Emotions Are Still Math
I started thinking about this when I was typing my previous blog post about Google having the Holy Grail. As a marketer, I’m always trying to figure out human behavioral patterns and how I can maximize my company’s profit from the understanding of this.
I had an interesting thread going on Facebook the other day. I was eating sushi at a restaurant and was watching the people around me, talking to each other, responding to conversations with various facial expressions, hand gestures, and vocal tones that varied in intensity. All of these ways of expressing themselves were based on emotion that was being outputted as a physiological response to conversational input they had just received from whoever was sitting across the table and having lunch with them.
I had posted a Facebook status stating that “Emotions are still math.” It was interesting to see people’s responses to this. The vibe I got is that it almost was considered offensive that I had said that. My only point was to acknowledge the fusion between the two concepts, not to minimize the importance of one over the other. Maybe my choice of words made it come off that way, “flattening” the value of emotion. [...stealing your descriptor Andy 
]. This definitely was not my intention.
If you know me, I’m far more emotional and dramatic than your average person, half the time it’s to my detriment.
Patterns
While I’m not necessarily referring to my friends on Facebook that participated in that conversation in my next statement here, for certain people I think it strokes a chord with them, like my statement was disregarding humanity on some blunt robotic level, not validating peoples emotions, converting the organic human aesthetic, all the things that mean so much to people, into 1′s and 0′s, basically saying that our entire population is just an abbacus made out of living tissue. My point with it was just that you can plug in formulas to patterns of human behavior. Patterns, whether abstract or linear, are still patterns, no matter how random we think the activity contained within those patterns actually is. I’m not the first person to say this and certainly not the last. Everyone learns this in Psych 1A their first year of college.
Is Business/Marketing Inherently Evil?
What I’m about to say here excludes non-profit organizations.
Successful marketers know that you need to recognize and understand behavioral data to make sound marketing decisions. This requires that on some level you convert what you see in human beings into a formulaic pattern so that you can run some numbers and calculate a risk. The goal of all that is to make more money. Period.
In reference to my “Emotions are still math” statement that kicked off the colorful convo on Facebook: If you are a marketing genius at a company that wants to grow, employ other human beings, beat your competition, understanding how to convert human emotion into dollars, does that make you evil? Smart? Shrewd? Heartless? All of the above?….or just someone trying to pay their bills?
I’m don’t know the answer…that’s why I’m asking.
Actually I never had any problem with the emotions = math statement and I tend to agree with it. I recall sitting in high school chemistry class many years ago and thinking about how the human thought process is chemically facilitated, possibly chemically motivated, and thinking to myself: “damn! what’s happening in this room is chemistry trying to understand *ITSELF*.” My teenage mind was blown to say the least.
I think there’s a middle ground in this conversation which is usually left out. The 2 classic positions are: 1) the universe is deterministic, governed by math, and is therefore just a sprung trap we’re all caught in, nothing is interesting, nothing is fun, there are no surprises, it’s all just flat and 2) no, how can my free will be flatted, I am a special snowflake, blah blah quack quack bleat bleat.
The middle ground, I think is that while math can describe everything in the universe, it takes an absolutely incredible amount of incredibly complex math to do so. We think that recognizing the mathematic nature of life robs it somehow of its dimension and spark, but it’s a question of resolution. Imagine if someone said: “A photograph could never look good on a computer. It’s just a grid of squares.” Sure, they’d have a point, up *to* a point. But as we all know, even a grid a few thousand pixels across and down can look absolutely amazing – it can trigger all the same responses as a silver photographic print (which I’ve always admired for their literally atomic pixel size).
So when you say: “our entire population is just an abbacus made out of living tissue” I guess my only objection is to the word “just.” What do you mean “just?” We are an abacus. A gigantic, multidimensional, complex-to-the-point-of-chaos abacus. We’re not “just” an abacus. Take the biggest abacus you’ve ever seen, lay it on its side, stack a million more like it on top, and maybe several thousand of those stacks could describe an eyelash of mine. A dead one that’s fallen onto my shirt. But sure. I think that artists and poets protest math as the foundation of the universe because they can’t understand very much math, and 1+1=2 is not very sexy to them.
But I also think that people who insist that you can’t quantify reality are denying themselves some pretty profound miracles. Okay hippies, you can stand on a pedestal and claim that math and science can never describe you. But while we’re off here coding the human genome, you’re still scraping around the bottom of your tarot deck thinking you can find some kind of answers there. Give me a break, the reality, while much more digital than you might have thought, is much more interesting than your bullshit, albeit analog, spiritualism and religion.
So yes, the world is math, emotion is absolutely part of that. But math can be a very deep and wide language, so let us not fear to be described by it.
Great post, Rich.
Andy – No one appreciates your content and brain like me. Some thoughts on some of what you said….
“I think there’s a middle ground in this conversation which is usually left out. ” – I agree and was thinking about this after I wrote it. After reviewing my own blog post a few hours later here I realized that it’s probably not a good idea to go into a blog post/article like this unless I am willing to cover the entire spectrum. It’s easy to cover the extreme on both ends but it’s important to acknowledge the grey area and it’s place in what I’m talking about. I don’t write only the extreme aspects of a topic for the sake of boneheaded controversy, I think I’m just impatient in assuming that peeps reading this already see it and I assume they’re gonna fill the gaps for themselves.
So when you say: “our entire population is just an abacus made out of living tissue” I guess my only objection is to the word “just.” – My choice of words again maybe have been poor here…minimizing some actual reality, not my intent. After taking a physiological psych class in college, I say we’re definitely an abacus but it’s so complex that I think people have a hard time delineating between what is real and what isn’t because their emotions and life experiences. I think we are so caught up in staying alive that not many of us take time to break it all down like we should. When you can intellectually break all of this stuff down, I actually feel like it can help people find peace in their own struggles (in the, you know, Buddhist sorta way). Going through those mental exercises for myself helps to eliminate unnecessary *noise* internally. Pretty refreshing sometimes to not be some emo super-charged energy drain.
“Okay hippies, you can stand on a pedestal and claim that math and science can never describe you. But while we’re off here coding the human genome, you’re still scraping around the bottom of your tarot deck thinking you can find some kind of answers there.” – Couldn’t have possibly said it better myself. Thank you fellow thinker that transcends bay area bullshit to achieve some sort of realistic grasp on reality.