← The New Inquisition Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science
The New Inquisition Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science Chapter 3. Two More Heretics and Other Blasphemies
Author: Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press. Publish Date: 1986 Review Date: 2022-9-1 Status:⌛️
Annotations
- Highlight(pink) - Page 89 · Location 1774 What I do care about is the threat to my own free speech—and yours—posed by the mentalities that tried so hard and so long to suppress Dr. Velikovsky’s right to think and to publish.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 92 · Location 1824 It is accepted by all schools of philosophy that the world presents only appearances to us. Facts are deduced from the appearances, according to the various factions, by PR (pure reason) or by a combination of PR and SD (sense data) in tandem, or by PR and SD aided and abetted by creative intuition, but in any case, they are deduced, not given. Hume and Nietzsche seem to be alone in claiming that what is called a “fact” is just another appearance which somebody has decided to believe is a fact.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 94 · Location 1871 No: it did not turn into a human. But, then, I am not trying to do anything else in this book except hold up a mirror to that part of human psychology in which anxiety increases perceptibly (or is replaced by anger) when we even approach the line at which Taboo might be broken. I am trying to show that every emic reality or mind-construct is a way of segregating appearances, so that those which fit our personal reality-tunnel can be accepted as “real” facts and those which do not fit are quickly discarded as “only” appearances.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 95 · Location 1882 All appearances seem to be facts, at first, to those to whom they appear. If they are bizarre, if they don’t fit our reality-tunnel, and if they go away quickly, we are happy to dismiss them as “only” appearances, or as misperceptions. If they keep coming back, we wonder about our sanity, or we eventually accept them as “facts.” As Norbert Wiener once said, the brain operates on Lewis Carroll’s principle, “What I tell you three times is true.” Redundance is the great persuader. A fact allegedly exists; a non-fact allegedly doesn’t exist. But existence is something we can never know all about. It is a term in metaphysics, not in operational science.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 95 · Location 1891 It is awkward to think that bacilli and other small organisms did not exist until we invented microscopes to see them, or that other galaxies did not exist until, in the 1920s, we invented telescopes powerful enough to detect them. Similarly, the past does not exist any longer for us, in ordinary perception, but it exists—and so does the future—in the geometry of Minkowski’s space-time continuum.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 95 · Location 1894 Bucky Fuller has another pedantic suggestion we might consider at this point. Since “existence” appears to be either meaningless (scientifically indeterminate forever) or some kind of Game Rule in disguise, we should not talk about it at all, if we want to make sense. What we can talk about sensibly, Fuller says, is the tuned-in and the not-tuned-in. The microscopic world was not non-existent but not-tuned-in before we had microscopes. The beauty seen by a painter is not exactly non-existent for a money-oriented businessman but is not-tuned-in by him, because it is not relevant to his reality-tunnel.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 95 · Location 1904 If we talk always and only about the tuned-in and the non-tuned-in, we will make statements that are operationally and scientifically meaningful, although limited by our space-time coordinates. When we talk about existence and non-existence, on the other hand, we make statements that can never be totally confirmed and perhaps can never be totally refuted, which means we are making operationally meaningless statements.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 96 · Location 1912 It is not impossible, however uncongenial the thought may be to the Citadel, that many “unscientific” reality-tunnels, explored by, say, painters, or poets, or musicians, or novelists, or “mystics,” may be not non-existent but merely not-tuned-in by those who have not practiced for many years in tuning-in painterly or poetic or musical or novelistic or “mystical” brain circuits.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 97 · Location 1942 But I wonder why the whole subject is under such heavy Taboo and why so many of the New Fundamentalists not only reject the spaceship idea but reject the data as well and heap ridicule on anybody who reports such events.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 97 · Location 1944 I have personally met 17 UFO witnesses. I didn’t seek them out—it just happens I travel a lot and lecture a lot and thus meet a lot of people. All 17 told me they had not reported their sightings to the government or the press. When asked why, all 17 said they were afraid of being called crazy.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 98 · Location 1946 So: I wonder—if the Center for UFO Studies found 440 cases of UFOs related to auto accidents, how many more such cases are there in which the witnesses were simply too prudent to talk about what they saw?
