The New Inquisition Chapter 1 Models, Metaphors, and Idols

← The New Inquisition Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

The New Inquisition Chapter 1. Models, Metaphors, and Idols

Author: Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press. Publish Date: 1986 Review Date: 2022-8-25 Status:📚

Annotations

The conventions of coding or systems of metaphor that make us human are known as “culture” or “cultural configuration” in anthropology. The systems used in science at a given date are known as the models of that period, or sometimes all the models are lumped together into one super-model which is then called “the” paradigm. The general case — the class of all classes of metaphors — is called a group’s emic reality (by Dr. Harold Garfinkle who has built a meta-system called ethnomethodology out of the sub-systems of anthropology and social psychology) or its existential reality (by the Existentialists) or its reality-tunnel (by Dr. Timothy Leary, psychologist, philosopher and designer of computer software). That these terms are sometimes overlapping and sometimes distinct can be illustrated with a few real and hypothetical examples.

In terms of one kind of sociological model, a common event in any large city can be described as follows: A group of people agree to meet at a certain hour on a certain day to make noise. Other people arrange to be there, to listen to the noise. The meeting happens as scheduled, the noise continues for over an hour, and everybody exhibits behavior indicating that the ritual was satisfactory to them. According to another type of sociological model, favored by phenomenologists and ethnomethodologists, we need to know that the noise was called Symphony No. 9 in D by Beethoven before we can begin to understand what has happened, which is that in the emic reality or existential reality of these people something has occurred which contains meaning, beauty, grandeur and affirmation of life. Prof. X, who is Japanese, shares the same model of gravity as Prof. Y, who is Swedish, because they are both physicists; but Prof. X still lives in a Japanese reality-tunnel when relating to family and friends and Prof. Y is in a Swedish reality-tunnel when outside the lab in Swedish society. This is why, when not discussing physics. Prof. X might seem stiff or formal to Prof. Y, who might in turn seem rude or even crude to Prof. X. Stanley Laurel throws a pie which hits Oliver Hardy in the face. In the physicist’s model or reality-tunnel (the two overlap in this case) the best description of what has happened is Newton’s F equals ma (Force equals mass times acceleration). In the anthropological reality-tunnel, what has happened is a continuation of the Feast of Fools or Saturnalia or the tradition of the royal fool who is immune from the tabu against rebellion in comic form. To some Freudians, the best reality-tunnel is that the Son’s rage against the Father is being expressed symbolically. To some Marxists, it is the worker’s rage against the boss. Etc. It begins to seem that no one “reality-tunnel” is adequate for the description of all human experience, although some reality-tunnels are better for some purposes than others are.

Highlight - Page 10 By the New Inquisition I mean to designate certain habits of repression and intimidation that are becoming increasingly commonplace in the scientific community today.
Highlight - Page 10 By New Idol I mean to designate the rigid beliefs that form the ideological superstructure of the New Inquisition.
Highlight - Page 10 By the New Agnosticism I mean to designate an attitude of mind which has elsewhere been called “model agnosticism” and which applies the agnostic principle not just to the “God” concept but to ideas of all sorts in all areas of thoughts and ideology.
Highlight(pink) - Page 10 · Location 122 The agnostic principle refuses total belief or total denial and regards models as tools to be used only and always where appropriate and replaced (by other models) only and always where not appropriate. It does not regard any models, or any class of models, as more “profound” than any other models, or any class of models but asks only how a model serves, or fails to serve, those who use it. The agnostic principle is intended here in a broad “humanistic” or “existential” sense, and is not intended to be narrowly technical or philosophical only.

Highlight(pink) - Page 11 · Location 137 Some terms which may be unfamiliar to certain readers are used frequently in this book. They are defined briefly here, and will be explained further, by context and example, as the argument unfolds.
Highlight(pink) - Page 11 · Location 139 EMIC REALITY: the unified field made up of thoughts, feelings and apparent sense impressions that organizes our inchoate experience into meaningful patterns ; the paradigm or model that people create by talking to each other, or by communicating in any symbolism; the culture of a time and place; the semantic environment. Every emic reality has its own structure, which imposes structure upon raw experience.
Highlight(pink) - Page 11 · Location 143 ETIC REALITY: the hypothetical actuality that has not been filtered through the emic reality of a human nervous system or linguistic grid.
Highlight(pink) - Page 11 · Location 146 INFORMATION: as used in mathematical information theory, this denotes the amount of unpredictability in a message; information is, roughly, what you do not expect to hear. In this sense, information may be “true” or “false,” but is always a small surprise. Resistance to new information measures the degree of Fundamentalism in a culture, a sub-culture, or an individual.
Highlight(pink) - Page 11 · Location 151 NEUROSEMANTICS: the study of how symbolism influences the human nervous system; how the local reality-tunnel programs our thoughts, feelings and apparent sense impressions.
Highlight(pink) - Page 11 · Location 153 REALITY-LABYRINTH: existence regarded as a multiple-choice intelligence test; the sum total of reality-tunnels available to an open-minded or non-Fundamentalistic human at a given time and place.
Highlight(pink) - Page 11 · Location 155 REALITY-TUNNEL: An emic reality established by a system of coding, or a structure of metaphors, and transmitted by language, art, mathematics or other symbolism.
Highlight(pink) - Page 12 · Location 157 SYNERGY: those behaviors of whole systems which cannot be predicted by analysis of parts or sub-systems. A term popularized by Buckminster Fuller and roughly equivalent to Holism. Cf. Gestalt in psychology and transaction immediately following:
Highlight(pink) - Page 12 · Location 160 TRANSACTION: used here in the sense of Transactional Psychology, which holds that perception is not passive re-action but active, creative trans-action, and that the “observer” and the “observed” must be considered a synergetic whole.

