Favorite Animals, White Room Feelings, Body of Water Descriptions

[zoobyshoe]

Right. My favorite animal is paired in this (simple) riddle.

So, your favorite animal is the sphinx, and your two adjectives are enigmatic, frustrating. OK.

 

[Smurf]

I looked it up. No wonder zooby thinks of the pacific ocean as hot!

Because he peed?

 

[Smurf]

You have your head up your avatar.

I thought his head was his avatar?

 

[zoobyshoe]

I thought his head was his avatar?

You don't know your avatar from your elbow.

 

[Smurf]

You don't know your avatar from your elbow.

You're his avatar.

 

[hypatia]

Well I don't have time to look it up, so would someone let me know what it all means?

 

[zoobyshoe]

You're his avatar.

Don't be so hasty, smurf. Checked the mirror lately? You've been going through some peculiar changes since I put the zoobonic whammy on you.

 

[honestrosewater]

Well I don't have time to look it up, so would someone let me know what it all means?

Yes, me too, please. I've seen these before, but I don't know what this one is supposed to mean.

 

[zoobyshoe]

The Meaning

The first question, your favorite animal, reflects your attitude toward yourself. Not the animal itself, but the words you used to describe it.

The second question: how you feel when imagining yourself entering an all white room, reveals your attitude to death.

The third question, how you describe your favorite body of water, reveals your attitude to sex.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

Interesting...

The second question: how you feel when imagining yourself entering an all white room, reveals your attitude to death.

And I think that it is unnatural huh? I always knew that I was immortal.

 

[zoobyshoe]

And I think that it is unnatural huh? I always knew that I was immortal.

When I was given the test years ago, I had a lot of questions I wanted answered about the white room before I would give my response: does it have a window? If so, what's outside the window? Is there furniture? Carpet? And so forth. My answer depends completely on what kind of white room it might be. The guy just kept saying "Whatever comes to mind." So I enisioned a nice sunny, white room with a big window. A person, I think, could just as easily envision a cold, sterile basement cell lit by fluorescent light, and tiled from floor to ceiling in cold ceramic white industrial tile. There are white rooms, and white rooms.

 

[honestrosewater]

Maybe the accuracy depends on how much thought you put into the answers and knowing that it's meant to reveal something about yourself.

The second question: how you feel when imagining yourself entering an all white room, reveals your attitude to death.

Yeah, I was thinking of the separation of mind and body (reason and appetite, judgement and blood, god and beast), but in a kind of poetic instead of physical sense.

The animal made me think about the more observable aspects of myself, in my relationships with people, and the body of water made me think about the physical world and society. Not far off.

3) Eternal, majestic.

Hmmmm...

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

I think that changing from body of water to type of water kinda messed up my answer for the last one. It doesn't really make much sense that way. I don't think the meanings were the same in the first one I did. I used fog for that one too.

 

[zoobyshoe]

The animal seems pretty reliable, but I would like to know how someone came to the conclusion an all white room would be analogous to people's notion of death, or a body of water to sex. I wonder if this is derived from Jungian psychology? (It's not Freudian.)

 

[honestrosewater]

The animal seems pretty reliable, but I would like to know how someone came to the conclusion an all white room would be analogous to people's notion of death, or a body of water to sex. I wonder if this is derived from Jungian psychology? (It's not Freudian.)

I was thinking Jung too, but it was just a connection my brain spat out - don't really know anything about him.

 

[Math Is Hard]

I remember a similar version of this from high school. We called it a "parlor game". It sort of goes in a story form:

1) You are walking along a path. Describe it.
(This represents your feelings about life.)
2) You come across a knife. Describe it. What do you do with it?
(This is your feelings about your father.)
3) You come across a bottle. Describe it. What do you do with it?
(This is your feelings about your mother.)
4)You come across a building. Describe it. What do you do?
(This is your feelings about death.)
5) You come across a body of water. Describe it. What do you do?
(This is your feelings about sex.)

 

[matthyaouw]

Atlantic ocean; unforgiving, pounding

*giggles to self*

 

[El Hombre Invisible]

*giggles to self*

Hey, I went for Pacific Ocean: big, wobbly. How do you think I feel now? Oh well. At least I'm domesticated.

 

[matthyaouw]

3)Historic, inconstant.

*giggles even more*
I like this game!
(Me, grow up? never!)

 

[honestrosewater]

*giggles even more*
I like this game!
(Me, grow up? never!)

You just don't know how I intended those words.

 

[honestrosewater]

But big and wobbly is pretty straightforward... or not.

