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Dawkins, Professor Richard - Unweaving the Rainbow - Personality
Identifier
011837
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Professor Richard Dawkins – Unweaving the Rainbow
Personality is a real phenomenon and psychologists have had some success in developing mathematical models to handle its variation in many dimensions. The initially large number of dimensions can be mathematically collapsed into fewer dimensions with measurable and for some purposes conscionable, loss in predictive power.
These fewer derived dimensions sometimes correspond to the diemnsions that we intuitively think we recognise – aggressiveness, obstinacy, affectionateness and so on.
Summarising an individual’s personality as a point in multidimensional space is a serviceable approximation whose limitations can be stated.