Highlight(pink) - Page 13 · Location 182 The late R. Buckminster Fuller—architect, engineer, poet, mathematician and gadfly—used to astonish audiences by remarking casually in the middle of a lecture that everything we see is inside our heads. If the consternation of the audience was voluble. Fuller would stop and explain, by drawing on the blackboard the diagram encountered in the elementary optics part of any first year physics course:
Highlight(pink) - Page 13 · Location 186 The upward arrow on the reader’s left represents an “object” or, in more precise terms, a space-time event. The light rays from this existential knot or energy cluster travel to the lens of the eye which, like all lenses, reverses them and the retina then registers the reversed “image.” We do not see things upside down because the retina is part of the synergetic eye-brain system and before we have a conscious perception of the energy-knot the brain has already interpreted and edited the signal into its system of classification, which includes turning it around to mesh with the general geometrical coordinate system the brain uses to “file” data.
Highlight(pink) - Page 14 · Location 192 Some people think they understand this the first time it is explained to them. Others, around the hundredth time it is explained, suddenly cry “Eureka!” and think they really understand it at last. In my experience teaching seminars on this area, nobody gets the full meaning of it until some experiments are performed which make it a vivid experience. Here is one such experiment which the reader is urgently implored to duplicate:
Highlight(pink) - Page 14 · Location 196 Ask a friend to cooperate and then obtain a newspaper you have not already glanced over. Sit in a chair and have the friend, holding the newspaper so that you can read the front-page headlines, walk slowly away, across the room, until the headlines are blurry for you. Have the friend turn a page to ensure that you cannot read the headlines. Then have him, holding the newspaper in the same position, read a headline out loud. You will then “see” the headline clearly.
Note: Similar experiements include hearing unintelligable speech, and when its played for a second time, it is supplemented with subtitles, allowing you to “hear” waht is being said
Highlight(pink) - Page 14 · Location 202 Aristotle, without knowing the modern laws of optics, understood this general principle well enough to point out once that “I see” is an incorrect expression and really should be “I have seen.” There is always time, however small, between the impact of a signal on our eye and the “perception” or “image” in our brains. In that interval the brain imposes form, meaning, color and a great deal else.
Highlight(pink) - Page 14 · Location 207 What is true of the eye is true of the ear and of other senses.

Highlight(pink) - Page 14 · Location 208 On the face of it, once this has been pointed out, there seems no escape from an at least partial agnosticism—i.e. from recognition that all ideas are somewhat conjectural and inferential. Aristotle escaped that conclusion, and until recently most philosophers and scientists have escaped it, by asserting or assuming or hoping that a method exists whereby the uncertainty of perceptions can be transcended and we can arrive at certitude about general principles.
Highlight(pink) - Page 15 · Location 216 If perception is not absolute, no deduction from perception can be absolute. No matter how ingeniously one juggles with approximations, they do not magically turn into certainties; at best, they become the most accurate possible approximations.

Highlight(pink) - Page 15 · Location 219 Again: consider this well-known illustration, to be found in most general psychology texts:
Highlight(pink) - Page 15 · Location 220 If you see the line on the bottom as longer than the line on the top, your brain, working on habitual programs, has deceived you. The V and reverse-V decorations seduce the eye-brain system into seeing inaccurately. You have just had a mild hallucination.
Highlight(pink) - Page 15 · Location 223 The processes (optical and neurological) by which “miracles” and “UFOs” are created and by which you “create” the chair across the room from you right now, are fundamentally similar to what just happened when you looked at those lines.
Highlight(pink) - Page 15 · Location 225 If you think the chair is somehow more “objective” than a poem by Dylan Thomas or those pixillated lines, you might try the expensive experiment of hiring three painters and three photographers to come in and make you a “realistic portrait” of the chair. You will find that, in the photos as much as in the paintings, a personality has somehow given a meaning or a richness to the “object.”

Highlight(pink) - Page 16 · Location 233 “The” Greeks as we say, or “the” ancient Greeks—the handful of ancient Greeks whose ideas we encounter in University, actually—were well aware of this fallibility of perception, and an illustration well-known in Athens in its Golden Age went like this: take three bowls of water. Make one of them quite hot, one medium-temperatured, and the third quite cold. Put your right hand in the hot bowl for a while and your left hand in the cold bowl. Then put both hands in the medium bowl. The same water will feel “cold” to your right hand and “hot” to your left hand. (Again, doing the experiment teaches more, neurosemantically, than merely reading about it.)

Highlight - Page 16 Nonetheless, the Greek philosophers, or some of them, still thought there was a path to certitude. They called it the path of Pure Reason. The argument for PR goes that, even if sense data is fallible, we have a higher faculty which is not fallible and which knows truths a priori. This has collapsed over the centuries for a variety of reasons, but chiefly because the things philosophers thought they knew this way have often turned out to be simply not true. For instance, even as late as the age of libertarian free thought in the 18th Century, Kant still thought PR “knew” intuitively that Euclidean geometry was the true and only geometry. Nowadays, mathematicians have several varieties of non-Euclidean geometry, all of which are equally valid (consistent) and all of which are as useful as Euclidean geometry, although in different areas.

Highlight - Location 16 In the 13th Century, Thomas Aquinas thought he had the infallible method of arriving at certitude — a combination of PR and Holy Writ. This is still believed in backward countries like Ireland or Portugal, but is not generally accepted in civilized nations because PR itself has been proven fallible, as noted, and because there are many varieties of HW around — Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, Jewish, etc. as well as such modern products as Oahspe and the Urantia book — and there is no known empirical test to determine which HW is the “real” HW.

Highlight - Page 17 In the 19th Century, Kierkegaard circled back to the pre-Aquinas era of Christianity and suggested, again, that the way out of this perpetual relapse into uncertainty is a “leap of faith.”
Highlight(pink) - Page 17 · Location 254 his argument is something like that of the present book (and of Nietzsche), which is that all the other methods of seeking certitude have a concealed “leap of faith” in them, which their devotees conveniently “forget” or overlook. So Kierkegaard asks: why not admit frankly that we are taking a “leap of faith”?
Highlight(pink) - Page 17 · Location 257 My answer to that is that there is an alternative which appears more reasonable to some of us; namely to avoid the “leap of faith” and remain agnostic about all methods, although willing to learn from them in an open-minded way.

Highlight - Page 17 There remains, of course, Scientific Method (SM), the alleged source of the certitude of those I call the New Idolators. SM is a mixture of SD (sense data: usually aided by instruments to refine the senses) with the old Greek PR. Unfortunately, while SM is powerfully effective, and seems to most of us the best method yet devised by mankind, it is made up of two elements which we have already seen are fallible—SD (sense data) and PR (pure reason) can both deceive us. Again: two fallibilities do not add up to one infallibility. Scientific generalizations which have lasted a long time have high probability, perhaps the highest probability of any generalizations, but it is only Idolatry which claims none of them will ever again have to be revised or rejected. Too many have been revised or rejected in this century alone.

