received a patchwork of anecdotes from both of my parents about their experiences growing up—some merely amusing accounts, others more profound windows into their psychological development and attitudes at pivotal moments in their lives, including the challenges they faced and what it took to do so. Aside from these accounts, I received vignettes of a handful of interesting relatives, selected by their relevance to the broad narrative arc of our family, naturally.

Of the first sort, from my father, I’ve primarily received assorted recollections of his intensely exploratory and somewhat tumultuous childhood. My father was a born naturalist, and he grew up in northern Georgia and in the suburbs of New Orleans, always in proximity to nature, where one could find creatures of all sorts due to the subtropical climate and great variety of ecosystems in the region. Accordingly, he spent most of his time outside catching and inspecting every critter under the sun, and he had a string of unconventional pets, including a friendly raccoon and a rat, which he taught to run obstacle courses around his home.

One of my favorite stories of his pertains to him catching a nutria, a semiaquatic rodent, and bringing it into the bathtub of his family’s home to observe its behavior. He noted that in and around water, the nutria was feisty and highly active, but on dry land, it became torpid and virtually non-responsive. This behavioral pattern persisted even in his house; when it was in the bathtub, its spunk returned, but in his living room, it became practically catatonic, allowing him to set it on his lap and pet it freely. For reference, nutria are generally between 12 and 20 pounds. My grandmother somehow tolerated this! 

My father also often spoke of interactions with peers in his youth. He grew up in a rougher time marked by far less parental supervision than today, and I heard numerous stories of fights, adventures, and other wild occurrences. These always excited me. I found myself especially captivated by the more violent stories, especially those with tribal elements, which seemed to excite some atavistic impulse in me—I think this is quite typical of boys, though in contemporary Western culture, the notion seems somewhat fraught.  

From my mother, I received stories of a mostly different character, focusing somewhat less on isolated anecdotes and more on the general psychological feeling of her environment and the relationships therein. My mom told of a childhood and adolescence that were stable, predictable, and full of love, set in a provincial, hedonistic, fatalistic, and fundamentally limited culture that she inevitably felt compelled to escape, though her neighborhood was safe and its people friendly. She grew up in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, which at the time was a working-class neighborhood, though now it would be more aptly described as a ghetto, where everything revolved around the liturgical calendar—for context, when we visited some years ago, there was a sign on the corner of the street she grew up on that said, “No crack selling, no cat selling, and no loitering.” 

The most prominent stories my mom has passed down highlight her not quite fitting her environment, though she always cherished some aspects of it—mixed feelings, essentially. For example, in elementary school, she was seen as somewhat strange for being intense and intellectual, though her amiable nature somewhat smoothed over the reception of her eccentricity. She transitioned from an entirely dysfunctional and educationally inadequate junior high school, which was freshly integrated and where the teachers often didn’t show up, to a selective magnet high school, Benjamin Franklin, that had an IQ cutoff. She was among only a handful of working-class students at that high school, so she was a bit of a black sheep there too, and she started near the bottom of a class of about 130 students due to her relatively benighted background, though by the time she graduated, she was ranked 13th in the class and was a national merit semifinalist. 

Eventually, she had to leave New Orleans because of the dissonance between its culture and her values, which she said was the most difficult thing she’s ever done. My mother’s stories are generally about growth and evolving into the person you’re meant to be, even if that entails drastic and painful change or assiduous effort and unnerving uncertainty. 

Of the second sort of story mentioned in the first paragraph, my father spoke of his paternal grandfather, who was a doctor and pillar of his community; his maternal grandmother, who was a crack shot with a pistol and master at bridge; his eldest brother, who was a great athlete, being the pitcher, quarterback, and star basketball player of his high school’s team, a scratch golfer, and eventually becoming a cardiologist; and his mother, who he described as a saint. My father is particularly struck by people who attain high degrees of competence in some endeavor, so excellence is the main theme of stories he’s passed down about others. 

My mother sometimes spoke of her grandmother, who was highly intelligent and musical but who had agoraphobia and what at the time was called inadequate personality disorder, rendering her homebound. My mother’s uncle left home and got a PhD, while my mother’s father, despite being near the top of his military cohort intelligence-wise, remained in New Orleans, in part, to tend to his mother, never attending college. Prominent themes characterizing stories from that side of the family include anxiety, conscientiousness, loyalty versus self-actualization, and contentedness versus entrapment. 

Jacobsen: Have these stories helped provide a sense of an extended self or a sense of the family legacy? 

Anonymous High Range Tester: These stories have certainly helped me understand my parents, and they do make me feel connected to some broader narrative, though I would hesitate to consider it an extended sense of self or even a legacy since I’m somewhat more individualistic in that regard. It’s of course true that the psychological development of my parents has some bearing on or somehow colors my own, but I would hesitate to identify with that. 

Mostly though, these stories have helped me understand the broad contour of my family history in a psychological sense, and they provide a way to connect to that on a personal level. I’m an only child born of old parents—my mother was 47 and father 40 at the time of my birth—and we don’t live close to any relatives. Additionally, since my parents were quite old when I was born, many of the people they’ve mentioned are dead. This can feel somewhat isolating or lonely, and these stories help assuage that sense, partially because these people still live on in my imagination. 

 Jacobsen: When you think of the ways in which the geniuses of the past have either been mocked, vilified, and condemned if not killed, or praised, flattered, platformed, and revered, what seems like the reason for the extreme reactions to and treatment of geniuses? Many alive today seem camera shy – many, not all.

