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← Prometheus Rising Book Summary, Notes and Highlights

Prometheus Rising Chapter 6. The Time-Binding Semantic Circuit

Author: Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press. Publish Date: 1983 Review Date: Status:📚

Annotations

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1019 The third semantic circuit handles artifacts and makes a “map” (reality-tunnel) which can be passed on to others, even across generations. These “maps” may be paintings, blueprints, words, concepts, tools (with instructions on use transmitted verbally), theories, music, etc.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1021 Human beings (domesticated primates) are symbol-using creatures; which means, as the pioneer semanticist, Korzybski, noted, that those who rule symbols, rule us.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1022 If Moses, Confucius, Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus and St. Paul can be considered living influences—and they are: look around the world—this is only because their Signal has been carried to us by human symbol systems.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1024 These systems include words, artworks, music, rituals and unrecognized rituals (“games”) through which culture is transmitted.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1027 Since words contain both denotations (referents in the sensory-existential world) and connotations (emotional tones and poetic or rhetorical hooks), humans can be moved to action even by words which have no real meaning or reference in actuality. This is the mechanism of demagoguery, advertising and much of organized religion.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1033 The semantic circuit allows us to sub-divide things, and reconnect things, at pleasure. There is no end to its busy-busy-busy labeling and packaging of experience. On the personal level, this is the “internal monologue” discovered by Joyce in Ulysses. On the historical level, this is the time-binding function described by Korzybski, which allows each generation to add new categories to our mental library—connecting new things, separating new things, reclassifying and reshuffling forever.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1043 So-called “future shock” has always been with us, since the semantic circuit began functioning somewhere in pre-history. In a symbolizing, calculating, abstracting species, all times are “times of change.” The process is however accelerating faster as time passes, because the symbolizing faculty is inherently self-augmenting.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1046 In ordinary language, the semantic circuit is usually called “the mind.” (As psychologist Robert Ornstein said in a recent radio show, when we say someone “has a good mind,” we generally mean they have a good mouth, i.e., they use the semantic circuit well.)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1054 It should be no surprise that most people, most of the time, are controlled more by the older reptilian-mammalian circuits than by the human semantic (rational) circuit, or that the semantic circuit is so easily perverted into false logics (bigotries, intolerant ideologies, fanaticisms of all sorts) when the bio-survival circuit signals threat to life or the emotional circuit flashes threat to status. Cynics, satirists and “mystics” (circuit V-VIII types) have told us over and over that “reason is a whore,” i.e., that the semantic circuit is notoriously vulnerable to manipulation by the older, more primitive circuits. However much the Rationalist may resent this, it is always true in the short run—that is, to use one of the Rationalist’s favorite words, it is always pragmatically true. Whoever can scare people enough (produce bio-survival anxiety) can sell them quickly on any verbal map that seems to give them relief, i.e., cure the anxiety. By frightening people with Hell and then offering them Salvation, the most ignorant or crooked individuals can “sell” a whole system of thought that cannot bear two minutes of rational analysis.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1062 And any domesticated primate alpha male, however cruel or crooked, can rally the primate tribe behind him by howling that a rival alpha male is about to lead his gang in an attack on this habitat. These two mammalian reflexes are known, respectively, as Religion and Patriotism. They work for domesticated primates, as for the wild primates, because they are Evolutionary Relative Successes. (So far.)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1065 The emotional-territorial or “patriotic” circuit also contains the pack’s status programs or pecking order. Working in tandem with first-circuit bio-survival anxieties, it is always able to pervert the functioning of the semantic-rational circuit. Whatever threatens loss of status, and whatever invades one’s “space” (including one’s ideological “head space”), is a threat to the average domesticated primate. Thus, if a poor man has one status prop in his life—“I’m a white man, not a goddam nigger” or “I’m normal, not a goddam faggot” or whatever—any attempt to preach* tolerance, common humanity, relativism, etc. is not processed through the semantic circuit but through the emotional circuit, and is rejected as an attack on status (ego, social role).