Highlight(pink) - Page 17 · Location 268 Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude.
Highlight - Page 19 For instance, run your eyes down the following list of propositions and play the Aristotelian either/ or game with them: mark each one “true” or “false” (since no” maybes” are allowed in the strict Aristotelian game):
Highlight - Page 20 notice that emotional preferences and fixed ideas did become somewhat perceptible in a few cases, for almost every reader, even when, or especially when, the evidence for or against the proposition is dubious or controversial. It is amusing to reflect that other readers no doubt experienced a similar insight into their own bias but on entirely different items on the list.
Highlight(pink) - Page 20 · Location 279 What I call Idols are projections of these inner compulsions of human psychology. When an Idol “speaks” (through its priests) it only says what the Faithful want to hear.

Highlight(pink) - Page 20 · Location 286 All thought consists of manipulations of symbols according to Game Rules. The combination of symbols and rules (for manipulating the symbols) makes up a system. When stripped down to their bare mathematico-logical bones, all systems appear to be either trivial or dubious. If trivial, they are certain, but we cannot learn much from them because they “refer” to very little. As soon as a system becomes less than totally trivial, and “refers” to more and more, a species of infinite regress enters it and it becomes increasingly uncertain: we have to prove, as it were, an endless series of steps between Step A and Step B before we can go on to Step C.
Highlight(pink) - Page 20 · Location 293 There is a hilarious example of this regress, from Lewis Carroll, in Hofstadter’s book mentioned above. A simplified analogy is this, which I once heard: “I never eat animals because they are our brothers,” said an American student of Buddhism, to a Zen roshi. “Why shouldn’t we eat our brothers?” asked the roshi. The student had a simple system which can be abbreviated: Animals are our brothers. We should not eat our brothers. Therefore, we should not eat animals. Once any step of this is analyzed critically, a new argument begins; and that argument in turn can be analyzed at any point, and so the infinite regress is created.

Highlight(pink) - Page 21 · Location 302 In “common sense” or in the context of probability, many such challenges appear absurd and can be disregarded, but any system that claims certainty must answer all challenges. Since this would take an infinite amount of time, it has not yet been performed, and the foundations of every mathematical-logical system are increasingly regarded as formal—Game Rules—and not as eternal “laws of thought” as they seemed to be to philosophers from Aristotle to about the time of Kant.
Highlight(pink) - Page 21 · Location 310 This applies to the structure of systems of PR in itself. When we combine PR with SD (sense data) another problem arises — the fallibility of SD already discussed. A third problem is that there are many systems of PR available — e.g. in describing separation we have to choose between Euclidean geometry, Gaussian-Reimannian geometry, Lobachevskian geometry, Fullerian geometry, n-dimensional Hilbert space, etc. — and we can only judge which system of PR should be combined with SD by scrutinizing the results of further SD (by experiment), which gives us high probabilities but still no certainties. Any system of PR/SD which has worked in the past may be replaced if new SD no longer fits its grid, or if a different system of PR gives a new “perspective” which seems more useful operationally or practically.
Highlight(pink) - Page 21 · Location 316 In daily life and in “common sense,” we use this agnostic caution most of the time and “expect the unexpected” and “keep our eyes and ears open,” etc. We only rush to judgment when we are under time-pressure to make a quick decision or when our prejudices are involved, as in political and religious controversy. When there is no existential pressure for quick decisions, only prejudice asserts certitude.

Highlight(pink) - Page 22 · Location 324 Stage I represents an energy-event in the space-time continuum, in the Einsteinian sense. This can be a sub-atomic process, a horse running in a field, a Laurel and Hardy movie projected on a screen, the nuclear engine called “the sun” transmitting light and heat to us across 93,000,000 miles, or any other kind of event possible in space-time. This is often called Etic Reality, or non-verbal Reality.
Highlight(pink) - Page 22 · Location 328 The first arrow represents part (not all) of the energy in the original energy-event traveling toward some perceptor organ belonging to you or me or some critter like us.

Highlight(pink) - Page 22 · Location 330 Stage II represents the activity of the perceptor organ after being “hit” or tickled or somehow excited by the part of the energy that reaches said organ. Please note that all of the energy is not absorbed by the organ even in extreme cases—e.g. when we are hit by a hammer, we still do not absorb all the energy in the hammer.\
Highlight(pink) - Page 22 · Location 335 Even at this stage—even if nothing further was required for perception—we would still be dealing with part, not all; we would be dealing with abstraction, uncertainty, fallibility.
Highlight(pink) - Page 22 · Location 338 The second arrow indicates part of what happens after the perceptor organ is stimulated, by part of the energy flowing to us from the space-time event. In this arrow we are representing very, very many signals traveling to many parts of our organism.

Highlight(pink) - Page 22 · Location 341 Stage III represents this organismic reaction, which can be quite complex. For instance, if the energy-packet happens to be the signal, “Your mother has been raped and murdered by terrorists,” the stomach and tear-ducts and heart at least will be involved in processing the signal, as well as the neural and neuro-endocrine systems.
Highlight(pink) - Page 23 · Location 349 It is obvious that along with subtraction (or abstraction: receiving part not all of the external energy), perception also involves a kind of addition of pre-existing emotions, which is what Freud meant by “projection.”
Highlight(pink) - Page 23 · Location 352 The next arrow indicates the transmission of all this to the brain. Obviously, what the brain receives is already highly colored by the subtractions and additions we have indicated; but the brain itself, except perhaps in the newborn infant, already has a set of programs, or a “filing system” for classifying such incoming signals.

Highlight(pink) - Page 23 · Location 356 Stage IV indicates the “percept” as it is usually called, the mental “image” or “idea” that emerges after the brain has processed the original energy plus additions and minus subtractions.
Highlight(pink) - Page 23 · Location 358 The final, two-way arrow indicates the most subtle and nefarious stage of this neurological programming, the feedback between the incoming energy (plus additions and minus subtractions) and the language system (including symbolic, abstract languages like mathematics) which the brain happens to use habitually.

Highlight(pink) - Page 23 · Location 361 The final precept in humans is always verbal or symbolic and hence coded into the pre-existing structure of whatever languages or systems the brain has been taught. The process is not one of linear reaction but of synergetic transaction. This finished product is thus a neurosemantic construct, a kind of metaphor.

