Raymond Smullyan: ILE

 

"I have free will, but not of my own choice. I have never freely chosen to have free will. I have to have free will, whether I like it or not!"

"All my life I have been intensely repelled by the idea of 'making an effort'. I hate this idea today as much as I did as a child. I don't know why I hate it so much; I just do."

"There are three people (Alex, Brook and Cody), one of whom is a knight, one a knave, and one a spy.

The knight always tells the truth, the knave always lies, and the spy can either lie or tell the truth.

Alex says: "Cody is a knave."

Brook says: "Alex is a knight."

Cody says: "I am the spy."

Who is the knight, who the knave, and who the spy?"

Even the many squabbling Socionics schools would likely agree on this typing. Smullyan (1919-2017) was an American mathematician, magician, concert pianist, logician, Taoist, philosopher, and a "classic" ILE.

The career trajectory alone is diagnostic. Smullyan never followed a linear path because ILE's key word is interest — he may abandon everything he has done before if something more interesting is nearby, and he is more interested in the initial phase of problems rather than the finishing phase. Smullyan dropped out of high school because it didn't offer mathematics courses comparable to its music courses. He then drifted through Pacific University, Reed College, Berkeley, Wisconsin-Madison, and Chicago — following whichever professor or subject had captured his attention at the time — before eventually getting a bachelor's degree awarded on the basis of courses he had taught rather than taken, at the age of thirty-six. He got his PhD at forty. In between he had been a professional magician performing under the name Five-Ace Merrill in Chicago nightclubs. He independently discovered Boolean rings. He ground the mirror for his own reflecting telescope. He composed chess problems. He became a concert pianist. He then became a Taoist philosopher. He then became the most beloved recreational logician since Lewis Carroll. Martin Gardner described him as "a unique set of personalities that includes a philosopher, logician, mathematician, musician, writer, and maker of marvelous puzzles" — which is less a description of a person than a description of ILE's characteristic relationship with the world, in which every domain is potentially interesting and none is definitively closed. 

The ILE's key word, in Talanov's formulation, is interest. The type is more drawn to the initial phase of problems — the setting up, the paradox identified, the elegant structure glimpsed — than to the finishing and debugging phase. Smullyan's biography is a sustained demonstration of this principle. He dropped out of high school because its mathematics offerings didn't match its music offerings, and spent years drifting between universities — Pacific University, Reed College, Berkeley, Wisconsin-Madison, Chicago — following whichever professor or subject had captured his attention at the time. He got a bachelor's degree at thirty-six, awarded partly on the basis of a calculus course he was teaching rather than taking. He got his PhD from Princeton under Alonzo Church at forty. In between he had independently discovered Boolean rings, performed stage magic as Five-Ace Merrill in Chicago nightclubs, composed retrograde chess problems, studied piano to a professional concert level, and done enough serious mathematical research that Dartmouth hired him as a mathematics instructor before he had any formal qualifications at all. The institutional path was an afterthought to the intellectual one.

His books went from relatively simple puzzles like the one from the quote above (try to solve it!) to geniunely complex issues in combinatorics and high-level mathematical logic like Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. Ne generated the lateral approach, the unexpected angle of entry that makes the apparently forbidding accessible. Ti provided the underlying structural rigour that ensured the sequence was actually valid. The puzzle that seems to be about vampires and truth-tellers in Transylvania is actually introducing the logical structure of self-reference; the detective story about Inspector Craig is actually building the conceptual vocabulary for incompleteness theorems; the question about whether this book needs a title is actually a question about the limits of formal self-description.

Smullyan was definitely a more peaceful ("peripheral", in Socionics parlance) character than Gavril Myasnikov, and lacked any SLE traits (although since your average ILE's combativeness is... average, quite a wide variation is possible here without outright contradicting the type), albeit he didn't seem to be the sort of person to like edifying conversations about morality, either. His book about religion, Who Knows?, operates in a logical manner, going through various possible positions on the existence of a higher power and arguments for and against it, being more of a systematic tour through the logical space of possible positions: what follows from what, which combinations of premises are consistent, what the strongest version of each position actually requires. What to other people is a moral question, is redirected towards logical constructs. Smullyan's gentleness was partly temperamental and partly the product of operating in environments where the people most likely to push back aggressively (religious fundamentalists, ideological combatants) simply didn't show up to engage with him.