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1072 *Of course, preaching itself is bad second circuit politics, since it puts you one-up on the person preached-at. You are not one-up unless imprinted as such by being an alpha male in the same gene-pool or conditioned as such by being a “boss” or other authority-figure. The counter-culture of the 1960’s, like may other idealistic movements, failed because it did so much preaching from a morally one-up position when nobody had been imprinted or conditioned to accept it as one-up.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1048 In terms of Transactional Analysis, the first (oral) circuit is called the Natural Child, the second (emotional) circuit is called the Adapted Child, and the semantic circuit is called the Adult or Computer. In Jungian terms, the first circuit mediates sensation, the second circuit feeling, and the third circuit reason.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1050 The neurological components of the first circuit go back to the oldest parts of the brain; Carl Sagan called these functions “the reptile brain.” These neural structures are at least billions of years old. The second circuit structures appeared with the first amphibians and mammals, somewhere around 1000 million or 500 million years ago; Sagan called them “the mammalian brain.” The semantic circuit appeared perhaps 100 thousand years ago; Sagan called it “the human brain.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1078 The attentive reader will remember that the grid of the first two circuits puts the pre-verbal child in a two-dimensional world,

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1080 The third, semantic circuit seems intimately connected with three dimensionality (although our binocular vision, of course, also plays a role here). Specifically, right-handedness is a human, or at least a primate, trait. Other mammals show no right-hand preference; they are ambidextrous. Recent neurology has shown that our right-handedness is intimately connected with our tendency to use the left hemisphere of the brain more than the right.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1085 Thus, there is a genetic (hard-wired) preference, in most humans, for right-handed manipulations and left-brain mentations. Now these connections seem intimately involved with our verbal, semantic circuitry, because the left brain is the “talking” brain. It is linear, analytical, computer-like and very verbal. Thus, there is a neurological basis for the linkage between mapping and manipulating. The right hand manipulates the universe (and makes artifacts) and the left-brain maps the results into a model, which allows for predictions about future behavior of that part of the universe. These are the distinctly human (postprimate) characteristics.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1089 The left-handed, on the contrary, specialize in right-brain functions, which are holistic, supra-verbal, “intuitive,” musical and “mystical.” Leonardo, Beethoven and Nietzsche, for instance, were all left-handed. Traditionally, left-handed people have been the subject of both dread and awe—regarded as weird, shamanic, and probably in special communication with “God” or “the Devil.”*

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1095 Aleister Crowley knew about this pragmatically, before modern neurology. He taught his pupils to learn to write equally well with both hands, thereby forcing the dormant right brain to spring to activity.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1098 There is thus a cross-over which makes for a left-right polarity in both brain-functioning and hand-functioning, each being a reverse mirror image of the other:

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1100 This double (and reversed) right-left polarity places us neurologically in three-dimensional space. Rearranging our diagram and adding the third circuit, we can illustrate the mind-field as follows:

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1104 This is “Euclidean” space. It is obvious, in this context, why Euclidean space was the first kind of space discovered by mathematicians, and by artists, and why it still seems “natural” to us; why some have great difficulty in imagining the non-Euclidean kinds of space used in modern physics. Euclidean space is a projection outward of the way our nervous systems stacks information on the bio-survival, emotional and semantic circuits.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1107 Thus, the imprint sites of this circuit are located in the left cortex and closely linked with the delicate muscles of larynx and the fine manipulations of right-handed “dexterity.” The cortex itself is so recent in evolution that it is often called “the new brain”; it is found only in the higher mammals and is most developed in humans and cetaceans (dolphins and whales).

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1122 As with the earlier circuits, the semantic circuit builds all of its conditioning and learning onto a bedrock of hard-wired imprinting. Thus, many existentially thinkable thoughts are socially unthinkable, since (a) everybody in a given society has roughly the same semantic imprint and (b) this is reinforced daily by assumptions that are mechanically taken for granted.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1124 Thus, a genius is one who, by some internal process, breaks through to Circuit VII—a minor neurological miracle loosely called “intuition”—and comes back down to the third circuit with the capacity to paint a new semantic map, build a new model of experience. Needless to say, this is always a profound shock to those still trapped in the old robot-imprints, and is generally considered a threat to territory (ideological head space). The long list of martyrs to free enquiry, from Socrates onward, shows how mechanical this neophobia (fear of new semantic signals) is.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1128 As Thomas Kuhn showed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, science itself—the apotheosis of third-circuit semantic rationality—is not free of this neophobia. Kuhn demonstrated, at length, that each scientific revolution took one full generation to turn over the old world view. And Kuhn further showed that the older scientists never are converted to the new semantic paradigm. They are, in our terminology, mechanically hooked to their original imprints. The revolution is complete, as Kuhn shows, only when a second generation, not hooked to the old imprint, is able to compare the two models and decides rationally that the newer one really does make more sense.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1133 But if science, the most self-correcting of all information processing third-circuit functions, has this one-generation time lag, what can be said of politics, religion, economics? Time-lags of centuries, or even millenniums, are common there.*