Anonymous High Range Tester: I would start by saying that none of these responses are surprising. A consummate genius brings forth a new paradigm, in the Kuhnian sense, which often entails reconfiguring the available evidence in a spectacularly novel way to address inconsistencies in the extant models of some fundamental phenomenon. 

Humans are fond of (reliant on) predictive processing. Once we see things a certain way, we tend to struggle to revise our conceptions. For example, consider latent inhibition, a tendency present in varying degrees in all of us, which broadly encapsulates the process of attentional attenuation that commences after a novel stimulus is first encountered and conceptualized. Once you see something as a particular thing, your attention toward it is increasingly inhibited with that and each subsequent encounter, or in other words, the stimulus fades into the background as a more and more implicit part of your perception, reducing the likelihood of novel reformulations.

This conceptual ossification is necessary at some level to stay sane. Imagine if every time you saw your toothbrush, it was like discovering a completely new object! With no latent inhibition, you’d struggle to leave your house every morning, since you’d be rediscovering everything in a sense. A genius has the requisite flexibility to overcome this tendency, allowing them to flexibly recast concepts—seeing things in new and salient ways—but that doesn’t mean their peers or culture do. Studies of people with high creative achievement show that they often have relatively lower latent inhibition and higher intelligence compared to the general population.

If we’re honest with ourselves, we can see a microcosm of one of the dynamics in question in our day-to-day lives. Consider your theory of getting to work. You travel the same route day after day. You have it down pat, and you’ve refined your morning routine to a tee. You show up to work without a minute to spare, chuckling to yourself smugly—the Germans should envy your efficiency. One day, you encounter unexpected traffic. Cripes! This vehicular vicissitude has you on the verge of tears. Is that how you react, generally? No! You turn red and spew expletives or at the very least huff in frustration. 

In the above example, you’re getting a taste of what having your theory of the world undermined feels like. We’re constantly building maps, and especially when we’re reliant on those maps, when they fail, negative emotions ensue, anger often first and foremost among them. In his seminal tome, The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist states that, according to neuroimaging studies, outward-oriented anger lateralizes to the left hemisphere, which is also primarily where the verbal schema we use to navigate the phenomenal world are manufactured. 

We’re typically okay with smoothing over or ignoring small gaps between our maps and reality, but the genius sees how those gaps could be made even smaller, and sometimes, to do that, they make leaps that initially seem absurd and jarring, provoking ire from those who encounter them.

Consider the transition from the geocentric to heliocentric models of our solar system. In De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, Copernicus first proposed the heliocentric model, and later, Kepler refined the model by introducing elliptical orbits. Initially, as I understand it, these models were received as merely theoretical, and only fringe astronomers took them as reflective of reality—people often initially compartmentalize threatening ideas in this way. After Galileo used the newly invented telescope to corroborate the heliocentric theory, explicitly espousing it in Sidereus Nuncius, the Roman Catholic Inquisition averred his ideas “formally heretical,” and he was eventually sentenced to house arrest, where he remained until death. 

If having your theory of commuting undermined upsets you in the moment, imagine receiving evidence that disrupts your foundational spatiotemporal picture of the world and concomitantly, your faith in the religious institution from which said picture and much of your remaining worldview was sourced. If they were mistaken about that, where else might they, and transitively, you, have erred? It’s hard to imagine how disconcerting this would be. 

On the flip side, the veneration of geniuses isn’t surprising either. The lines of reasoning they pursue seem incredibly unlikely, and they often seem driven by nothing short of divine afflatus—like the intuition of the cosmos is somehow channeled through them. Even Feynman, a genius in his own right, was gobsmacked by Einstein’s derivation of the general theory of relativity. It’s no surprise Einstein has become the de facto archetypal genius.  

Considering the diametric responses above, it’s no surprise geniuses often prefer to remain low-key. Neither being maligned nor exalted is generally comfortable. 

Jacobsen: Who seems like the greatest geniuses in history to you?

Anonymous High Range Tester: Shakespeare, Newton, Gauss, Euler, Leibniz, Darwin, Da Vinci, Einstein, Nietzsche, Bach, Buddha, and Jung.  

Jacobsen: What differentiates a genius from a profoundly intelligent person?

Anonymous High Range Tester: This is one of the most fascinating questions in all of psychology, and Hans Eysenck addresses it masterfully, in my opinion, in the book: Genius: The Natural History of Creativity, citing historiometric and psychometric evidence to bolster his claims. Up to the point he published this work, inquiry into genius was primarily idiographic, and thus, there was substantial motivation to explicate trait genius, so that it could be predicted rather than simply retrospectively recognized. I’ll paraphrase some of his ideas and others I’ve heard about the topic here. 

Firstly, depending on one’s cutoff, profound intelligence in at least one cognitive domain seems necessary for genius, especially in the scientific, mathematical, and literary realms—It’s possible that geniuses in the visual arts have generally had more mild general cognitive ability, but they don’t typically come to mind when I think of genius proper. That being said, extreme intelligence per se is far from sufficient to constitute genius, and when people conflate the two, it’s generally reflective of lexical laziness or conceptual confusion, in my view. 