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Highlight(pink) - Page 98 · Location 1948 And if people in many cases are afraid to talk of what they have experienced, is it really wicked satire to say there is an Inquisitorial spirit abroad in the world today?
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Highlight(pink) - Page 104 · Location 2093 Such data is so rare, some will say, that it is not worth any intellectual analysis. But Charles Fort argued, at length, that such data is not uncommon at all; it is merely repressed by the same mechanisms of avoidance that Freud analyzed, the mechanisms that allow e.g. Roman Catholics and Marxists to “forget” things inconvenient to their emic realities.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 104 · Location 2098 We are certainly dealing with classic Freudian repression, bordering on hysteria, in some of our cases. The burning of Dr. Reich’s books. The distortion of astrological statistics by CSICOP. The conspiracy to prevent the publication of Velikovsky’s works. The destruction of Dr. Vallee’s UFO’s records by his superior at the observatory. Rational men and women do not do such things; only repression in the clinical sense—or acute anxiety—drives people to behave in that way.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 104 · Location 2102 Try an experiment that I have often performed. Go to a party, tell people you are a writer, and say you are writing a book on “paranormal” or anomalistic events. Ask if the people present have ever had any such experiences. Unless there is a Fundamentalist Materialist present to forcibly repress the relaxed conversational mood by hostile mockery and sarcasm, the most ordinary people will tell the most astounding tales.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 105 · Location 2105 From which I deduce that maybe these things are quite common after all, as Fort said, and the Fundamentalists will deduce, oppositely, that ordinary people do not know what the hell is going on around them unless the priests—pardon me, the experts—tell them what is really going on.
- Highlight(pink) - Page 107 · Location 2162 ❗️ And, incidentally—We’ve already pointed out, in Chapter One, that “matter” was originally a synergetic or holistic concept, including the observer, and not a reified or thingified Substance outside us—it meant, originally, that which we experience in making a measurement, remember?—and, in this connection, what do you suppose “fact” meant originally? The Latin root, facere equals that which has been made. You can still see this holistic/ interactive idea in such derivatives as factory and manufacture.
- Highlight(pink) - Page 108 · Location 2191 ❗️ Nietzsche said once that we are all greater artists than we realize, but fundamentalists are too timid to think of themselves as great artists. They take no credit for what they have invented; they assume they have no part in the creation and maintenance of the Idols they worship. Like the paranoid—very much like the paranoid, in fact—they devise baroque and ingenious Systems, and define them as “Given.” They then carefully edit all impressions to conform to the System. There is no vanity, no vanity at all, in people who are so intensely creative and so unwilling to recognize their own cleverness.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 110 · Location 2216 ❗️ Prince Peter Kroptokin, who was a trained naturalist and geographer before embarking on his more celebrated career as a Philosophical Anarchist, wrote a whole book proposing a non-Darwinian theory of evolution, called Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution. It stresses the survival-advantages of cooperation and argues that Darwin, influenced by Capitalist ideology, had outrageously over-stressed the role of competition.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 110 · Location 2225 Dr. James Lovelock’s “Gaia hypothesis,” which treats the Earth as an intelligent being, or a self-regulating computer,
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Highlight(pink) - Page 110 · Location 2228 Even Lamarck, the most frequently “refuted” of non-Darwinian evolutionists—he posited the inheritance of acquired characteristics and thus allowed a kind of emergent intelligence
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Highlight(pink) - Page 110 · Location 2232 Dr. Gregory Bateson, generally considered one of the greatest American anthropologists, presents a kind of neo-Lamarckian evolutionary theory in his Mind and Nature, using cybernetic metaphors to explain teleological behaviors that are extremely awkward to explain in purely Darwinian terms, and leading to the thought of Earth as a goal-seeking organism.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 111 · Location 2240 Neo-Lamarckian ideas infest psychology—e.g. Freud’s “racial memory,” Jung’s “collective unconscious,” Grof’s “phylogenetic unconscious,” Leary’s “neurogenetic circuit of the brain.” This is not because psychologists are necessarily less scientific than biologists, but because they encounter a different class of data. Specifically, all these neo-Lamarckian models are based on cases of patients, or experimental subjects, who seem to “remember” events in past history or earlier stages of evolution. As we shall see, Sheldrake’s model explains such data without positing Lamarck’s notion that the “memory” is carried by the genes.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 111 · Location 2250 It is a sociological curiosity that the Darwinian theory alone is the model that best suits the blood-and-guts reality-tunnel of the Military-Industrial Empire that employs the Citadel. That’s another coincidence, no doubt.