The Human Equation : UC Irvine theoretical psychologist Vladimir Lefebvre uses mathematics to show who we are.
A couple of decades ago the late author Donald Barthleme penned a short story in which researchers manage to photograph a human soul as it travels through space. The soul, it turned out, looks like a rusted cast-iron skillet with a wart in the middle. Nobody in the story was particularly happy about this discovery.
Folks may feel no more flattered by UC Irvine theoretical psychologist Vladimir Lefebvre’s model of human consciousness. The stocky, personable Russian-born psyche scientist believes he has found a way of expressing who we are in an algebraic equation, and, reduced to some Xs and little numbers on a blackboard, we don’t look like much.
“Instead of talking about consciousness as some quasi-mystical thing, I tried to pictorialize it with the help of mathematics,” he said last week in his cramped campus office as he used the side of one hand as a chalkboard eraser to make room for more numbers on the murky board.
“I show a subject at readiness to choose between two poles, good and bad. It is an uncertain condition, like in quantum mechanics, a mixture between plus and minus. And this theory predicts the measure for that mixture. I give you a scale to predict this tendency.”
Unlike physicists’ applications of quantum mechanics, Lefebvre in his recently published little red book, “A Psychological Theory of Bipolarity and Reflexivity,” is factoring in such items as “the axiom of free will” and “the axiom of non-evil intent.” One variable denotes the amount a person “underestimates the degree of negativity of his image of the world.”
When these and other factors are plugged into his equation, he says, he gets some curious results. One is that when people are faced with choices on which they have no strong feelings or knowledge, their decisions naturally skew to 62%, one way or the other.
This holds true, he finds, whether voting on indistinguishable ballot initiatives or sorting near-identical beans into “good” and “bad” piles on his desk.
Lefebvre’s ideas have sparked some serious and heated consideration in his field, and there doubtless is more to them than this writer can accurately convey here. For starters, the theoretician speaks with such a heavy Russian accent that at least once I thought he was saying, “Natasha, is moose and squirrel again!” Additionally, his equation could be the formula for Ovaltine, for all I know about algebra.
Last, I’ve noticed sometimes that a subject can make a statement that’s brimming with implications and deeper questions that I don’t always follow up on. At one point while Lefebvre was pondering whether it is possible to mathematically express qualities that have previously been the province of philosophers and saints, this was our actual tape-recorded exchange:
Lefebvre: “A hypothesis we have to check is whether we can quantify belief . It might give a greater range where we receive not 62% but 71. We don’t have enough data. I’m not sure that this prediction is correct and I don’t know yet how to measure intensity of belief.”
Washburn: “Are these pinto beans?”
*
There is a high-stakes debate over Lefebvre’s mathematical model of consciousness. If it is correct, says one colleague who believes it isn’t, psychology will have to be reinvented from the ground up.
Lefebvre, meanwhile, claims that many previous explorations of consciousness such as Freud’s and Jung’s may have been great literature or fine philosophy, but they haven’t followed the scientific method of constructing a formal model, such as his equation, and seeing if the world behaves in accordance with it.
For his part, he doesn’t see expressing the mind with math as dehumanizing.
“Mathematics is just a manifestation of the laziness of human beings. Instead of using many, many words and implications, sometimes we can use a few formulae instead. Mathematics is a great abbreviation. It is a form of poetry,” he said, with some enthusiasm.
His numbers, curiously, do indeed meet up with aesthetics.
Since the ancient Greeks, there has been a ratio referred to as the “golden section” in classical art and design, considered the most harmonious, most pleasing proportions to humankind. That ratio is 62% (OK, 61.8 if you want to be picky). That same ratio is used when tempering the musical scale, corresponding to the perfect fifth, the most harmonious interval.
It is the same ratio he gets when he’s had groups of people sort his pairs of beans (yes, pinto) into good and bad piles, the same 62% that he’s found to be the decisive margin averaged over 100 years of California ballot initiative results. He chose to study the initiatives because he suspects most voters act as he does: “I’m a busy person and don’t have time to investigate them. So it’s a bit like the beans. I read the description and go ‘yes or no, yes or no.’
“Why .62? With these decisions we have what looks very much like the individual actions of people, with very individual reasons. But statistically we have some routine stupid number keep appearing. This is evidence that there is at work some machinery, which corresponds to my model,” he said.
Lefebvre said he’s found evidences of the same ratio in studies of human inaccuracies in judging the relative size of objects. He then displayed a graph of a Grecian vase, with its various proportions each being golden section rectangles.
“This ratio for thousands of years has been considered very beautiful. I can explain this: Art is the result of projection of our inner state. This ratio is a projection of our neutral condition,” he said. Hence, when people say they feel 50/50 on a subject, chances are it’s more like 62/38.
In finding parallels between our choice-making processes and fields as disparate as music and statistics, Lefebvre sees his use of algebra as part of a move away from rather than toward a mechanistic view of the mind.
He said: “I believe in a couple of decades there will be a completely new psychology, because many people now, especially in computer science, are starting to understand that the human being is not a computer. We are something much more fundamental, as fundamental as quantum objects. The human being is related to some hidden and unknown laws of the universe. This is a lot of questions, much more now than we have thought before.”
*
Lefebvre has already worked for 12 years on his theory. He considers it his life’s work and hopes to publish two more volumes on it. One will be on generalizations of his theory and the other philosophical reflections on it.
His work has its supporters, but it also has prompted a flurry of criticism. He finds this healthy.
“This is really a normal reaction in the scientific community. If it accepts a new idea easily, this paves the way for the destruction of science. A new idea must survive questioning. Basic science is very conservative, and this is why science represents our world of knowledge today, so I accept it as a normal reaction,” he said.
He is less accepting of what he sees as a reticence to risk new ideas.
“You know, controversial in contemporary American culture is a bad term. Scientists don’t like discussion and are afraid to make mistakes because a mistake in the contemporary university business is crucial sometimes to a career. One can be a slave to consensus. A real professional must be free from it. In Russian science, consensus was like a bad term.”
In that aspect, at least, he found his former homeland to be freer.
“I was among the Soviet Union’s political critics at the time. Now I would like to mention some positive things. Russian science is much younger than American science. Here we have students of students of students of students. In Russia many people of my age were the first generation of experts in their fields. We didn’t have icons. We were much more free.”
Lefebvre was a child during the Nazi siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and lost many friends and family members.
“I was only 5 then, and mostly remember the wanting of eating, I forget the term. Hungry. Even now, if I am in a line for hamburgers and I see one built with more than another, if some person before me gets it, I go uungh .”
He and his wife, Victorina, immigrated to the United States in 1974. Despite the scientific openness, he said, the Soviet Union was “not a place for individual freedom. I applied to leave at a very good moment, when Nixon planned to visit Moscow. I was a part of a ‘present’ to Nixon, one of about 1,000 persons who received permission to emigrate.”
His family now lives in Irvine. For relaxation, the 56-year-old likes hiking mountain trails. It’s a relief to know that he sometimes forgets his phone number. He realizes that he has gone out on a limb with his work, but he’s used to life on the outside.
“You say ‘theoretical psychologist’ and people think, ‘Who is this person?’ But if you say theoretical physicist , it is very respectable because it is understandable what this means.
“When I started on this theory approximately 12 years ago, people were smiling and saw me as a crazy person. But I’ve since been published in many serious magazines and people discuss it. And today there is not only smiles. Now it has become quasi-controversial,” Lefebvre said, with a smile.