I’ve also heard the idea that when it comes to intelligence’s contribution to genius, more isn’t necessarily better—In other words, there may be a sort of “Goldilocks zone,” between three and four standard deviations or so, where genius is most likely to emerge. The explanation I’ve heard for this is that intelligence is generally associated with mental efficiency, neurologically evinced, in part, by shorter mean path length, the average distance between two neurons or groups of neurons in the brain’s network. 

At some level, economy may begin to conflict with ingenuity: putatively, the neuronal network of a genius is anfractuous relative to a merely highly intelligent person, so as electrical signals travel through it, novel connections are more likely to be made. This is the first layer of tension in the genius’s constitution. 

Eysenck also said geniuses have an increased tendency for psychopathology and disagreeableness. The first-degree relatives of geniuses generally have a higher loading of psychopathological traits, and besides that, Eysenck used the concept of psychoticism, which subsumes impulsiveness, nonconformity, and a tendency for divergent thinking, among others, to capture some personality tendencies commonly found in geniuses. 

He also stated that geniuses typically have high ego strength, which is associated with emotional stability, resilience, self-efficacy, and adaptability, and if I recall correctly, he said geniuses were typically introverted.  

These additional traits represent the other layers of tension in the genius. Once intelligence is too high, extreme creativity is potentially precluded. Psychopathology seems to be related to creativity in a similar manner—too much, and one might develop psychosis or some similarly debilitating affliction, destroying the creative capacity—and it’s also negatively associated with ego strength, unsurprisingly. Intelligence is also negatively associated with psychopathology, assuming you appropriately ignore a specious study of Mensa members which showed the opposite. 

Additionally, I suspect that the optimal proportion of the aforementioned traits is domain-dependent apropos creative achievement. For example, I suspect ego strength and emotional stability are more important in the hard sciences, while psychopathology is probably relatively more prominent in the literary realms. 

Perhaps it’s unnecessary to say, but a profoundly intelligent person merely has high general cognitive ability. Genius is far rarer and far more interesting. Geniuses also rarely beget geniuses, and they often come from otherwise unremarkable families, which is not surprising, considering the extremely unlikely constellation of conflicting characteristics that coincide in them. 

Jacobsen: Is profound intelligence necessary for genius?

Anonymous High Range Tester: See the answer above. 

Jacobsen: What have been some work experiences and jobs held by you?

Anonymous High Range Tester: I’ve worked at a dog kennel, as a tutor for standardized tests, at a daycare, as a factotum at the university, and as a research assistant—which is what I do currently while I complete my degree.

Jacobsen: What are some of the more important aspects of the idea of the gifted and geniuses? Those myths that pervade the cultures of the world. What are those myths? What truths dispel them?

Anonymous High Range Tester: I have to say that I’m not a huge fan of the word gifted. It seems more appropriate to refer to intelligent people as what they are—intelligent people—avoiding unnecessarily superimposing a pseudo-religious framework on the matter. Yes, it’s true that people don’t earn their intelligence, and intelligence is generally seen as a positive trait, so in that sense, it’s akin to a gift, but why analogize when you can just refer to it plainly. It’s just not parsimonious, conceptually.

To elaborate and avoid seeming contradictions, if an idea is going to be used again and again, as a general rule, I think the most parsimonious casting of it is preferable—I don’t treat parsimony as the highest ideal in all contexts, as one can easily see in my writing (to put it lightly). I felt qualifying this necessary to resolve the antinomy potentially induced by the antepenultimate statement, that is, the prima facie conflict between my statement about parsimony and the general character of my writing, which could hardly be described as such. In writing, I favor precision, comprehensiveness, and aesthetics over parsimony, and I believe I have a decent understanding of the tradeoffs entailed by this approach. 

The biggest myth I see is that “giftedness” is generally associated with some counterbalancing undesirable trait or set thereof. General cognitive ability is positively associated with all manner of positive traits, sans myopia, as far as I’m aware. The idea that people with some advantages are more likely to have others conflicts with the egalitarian sensibilities of Western people. In general, there’s crucial tension here between meritocratic and egalitarian ideals, and this is one of the primary memetic conflicts defining the present age. 

As far as genius goes, the biggest myth is that it’s synonymous with high intelligence as I elaborate on in one of the previous answers. 

Jacobsen: Any thoughts on the God concept or gods idea and philosophy, theology, and religion?

Anonymous High Range Tester: I’m somewhat partial to the apophatic conception of God or Brahman found in Advaita Vedanta, originally a non-dual school of thought and textual exegesis of the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita that eventually evolved into a syncretic yogic tradition. 

To me, it makes sense to think of God as beyond conception in the verbal sense, and I think it’s a clever trick to inductively arrive at Brahman by negating that which it can’t possibly be—Neti neti. Anything you can refer to ostensively and inevitably label falls short, so I don’t favor concrete representations of God, as they’re sort of the ultimate and most unseemly reification imaginable to me. I think God is ineffable in the positive sense.   

It seems to me as though there’s some creative principle that somehow undergirds the phenomenal world and ourselves. In Advaita Vedanta, as I understand it, the Atman is the aspect of that principle that lies beneath the ego, or the individuated self, which I see as fundamentally verbal or at least preverbal and not essential. Another idea in Advaita is that Atman is inevitably identical to Brahman. This is the ultimate sort of non-dualism, and it rings true to me. 

Jacobsen: How much does science play into the worldview for you?

