3. How do you describe a person?
We need to be able to calculate an agent's behaviour from a limited set of quantifiable parameters. So how do you define a character's personality? It's the fact that we are different, that creates the problems we have in society, but it also creates positive dynamic forces and makes life interesting.
This is what the field of psychology is all about, and I must say I think they have failed to accomplish the fundamental task of figuring out how we differ from each other and how much. A popular but rather meaningless pursuit, is to divide people into types. That's a too simplistic approach.
Let me try to identify the many different layers of our personality that affects how we live.
First we have physiological needs – for food, sleep, warmth – and they are basically the same for everyone, so they are not good measurements to define an individual.
At the next level we have psychological needs, which differ a little more from person to person. They are for example the needs to feel safe and loved and having a purpose. The instinct to reproduce might be on this level.
On a level higher up, we have personality traits. These are for example being extroverted or introverted, messy or pedantic, callous or empathetic, having high or low IQ. They are mainly inborn or formed during childhood and are not easy to change.
Next we have tastes and preferences. We are not born with our taste in food, music, art (and I would put sexual preferences here too, but that is more controversial). We know what we like but not why. It's never one consciouss decision we make to like something. A lot of things form our taste including our personality traits, but probably mostly our wish to please/imitate or displease/separate us from our parents or friends. Tastes can change over time but often not quickly.
Then we have moral values, political ideologies, prejudices. They can be more strongly or loosely hold opinions. It's distinctions on this level that we usually identify as, because it is what we choose to believe.
Knowledge and experiences are in the top level of what defines us and sets us apart from others.
All these inner qualities decide how we react and act under different circumstances.
If we were able to measure them in a population, I'm sure we would see that each one of them have a normal distribution around a mean value. (My opinion is that many of the psychiatric diagnosis we make, are just people on the tail end of one or more of these parameters.)
It would be neat if we could quantify a few innate characteristics and then calculate all the layers from that. But the higher up we get in the layers, the more they are influenced by inputs from the outside world.
There are probably at least fifty fundamental parameters that define me as a person (not counting external factors, like how I look, where I live, what I do and so on). Even if we only have a resolution of five on each parameter (average, slightly less or slightly more than average, and much more or much less than average) we get over 1033 possible unique personality profiles.
Is it too much to keep track of fifty parameters? For a person, yes, but it shouldn't be for a computer. (The language model GPT-3 has a capacity of 175 billion machine learning parameters.) To make a simulation of a group of people or a society, we have to add all the different aspects of how people interact with each other. More on that in a coming post.
What we still need to do is to define the characteristics and measure how they are distributed among populations.
Relevant Wikipedia articles:
Another fundamental difference seems to be whether one thinks mainly in images, words or abstract ideas. But it's only recently we've realised that we're different in this way, which implies that it doesn't affect our behaviour in any obvious way.
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