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 112 · Location 2267 ❗️ Dr. Sheldrake’s Heresy is that there are non-local fields in nature—somewhat like Dr. Reich’s verboten orgone field but even more like the non-local fields in modern physics, which we will discuss in the next chapter. Dr. Sheldrake calls his fields “morphogenetic fields” and claims they allow certain kinds of transmission of information between organisms that are similar, so that, say, a rat in Australia might “know” not by material transmission but by “morphic resonance” something learned earlier by a rat in Massachusetts.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 112 · Location 2272 In fact, this theory was suggested to Sheldrake partly by a celebrated set of anomalous experiments in animal psychology in which just such an effect seems to have happened. Details can be found in Sheldrake’s A New Science of Life, Blond & Briggs, London, 1981, pp. 186-191.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 112 · Location 2274 Briefly: Dr. William McDougall of Harvard University, in the 1920s, began a long-range test of the extent to which intelligence in rats was hereditary. He measured intelligence, in this case, by the ability to solve water-mazes. “Smart” rats, defined as those who solved the maze quickly, were bred with other “smart” rats and the slow learners were also bred with other “smart” rats and the slow learners were also bred with slow learners. 22 generations later, instead of only the “smart” rats getting smarter, all the rats were proportionally smarter, in the dimension of maze-solving. Even those rats bred from slow learners were solving the mazes nearly ten times faster than their ancestors. There is no explanation for this in orthodox genetics.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 113 · Location 2280 McDougall’s experiment was later duplicated in both Scotland and Australia, with even more disconcerting results. By then even the first generation of rats was solving the maze faster than McDougall’s last-generation fastest learners.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 113 · Location 2286 February 1984 New Age magazine (Boston)—Interview with Dr. Sheldrake. He cites two attempts, since his book was published, to verify or refute his theory. One was sponsored by New Scientist (London) and the other by Brain/ Mind Bulletin (Los Angeles). Both seem to confirm him. He does not claim he is vindicated. He merely says the results are encouraging and should inspire further research.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 113 · Location 2291 In the New Scientist experiment people in various parts of the world were given one minute to find the hidden faces in an abstract drawing. Averages were then taken. Later, the solution was broadcast on BBC-TV when about a million viewers were expected to be looking. Then, elsewhere, in places where BBC-TV was not received, immediately after the broadcast, the tests were given again. Those who found the hidden faces in a minute were a higher percentage—by 76 percent—than before.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 113 · Location 2295 Dr. Sheldrake estimated—and New Scientist accepted his estimate—that the odds were 100 to one against getting this result by chance.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 113 · Location 2297 It seems that non-local fields might have carried the information to the people who hadn’t received it by television.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 113 · Location 2300 In the Brain/ Mind Bulletin test, various groups were asked to memorize three rhymes. One was a traditional Japanese nursery rhyme, the second was by a modern Japanese poet, and the third was gibberish. As the non-local field theory predicts, the traditional rhyme, having been learned by millions of Japanese children over the centuries, was memorized more quickly than the two alternatives.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 114 · Location 2305 —this so-called “ESP” is just one flavor of the non-local information field Sheldrake posits.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 114 · Location 2319 Jung, or course, prefers to regard it as synchronicity—his own label for an alleged resonance in nature, or between nature and its various parts, including us—a resonance which creates seeming “coincidences” so startling that most of us, fundamentalists excluded, sense deeply that they require an explanation.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 115 · Location 2322 Dunne himself, who had the dream, preferred the label of “precognition.” He had not read Prof. Bunge’s pontifical announcement that precognition is forbidden by “basic physical laws”—i.e. by those personal prejudices which Bunge fervently believes are laws
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Highlight(pink) - Page 115 · Location 2324 and so he devised his own mathematical theory by which precognition is consistent with physical laws. Dunne’s theory is in his books, An Experiment with Time and The Serial Universe, and is elegant enough to have favorably impressed the astronomer, Sir Arthur Eddington, who said that it did not contradict any of the basic physical laws he knew and was worthy of consideration.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 115 · Location 2328 But this dream could also be a case of Sheldrake’s non-local field, if all the animals in and around the crater were sensing the mounting turbulence and starting to move away from it.