Anonymous High Range Tester: In the above response, I alluded to some distinction between the phenomenal world and that which lies underneath, which can be gestured to through a process of negation. When it comes to having an accurate map of the phenomenal world, the scientific method is the best tool we have, in my opinion. Regarding philosophy of science, I suppose I favor the Popperian lens, especially his idea of verisimilitude; it strikes me as intuitively correct. 

Essentially, in doing science, we conceive of testable symbolic models of the world that can be more or less true than others but that are not taken as true in an absolute sense. We figure out which models are better than others by, surprise surprise, testing them. There’s something really attractive about this idea to me. Accordingly, in science, unlike mathematics, we don’t prove things as true—rather, we arrive at provisional truths. 

I have to say that science for me is just one of many tools in my store, and like any, it has its time and a place, and that’s not every time and place; when it comes to building a workable model of the material world, the scientific method and models informed by it reign supreme. Notions of the divine don’t exactly help you build a house or predict the weather. Besides science, intuition, imagination, experience, rationality, and emotion are all important ways I’ve developed different aspects of my worldview. Intuition is somewhat dominant, though, since it seems to be what selects the tool that seems most suitable for a given context.

Jacobsen: What ethical philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?

Anonymous High Range Tester: I haven’t studied any ethical system in depth, and I’m basing my answer on cursory and potentially flawed understanding, so do keep that in mind. Some more philosophically informed readers may roll their eyes. I favor virtue ethics, for roughly the same reason I think people generally look to religion instead of philosophy for guidance about how to live a good life—at least in the West; in the East, the two are more intertwined. 

Humans are narrative creatures. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari elaborates on this characteristic of human behavior, contrasting us with chimps, whose troop size is approximately limited by Dunbar’s number—150. Troops that get much larger than this inevitably balkanize because a chimp is cognitively capped in the number of relationships it can keep track of—as are we. Humans have overcome this tendency, in part, by developing the capacity to organize around memes, and these memes inevitably contain prescriptions for optimal social behavior. Accordingly, the success of groups of humans is contingent on the effectiveness of the memes they organize around in promoting prosocial behavior and general well-being. For example, you likely won’t find an extant society where murder is permitted—at least not a successful one. 

Consider the success of Christianity and tropological interpretations of the Bible, which often entail simultaneously apprehending abstract moral principles and concrete instantiations thereof in the medium of individual human behavior—characters in stories. The Bible is not exactly a set of pseudo-mathematical rules for maximizing utility, it’s more human. 

The idea of utility is attractive to the quantitatively inclined, in particular, but I don’t see it as particularly pragmatic, especially because, on the surface, utility seems to be something retrospectively assessed, and it collapses a variety of potentially incommensurable values to a single measure. Virtues, on the other hand, are easy to understand and implement in one’s life immediately because they’re inevitably predicated on patterns of behavior, and humans learn largely through the mimicry thereof. I also think the fact that we see certain traits as virtuous stems from their being realized as promoting utility in a general sense if you prefer to adduce that concept. Over vast swaths of time, across countless and diverse contexts, billions of humans have converged upon certain traits or behaviors as optimal, arriving at what we now call virtues.

I believe their development or discovery is an evolutionary process since it’s based on variation, reproduction, and differential outcomes over time. Humans vary in their behavior, and the variation in these behaviors is consequential—the outcomes are differential—more optimal patterns of behavior are more likely to be passed down or “reproduced,” and this process has been iterated over thousands of years. So virtues are distilled or compressed representations of optimal patterns of human behavior with high metaphorical applicability—they can be readily understood and exercised in one’s day-to-day life.

Utilitarianism is intellectually attractive, but when it comes to workable ethical systems, virtue ethics is the most intuitive to me. I like how you invoked workability in the question since it’s the crux of my position. 

Jacobsen: What social philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?

Anonymous High Range Tester: I haven’t thought about that yet. 

Jacobsen: What political philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?

Anonymous High Range Tester: I’ve yet to study or think about political philosophy, so I can’t say. 

Jacobsen: What metaphysics makes some sense to you, even the most workable sense to you?

Anonymous High Range Tester: Advaita Vedanta.

Jacobsen: What worldview-encompassing philosophical system makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?

Anonymous High Range Tester: Advaita Vedanta augmented with science.

Jacobsen: What provides meaning in life for you?

Anonymous High Range Tester: Individuation, becoming the person I was meant to be—though not necessarily individuation in the sense of separation. Discovering my deepest values and becoming an ideal conduit for them. 

I’ve recently discovered that I want to work in a group of people toward some aim I feel is worthwhile or good, and I want the work to provide opportunities for intellectual and moral growth. More abstractly, harmony is a paramount value for me, manifesting in social, artistic, intellectual, and all aspects of life.

Jacobsen: Is meaning externally derived, internally generated, both, or something else?

Anonymous High Range Tester: I see humans as organisms with aims in a paratelic or maybe even telic sense. To address this question appropriately, I’d like to outline an intuitive model of the self I’ve synthesized, sourcing ideas from internal family systems, Jung, conversations with friends, observation, and direct experience. I’d like to thank Erik Hæreid and Keith Causey in particular,  since many of these ideas were spawned from our interactions—Erik and I exchanged about 15,000 words within our first ten or so messages. Keith had an idea of the “arrow of intention,” which hinted at a vector representation of the self to me, though I believe he meant something else by it.

I’m not a truly creative person, so this isn’t exactly original, but I feel like I can understand the basics of seemingly disparate ideas and see how they could be reconciled—sometimes lending the appearance of novelty—my friends and I think of this as combinatorial creativity instead of creativity proper. 

