Shedding some light on why God doesn't seem to adopt "The Fundamental Option"

About 15 years ago I came across an element of Catholicism that I had never been exposed to at any point prior in my life that was very difficult for me to come to terms with.  It has given me mental struggles for the last 15 years.  It is the idea that salvation is entirely dependent on your state of grace when you die.  In some sense no good or bad thing a person had done prior was of any importance in terms of whether a person ultimately chose heaven or hell.  This concept is known as "Every Voluntary Act,"  American culture tends to reject this line of thinking.  I suspect this is a result of Protestant influence.  American culture tends to adopt a stance toward salvation known as "The Fundamental Option."  The fundamental option basically says that as long as a person is for the most part a good person they will achieve salvation.  It doesn't matter that they occasionally cheat on their taxes or miss Mass on Sunday every once in awhile.  All that really matters is they are generally a good person.  This is not the Catholic understanding.  

So from a Catholic point of view once you are Baptized and you are in a state of grace if you die you will end up choosing heaven.  If you lived a saintly life then committed a mortal sin and died right after you would choose hell.  Alternatively you could lead a sinful life, then make a deathbed conversion and die and you would choose heaven.  People like to point out alot of various nuances to this system that we postulate may exist.  These nuances generally have to do with things like mercy, but for the most part this is how the system works.  In alot of ways it doesn't seem very fair and it also seems somewhat random and haphazard.  This bothered me for quite awhile.  Below is a snapshot I took from a document from the Dominican Sisters in Nashville, Tenn.  If I remember correctly they have a Sister that has a PhD in Moral Theology who generated this.  It explains the fundamental option and every voluntary act in more detail. 

 Roughly a year ago I started to study personalities and temperaments.  I mostly focused on Jungian theory/Meyers Briggs.  Academia doesn't seem to use this right now, but I am not too worried about that.  They use the data-driven 5 factor model.  I am not going to go into my thoughts on the 5 factor model now, but suffice it to say I have my scepticism.  Alot of this has to do with the purely data driven methods used to build the 5 factor model, but I digress.  The remainder of this discussion I will use Meyers Briggs terminology so if you are not familiar with it wikipedia can help you out.  

The reason I started learning about personalities is because I met someone with a Perceiver (P) type personality.  I have the opposite Judger (J) personality.  I discovered this was a major difference between people.  Most people believe that the difference between iNtuiters (N) and Sensors (S) is the largest between people.  I would agree, but looking back now my experience is in relationships that require interdependence, J-P differences can cause alot of conflict.  They seem to be pretty radically different views of the world. I have heard some people say that this can lead to people who start at the same place, but come to different ultimate conclusions.  Conversely some personalties start from different places but come to the same conclusion.

Basically, Judgers tend to want things decided upon and settled, where as perceivers  tend to delay making decisions in order to keep their options open.  Roughly half the poulation is judgers and the other half are perceivers.  Both of these stances have advantages and disadvantages.  For instance, it appears to me that perceivers are generally more creative, but they seem to be less strong on follow-through.  Judgers seem naturally more inclined to follow through on things, but they often do not have good creativity.  Also, I suspect from a Catholic point of view that many mystics may have been perceivers.  My notion is that being a perciever would probably make you more open to listening to the will of God.   There seems to be a general consensus that the Virgin Mary for instance was INFP.  I would not be suprised if the little Flower was INFP as well.  Thomas Aquinas sounds INTP to me (arguably he could be INTJ though as well).  On the other hand I suspect that alot of the more forceful saints were Judgers.  For instance St Paul and St Catherine of Sienna. 

Anyways, my observation is that perceivers tend to be a little more unpredictable (except in the sense that they consistently hate being categorized but that is a different blog post), change their minds more often, and tend not to take linear paths to get to things.  Judgers on the other hand tend to make decisions and stick with them.  At first as I started looking at this my impression was that perceivers seemed to be almost predisposed to sin because they changed their minds so much and lacked consistency.  Actually in some ways it seemed really unnerving.  But then I realized that I was looking at it from the Protestant "Fundamental Option" point of view, not the Catholic "Every Voluntary Act" point of view.  How would the Catholic vision of salvation treat the perceiver.  That is what I set out to consider in more depth.   (There is alot more to this, but I do not have time to go into it.  I am mostly trying to spark ideas and a conversation here.)

