Comments on: Quantum Psychology, by Robert Anton Wilson

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Situational vs. Dispositional Management || December || 2008

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 18:25:51 +0000

[...] The tricky thing here is that saying something is something raises warnings flags for me (see my review of Wilson’s Quantum Psychology for a longer take on the difficulties of “is”-ness). Attributing a characteristic as a [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Art as a web || March || 2005

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 06:05:22 +0000

[...] it could later give up, it tends to confuse things. This is one of the reasons that people like Robert Anton Wilson suggest we use a version of English called E-Prime, which abolishes “to be” and all of [...]

By: Hatch 23 » Blog Archive » Lost and apophenia

Hatch 23 » Blog Archive » Lost and apophenia — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 22:13:35 +0000

[...] The possibility of discovering patterns that don’t exist should not, however, dissuade anyone from looking for the patterns to begin with. It can be useful to see how history connects to itself, despite being a collection of unrelated people and events, as in James Burke’s television series called Connections. In the search for connections, the universe starts to take on a certain kind of structure of its own. The notion that the world is a complex and deeply interconnected mind is found behind nearly all mystical practices. In Hermeticism, it is called The All; in Hinduism the piece of god within everyone is the atman; in Buddhism the doctrine is of Interpenetration. One of the more useful metaphorical illustrations of interpenetration in particular is Indra’s Net, which then bleeds over into physics in the holographic universe theory. In such a reality, everything actually is connected to everything else, something also hinted at in Bell’s Theorem of non-locality. This makes finding patterns in random noise much easier, which is what divination is for. The methods of divination are nearly endless, all of them taking input from random phenomena of the world and interpreting meaningful results. One of the better-known ancient divinatory practices is the I-Ching, which decorates the outer edge of the DHARMA logo. Of course, there’s an extreme to this end of the spectrum as well, where one falls into the belief that imposing a pattern on the universe is just as easy as finding one; or even that one creates one’s own universe. [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Finite and Infinite Games, by James Carse || March || 2005

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 03:12:30 +0000

[...] is fluid – we can always bring a new perspective to it that changes the way we view events. To use Robert Anton Wilson’s example: “A cop clubs a man on the street. Observer A sees Law and Order performing their necessary [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Patterns and truth || December || 2006

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 02:42:31 +0000

[...] Is there such a thing as the Truth? I’m not sure there is. So much of what we observe is influenced by our previous experiences that I don’t think it’s possible for anybody to have a truly objective point of view. Books like Latour’s Politics of Nature and Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action and Wilson’s Quantum Psychology describe the context-dependent nature of thought, and lectures like Hacking the Mind remind us how our brains can be fooled in all sorts of ways. I could throw around terms like “social construction of facts”, but the basic idea is that “truth” is a really tricky concept and depends a lot on what other people think. Truth evolves; the truth about the Earth went from being the center of the universe, to circling the sun, to being an insignificant mote. For there to be universal undisputed Truth, there would have to be an omniscient impartial observer to decide on what Truth is. God serves that purpose for a lot of people, I suppose, but since He is not available to me to communicate the Truth in any situation, I think it’s equivalent to there being no such observer. [...]