Highlight(pink) - Page 24 · Location 364 This discovery that language is basically metaphoric, which emerged gradually in the early 19th Century, inspired Emerson’s famous dictum that we speak to each other in “fossil poems.” Thus, to want something is to be empty—want and vacant come from the same root. Speaking of all desires as “appetites” brings us back to the same metaphor.
Highlight(pink) - Page 24 · Location 369 Even “to be”—the most abstract word in normal use—comes from an Indo-European root which evidently meant becoming lost in the woods. That was as abstract, I guess, as an early human could feel; when no longer lost, when other people were found again, he or she would no longer simply “be” abstractly but become embroiled again in a more complex state, namely social existence and its Game Rules.
Highlight(pink) - Page 24 · Location 373 A villain is a person without property (and Marxists should have given us many more exegeses on the class-bias in our languages).
Highlight(pink) - Page 24 · Location 375 Man is the general human being, as Feminists keep telling us, because of the gender-bias in our language.
Highlight(pink) - Page 24 · Location 375 A humorous story of sexual nature is a “dirty joke” because ascetics and puritans have left their own programs embedded in our speech; but Saxon words for body functions are “dirtier” than Norman words because of a plurality of puritan-economic-racial prejudices.

Highlight(pink) - Page 24 · Location 378 Even “the” is a metaphor—it assumes the world is divided the same way our minds divide it—and seems to have been a very hypnotic metaphor indeed. In terms of human tragedy and suffering, think of what has been provoked by generalizations about “the Jews” and “the blacks.”
Highlight(pink) - Page 24 · Location 382 More subtly, remember that “the length of the rod” seemed to be a perfectly meaningful and “objective” phrase until Einstein demonstrated that a rod has various lengths—length1, length2, etc.—depending on its velocity and depending also on the relative velocity of the galoot who is trying to measure it.

Highlight(pink) - Page 24 · Location 392 And what about “is” in the sense of Aristotelian identification — as in A is a B? This appears very useful mathematically, because the members of a mathematical set exist abstractly, i.e. by definition, but what happens when we apply it to non-mathematical, sensory-sensual events? Consider such pronouncements as “This is a great work of art,” “This is meaningless drivel,” “This is Communism,” “This is sexism,” “This is fascism.” To reflect the currently acceptable principles of neurology, such statements should be a bit more complicated—e.g. “This seems like a great work of art to me,” “This seems like meaningless drivel to me,” “This seems like Communism to me,” “This seems like sexism to me,” “This seems like fascism to me.”
Highlight(pink) - Page 25 · Location 395 Of course, if some pedantic bastard like me points this out, people will say that the latter formulations are what they really mean and that the Aristotelian “is” was used only for convenience or brevity. But if you observe people carefully, you will note that language does indeed have hypnotic effects, and that one who has said “This is Sacred” will treat the non-verbal event as if it really is Sacred, and those who say “This is Crap” will act as if the event really is Crap.
Highlight(pink) - Page 25 · Location 401 Roger Jones’s Physics as Metaphor spends most of its time trying to make clear to the reader the transactional or poetic element in so seemingly factual a statement as This table is three meters long.

Highlight(pink) - Page 25 · Location 404 In case Dr. Jones’s point still seems obscure or excessive, consider the celebrated “cock-eyed room” designed by Dr. Albert Ames. This is discussed in Blake’s Perception mentioned above and has often been shown on educational television. This room is designed so that the brain, using its ordinary programs and metaphors, will classify it as an ordinary room. It is not ordinary, however: it has walls and ceiling and floor designed at odd angles which optically produce in educated humans the same signals as a “normal” room. (Some evidence suggests that children under 5 years of age are not taken in by this illusion.)
Highlight(pink) - Page 25 · Location 409 Something very amusing and instructive happens—something which may relate, I think, to UFOlogy and other “crazy” topics—if two men of the same size enter the cockeyed room and walk to opposite walls. What the brain “sees” is that one man “miraculously” grows taller, becomes a virtual giant, while the other man “shrinks” down to a dwarf.
Highlight(pink) - Page 25 · Location 412 The brain, it seems, having classified the room as normal, stubbornly clings to that program, even at the cost of having to classify new signals into a virtually supernatural event.

Highlight(pink) - Page 26 · Location 416 More subtle and alarming issues arise when we consider the structure of a system of metaphors interlinked into a code or language. Descartes, who tried, or says he tried, to doubt everything, found that he could not doubt the proposition “I think, therefore I am.” That was because he lived before the discoveries of 19th Century linguists. Nietzsche, who was trained in that field before becoming a philosopher or a social menace or whatever he became, noted that Descartes couldn’t doubt that proposition because he only knew Indo-European languages. It is an Indo-European coding convention that a verb must have a substantive noun before it—that an action must be attributed to some alegedly isolated and allegedly reified Actor.
Highlight(pink) - Page 26 · Location 423 It is this convention which still makes us say “It is raining,” even though we no longer believe in Zeus or any other rain-god and would be hard put to say what else the “it” might refer to.
Highlight(pink) - Page 26 · Location 425 These linguistic structural factors explain the notorious inability of even genius to translate a poem from one language to another, except very approximately. They may also explain some of the great conflicts in the history of philosophy—Prof. Hugh Kenner has wittily argued that Descartes, thinking in a French even more latinate than today’s, would perceive un pomme grosse et rouge and conclude that the mind starts from general ideas and then discovers particulars, whereas Locke, thinking in English, would perceive the same sort of space-time event as a big red apple and decide that the mind starts from particulars and then assembles general ideas.
Highlight(pink) - Page 27 · Location 432 In Chinese, the characters which literally translated into English would be jade/ sun + moon comes over to us, once we know that sun + moon means among other things brightness, as “the jade is bright” or more elegantly “the jade shines.” And student/ sun + moon becomes a surprisingly familiar metaphor—“the student is bright.” But heart + liver/ sun + moon has baffled every translator of Confucius.

Highlight(pink) - Page 27 · Location 442 And what about “matter,” the Idol of the Fundamentalist Materialists? This is a metaphor, too, a petrified poem, and is related to meter and measure (and, oddly enough, to mother also). Somewhere, somehow, out of the organismic (holistic) activity of metering and measuring, somebody invented the metaphor, the substantive noun, of that-which-is-measured.
Highlight(pink) - Page 27 · Location 446 In the same way, out of the experiences which Nietzsche once called “this leaf” and “that leaf” and “the next leaf”—which semanticists call leaf1, leaf2, leaf3 etc.—the substantive noun, or poem, of “leaf” or “the leaf” was created.
Highlight(pink) - Page 27 · Location 448 That the process was very poetic indeed and even metaphysical is indicated by the fact that Plato either believed, or has been understood to have believed, that “the leaf” really exists somewhere.
Highlight(pink) - Page 27 · Location 450 Most Materialists, similarly, either believe, or are very easily misunderstood as believing, that “matter” exists somewhere. But nobody has ever experienced this poem or abstraction “matter,” any more than anybody has ever experienced “the leaf.” Human experience remains limited to measurement1, measurement2, measurement3 etc. and leaf1, leaf2, leaf3 etc.

