How to simulate spontaneity

People with whom I have the misfortune to spend my little spare time consider that I am very intelligent. This is why, I think, two of my friends, Franz and Nicholas, came one day to ask me how they could become spontaneous – if if not as much as me, at least a half of it. Like most people in the real world where we pay insurance bills and where we punish stupidity using adjectives like “good” or “fairly well”, Franz, Nicholas and other members of my entourage thought that spontaneous people were born as such and that spontaneity was spontaneous.

It was very difficult to me to extract this idea from their heads; it was nested there by a bunch of stupid teachers who justify their educational failures by the means of empty concepts like “hereditary stupidity” or “native intelligence.”

[Parenthesis. Over the last 5 centuries, there were, in the history of Western Civilization, two fundamental changes. First, religion was replaced by science in the production of the epistemic authority. Secondly, the power wanted to leave us the impression that there was a reconfiguration in the criteria and the means of access to the upper part of the social hierarchy (the so-called "meritocracy", which we were  learned to rely upon and because of which we can say, at any time, what are the forms of a latin feminine noun of the 3rd declination at the oblique cases). The two mutations have generated the concept of "native intelligence", which is very similar to the divine right monarchy. This is how the theory of Francis Galton, the creator of the science of heredity, has appeared. I close the parenthesis.]

In the spirit of Franz and Nicholas, before coming to me, occurred the following reasoning:

If the spontaneity is not spontaneous, and if there are spontaneous people, then spontaneity is acquired. If it is acquired, then it can be learned.

When the two shyly entered my office, I was writing a review of a book whose author (Kronski) proposed a theory saying that, in the possible field of a particle at a time T, there is at least an impossible spot, where it happens that the particle simply isn’t, this being the result of the adoption of a probabilistic theoretic framework that quantifies the chance (which is the case for the new quantum mechanics) ; from this it actually can be inferred the incompleteness of the theory of quantum mechanics in its classical formulation. One can easily imagine that at that moment where I wasn’t quite sure about the consistency of the surrounding world. And I was unable to understand the nature of the request of Franz and Nicholas.

- But why do you want to be spontaneous? I asked.
- Because, said Franz, since we’re not spontaneous, people believe that we are not intelligent either. And in the world we live in, there is nothing worse than not being intelligent.
- Yeah, you right, I said. But what is the relationship between intelligence and spontaneity? If someone tells you that you are not intelligent (because you are not spontaneous), you can reply that he or she commits a serious syllogism error.
- A serious syllogism error? Nicholas asked with a dazy expression.
(All the amazement og this creation, as well as some other inhabited solar systems’, was on their faces; the pressure made them look exophthalmous and distorted their mouths, generating a grimace of misunderstanding.)
- Yes, I clarified. Those who believe that you are not smart do not take the premise that all spontaneous people are intelligent, but – wrongly and on the contrary – that all the intelligent people are spontaneous. They confuse the inclusion with the identity.

They were very happy to hear that. Admittedly, I had to explain what a syllogism, an error or a modus ponen / modus tollens are (I’m not sure they understood) and what was the relationship between spontaneity and intelligence, but it was worth it. I was quite happy to have helped, I was already rubbing my hands preparing me to resume the writing of my
review, when Nicholas made a surprising remark:
- But nobody tells us that we’re not intelligent. People only believe so. We can’t tell them they make a mistake, it would be pittyful and not at all intelligent.
- Yeah, you right, you too, I said. I hadn’t thought about it. It is impossible to extract from people’s minds the idea that spontaneity is a necessary condition of intelligence.
- We must be spontaneous! Franz said.
- Can you help us? asked Nicholas.

I was asked a lot of things during my life. Unknouwn people asked  me what time it was, the beggars asked me for money, the next-door ladies asked me for mustard, the students – for my phone number, some women even asked me to make them a child (they belonged to my entourage, where it is believed that I’m very smart), some lady asked me for pegs, string and a whip … but I was never asked for something so strange. I started thinking. I had never thought about spontaneity, but given the opportunity, I decided to take advantage.