So I decided it was time I made a little model and ran a small Monte Carlo simulation to see how my ideas played out.  Basically I generated a sequence of random numbers pulled from a zero-mean, Gaussian distribution.  This sequence represents random inputs ( read temptations or the call of grace), that a person experiences throughout their lifetime.  Tempatations would be negative, and grace would be positive.  Then I modelled Judgers and perceivers using the finite impulse response filters (FIR) shown below.  Judgers are represented using a decaying exponential (over-damped, exponential with only real components), and perceivers have an FIR filter that consists of a cosine function modulated by a decaying exponential (under-damped, complex exponential).  I chose this model because I think of this as the judger simply narrowing down to a solution whereas the Perceiver is constantly changing their minds in an effort to keep their options open.  You could probably argue with me on this and you would probably bring up some good points, but I do this as a hobby, I do not have time to dwell on rigor, and I only have so much time to plant the seed of the idea so please bear with me. 

Now I took these FIR filters and I convolved them with the random sequence I generated to simulate temptations throughout a person's lifetime.  The resulting sequence can be thought of as a simulation of a person's state of grace throughout their lifetime if they had no free will and simply succumb to every temptation and call of grace they received.  The point in doing this is to see if there is any bias That predispose a judger or perceiver to any particular final state of grace.  I generated 10,000 random sequences and convolved the Judger and Perceiver FIR filter with each one separately.  An example of one of the simulations is shown below.  The top is the judger and the bottom is the perceiver. 

 

So notice that the judger grace sequence throughout a lifetime is primarily consisting of low frequency components as expected.  The judger is in some sense slowly changing their state of grace as they go through life.  They make up their mind and stick with it, and only slowly change their life.  The perceiver on the other hand has a rapid fluctuations between being in a state of grace and a fallen state.  Notice though that by eyeball the Judger and the Perceiver both seem to spend about  the same amount of their life in a state of grace as compared to a fallen state. 

Next I took the 20,000 time series and for each one I took the total time a person was in a sate of grace and subtracted from it the time a person was in a fallen state.  I then histogram the results for the judger and the perciever as shown in the histogram below.  The top histogram corresponds to the judger and the bottom histogram corresponds to the perceiver.

Now since this is a simple linear analysis using Gaussian random variables you can actually do this in closed form solution, but I used the Monte Carlo just to be more visual.  Basically the expected value (mean) of both the Judger and the perceiver net state of grace should be zero because a linear combination of Gaussian distributed random variables has a mean which is just the sum of the means.  We do see in fact that the mean for both the judger and the perceiver net state of grace is 0.  Over the course of a lifetime their appears to be no bias for one or the other.  This is interesting.  Obviously though the two have very different variances which can also easily be computed in closed form solution.  For the purpose of this model a large variance indicates that type of person has the potential to be very good or very bad.  There are probably a couple ways this could be interpreted, but one way would be to say that Judgers will be all over the board in terms of time spent in a state of grace, where as perceivers are all close to a net zero.  If we assume overall merit is proportional to time spent in a state of grace then Judgers have more potential to be really good or really bad adn Perceivers are generally on the edge.  I think this result points out a weakness in my model.  For one, many perceivers have gone on to be great Saints.  Mary is generally considered a perceiver, as is St Francis.  I tend to believe St. Therese the Little Flower was too.  Also, we do not know how "merit" is really accumulated.  We have no idea.  It is certainly non-linear.  God is a pretty nonlinear guy.  Think of the story of the laborers and the wages.  The labourers who came at the end of the day got the same wage as those who came at the beginning.  The Lord works in mysterious ways, but part of the reason I am looking at this is to try and shed some light on what he is doing and why.  In this case I think it is interesting that God does not use the fundamental option.  The fundamental option would favor judgers over perceivers because the fundamental option would determine salvation based on large variances in the net state of grace assuming that to achieve salvation you had to be above some threshold of time in a state of grace.  If the threshold was a net state of grace of 0 it would not matter if you were a judger or perceiver because the Gaussian distribution is symmetric.  If however you needed to be above some non-zero threshold of goodness then it would be a different story.