Highlight(pink) - Page 30 · Location 504 It begins to seem that no one “reality-tunnel” is adequate for the description of all human experience, although some reality-tunnels are better for some purposes than others are.
Highlight(pink) - Page 28 · Location 460 The conventions of coding or systems of metaphor that make us human are known as “culture” or “cultural configuration” in anthropology. The systems used in science at a given date are known as the models of that period, or sometimes all the models are lumped together into one super-model which is then called “the” paradigm. The general case—the class of all classes of metaphors—is called a group’s emic reality (by Dr. Harold Garfinkle who has built a meta-system called ethnomethodology out of the sub-systems of anthropology and social psychology) or its existential reality (by the Existentialists) or its reality-tunnel (by Dr. Timothy Leary, psychologist, philosopher and designer of computer software).
Highlight(pink) - Page 28 · Location 469 That these terms are sometimes overlapping and sometimes distinct can be illustrated with a few real and hypothetical examples.
Highlight(pink) - Page 28 · Location 470 To cite Bucky Fuller again. Mission Control at Houston is often heard asking astronauts “How are things going up there?”—even when the astronauts are below Houston at the time. The technicians at Houston have a post-Copernican model most of the time, but their emic reality or reality-tunnel retains pre-Copernican metaphors implying both Earth’s flatness and its centrality.
Highlight(pink) - Page 28 · Location 475 According to Fuller, who may sound excessive at this point, this neurosemantic dissonance between model and metaphor could some day lead to a serious blunder.
Highlight(pink) - Page 28 · Location 477 Fuller, from 1928 on, always wrote and said “Universe” instead of “the” Universe. When questioned about this, he would explain that it is consistent with modern scientific models to regard Universe as process and “the” implies medieval notions of stasis and thing-ification.
Highlight(pink) - Page 29 · Location 485 In terms of one kind of sociological model, a common event in any large city can be described as follows: A group of people agree to meet at a certain hour on a certain day to make noise. Other people arrange to be there, to listen to the noise. The meeting happens as scheduled, the noise continues for over an hour, and everybody exhibits behavior indicating that the ritual was satisfactory to them. According to another type of sociological model, favored by phenomenologists and ethnomethodologists, we need to know that the noise was called Symphony No. 9 in D by Beethoven before we can begin to understand what has happened, which is that in the emic reality or existential reality of these people something has occurred which contains meaning, beauty, grandeur and affirmation of life.

Highlight(pink) - Page 30 · Location 507 I have spoken of Fundamentalism and Idolatry several times; now I may define these terms.
Highlight(pink) - Page 30 · Location 508 Idolatry is my label for that stage of semantic innocence in which the inferential and metaphoric nature of models and reality-tunnels is forgotten or repressed or has not yet been learned;
Highlight(pink) - Page 30 · Location 509 the stage of innocence or arrogance in which Stage V on our perception diagram, somebody’s edited final version of a perception (” Emic Reality”), is confused with Stage 1, the energy-event or Etic Reality “out there” in what is traditionally assumed to be a more-or-less Euclidean space.
Highlight(pink) - Page 30 · Location 512 To the Idolator, events “really are” what they appear to be as coded into his or her favorite reality-tunnel. Any other reality-tunnel, however useful it may appear to others with different purposes and different interests, must then be “mad” or “bad”—delusory or fraudulent. Anybody who disagrees with such an Idolator must be, by definition, a loony or a liar. This mentality underlies all Inquisitions, and I call it Fundamentalism when it appears as an active social ideology.

History and anthropology reveal that humans have “made do” or at least survived with an incredible variety of metaphor-systems or emic realities. In our own Western civilization, only 600 years ago everybody was living/sensing existence through the Thomist model with a manlike “God” at the top of everything, choirs of “angels” “thrones” and “dominions” descending therefrom, humans wandering about on a flat earth in the middle, and a burning “hell” full of “demons” beneath. Some of the denizens of County Kerry, and evidently some Hollywood screenwriters, are still in that reality-tunnel, which is just as “real” from inside as Beethoven’s grandeur is in the existential reality of those inside the classical music coding system. Around the world today are millions living in the Marxist reality-tunnel, the vegetarian reality-tunnel, the Buddhist reality-tunnel, the nudist reality-tunnel, the monetarist reality-tunnel, the Methodist reality-tunnel, the Zionist reality-tunnel, the Polynesian totemistic reality-tunnel etc.

Highlight(pink) - Page 31 · Location 528 Of course, this position “is” relative relativism, not absolute relativism. We say again that some reality-tunnels seem better, in some ways, than others. One would not wish to live in a nation dominated by the Nazi reality-tunnel, for instance; and that is called a moral choice. The Einsteinian reality-tunnel “is” better, in the dimension of predicting more accurately, than the Newtonian reality-tunnel; and that is called a scientific choice. James Joyce seems to “be” a greater writer to me than Harold Robbins; and this is called an esthetic choice.
Highlight(pink) - Page 31 · Location 534 In every case, however, a human organism, and specifically a human nervous system—in the biological model, a specialized kind of primate nervous system—has made the choice. The scientific, the esthetic and the moral are not always distinct, either—as can be seen by studying the arguments, anywhere, for and against building a new nuclear power plant.
Highlight(pink) - Page 31 · Location 538 Even in the scientific area, no choice is purely “objective” anymore, if it ever was, because—as we shall soon see—there are a variety of alternative models available these days in the advanced fields, and the choice between them always includes such factors as “simplicity” and “elegance”: two very subjective factors, indeed.
Highlight(pink) - Page 31 · Location 541 And, of course, in historical perspective, any choice between reality-tunnels is always made on the basis of insufficient data, because we have no way of knowing what new data will be discovered the next day, the next decade or the next century.

