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← The New Inquisition Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

The New Inquisition Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science Chapter 7. the Open Universe

Author: Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press. Publish Date: 1986 Review Date: 2022-9-6 Status:⌛️

Annotations

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 213 · Location 4455 Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying “there are only facts,” I should say; no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 214 · Location 4483 I have suggested in other books that Einstein’s physical relativity is just a special case of a more general neurological relativity: the observer, with or without instruments, always remains co-creator of the observation. To quote Nietzsche again: “We are all greater artists than we realize.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 214 · Location 4486 Each nervous system creates a great art-work which it usually considers “the” “real” “reality” in the philosophical sense and projects outward. These reality-tunnels, assumed to be “realities” and experienced as “realities,” are not only as varied and imaginative as the paintings of Rembrandt and Van Gogh and Picasso, etc.; they are as marvelously creative as the musics of Vivaldi and Beethoven and Wagner and Harry James and Rock and Indian raga and Polynesian chants; they are as miscellaneous as the novelistic styles or “frames” of Jane Austen and James Joyce and Raymond Chandler and Leo Tolstoy and Lewis Carroll and Samuel Beckett.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 214 · Location 4492 And every social reality-tunnel perpetuates itself by basically the same techniques as advertising, of which the chief is repetition. This is maintained half-consciously, by group reinforcement.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 214 · Location 4495 The signals (speech units) that maintain the group-reality are repeated endlessly and quite cheerfully, while others are edited out by selection of who gets in.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 215 · Location 4497 As Dr. Timothy Leary once remarked, most domesticated primate conversation consists of variations on “I’m still here. Are you still there?” and “Business as usual. Nothing has changed.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 215 · Location 4499 For instance, most of us are annoyed frequently by the daily newspaper. “News” or alleged news that we don’t want to read gets printed; heathenish and heretical opinions appear on the letters page, and sometimes in the columnists; politicians (of the opposite camp, of course) tell the most outrageous lies, which also get printed.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 215 · Location 4501 With modern computer technology, all of this can soon be avoided. Just fill out a simple questionnaire and mail it in. The computer will print a slightly different version of that day’s paper for each reader, and your Personalized copy will come to you in the morning containing absolutely nothing but what you want to know.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 215 · Location 4503 After a year, or maybe five years, you will have forgotten entirely all the “alien” and uncomfortable signals that once got through to you and caused you distress.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 215 · Location 4507 When they get together in groups, this is aided by the aforementioned group reinforcement. Everybody tells everybody how reasonable the group-reality is, and how wicked and perverse are all the alien groups with alternative group-realities.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 213 · Location 4458 Since the publication of Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride, and similar books, it has been realized that techniques of inducing “mass hallucination” or something like “mass hallucination” are well known to advertisers.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 213 · Location 4462 Almost all cigarette smokers, for instance, have a favorite brand and insist that they cannot be satisfied by any other brand. When blindfolded, however, they cannot distinguish this favorite brand from any other brand. They are not buying the cigarettes but buying the package. The same is true of most beer drinkers: they have a favorite brand, but cannot distinguish it from other brands when blindfolded.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 213 · Location 4465 This species of “mass hallucination” has been created by conditioning and association. Each advertiser tries to associate his product with something most domesticated primates desire, such as Sex or Status. The commercials carry the association, sometimes fairly blatantly, sometimes subliminally.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 213 · Location 4468 The repetition of the association gradually produces the conditioned response. The victim is not exactly “buying the package” as we just said but buying the hope for Sex and Status.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 213 · Location 4468 The repetition of the association gradually produces the conditioned response. The victim is not exactly “buying the package” as we just said but buying the hope for Sex and Status.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 213 · Location 4470 Of course, the satisfaction of the smoker or drinker is just as “real,” within that conditioned reality-tunnel, as the meanings of a Rembrandt are within the traditional Western Art tunnel, or the meanings of a Van Gogh within the Impressionist tunnel, or the meanings of an African mask within that tribal tunnel, or the meanings of a Picasso within the Modernist tunnel, etc. All are equally unreal, also (or equally meaningless, to say it otherwise) to those who haven’t learned or conditioned themselves to enter these tunnels.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 216 · Location 4522 Of course, we do not like to think of ourselves as hallucinators. We prefer the more soothing term, “misperception,” for cases like this. Only the mentally “ill” are hallucinating, we think. Still—the difference is only a matter of degree …