- Highlight(pink) - Page 115 · Location 2337 ❗️ Some of the most interesting evidence for a neo-Lamarckian or quasi-Sheldrakean model came from psychedelic drug research in the 1960s, as mentioned in a footnote. It is extremely curious that “memories” of past human lives and even of pre-human states of evolution were frequently reported by LSD subjects. This happened so often, indeed, that it led Dr. Leary in Boston to posit a “neurogenetic circuit” and Dr. Grof, independently in Czechoslovakia to posit a “phylogenetic unconscious.” Both researchers recognized that this contradicts Darwin, but reported their conclusions anyway
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Highlight(pink) - Page 116 · Location 2348 ❗️ It is Dr. Leary’s model that psychedelics create shock and stress which break down old imprints and conditioning. He says that, in “normal” consciousness we are imprinted and conditioned to tune in only to (1) bio-survival needs, (2) emotional games that give us status, (3) conditioned Game Rules of our culture and (4) sexual gratification, and to remain not-tuned-in to other, potentially-available signals.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 116 · Location 2353 We thus stay in one reality-tunnel all our lives. By breaking our imprints, he suggests, psychedelics allow us to tune in to other reality-tunnels, including the “neurogenetic” or “phylogenetic” or “morphogenetic” field-or-circuit in which such pre-birth “memories” are stored.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 116 · Location 2363 Meanwhile, meditation is still legal, even if the Fundamentalists will ridicule you for trying it. In intense meditation, under strict yogic rules, one undergoes a stress created by social and sensory deprivation. This stress may also break imprints.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 117 · Location 2365 Most intense meditators eventually “remember” past lives,” and guided by the metaphors of India, decide that such memories are best described in the reincarnation model.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 117 · Location 2371 ❗️ Archetypes, by Anthony Stevens, Quill, New York, 1983, page 48: It has been shown in many tests that new-born chicks, before any chance of learning from older birds, will exhibit alarm when a cut-out shaped like a hawk is flown above them. The cut-out, usually of cardboard, does not smell like a hawk; the chicks are reacting to the image of a hawk.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 117 · Location 2376 In 1939, the ornithologist David Lack tried a related experiment with finches captured in the Galapagos Islands, where there have been no predator birds for hundreds of thousands of years.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 117 · Location 2378 Lack captured over 30 finches from 4 different Galapagos species and sent them to a friend in California. The birds showed the alarm reflex, and tried to crouch and hide, when a hawk or falcon flew above them.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 117 · Location 2380 This “image” and associated fear had continued for hundreds of thousands of years in an environment where it was unnecessary.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 117 · Location 2382 Jung’s “collective unconscious,” which is supposed to contain such images stored for aeons, is often rejected as unscientific, but the finches didn’t know that, I guess. They had the information “hawk-image means danger,” somehow.
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Highlight(pink) - Page 117 · Location 2385 This seems more Lamarckian than Darwinian, to me, and it even sounds, possibly, like the activity of Sheldrake’s non-local field. If such acquired information cannot be transmitted genetically, and Lamarck is wrong, then the information was transmitted by some other means, and Sheldrake at least offers a model which might explain such transmission.
Notes
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