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1141 We commented earlier that in bio-survival neurology, there is no time. Emotional-territorial circuit actions begin to include time as a factor. Dominance signals may not “work”: the seemingly weaker mammal may offer a counter-challenge. Two dogs will walk around each other for several minutes growling and sniffing (the chemical secretions of each reveals its actual degree of fear to the other) before Top Dog and Bottom Dog becomes clear.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1145 On the human level, we often agonize over emotional decisions, becoming acutely conscious of time as we hesitate. As every suspense writer knows, the principle way to increase emotional tension is to set a time limit on a difficult or dangerous decision. On the third circuit, time becomes conceptualized as well as experienced. We know ourselves as creatures of time; the “tale of the tribe,” the totem pole, the Odyssey of Homer, the Old Testament, the Vedas, etc. tell us what came before and often contains prophecies of what will come later. Science expands the third circuit into contemplation of time-spans that stagger our imaginations. The very use of written languages and other symbols like mathematics creates the time-binding sense of Korzybski: we know ourselves as receivers of messages sent by sages “of olde” and as potential transmitters of messages that may be scanned ages in the future. The fourth circuit causes us to be even more involved in, and pressured by, time.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1110 Those extreme cases who take their heaviest imprint on the third circuit tend to grow up cerebrotonic. They are tall and skinny, because energy is perpetually drawn upward from the body into the head. The caricatured evil genius, Dr. Syvlanus in Superman, who was virtually all head, represents the extreme toward which this type seems to be evolving. Popular speech calls them “eggheads.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1113 Almost always, these cerebrotonic Third-Circuit types ignore or are hostile to their first and second circuit functions. Playfulness puzzles them (appears silly or eccentric) and emotions both baffle and frighten them.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1115 Since we all contain this circuit, we all need to exercize it regularly. Make up a schematic diagram of your business or home and try to streamline it for more efficiency. Design a chart that explains the whole universe. Every few years, study a science you know nothing about, at an Adult Education center. And don’t neglect to play with this circuit: write poems, jingles, fables, proverbs or jokes.
  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1154 In closing this chapter let us be reminded that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake February 18, 1600, for teaching that the earth moves. Was he guilty or not?
  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1155 EXERCIZES 1. If you are a Liberal, subscribe to the National Review, the country’s most intelligent (and witty) conservative magazine, for a year. Each month try to enter their reality-tunnel for a few hours while reading their articles. 2. If you are a Conservative, subscribe to the New York Review of Books for a year and try to get into their head-space for a few hours a month. 3. If you are a Rationalist, subscribe to Fate magazine for a year. 4. If you are an occultist, join the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and read their journal, The Skeptical Inquirer, for a year. 5. Buy a copy of the Scientific American and read any article in it. Ask the following questions: Why do they sound so sure? Does the data support dogmatism at this point, or is dogma a primate habit (defending head-space)? Will these theories still be believed in 2011? In 2593? 6. Get into a discussion of philosophy with an educated Marxist, an intelligent Moslem and a Japanese businessman at the first opportunity. 7. Buy some ZOOM or LIFT (two names for the same caffeine-high stimulant) at a Health Food Store. (This gives a close approximation of the effects of illegal cocaine.) When you are Zooming or Lifted and your mind is racing, find a victim and explain the universe to him or her, until they are able to escape you. What you experience in this “speed rap” is what the head of the compulsive Rationalist is always like. This is the verbal circuit gone wild and totally oblivious to information coming in on any other circuit. It explains why most people cannot stand Rationalists. “Speed” drugs evidently trigger neuro-transmitters characteristic of the verbal centers of the left cortex.

Notes

Amount: 11

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