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 219 · Location 4586 Colin Wilson, Criminal History of Mankind, op. cit.: Wilson presents a theory of the Violent Male, backed up by criminological and historical data from the past 3000 years, and some current anthropological data on our earlier ancestors. He claims the Violent Male basically acts like Van Vogt’s Right Man: he can never admit he might be wrong about anything. His ego definition, as it were, demands that he is always Right, nearly everybody else is always Wrong, and he must “punish” them for their Wrongness. He despises the “softness” of “emotions” and thinks most people are fools. As such, he sounds like the Authoritarian Personality described by such psychologists as Fromm and Adorno; what makes him Violent is a particular savage intensity of what I have called modeltheism. The Right Man, in addition to the above traits, has a basically paranoid attitude toward people: he thinks they are all rotten; they have all cheated him; they are always cheating; they are sneaks; they are liars; they are, in fact, rotten bastards. He is going to be the rottenest bastard of all to get back at them.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 219 · Location 4605 Wilson emphasizes that this model describes not only many, many infamous criminals, but quite a few of the more infamous statesmen and churchmen of history, who were not called criminals only because they were powerful enough to define what was “crime” in their society. Since these types have a strong power drive, most of history, as Wilson sees it, is Criminal History, the record of the crimes of one type of male.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 220 · Location 4615 Here we might think again about Dr. Bruner’s cat who was able to “edit out” sound at the ear-drum. These processes must be considered, not vaguely “psychological,” but concretely neurological. We receive around 10,000 sensory signals per minute and edit out (probably) more than 9,990 of them, to tune in or concentrate attention on less than 10 signals that seem “important” to us.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 220 · Location 4618 The other 9,990-plus signals are “unconsciously” classified as “meaningless” or “irrelevant”; they are not “consciously” suppressed because they never reach the “conscious” centers of the brain.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 220 · Location 4620 (It is extremely likely that, if the majority of sensory signals did reach the “conscious” centers, we would be so overwhelmed with data that we could not act at all.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 220 · Location 4621 It seems plausible to think that the mechanism of psychedelic drugs involves inhibiting inhibitors—turning on circuits that are habitually turned off—and the subject is, then, perceiving, maybe, 20 to 100 signals a minute instead of the usual 10. This itself is startling enough to produce hilarious laughter, profound awe or acute anxiety, especially on first dosage.)

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 220 · Location 4624 The Right Man, and especially the Violent Man, is then, according to Wilson’s theory, simply turning off even more signals than is neurologically normal. Specifically, he has been conditioned or imprinted, or has conditioned himself, to suppress as “irrelevant” or “meaningless” the kind of signals that usually evoke compassion, charity or tolerance, in most of humanity.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 221 · Location 4628 In his reality-tunnel, the only signals that reach the cortex are those confirming his thesis that People Are Rotten Bastards who need to be punished.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 233 · Location 4915 Of course, if we take the Buddhist metaphor seriously for a few moments, and try to think of a non-dual or non-local existence or a unified continuum—Then any damned Po game makes sense; that is, you can insert a Po between any two allegedly separate things or areas of knowledge and there will be a valid perspective gained.
  • Highlight(pink) - Page 242 · Location 5100 Some rough idea about causality has probably been around since the dawn of human intelligence, but the classic Western metaphor of cause only emerged after Aristotelian logic was combined with experimental method in the late Renaissance. The first doubts about causality began among quantum physicists in the 1920s. Now, since non-local effects violate this model of causality, physicists are becoming accustomed to thinking of two kinds of principles, the causal (local) and the acausal (non-local).

