“Love is a Decision” – A statement with no flesh on the bones

Learning in life thus far seems to more or less come in four years cycles for me. Four years of high school, four years of college, four years of graduate school.  I can associate a major, soul-changing, quest or life experience with each of these four-year cycles.  I feel as though another 4 year cycle is coming to a close.  Looking back the last four years have had a profound impact on how I view the world and the people in it.  What follows is my four year reflection on a statement that comes up occasionally.  The statement is “Love is a decision,” or alternatively “Love is a choice.”

About four and half years ago one uncharacteristically lazy San Diego summer afternoon, as the final months of my graduate schooling were coming to a close I was sitting in my living room and I took a moment to ask God what task was next.  I can be a very focused person and I often would not take the time to look around to see what was happening around me so for me this was a bit of an odd occurrence.  Thinking back on it this was totally out of character for me.  It was not something I had been inspired to do.  I was just inspired to ask what was next.  He immediately whispered an answer to me.  I diligently set to work to make it a reality in every way I knew how.  Admittedly I had very little experience in this particular area, but I generally did not let things like my ignorance or incompetence worry me too much me so I just clumsily moved forward.  Within a matter of months in the course of making this task come to fruition things started falling into place.  I was nervous, and felt very self-conscious and was more than a little bit scared.  Undeterred though I gathered what character I could and moved forward. Then in the course of attempting to realize my task I made a series of very bold moves that turned out to be one of the most memorable mistakes of my life.  Never in my life had I felt I had more acted as myself overcoming all my fears to do what I most thought was right...  I dug really deep, but I failed miserably.  It was a train wreck.  The details of what happened are not important.  All that is important for the current discussion is a reflection a on the statement, “love is a decision.”  This is statement that I had firmly believed with all my heart to this date.  Everything I had ever come across seemed to confirm and validate the idea.  Many people inherently hold the somewhat opposing viewpoint of love being a feeling.  I always kind of thought this was silly.  Sure feelings are associated with it, but love itself is not a feeling.  The idea that you knew who you should “love” based on the feelings they gave you also seemed quite silly to me as well.  I typically “felt” attracted to a wide variety of women for one reason or another.  That didn’t seem to mean anything.  Meeting someone based on feelings/emotions seemed to be similar to making decisions based on lust.  Furthermore, when you are a practicing Catholic (at least for me anyways) it was way more important to find someone who was actually a practicing Catholic and striving for Holiness.  Character in the face of adversity was what I was more interested in.  In my life to date it seemed to be about the most rare thing imaginable.  I had been involved in many Catholic groups throughout my life, but most people picked and choose what they would believe.  Most people rejected Church teaching on difficult things like contraception which I found particularly disheartening.  From my point of view finding someone who was a practicing Catholic who I was at least attracted to was good enough for me.  I did not really concern myself much for what their personality might be like or how they might make me feel.  This did not even register with me.  My reasoning was Love meant work and we would work our differences out.  I also discounted concepts such as the “soul mate.”  That just seemed to scream of emotions.  But now all of a sudden I needed to reconsider my stance.  My mistake made me realize I was missing something important so I set out to find out what it was.  

Shortly thereafter I started studying this problem from a point of view I had never considered before.  The point of view of feelings.  It seemed to me that in general “feelings” were more of a feminine concept so whenever I heard a more feminine talk show on the radio instead of changing the channel I would listen to it and try to understand.  Sometimes I would listen to songs with feminine emotional themes.  I read a number of books from the medical profession which seemed to have more of a “feelings” based approach to work.  I read about the experiences of medical students and residents.  I read books written by teachers and therapists because these seemed to be more feeling/emotion oriented professions.  I read accounts of cancer survivors discussing their experience.  I read books on visual design that discussed how emotions and feelings could be influenced by art.  I made some art myself.  I started reading about research on forgiveness.  I remember in particular coming across something known as the Stanford Forgiveness project.  I even remember going over Gen Patraeus’s counter insurgency field manual and finding a variety of areas where it discussed emotional and feelings based values.  I would occasionally ask female friends to recommend books that resonated with a more feelings based outlook on life.  I also nurtured a number of friendships with people who had a feelings-based approach to life and tried to understand why they thought the way they did.  Throughout all of this I think I slowly started to see why feelings or emotions might be important.  To be honest though it was purely at an intellectual level and in a lot of ways I was confused.  The whole world of feelings/emotions was still very alien to me.  I think I got more comfortable with it, but it was a world I did not fit into and a world I could not contribute to.  I would actively practice trying to be more understanding of people and listening to people.  I think I got better at it, and learned to appreciate emotions on some level.  I would occasionally read Catholic blog posts discussing the statement “Love is a Decision,” and some people would strongly defend the statement for the same reasons I would.  Others would totally dismiss it and say something along the lines of, “that is just something people say… Love is a feeling dear.”  I was hitting a roadblock.  It is pretty much a part of Catholic teaching that love is an act of the will, and thus a decision or choice.  Even the movie that describes the life of the very sweet and emotional St Gianna Molla was named “Love is a choice.”  I had made progress but things were still not clear.