The model is meant to be descriptive, abstract, and relatively parsimonious, assumption-wise so that it’s compatible with other frameworks a person might favor. Accordingly, it’s not meant to be exhaustive, merely proportional to what it’s trying to represent, and its relative simplicity should render it more immediately comprehensible and applicable than some of the more baroque frameworks that are the standard when trying to describe something as complex and multifaceted as the self. 

The essential axiom of this framework states that living creatures are creatures with aims. They are not static, passive entities disinterested in the state of affairs in their environment. In other words, they are preferential. I’ll touch on how I think these preferences emerge and dynamically interact with one another.

In general, life wants to live and beget more life. This is a positive observation, not a normative statement; one can object to this notion morally, as antinatalists might, but given the evidence we have, no other conclusion seems reasonable. From abiogenesis to single-celled organisms and beyond, living creatures at all levels of complexity are unified in their apparent aim to persist and reproduce. 

As the complexity of the nervous system and mind of a living creature scales, these preferences become more elaborated, nuanced, and hierarchical. Especially once self-reflective consciousness is reached, you start to see fascinating behavior that seems to go beyond mere survival and, accordingly, is not reducible to it in my view. Within a human, you see multiple evolutionarily instantiated subsystems with uniquely blinkered outlooks, all unified in their aim

to facilitate the continuance of the organism, though they don’t always do this particularly efficiently, to understate things somewhat! 

The idea of subpersonalities is fitting here, which says that the variety of drives present in any given human can be aptly characterized as a collection of simplified, provisional personalities, each with a unique aim and each responding to different queues, all related to the protection and maintenance of the organism. We can look at each of these subpersonalities as having their own value structure and will. 

Beneath these structures is some unifying awareness, which I believe is not dispassionate—it has values baked in, and these values transcend mere survival, but they can be obscured by the activity of subpersonalities. When we recruit the will, we’re generally pursuing some “highest” value, though not necessarily the deep aims of this awareness—rather, whatever value is apprehended as highest at the time. Subpersonalities are somewhat akin to parts in IFS and archetypes in Jungian psychology. I think this awareness is akin to self in IFS. 

People unknowingly allude to subpersonalities often: “I don’t know what came over me,” or the Snickers slogan, “You’re not you when you’re hungry.” Subpersonalities reduce the infinite complexity of the world to simple aims, like fear versus calmness, danger versus safety, hunger versus satiation, pain versus pleasure, etc. This is one way you can recognize when they’re operative. Another way is to notice when you feel automatically compelled in some way that’s hard to override, even when you think it’s sensible to do so.

From these concepts, an intuitive, vector-based representation of the self emerges. The aforementioned values or aims can be seen as the target of the self. We can see the will as a vector of variable magnitude with a relatively stable direction—the direction of our highest values—and perhaps emerging in proportion to and shifting in concert with our awareness of them—so a person without a clear understanding of their values will tend to suffer from a paucity of willpower, defaulting to the activity of subpersonalities, as they don’t know what they want, and the subsystems do know what they want. 

Feel free to adopt or discard this vectorial representation. It’s intuitive to me to spatialize these concepts, looking at the self as this fluctuating mass of components that are more or less aligned at different times and that “sum” together to produce an overall direction, but it’s perfectly comprehensible to consider it more verbally. How one interfaces with these ideas is not so important, and the model isn’t rigorous—it more so has a mathematical patina. 

We can see the subpersonalities as semi-permanent vectors with stable directions and variable magnitudes, predicated on drives and their fluctuations, many of which are present at birth. The variable magnitude of the will stems from our tendency to not recruit it, as it’s energetically expensive, finding it far easier to rely on subpersonalities and habits in most cases, these generally being somewhat aligned with what we want or what is necessary to sustain our existence, which is a sort of bottom line. 

The fluctuating sum of the constantly shifting vectors that constitute us—subpersonalities, habits, and will—produces a direction with a magnitude, which can be seen as a behavioral pattern or process and represents the direction and magnitude of our impact on the world. The more aligned our component vectors, the greater the magnitude of this resultant vector. 

If this sum is pointed in the direction of our highest or deepest values, then I believe we experience a sense of meaning. We will feel that we are moving in the right direction. If we believe there’s misalignment or we’re not sure what direction is right, not having a clear sense of our values, we will experience negative emotion or apathy and brain fog, respectively. 

The thing is, we will also feel an attenuated version of these negative emotions when we are out of alignment with the temporary drives, as again, each drive is a personality of its own with its own simplified value structure. The temporary satiation of the aims of subpersonalities produces a comparatively weak sense of meaning—for example, the sensation experienced after the first bite of food when you’re hungry. 

I think your deepest values are roughly your sense of what is good. You aim for what you believe is good, and you try to cultivate patterns of behavior that facilitate that, but you’re constantly having to manage the semi-autonomous actions of subpersonalities, some of which are ineffective or opposed to your highest values, at least temporarily.

This resolves the paradox of the alcoholic who knows it’s better not to drink, stemming from knowledge and higher values, who nevertheless succumbs to the urge to drink because of habit spawned from the activity of the alcoholic personality over time, which hijacks the brain’s reward system. It’s possible for a subpersonality to usurp the personality structure when its magnitude is especially large and its built habits that sustain it. Everyone who has succumbed to their impulses knows this well.