Highlight(pink) - Page 31 · Location 544 As Persinger and Lafreniere write in Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events, Nelson-Hall, 1977, page 3: We, as a species, exist in a world in which exist a myriad of data points. Upon these matrices of points we superimpose a structure and the world makes sense to us. The pattern of the structure originates within our biological and sociological properties.
Highlight(pink) - Page 31 · Location 548 To the extent that we remain conscious of this process of superimposing structure (programming our emic reality) we will behave liberally and will continue learning throughout life.
Highlight(pink) - Page 32 · Location 550 To the extent that we become unconscious of this process, we will behave Fundamentalistically or Idolatrously and will never again learn anything after the hour at which we (usually unconsciously) elevate a generalization into a dogma and stop thinking.
Highlight(pink) - Page 32 · Location 552 If we are fully hypnotized by a reality-tunnel, we may even become, in conventional terms, a bit mad. In such a state of mania, we might even burn books that contain heresy against our Idols, or fake the data to support our prejudices, or find ourselves compelled to explain increasing amounts of discordant data by accusing vast amorphous conspiracies of having “cooked” the data, or we might even become sincerely convinced that anybody who sees or hears or smells or tastes or otherwise senses anything inconsistent with our Idol must be hallucinating.
Highlight(pink) - Page 32 · Location 558 In such a state, we appear “beyond reason”—i.e. beyond the normal parameters of social discourse. The only places for us, then, are in a quiet and restful home in the country, surrounded by kindly doctors, or in the Vatican, or in the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal

Highlight(pink) - Page 32 · Location 562 Human beings appear, in the biological model, as very unique primates, but primates nonetheless. Specifically, the usual primate program about territory and property can be seen mirrored in any domesticated primate* (human) community in the plethora of “NO TRESPASSING” signs.
Highlight(pink) - Page 33 · Location 581 Due to the unique capacity of domesticated primates (evidently including chimpanzees, according to some recent reports) to learn neurosemantic systems (codes: languages), it becomes possible for these unique mammals to “own” (or think they “own”) symbolic territories as well as physical territories. These symbolic territories are usually called “ideologies” or “belief systems”—in our preferred terminology, reality-tunnels.
Highlight(pink) - Page 33 · Location 585 Domesticated primates battle not only over physical territories but over these “mental” or neurosemantic territories:
Highlight(pink) - Page 33 · Location 588 If a donkey kicks a donkey, as some cynic once remarked, that is a matter between two donkeys, but if a Spaniard kicks the King of France, all the citizens of those nations may become involved in the kind of territorial frenzy known as “war.” This will be preceded by a great deal of what an extraterrestrial would call “noise”–those who have entered the Western Linguistic reality-tunnel will recognize the “noise” as including signals concerning “national honor,” “an unforgivable outrage,” “our duty to our nation,” “cowardly appeasers who would crawl on their bellies,” etc. etc. These “noises” are as real and meaningful, to those in that existential reality, as the “noises” of Beethoven’s Ninth are to those in the Classical Music reality-tunnel.

Highlight(pink) - Page 34 · Location 595 Mark Twain once remarked that anti-semitism reminded him of a cat he once knew who sat on a hot stove once and never sat on a hot stove again. “What’s wrong with that?” asked an anti-semite, falling into Twain’s trap. “The stupid cat never sat on a cold stove either,” Twain replied.
Highlight(pink) - Page 34 · Location 597 This illustrates the generalization that mammals seem incapable of criticizing or examining their neural programs. To a dog or a cat or a monkey, some act or event or thing that seemed “bad” once will always seem “bad” and it, or anything that looks like it, will be attacked or fled.
Highlight(pink) - Page 34 · Location 602 Domesticated primates (humans) seem also to function largely on imprinting and conditioning, and mostly they share the mammalian inability to criticize or examine these neurological programs. These mechanical reactions interact with a linguistic (emic) reality-tunnel to produce a characteristic vocabulary, from which behavior can often be predicted mechanically.
Highlight(pink) - Page 34 · Location 606 If one hears the metaphors and/ or cuss-words of the Ku Klux Klan, one can guess how a Black human will be treated in that group. If one hears the language system of Radical Feminism, one knows how a male human will be regarded. If one hears the noises of Fundamentalist Materialism, one knows how an allegation of “ESP” will be received. Etc.

Highlight(pink) - Page 34 · Location 609 It appears that some domesticated primates, over the aeons, have not precisely evolved but have learned how to criticize and examine their own neurological programs. Members of this group cannot be mechanically predicted. They exhibit, at times at least, what looks like “growth” or “creativity,“
Highlight(pink) - Page 34 · Location 616 it appears that most of what I have been calling Idolatry and Fundamentalism can be biologically described as normal primate behavior—mechanical imprinting and conditioning combined with normal territorial pugnacity.
Highlight(pink) - Page 35 · Location 618 And in that case—unless some real possibility of creative thought exists—only mechanical primate programs will determine how we evaluate any incident or event, from the chair across the room to yarns about bleeding Catholic statues or charmed quarks or UFOs.
Highlight(pink) - Page 35 · Location 622 we follow conditioned programs so much that we do not stop to exercise our potential creativity. The artist tries to jar us out of this conditioned or hypnotic state by showing us a normal thing in a new way. The mystic tries to jar us by telling us to sit and look at a wall or an apple or something until—through the stress of social and sensory deprivation—we stop “seeing” what we always saw and start “seeing” in a new way.
Highlight(pink) - Page 35 · Location 626 We are using neither the artistic nor the mystic method here but are trying to look at those things which are normally ignored or dismissed—to look at them without first placing one of our habitual Idols in the way of our vision—And then, when we look back at the normal world again, at that chair across the room, will it still be quite normal for us?

Highlight(pink) - Page 35 · Location 630 The late J.B. Priestley often animadverted upon what he called the Citadel—the scientific-technological elite which both supports and is supported by our military-industrial alpha males. The Citadel, in most countries, gets millions of pounds for every twopence doled out to the humanities, the social studies or the arts; it devotes most of its time and intellect to the task, as Bucky Fuller used to say, of delivering more and more explosive power over greater and greater distances in shorter and shorter times to kill more and more people.
Highlight(pink) - Page 35 · Location 634 For this reason, the Citadel increasingly frightens most of us and there is a vast, somewhat incoherent rebellion against it all around the world. This rebellion takes the form, most of the time, of return to some earlier philosophy or reality-tunnel, although within the scientific community there is also a rebellion which is seeking a new reality-tunnel, which is usually called the New Paradigm.
Highlight(pink) - Page 36 · Location 652 Of course, “the Citadel” is a metaphor, a rhetorical convenience. Many of the most creative scientists of the past half-century have dissented vehemently from official Citadel dogma and even engaged in Heresy*; and a surprising number of “Scientific” Materialists are not scientists at all but cranky Village Atheists left over from horse-and-buggy days.