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 221 · Location 4646❗️ East-West/ South-North, by Peter Okera, Parade Press, Harrowgate, England, 1983—Mr. Okera, a Black African by birth, was educated as a physicist in England and worked on various UN committees. He tries to identify three types of human cultures. He calls the first Dionysian, and finds it chiefly in Asia and Africa. The second type, Apollonian, is found around the Mediterranean. The third he calls Thorian, and finds dominant in modern Europe and America.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 222 · Location 4652 The Dionysian culture produces humans whom Mr. Okera calls inunituals (pronounced in-UNITE-uals): persons who feel themselves united with all around them. The Thorian culture produces individuals (pronounced in-DIVIDE-uals, in a Joycean pun that might be greater than the word): persons who feel themselves separate from all around them. The middle, Apollonian cultures, he says, produce persons who swing between the in-UNITE-ual mode and the in-DIVIDE-ual mode.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 222 · Location 4656 Mr. Okera argues that Thorian in-DIVIDE-uals are the most intolerant type of human beings. He says they seem tolerant to themselves, but seen from outside—from an African or Asian perspective—their chief characteristics are dogmatism, robotism, bullying, and violence.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 222 · Location 4659 That’s only his perspective, of course, but current news seems to indicate that a great many Africans and Asians have that view. It also seems that the cultural type that Mr. Okera calls Thorian is quite a bit like Mr. Van Vogt’s Right Man and also like the Male Chauvinist Pig of Feminist polemic. I wonder again if it is only a coincidence that the Citadel is largely made up of economically privileged white males.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 223 · Location 4672❗️ A social field might be considered a type of energy-field that is highly variable.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 223 · Location 4673 People get together and agree to produce a certain field effect called the Jupiter Symphony and it is “meaningful” to them.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 223 · Location 4675 Other people, not so consciously, “agree” to perpetuate a certain kind of social game. This game defines social space—how close they stand, who may actually touch another, etc.—depending on the game rules, or definitions of class, caste, hierarchy, etc.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 223 · Location 4677 Certain perceptions are reinforced by playing the game, and other perceptions are taboo or “unthinkable.” Over generations, this kind of social game becomes a group’s reality-tunnel or emic reality or culture.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 223 · Location 4679 If there is any validity found in models which consider “consciousness” a social field effect, some games produce in-UNITE-uals who feel connected across space, and other games produce in-DIVIDE-uals, who feel that separation in space is “real” because their game defines it as such.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 224 · Location 4699 ❗️ Maybe, we all begin as modeltheists—incapable of criticizing our own neurological programs. What we see and feel and measure is What Is Real. Our grids and models are experienced out there, not our creations, “objective.” Animal behavior indicates that is the evolutionarily “normal” mode of behavior. A dog and a cat do not sit down and ask “What is Real?” They react, automatically and mechanically, to whatever model has been imprinted and conditioned.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 224 · Location 4706 ❗️ I think maybe Mr. Okera goes a bit too far in his glorification of the Dionysian, and much, much too far in his denunciation of the Thorian. There are some in-DIVIDE-ual values that I, as a libertarian, cherish and would not want to see thrown out in a general reversal to in-UNITE-ual modes of thinking/ feeling. Alan Watts, Fritjof Capra and Theodore Roszak, like Mr. Okera, seem to me to often fall into the very error of dualism—mechanical either/ or choices—that they denounce as the major sin of the modern West.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 225 · Location 4710 In general, what Peter Okera calls the Dionysian is isomorphic to Joyce’s —which includes, in addition to Cain and Satan, such historical figures as Napoleon, Shakespeare, Parnell etc., the Irish in general, the non-white races, and “artistic” and “intuitive” modes of apprehension.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 225 · Location 4713 What Okera calls Thorian is similarly isomorphic to Joyce’s —which includes, in addition to Abel and the Archangel Michael, such historical figures as Wellington, Sir Francis Bacon, Gladstone, etc., the Anglo-Irish ruling class of Joyce’s time, the white race, and “rational” and “political” modes of thinking/ feeling.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 225 · Location 4717 These stark contrasts—the  or Dionysian, and the  or Thorian—seem to be virtually identical to the split in the brain between the holistic right hemisphere and the linear-analytical left hemisphere. Dionysian or -type cultures are dominated by the right hemisphere of the brain, and Thorian or -type cultures by the left hemisphere.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 225 · Location 4721 Like Joyce, I think that the conflict between these two brain-functions is not likely to be resolved by the triumph of either  or —Dionysian or Thorian—but by the emergence of a unified type including both—Joyce’s , which Okera also recognizes as the Apollonian mean.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 225 · Location 4725 Maybe just as the West badly needs to integrate the long-repressed Dionysian (  ) holism, the East badly needs to recognize that tradition of civil liberties for the individual (  ) that has never appeared in any non-Western culture. Maybe then, as both sides approach Apollonian balance (  ) neither will perceive the other, any longer, as lop-sided to the point of perversity and madness. Maybe.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 227 · Location 4772 ❗️ Mysteries, by Colin Wilson, op. cit. p. 198—an experiment on “ESP” by Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler, at Radcliffe College, 1942. As usual, those who believed in ESP scored above chance in guessing hidden cards. We know the materialist objections to this, which is why we mostly haven’t bothered citing such research: it was trickery by the subjects or it was sloppy research technique by Dr. Schmeidler. Of course. But in this case—The ones who did not believe in ESP scored significantly below chance. That is, they did not guess as well as any ordinary group would guess. Were they cheating, too? Or are all reality-tunnels maintained in much the same way, by the same unconscious “decisions” to turn synapses off or on to accord with beliefs?
  • Highlight(pink) - Page 227 · Location 4780❗️ 30 December 1985 Brain/ Mind Bulletin (Los Angeles)—a new study by Dr. Persinger, he of the wobbling magnetic and gravitational fields. Persinger took 25 “well-documented” cases of “intense” paranormal experience from the records of University of Virginia researcher Ian Stevenson. These were 25 experiences in which people thought they were having what we call non-local awareness, or what is sometimes called “ESP” or that damned “precognition.” Each case involved a relative who was in danger, and the “hunch” or whatever it was, was later confirmed as accurate.

Highlight(pink) - Page 228 · Location 4791 Persinger examined the geomagnetic activity on the days when the 25 eerie events occurred. He discovered that in all 25 cases geomagnetic activity was “less than the mean for the month” and “considerably” less than during the seven days preceding and following. 25 out of 25 is 100 percent.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 228 · Location 4795 Or else the non-local fields possibly involved in such happenings are more “open” when not interfered with by heavy geomagnetism?

Notes

Amount: 10

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