To be clear, these are more than just drives; they generate thoughts of a certain character and pull the self in different directions, so personality is a more appropriate way to view them. If you’ve spoken to someone experiencing anxiety, for example, you’ve probably seen how their perception has somehow been reduced to threat or potential threat versus safety, how they’ve been taken over by something that organizes the world in this way, how the expression of their self in the truest sense is restricted. 

Accordingly, you can have dialogues with the subpersonalities within you, and you can negotiate with them, in a sense, to achieve more internal harmony, assuming you’re firmly situated in your broad awareness and not forceful. It’s a worthwhile exercise to try and figure out the main subpersonalities operative within you and their themes.  

Sometimes, the will is just used to cancel out the misbehaving subpersonality. This is one way we can exert our will in the world. The other is to point the will in line with existing subpersonalities or habits. In both cases, we’re moving toward values, but in the former case, we see a reduction in the magnitude of the sum or self-vector, and in the latter case, we see an increase in it. We stay in place, avoiding the path we don’t want to go down, or we move with greater force in the direction we want, respectively. Again, I think facilitating communication between your subpersonalities can make this go over more smoothly. 

When we characterize ourselves as a collection of subpersonalities, each with a uniquely blinkered outlook and simplified value set, with a unifying awareness underneath that is privy and beholden to both the values of the subpersonalities and its own, higher values, stemming from the structure of ourselves in the most general sense, to reference the paratelic framing I referenced earlier, many contradictions in our behavior disappear. 

The direction of the self over time can increasingly be seen as a product of the recruitment of the various wills that compose us and will proper, as the activity of each subpersonality over time produces habits that support it, and so does the activity of the superordinate will. I see habits as paths that are easier to go down, roughly, not as subpersonalities per se. A vector’s magnitude is greater with less effort down a path well-trodden. 

Now I will discuss how I think our understanding of values emerges over time—values being the targets of our will and the predicates of the sense of meaning in question. 

By default, at birth, we have instinctual subpersonalities that pilot our behavior and guide habit formation. Over time, we become aware of more and more predicates of behavior, including societal values, the expectations of our families, and the general cultural current. We experience negative emotional states, sometimes because of how others treat or react to us when we aren’t aligned with these values, so initially, the activity of our will is usually disproportionately to align ourselves with these external forces, and they often operate through our sense of pleasure and pain. 

When you mention externally derived meaning, this is usually what I think is happening. There may be values we don’t care about fundamentally, but external forces punish or reward us when we’re aligned or misaligned with them—hijacking the personality associated with the pleasure-pain axis.

For some, these readymade, culturally sourced values suffice to guide behavior for the entire lifespan. For others, it merely suffices to repeatedly sate the subpersonalities perennially. For others, higher values are discovered, predicated on one’s temperament and general psychological constitution, and moving in the direction of these values may entail going against the aims of one’s society, perhaps to improve it. 

These values are realized as higher because when one acts in service to them, a profound sense of meaning or engagement is felt. Such a person might find the mindless execution of the expectations of one’s society empty or somehow disingenuous. 

I think the aforesaid sensation of meaning is analogous to harmony in music. You might hear one note and find it pretty, but that note’s effect on you will pale in comparison to an elaborate chord that contains the same note, evoking a far richer emotional response. One note is analogous to fulfilling the value of a subpersonality, and the entire chord is like fulfilling an essential constellation of values for you. 

If you are a highly competitive person, you may enjoy playing chess. If you are a highly physical person, you may enjoy gardening. If you are a highly competitive and highly physical person, you will probably derive more meaning from playing soccer than from playing chess ceteris paribus, though you would enjoy both. If you are a physical and nurturing person, then gardening would be similarly meaningful to you. You can imagine how as more values are expressed through a particular activity, the feeling of meaning is deeper. 

Each time we recruit the will, we change the overall direction of ourselves, suppressing or realigning wayward drives and adopting behavior toward a certain aim. I believe we feel happiness when we sense ourselves aligning with core values, but this feeling recedes once the direction is set again, even if things are more copacetic than before. 

We exercise our will so that in the future we can move in the direction of our values without having to exercise our will, by forming new habits and aligning subpersonalities so that they work for us instead of against us. This is arduous work due to inertia and the amount of concentration and active cognitive energy it requires.

Some might say that the will itself is not “ours”—it’s something inherent to consciousness, which isn’t necessarily constrained to the self, so I don’t mean to exclude non-dual interpretations of the self with this framing. 

Again, the entire process can be intuitively visualized by drawing a pseudo-mathematical analogy to vectors and vector arithmetic, largely because it’s natural to encode values in a high-dimensional space, but also because vector arithmetic nicely captures how the disparate drives within us act together to produce our overall direction. It captures the individual directions of our components and their composite picture or sum. If two equal parts of you want to go right, you go right with twice the magnitude of one part. If one of those parts wants to go left while the other wants to go right, they cancel each other out and you don’t move. 

In roughly this manner, we use the will to steer the ship that is our self, using our values—our sense of what is right—internally sourced or otherwise, as a cynosure, realized through the sense of meaning felt when we serve them. I believe this is why we tend to identify with the will. It is the most active part of ourselves, and it’s moving in a direction that feels correct. It’s why we separate intent from outcome, partially. 

It occurs to me to explain some common psychological phenomena through this model. 

A natural extension of these ideas is that maturing is about getting your subvectors in order so that the magnitude of the self vector is greater—so there’s more cohesion and less dissonance, a feeling we experience when aims within us are not aligned, and so that the sum vector is pointed toward our highest or deepest values. 