Highlight(pink) - Page 41 · Location 756 SOMBUNALL … Is this a new wonder-drug? The latest computer from Japan? The Swahili word for water-closet? Another borrowing from Finnegans Wake? Sombunall is, I think, a word we badly need. It means some-but-not-all. We have already pointed out that perception involves abstraction (or subtraction)—When we look at an apple we do not see all the apple but only part of the surface of the apple—And our generalizations or models or reality-tunnels are made up of coordinations or orchestrations of these abstractions—We never know “all”; we know, at best, sombunall.
Highlight(pink) - Page 41 · Location 764 Now, to return to my frequent occupation of writing science fiction, imagine a world in which German did not contain the word “alles” or any of its derivatives, but did include some form of sombunall. Adolph Hitler would never have been able to say, or even think, most of his generalizations about all Jews. At most, he would have been talking and thinking about sombunall Jews. I don’t claim this alone would necessarily have prevented the Holocaust—I am not about to offer some form of linguistic determinism to rival Marx’s economic determinism or Hitler’s own racial determinism, but—Holocaust mentalities are encouraged by all-ness statements. They are discouraged by sombunall statements.
Highlight(pink) - Page 42 · Location 773 Imagine Arthur Schopenhauer with a sombunall instead of all in his vocabulary. He could still have generalized about sombunall women, but not about all women; and a major source of literary misogyny would have vanished from our culture. Imagine the Feminists writing about sombunall men, but not about all men. Imagine a debate about UFOs in which both sides could generalize as much as they wished about sombunall sightings but there was no linguistic form to generalize about all such sightings.
Highlight(pink) - Page 42 · Location 778 Imagine what would happen if, along with this semantic hygiene, the Aristotelian “is” were replaced by the neurologically-accurate “seems to me.”
Highlight(pink) - Page 42 · Location 781 “All modern music is junk” would become “sombunall modern music seems like junk to me.” Other dogmatic statements would become, e.g. “Sombunall scientists seem to me ignorant of art and culture,” “Sombunall artists seem to me ignorant of science,” “Sombunall Englishmen seem to me a bit pompous,” “Sombunall Irishmen seem to me to drink a lot” …
Highlight(pink) - Page 42 · Location 784 Idols would suddenly shrink back into models or reality-tunnels; we would remember that we created them, or that our ancestors did. We might become suddenly startlingly sane.

Highlight(pink) - Page 43 · Location 804 Due to the territorial imperatives of primate neurology, some information is not only ignored but actively resisted. Denial, anger or even desire to punish the messenger who brings “bad news” are well-known traits of our species.
Highlight(pink) - Page 43 · Location 805 To the extent that we are aware of this tendency, and try to combat it in ourselves, we will make efforts to seek unwelcome signals—e.g. by reading periodicals of the groups whose reality-tunnels oppose our own, as Bertrand Russell often recommended. To the extent that we ignore or forget this primate tendency in ourselves, we will lapse into Fundamentalism, Idolatry and the Inquisitorial mode of behavior.

Medieval Idolatry consisted of metaphors that were called Revealed Truth. Modern Idolatry consisted of metaphors htat are called Objective Truth. In both cases human linguistic structures—complicated primate chatterings—have, in effect, become Gods, and whoever questions them is considered a blaphemer and the preists seek ot destroy the impiety. Thats how books get burned

Highlight(pink) - Page 37 · Location 664 ❗️ We will now consider the rather peculiar case of a cat who is dead and alive at the same time. This flexible feline first appeared in Volume 23 of Der Naturwissenschaft (1935) and is the progeny of Dr. Erwin Schrödinger, Nobel laureate in physics.
Highlight(pink) - Page 37 · Location 673 This is the case: inside the atom, or below the atomic level, are various thingamajigs—we cannot be more specific—which are sometimes called waves and sometimes called particles. If the reader has digested the earlier part of this chapter, that can be translated: the thingamajigs can be usefully described in a wave model part of the time and in a particle model the other part of the time.
Highlight(pink) - Page 37 · Location 676 If we want to know what one of the sub-atomic thingamajigs is doing or where it is going, we find “the” answer in one of the equations for which Dr. Schrödinger won the Nobel prize. The equation—and the nonmathematical reader need not be alarmed at this point—happens to look like this:
Highlight(pink) - Page 38 · Location 679 The first side of the equation means the rate of change in time (t) of , we will explain , sort of, in a moment. The other part of the equation tells what that rate of change is. We need not, in this book, concern ourselves about all of the symbols. The x, y and z are merely the spatial coordinates which even the most nonmathematical may remember vaguely from analytical geometry classes in secondary school, while would require a lengthy essay on quantum mechanics to be explained fully. For the purposes of ordinary understanding (if we are not to embark on careers as quantum physicists) it is enough to note that all the symbols on the right denote properties of the subatomic system in question, and then to note that they are all multiplied by the mysterious .
Highlight(pink) - Page 38 · Location 687 For the sake of ordinary simplicity in the lay sense (not mathematical simplicity) we can regard the right-hand side of the equation as A + B —which is to indicate, more clearly, that all the symbols in the first half of the expression are multiplied by and so are all the symbols on the left half.
Highlight(pink) - Page 38 · Location 692 So what is ? is the symbol for the components of the “state vector.” Note that the word “components” is plural. When I asked a friendly physicist, Saul Paul Sirag, for a definition of the state vector that would be accurate but also comprehensible to non-physicists, I got the following from him: The state vector is the mathematical expression describing one of two or more states that a quantum system can be in; for instance, an electron can be in either of two spin states, called “spin up” and “spin down.” The amusing thing about quantum mechanics is that each state vector can be regarded as the superposition of other state vectors.
Highlight(pink) - Page 38 · Location 700 The important part of that definition is the part Sirag italicized. Any state vector, , has two or more components. This underlies the one generalization about quantum mechanics that every layperson has heard of by now—their indeterminacy. Physicists cannot predict what a quantum system will do; they can only calculate the probability that it will arrive at each of two or more possible states. This equation is used in calculating such probabilities. It gives us probabilities, not certainties, because is itself uncertain, or has more than one possible value.
Highlight(pink) - Page 39 · Location 705 This indeterminacy was a hard pill for physicists to swallow; it was even hard for Dr. Schrödinger, who worked out the mathematics of it. This is where the two-valued cat comes in. Schrödinger invented the cat problem as a way of bringing to the forefront of debate and philosophical analysis among physicists the question of what this quantum indeterminacy means to our ideas of actuality.
Highlight(pink) - Page 39 · Location 709 The case assumes a cat in a box, together with some sort of lethal device, such as a pistol or a poison-gas pellet, which may discharge and kill the cat. The device will discharge and kill the cat at some stage of a quantum decay process. We want to know, at a given second, t, if the device has gone off and killed the cat yet. We solve the equation—and we find, in the “best possible case,” where all the other functions are known, that that damned function, the state vector, is still in two states. The answer is then that the cat is both dead and alive at that moment.

