The notions of an external reality distiushed from an internal one gives rise to
The UFO debate, or quarrel, hinges upon the two categories—the innocent-looking ideas of “inside” and “outside.” Broadly speaking, the UFO “skeptics” are those who claim the UFO is “inside” the UFO observer (“hallucination,” misidentification, etc.), while the UFO “believers” claim the UFO is “outside” (objectivity).
As the semanticist Alfred Korzybski often warned, when we split verbally that which is never split existentially we introduce fallacies into our thinking. Korzybski’s favorite example was the matter of “space” and “time”; for in experience, we never encounter “space” without “time” or “time” without “space,” i.e., a year measures the space the Earth moves around the sun, and the space the Earth travels in one orbit gives us the time we call a “year.” The verbal separation of “space” and “time” became such a problem in late 19th Century physics that paradoxes and contradictions multiplied endlessly; and this was only resolved when the genius of Einstein went back before the verbal categories, realized we had created them, and started physics over from the ground up on the simple existential fact that we never encounter “space” or “time” separately but only the undifferentiated “space-time continuum.”
Applying this Einsteinian operational orientation to the UFO problem, we observe that we never hear of a UFO without a human observer. In fact, even the UFOs “seen” on radar become UFOs (unidentified, rather than identified, flying objects) through processes of evaluation in the nervous system of the radar operator. It is, therefore, the Einsteinian and operational approach to accept the seamless unity of UFO-observer and cease to separate them into “UFO” and “observer.”
References
- Wilson, A., Robert. (1983). Prometheus Rising Chapter 13. Introduction to the Metaprogramming Circuit (Location 2559). Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press.
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