Another extension of these ideas is that we are subpersonalities in the larger groups we participate in, and groups are subpersonalities in larger groups. Thus, the memetic multiplicity and concomitant conflict of society somehow reflect an analogous state of affairs within. 

The Jungian idea of the persona is a prominent subpersonality in each of us, the other-facing self each person cultivates to comport with the pressures of their social world, though some are relatively incapable of this. Note that subpersonalities need not have unitary value structures. They can come to subtly dominate the personality and have a complex value set. 

I believe the classic existential crisis occurs when one aligns their persona with the values of society, seemingly having everything figured out, only to be struck by profound ennui seemingly out of nowhere. In these and similar cases, I believe core values of the self have been neglected, and some psychic process precipitates psychopathological symptoms to catalyze an introspective plumbing of the self in order to help right one’s course. Unsurprisingly, I think this is often referred to as “soul searching.” Dabrowski’s ideas of positive disintegration accord with this view. 

Jacobsen: Do you believe in an afterlife? If so, why, and what form? If not, why not?

Anonymous High Range Tester: I’m agnostic on this topic. 

Jacobsen: What do you make of the mystery and transience of life?

Anonymous High Range Tester: The mystery of life is a continual source of meaning for me. Looking around, learning, developing, discovering, exploring… It seems like the most captivating aspects of experience somehow relate to that sense of mystery.  

I feel pretty unperturbed by the transience of life. For whatever reason, it’s always made sense to me. I can share an impactful experience I had in my youth that feels intuitively related—I’ve already written it up. 

When I was four or so while standing on my deck, I had the sudden realization that I’m Anonymous High Range Tester: I’m here, and I don’t know how I came to be, but there are other people too, and they are also in an analogous position. We are all in our little observational pockets with no direct access to others’—I was struck by the arbitrariness and absurdity of everything; I moved my fingers around while holding my wrist like my body was some sort of fleshy marionette. I tried to imagine an alternative, or at least, that’s what the cogitation felt like—I didn’t have the words at the time; this was an instinctive movement of the mind and hardly verbal. 

The most intuitive antipode to the absurdity of experience was nothingness, so I tried my best to fathom it, and it felt like my brain broke. I pictured myself, everyone I know, the earth, our solar system, and the universe disappearing—pure stillness—and I couldn’t grasp it. I ran inside and said “Dad! Try to imagine nothing! If I do it it feels like my brain breaks!” This was the most formative thought experiment I’ve ever conducted, and thinking through it produces the same surreal feeling as when I first conjured it.

So given the arbitrary feeling of my appearance in this world, an exit isn’t hard to accept. It doesn’t make sense to be here in the first place. 

Jacobsen: How was the experience with peers and schoolmates as a child and an adolescent?

Anonymous High Range Tester: I delighted in social interaction from the time I was an infant. In school, I did sense some difference between me and my peers, but I wasn’t quite sure what it was, and it didn’t exactly matter because I was determined to find any way possible to have fun with others. I remember in kindergarten thinking that the other children were somehow hiding something—they were relatively terse, while I was much more voluble and “out in the open”. When I spoke, my sentences were typically longer and more complex. At the time, I ascribed this to some unknown quirk of my personality, and I was somewhat abashed about it.  

I was always fond of humor and saw it everywhere. One of my earliest memories is from a home daycare I attended between the ages of one and two. I’m orthogonal to another boy at the corner of a wooden table, and we’re strapped into high chairs with bibs. The caregiver is shoveling mixed vegetables from a can into our mouths with a staid expression, alternating between us, and I’m howling with laughter between mouthfuls of veggies and smiling at the other boy. It struck me as absurd that at almost two years old, we were being treated like infants. We had the motor coordination to feed ourselves, but the caregiver was particularly fastidious, and she didn’t want us making a mess. 

Another time, in preschool, I got my friend in trouble by making him laugh to the point of disrupting the class, so he was put in the time-out chair. While he was in the chair, I continued to make him laugh while remaining under the radar, and his timeout was repeatedly extended because he was unable to compose himself. I was in stitches—discreetly. 

In general, I was more of a social, physical, and imaginative child than an intellectual one, which I believe was to my benefit. I loved and excelled at sports, building Legos, reading, drawing, and interacting with others. Toward the end of high school, I started to wake up to the more intellectual side of myself, and I became quite dissatisfied with school, but I always had friends, and I still keep in touch with multiple people from my childhood.

Jacobsen: What is the purpose of intelligence tests to you?

Anonymous High Range Tester: After addressing this question, I’ll venture slightly outside its scope to make some comments I feel are important and at least obliquely related. 

Standard intelligence tests are clinical instruments that can provide crucial insight into a person’s general cognitive functioning, especially when taken in context with their personal history and overall psychology. 

Their purpose is not to detect high intelligence per se. The best of these tests seem to be maximally valid within three standard deviations from the mean, and they get shaky from that point on, especially as subtest ceilings are hit, though some do a bit better in this range than others. That doesn’t matter in the vast majority of cases. I should add that most adults probably have a decent idea of their intelligence and should have no need to test it explicitly. 

Experimental high-range intelligence tests represent an attempt to understand what is going on in the far right tail of intelligence. They can be seen as introspective tools, an opportunity to see one’s limits, a chance to compete with other intelligent people, a way to contribute to the study of high intelligence, or simply a collection of puzzles to enjoy. 