Highlight(pink) - Page 39 · Location 713 Of course, common sense “knows” that this cannot be true—if we open the box, we will find either a dead cat or a living cat, not some monster in a mixed dead-and-alive state—But mathematical quantum physics does not “know” this—it only “knows” that the state vector is in “a mixed state” (the expression is actually used) and therefore it predicts that the cat is in a mixed state, too—So: do we believe mathematical physics or do we believe common sense? Readers familiar only with one form or another of Fundamentalism will assume I am about to answer that question. I am not. As I said, Schrödinger first published the problem fifty years ago. That’s half a century. In that time, the majority of physicists have arrived at no consensus about it. They are still arguing.
Highlight(pink) - Page 39 · Location 721 The argument for trusting common sense in this case sounds much of a muchness with the epistemology of the present chapter. The models of physics are abstractions from experience. They are coded into symbolisms, here technically called formalisms, which are useful at a time and in a given area of investigation. When formalisms is generalized—when the model is extended—and the results are “obviously” absurd, as in the Schrödinger’s cat example, then we need to remember that the model is only a human invention or emic tool and not identical with etic (non-verbal) actuality.
Highlight(pink) - Page 40 · Location 727 You might say that those who hold this view are close to my position that if we believe a model in all cases we have become Idolators of the model. The opposite position—and there are intermediate positions, too, as we shall see—starts by reminding us that that which is “obvious to common sense” is not always true. It adds that most great scientific breakthroughs were profound shocks to common sense at first—Copernicus was unbelievable to those who “knew” and felt deeply that they were standing on an Earth that did not move; Darwin was equally stunning to those who knew they were not primates; Einstein was almost incomprehensible at first to those who knew that a rod has only one length which is “objective”—
Highlight(pink) - Page 40 · Location 734 The proponents of this view usually add also that quantum mechanics has been one of the most fruitful areas in modern science; it underlies not only about half of modern physics (including the nuclear weapons that terrify us) but is crucial to many other fields, including television and computers and molecular biology.
Highlight(pink) - Page 40 · Location 736 Those who argue this way say that we should dare, at least as an exercise, to think about the possibility that what the quantum model seems to imply may indeed be the case. If the quantum equations mean nothing, why does the technology based on them work?

Highlight(pink) - Page 40 · Location 739 The development of this view is known as the multiple-universe theory, or the EWG Model—named after Everett, Wheeler and Graham, who first proposed it—and says that each state vector does produce two or more results. Since these cannot all be in one universe, there are then many universes. In effect, anything that can happen, does happen—somewhere or other in some space-time continuum. The latest spokesperson for this view is John Gribbin, physics editor of New Scientist, who writes forthrightly enough in his In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat, Bantam, New York, 1984, p. 238: There is a live cat, and there is a dead cat; but they are located in different worlds … Faced with a decision, the whole world—the universe—split into two versions of itself … (This theory) sounds like science fiction, but it goes far deeper than any science fiction, and it is based on impeccable mathematical equations, a consistent and logical consequence of taking quantum mechanics literally.
Highlight(pink) - Page 41 · Location 750 John Archibald Wheeler, one of the greatest living quantum physicists, helped create this model, but now says he no longer believes it. Dr. Bryce de Witt, who has written that he could not take this theory seriously when he first encountered it, has now become one of its leading advocates. Other physicists, whom we will discuss when we return to this topic in more detail, have found other ways around or under or over that damned dead-and-alive cat.
Highlight(pink) - Page 41 · Location 753 When our knowledge of the mathematical basis of physical structures is in this state—when physicists cannot agree with each other about what is a real possibility and what is a flight of fantasy—any Fundamentalism seems a bit premature.

Highlight(pink) - Page 7 · Location 88 Back in the Renaissance, Francis Bacon, the father of empirical reasoning, announced that materialist science would allow man to “take nature by the forelock, hold her down, and submit her to our will.” He used a rape metaphor to describe the benefits of rational thinking. This is not a way of understanding nature, but forcing nature to conform to the model. As Korzybski and Wilson both liked to remind us, “the map is not the territory.” For Bacon, this means changing the territory to become more like the map.

Highlight(pink) - Page 8 · Location 92 Indeed, fundamentalist materialist science is about quantifying everything. If you can’t measure something and assign a metric, it may as well not exist. Homeopathic medicine, human rapport, and the humanities themselves would fall into this category. Their benefits, even their very existence, cannot be acknowledged because there’s no instrument capable of quantifying them. That was bad enough.
Highlight(pink) - Page 8 · Location 95 But in a digital age–and I’m convinced this is why Bob was interested in my own work–everything must be quantized. Things must not only be measurable, but they must be resolved to the nearest appropriate integer. Reality, auto-tuned to the nearest quantized gradient. Not only is the map the territory, but the map is now divided into discrete units. You can be at 49 latitude, or 50 latitude, but nowhere in-between. One or zero. Yes or No. Right or wrong.
Highlight(pink) - Page 8 · Location 99 Reality is weirder than this. All you need to do is walk in nature, have sex, talk to a cat, or watch a David Lynch movie to understand there is more going on here than can be described by the standardized metrics of science or the sampling rates of digital recording devices. There’s information between the lines and off the map. Things happen that violate the laws, challenge our long-held assumptions, and suggest that reality is not what it seems.

Highlight(pink) - Page 8 · Location 103 Bob’s message is more important right now than it was when he wrote it. Our digital fundamentalists see human beings as an engineering problem to be solved. Behaviors and thoughts that do not conform to our algorithmically generated profiles are to be eliminated, and humans shepherded into the reality tunnels that obey the laws of rationality alone.

Notes

Amount: 39

🔮 The Cosmos