What is going on - I sometime wonder if a problem with us Judgers is that we find better ways to rationalize our behaviour for good or bad.  I wonder if this is what keeps us stable for better or worse.  I suspect this might cause us to have a harder time repenting when we do something wrong.  We have probably built a rationalizing framework to support our sinful decisions.  Conversely I wonder if perceivers do not have this kind of problem.  Prehaps they are less consistent, but in may be the case that they are more open to repentance when they make a mistake.

I want to point out one other implication of these results that I think is noteworthy.  Most good artists of all forms are perceivers.  The reason being is that people who are more creative are often times just more open to new ideas, experiences, and expressions.  They turn questions and situations inside-out to see things from new points of view.  They do not immediately crack down on ideas as good or bad.  Judgers like myself on the other hand can be kind of boring in alot of ways.  We do not look at things from particularly new and insightful points of view.  We generally are very linear thinkers.  Most real breakthroughs and paradigm shifts seem to come from perceivers such as Albert Einstein or Shakespeare.  Now why is this important?  Well if you compare Catholisism with most non-Catholic Christians, particularly Protestants and fundamentalists one of the biggest differences that stands out to me is the disparity in artistic output between the two.  Over the centuries Catholics and Catholic teaching has been responsible for inspiring, and commisioning a large amount of art.  There are poems, paintings, sculptures, songs, symphonies... The list goes on and on.  Catholic Cathedrals, basilicas and churches are works of art often times.  You really do not see this kind of artistic expression in Protestant religions outside of perhaps music.  Protestant reliions especially in the past seemed extremely anti-art.  They used to be against things like plays.  I cannot help but wonder if this is partially a result of Protestants adopting a "fundamental option" stance.  By adopting the fundamental option they are essentially rejecting the wild ideas of artists.  There is no room for ideas that do not immediately fit the framework.  It is almost like they have adopted an overly-conservative stance and lost a major element of human expression in the process.  Catholisism on the other hand seems setup in a way that can parse artistic expression.  Some is embraced, some is rejected, but there is definitely room for considering outlandish ideas, if nothing else in our universities and certain religious orders.  An interesting example is the Vatican allowing certain controversial groups such as the Neocatechumenal Way to operate.  At least temporarily.  In some sense those religous orders might be thought of as places where experimental worship can take place.  It probably is not suitable for the general public, but people in religious orders are professionals and can accept wiggle room that is not always appropriate for the general public.

Also I have a suspicion that pervcivers make better mystics as well.  Simply because they are in some sense going to be more open to the voice of God, whereas a judger would drown God's grace out in favor of their own known opinions.  I have mentioned to some people that I have some plans under way to build machines that have personalities.  I suspect the perceiver/judger personalities can be achieved using different filtering techniques.  A judger has a very narrow band filter on his sensor/thinking inputs.  As a result he has very high signal-to-noise ratio  because alot of the wide-band noise is removed, but he misses alot of interesting stuff because he filters out the interesting outliers.  The perceiver on the other hand might have a wide-band filter.  As a result he gets alot of noise in his measurements leading to low signal-to-noise ratio.  Spurious noise causes him to jump around alot from topic to topic.  Alot of these spurious signals are just noise that leads to dead ends, but every once in awhile something pops up that is a really interesting outlier.  This is where the paradigm shifts come from.  In some ways the perceiver is almost like a really sensitive radio receiver that needs to be cooled down to reduce the effects of random thermal noise.   Actually I think this is part of the reason monks live in the solitude of monasteries.  If many of them are perceivers they would would be over-stimulated in normal society.  However, by putting them in the solitude of the monastery it is like we are removing as much of the noise as possible so they can focus on the "quiet" signal associated with the voice of God.  It is interesting that you do not see a monastic tradition among Protestants.  

Alot of this is speculative.  Take it for what it is worth... an invitation to look deeper.  Nothing more.  I found these new ways of looking at things very helpful and interesting and I am actively exploring it further in the ways I can in my spare time. 

In future work I need to start looking at what happens if I randomly choose a time of death for the judger and the perceiver.  I suspect this can be done in closed form, but I will need to brush up on random processes.  Also, there is a problem because the analysis I just proposed implies that God operates Randomly.  This may or may not be a good assumption. Actually it brings up interesting philosophical questions, but I will deal with those later. 


Here is the git gist of the code in case you want to run some simulations. 
https://gist.github.com/4471392