 

[hypnagogue]

eh, like I said, I'm very skeptical. It might make sense on some intuitive level that, say, the animal you choose is some sort of representation of yourself. But this in itself is really no guarantee that there is any real deep meaning to all of this. From the link I posted earlier about the Rorschach ink blot test:

Why then does the Rorschach continue to be used?

The answer may be found in the review of A. G. Bernstein in the seventh Mental Measurement Yearbook in 1972. He wrote (p.434): "the view that recognition, the act of construing an unfamiliar stimulus, taps central components of personality functions is one that will remain crucial in any psychology committed to the understanding of human experience." Despite his misuse of the term recognition (which means noting that a stimulus has appeared before in one's experience — the exact opposite of "construing an unfamiliar stimulus"), I agree with Bernstein. He refers to a view, a plausible assumption. If we adopt this assumption, the Rorschach should work. The overwhelming evidence that it does not work is ignored.

Now I'm not aware of any real evidence that's been collected on the questions posed in this thread, but the thrust behind them seems to be the same as the Rorschach: a plausible interpretation of the associations one makes used to infer something about one's personality or psychology. But plausibility alone means little, apparently especially so in the case of psychological probes like this, since the Rorschach test is so plausible but has not been shown to be very useful.

And really, for what it's worth, I think the Rorschach test is much more plausible than this test-- why is it at all plausible that one's attitude towards bodies of water should correlate with one's sexual attitudes? If this comes from Freudian or Jungian traditions, the same problem crops up of actually grounding the theory in experiment and fact.

It might even well be that for at least some of the questions, for some of the people who answer them, there is something going on that makes the intended inference valid, e.g. for a particular person it might be the case that that person's psychology is such that the animal adjectives he chooses really do reflect his self-attitude, for whatever reason. But even if this is the case occasionally, I highly doubt that there is some universal, intercultural (or even intracultural) mechanism of human psychology that makes these intended inferences valid across all, or even most, people.

 

[El Hombre Invisible]

But big and wobbly is pretty straightforward... or not.

What, and "unforgiving, pounding" is subtle?

 

[El Hombre Invisible]

eh, like I said, I'm very skeptical. It might make sense on some intuitive level that, say, the animal you choose is some sort of representation of yourself. But this in itself is really no guarantee that there is any real deep meaning to all of this. From the link I posted earlier about the Rorschach ink blot test:

Now I'm not aware of any real evidence that's been collected on the questions posed in this thread, but the thrust behind them seems to be the same as the Rorschach: a plausible interpretation of the associations one makes used to infer something about one's personality or psychology. But plausibility alone means little, apparently especially so in the case of psychological probes like this, since the Rorschach test is so plausible but has not been shown to be very useful.

And really, for what it's worth, I think the Rorschach test is much more plausible than this test-- why is it at all plausible that one's attitude towards bodies of water should correlate with one's sexual attitudes? If this comes from Freudian or Jungian traditions, the same problem crops up of actually grounding the theory in experiment and fact.

It might even well be that for at least some of the questions, for some of the people who answer them, there is something going on that makes the intended inference valid, e.g. for a particular person it might be the case that that person's psychology is such that the animal adjectives he chooses really do reflect his self-attitude, for whatever reason. But even if this is the case occasionally, I highly doubt that there is some universal, intercultural (or even intracultural) mechanism of human psychology that makes these intended inferences valid across all, or even most, people.

I don't think you're taking this seriously enough. There's a time and place for fun and games, you know... [the psychology forum, for instance]

 

[honestrosewater]

Poor hypnagogue is trying to be serious here. Shape up, floppy.

Er, floppy, wobbly, whatever...

 

[hypnagogue]

Sure, I said as much previously, that this could be nice for fun and games. But it seems as if zooby thinks there might be something to it (?).

 

[hypnagogue]

So apparently I see myself as wise and strange, and I like my sex eternal and majestic (maybe I should look into that tantric stuff), but when it comes to death I'm kind of indifferent. "What's that you say doc? I have two weeks to live? eh, whatever."

 

[honestrosewater]

Oh, that was directed at droopy. I wasn't making fun of you, hypnagogue.

 

[hypnagogue]

is this what you wanted?

3.) Yosemite Falls (I know, not a body of water.) Fast, powerful.

*chortle* *snicker*

 

[honestrosewater]

So apparently I see myself as wise and strange, and I like my sex eternal and majestic (maybe I should look into that tantric stuff), but when it comes to death I'm kind of indifferent. "What's that you say doc? I have two weeks to live? eh, whatever."

Strange indeed. Since when are elephants wise? I thought owls were the wise ones.