I’m not that fond of puzzles for their own sake, and I see these tests as one way to get information about the self, which, to me, is the ultimate mystery. Thus, I favor them as tools for introspection, but I also like the competitive aspect and feeling of “conquering” something.

In high-range tests, the fact that you get to work on problems over time is highly rewarding; it feels good to mull over something, eventually arriving at “aha!” moments. The emotional salience of these moments seems proportional to the struggle that preceded them, which is a good life lesson.

That’s something I didn’t quite appreciate with the first few high-range tests I tried, though I was somewhat younger, which certainly played a role. I rushed through them, solving the tests for well less than a week, eager to see how I would score, which generally led to underperformance, though I still did well—I’ve tried three Cooijmans’ tests, including the Test of the Beheaded Man, and all were above three sigma. For context, I spent slightly over five weeks on TBM, distributing my time evenly across that period, looking at the test for a bit each day, though some days more than others. I only submitted it when I felt there was no possible way I could improve my answers further. My skepticism in myself and awareness of my fallibility increased due to my prior underperformance.

One should note that, ostensibly, the presence of suboptimal approaches to these tests likely indicates that those who spend their time properly may get a bit of a score boost, assuming they have the requisite intelligence to benefit from that. Also, one generally has to calibrate their sense of correctness, and this may take a submission or two. This is just my opinion, and not everyone feels this way. Regardless, I have no plans for further testing since I have many things I want to learn and do and feel as though I’ve exhausted the utility of psychometric navel-gazing. I met my goal of doing well on a high-quality high-range test. 

I should also note that I believe scores on these tests should be taken with more than a healthy dose of caution. If someone can score above four standard deviations on a reputable—meaning substantially g-loaded, sufficiently heterogeneous, and properly normed—high-range intelligence test, I would conclude that they are almost certainly very intelligent. I wouldn’t say that they are statistically rarer than one out of thirty thousand people in an unselected sample of the general Western population, since that conclusion, to me, isn’t justifiable given the (considerable) limits of the norming procedure given such rarified samples. I have no idea how HRT scores map to “true” rarity. I certainly don’t view my recent score as reflective of the actual rarity of my intelligence.

Jacobsen: What is love to you?

Anonymous High Range Tester: This question is incredibly difficult for me to produce a straightforward answer to. It’s not one I’ve thought about at length, regrettably. I tentatively write some of my initial thoughts on the matter below. I suspect love is one of those concepts beyond language—“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” 

A major part of love is understanding. Love seems to entail an at least partial relaxation of the sense of separation between yourself and some other or others. As these conceptual boundaries drop, your consciousness in the deepest sense seems to start to simulate the other, allowing you to see the world through their eyes in a way. I think this is where love starts. 

It’s possible to have a decent understanding of another and find it best to refrain from interacting with them since you don’t see it as being salutary for yourself or them, typically affecting a sort of wistful melancholy in my experience. You hope things turn out well for them, which is a sort of love, but not its florid form. 

If you like what you see, feel as though you’re not infringing on the other, and see it as beneficial for the both of you, the partial weakening of these boundaries allows whatever perpetuates your instinct for self-preservation to extend outward, tending to them. Ideally, they extend the same to you in a commensurate though not necessarily identical sense. A reciprocal bond of this sort is something I believe nearly all humans covet. 

At this point, depending on numerous other factors like sexual attraction, cultural considerations, practical considerations, maturity differences, goals, and responsibilities, to briefly touch on a few, a variety of types of relationships could form, including romantic relationships, friendships, mentor-mentee relationships, stewardships, guardianships, et cetera.

Somewhat analogously to the way that different values overlap to produce more or less pronounced feelings of meaning, the various elements of love overlap to determine its poignancy, I suspect. 

Again, this is only an initial foray into the topic. I’ll have to think about it more to address any inaccuracies or insufficiencies in my conceptions.

Thanks for the interesting questions! 

(For information about Advaita Vedanta and the transition from the geocentric to heliocentric models, I used their Wikipedia pages.)

Bibliography

None

Footnotes

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Citations

American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with Anonymous High Range Tester on Life, Work, and Views: High-Range Test-Taker (1). July 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/anonymous-hrt-taker-1

American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, July 15). Conversation with Anonymous High Range Tester on Life, Work, and Views: High-Range Test-Taker (1). In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).

Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Anonymous High Range Tester on Life, Work, and Views: High-Range Test-Taker (1). In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.

Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “Conversation with Anonymous High Range Tester on Life, Work, and Views: High-Range Test-Taker (1).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/anonymous-hrt-taker-1.

Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Conversation with Anonymous High Range Tester on Life, Work, and Views: High-Range Test-Taker (1).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (July 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/anonymous-hrt-taker-1.

Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘Conversation with Anonymous High Range Tester on Life, Work, and Views: High-Range Test-Taker (1)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/anonymous-hrt-taker-1>.

Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘Conversation with Anonymous High Range Tester on Life, Work, and Views: High-Range Test-Taker (1)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/anonymous-hrt-taker-1>.

Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Conversation with Anonymous High Range Tester on Life, Work, and Views: High-Range Test-Taker (1).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/anonymous-hrt-taker-1.

Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Conversation with Anonymous High Range Tester on Life, Work, and Views: High-Range Test-Taker (1) [Internet]. 2024 Jul; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/anonymous-hrt-taker-1.

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