I struggled with this question nearly every day for 3 years.  The mistake I made haunted me and I really wanted insight into what I had missed.  Along the way I was seeing parts of the world and human experiences I would have otherwise never had seen.  I was learning a lot.  It was a bit of an adventure.   Was there something important about feelings and emotion I had totally not accounted for?  Why were emotional responses so important to some people?

One day about a year ago I was faced with a problem that I decided to deal with by learning about personality types.  At the time I primarily focused on Meyers-Briggs type indicator.  As I learned more and more about it so many questions that had bothered me for years began to be answered.  It gave me a boatload of insight into who I was and why I was perceived the way I was by others.  I learned a great deal about the gifts and talents of others as well.  Light was shed on so many problems I had encountered that I would just study and study and study and learn everything I could about it.  I am still learning daily more and more about personality and psychology.  I find it fascinating.  

One important feature I learned about was the thinker-feeler dichotomy.  This was the most relevant to the question of “Love is a decision.”  What I realized was that I think and make decisions in a very logical rational way, but others actually think and make decisions with their emotions.  I had never appreciated this before.  Actually there is a technological equivalent to this.  I am a thinker so I make decisions using a logic engine type approach.  I can lay out all the aspects of my decision and explain to someone else exactly why I made the decision I did.  Alternatively, a feeler is like a neural network.  We do not always have a great amount of insight into why a neural network makes the decisions and classifications it does, but it can be successful at dealing with very complex classification problems.  Rational thinkers like myself though may not be as good at dealing with extremely complex problems because we are limited to our own insight.  Feelers may be less constrained by their own insight.  I could now see the possible advantages and disadvantages of making decisions by thinking and feeling.  Both had validity and were worth appreciating.  Feelers tend to generally be more people-oriented.  I think this is because people are much more complex than the physical systems rational thinkers deal with.  Interestingly enough I also came to the conclusion that most stereotypes about men and women are false.   There are plenty of emotional, people oriented men out there, and a number of rational minded women.  

Slowly I started to see the folly of my stance on “Love is a decision.”  It is not that I was wrong.  It is that I was not seeing the whole picture.  What I realized was that what I thought was “a decision,” was in many cases being masked by my thinking.  I could give rational reason why I might or might not choose to love someone.  Feelers on the other had would use a feelings-based decision process to make the decision.  It was just that thinking looks so much like decisions it is hard to tell the two apart. 

Here is where I think it gets interesting though.  My personality is considered the most emotionless of all personalities in the Jungian MBTI sense.  Despite this I know even we emotionless people want some emotion in our life.  We are just very careful and guarded about who we share it with.  As a result we do not practice using our emotions very much, and are not good at it, especially when it comes to externally expressing them.  Really though in many ways emotions and human interactions are what makes life worth living and interesting.  Feelings are the tool that make love for humans interesting.  The statement “Love is a decision” is a very spiritual statement.  God loves thorugh an act of will, and the angels experience love or a lack of love as well.  They do not have emotions or feelings.  The difference is though that we are humans.  We inherently have a material as well as physical nature, both of which have needs that must be respected.  There may be some people who literally need emotion support and the excitement of butterflies in their stomach to experience love.  Others need a person they can share intelligent conversation with.   Both of these are material needs that humans have.  Some people may need more emotional support than others and others may find more excitement in the intelligent conversation and that is ok.  One thing I realized though, is that emotions are inherently the tool with which we display and implement love to others.  Intelligent conversation falls short here as does a number of other human activities such as giving gifts or performing acts of service.  Being skilled in the art of emotions and feeling definitely has its advantages.  It can smooth out relationships between people, make life generally more enjoyable, and it just feels nice when it goes right.  It is kind of like the decision to love is the skeleton of the body, but the emotions are the flesh.  The skeleton keeps everything upright and together but it is the squishy parts that make the body interesting.  Of course conversely there is the problem of emotions.  For people who are feelers we often say they use emotions inappropriately to make decisions that might be better made using rationality.  It is kind of a case of when your only tool is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail.  But I digress…

I still firmly believe love comes from an act of the will or the heart.  Most of the time I do not thing we are making acts of the will though.  We are kind of operating on autopilot.  It is when we have no good reason to continue, and we really do not “feel good” about loving that we have more certainty we are actually making an act of the will to keep loving.  I think a really good example of this is in the book “Lord of the World,” by Fr Robert Hugh Benson.  He the Catholic faith is mostly obliterated.  Science and psychology have destroyed all reasons to continue having Faith.  People routinely leave the Church including priests, bishops and Cardinals.    Even the Pope has serious doubts and does not have any good reasons to continue, and he certainly does not feel like staying Faithful… but he does it anyway.  That is an act of the will.  In my own life I have seen situations where reason and feeling both suggested we should no longer continue, but we did anyways… and I am glad we did but that is another story.

So for all you feelers out there I would like to extend an olive branch.   Let’s meet in the middle and enjoy both the though and feelings and the decision to love.  We can teach each other.  On a side note I want to mention that as I have learned about personality I can even see how the concept of a “soul mate” even makes sense.  

Well that was a long discussion.  I find it amusing that that the Magnetic Fields paradoxally sang, “The book of love is long and boring…. It’s full of charts and facts and figures, and instructions for dancing”   – I will leave you with some feelings to enjoy :-).

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