- My dear Franz and Nicholas, I said, spontaneity cannot be learned.
- So you can’t help us, Franz said dryly. (And to Nicholas) I told you so.
- But this doesn’t mean that I can’t help you, I hastened to add.
(I bet two wigs and a test tube against anything that if they were dogs, they would begun to wag their tails.) I have first explained why spontaneity could not be learned.
- … Because the spontaneity, the way it is generally understood, presupposes the notion of causality. Almost a mechanistic causality. There’s not so much difference between this causal reflex and the automatic leg benting when the doctor hits it with his little hammer. The two hadn’t understood a single. They had even begun to look at me a little suspiciously. I tried to reassure them.
- I will explain to you the theory of spontaneity, I’ve just built it. Be S a stimulus, IR an immediate reaction and TR a tardive reaction; be t1 the time between S and IR; be t2 the time between S and TR. We call spontaneity the relationship S-IR, where t1 istending indefinitely to 0. We call stupidity the S-TR relationship, where t2 indefinitely tends to infinity. The imaginary boundary between t1 and t2, and hence between S-IR ans S-TR is a variable oscillating around the value 1′ on a time scale T. The index of spontaneity (IS) is the product of the difficulty coefficient of the assertion (its quality, measured in number of associations of ideas and symbolized by Q) by 1 / t1, i.e. IS = Q / t1 idead associations  per second. The formula is interesting because it also gives us the stupidity index (IS).

Photo by wburris.
- We don’t understand. Continue this way and we’ll never be spontaneous, said Franz.

[Parenthesis. The publisher of this blog told me the same thing. She believed that the general audience will be bored to death while reading this article. But I think that any educated person should be glad to have learned the equation of spontaneity, or, as called our publisher, "the equation of the general stupidity." I close the parenthesis.]

- Is there any other way you can help us? asked Nicholas.
- OK, I’ll try. Spontaneity cannot be learned because it presupposes a rapid series of associations between different words or language games. What we name, in the natural language, “associations of ideas” can be translated,  in a physicalist description,  by” neuronal synapses,  electro-chemical processes by which neurons are connected to each other. To get a number of synapses in a short span of time it takes a long and torturing training. If you are willing to try, in 5 years you will be spontaneous.
- 5 years? …
- Anyway, spontaneity is a mistake, I tried to comfort them. By assuming the causality, it tacitly acknowledges all itsfaults. Newtonian time, for instance, which …
- Thanks for nothing, said Franz.
- We wish you a good day and a wonderful life, said Nicholas.
- Stop it, I haven’t finished yet.
- We don’t wanna hear a single word. You made us dizzy enough. And we couldn’t say that you saved our time, either.

I noticed that people receive the good intentions of their peers in the most thankless way. If there is something written into the human nature, it must be the ingratitude. This truth troubles me. And, at the moments I’m writing about, I was saddened. Not so much because I wanted to help my friends (whos IS didn’t had a value greater than 1), but because they would have had the impression that I had been unable to help them. So I decided to show them the easy way of obtaining the recognition of their intelligence.

- And what if I promise you immediate results?
They stoped. Were silent, but – obviously – I had won their attention.
- It’s obvious that I can’t teach you how to be really spontaneous. But I can teach you how to simulate being so. Everything you need to do is saying random sentences. They should fall like a dog in a bowling game.
- But, if we do this, people will think that we are completeidiots.

- No, they won’t. It depends on the confidence in your voices. This confidence will make people believe that you had something in mind when you say your stupid line. If they are smart, they’ll look a link between the stimulus and the response and they’ll be surprised by the number and speed of the associations you supposedly made. If they’re not intelligent, they would wonder what you meant, so you can actually create an ad hoc series of associations between the two ends of the stimulus – response continuum; under the pretext of explaining every link, you have all the time in the world to really make those associations. In any event, everybody will admire your intelligence. Let me give you an example. Let’s say I tell you ‘cigarette’ and you answer something like “bastard”. Being a very intelligent person, I’ll make the following associations: ‘cigarette – lighter – fire – fire in the house – firefighter – male strip-tease -
bachelorette’s party – sleeping with the stripper – birth of the bastard “. Realizing that you have an 8 associations of ideas per second IS, I’ll be convinced that you are very intelligent and I’ll admire you.
- And we can say practically anything? asked Nicholas withdistrust.
- Yes. Anything goes.