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dayface's review against another edition
5.0
Brilliant book that digresses in academic research on occasion (but one can forgive an individual for reaching the same conclusions as another. We'll synthesise concurrent ideas into refined ones with time). The prose was sharp, witty, and as economic as possible (this is a rather succinct book for its content). Nonetheless, the formatting of this edition was atrocious, with non-justified text resulting in hanging letters and broken clauses. This isn't reflective of the work, however, which is as mind-whirling as this kind of book can get. For readers of Hofstadter, Rovelli, etc!
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The Introduction
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
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The Introduction
reeled me in with discussions of multi-verses, mind-body problem, and individuals with a predisposition towards synchronicity/placebo. Here, he suggests the phrase 'psychosomatic unity' as an alternative solution to the mind-body problem, with it operating like a 'spacetime continuum,' the divisions redundant. He then introduces 'The Law of Octaves' and the import of imprinting/conditioning/learning, before moving onto the 'knowledge doubling curve' and eventuality 'singularity' - most of this is known to me naturally; it's always reassuring to be told I'm not crazy. People like Wilson and Hofstadter (to speak nothing of the great philosophers) have made this life far more bearable.
Wilson then goes onto denote the concept of 'noise' in life - semantic, printed, psychomimetic, etc - instances where communication and connection is distorted; interference of perception.
Emic realities comprise the 'imagined realities' or 'social realities' that follow game theory rules, such as language games, communication, symbols, etc. Whereas the supposed 'etic reality' is the 'objective' singular reality most believe we live in. It's impossible to discuss, demonstrate an etic reality without using the emic reality. I feel this strongly.
Part I
1. Kafka 'Before the Law' parable and accompanying anecdote of a Zen Roshi and his beguiled disciple. Brilliant introduction to... A lot of things - Coppenhaganism, interpretation, futility, the veil, and even the impossibility of understanding an etic reality.
2. Deep reality, and how we cannot find one (which does not convey the same thing as 'there is no deep reality') in relativity to the Copenhagen interpretation of wave function collapse. Our nervous system operates as an instrumental sensor for reality, and obfuscates complete understanding. Makes me think of Metatron, the veil, and imagined realities. "A poet does not register the same spectrum as a banker," might be why I've spent a decade building my prism; a portfolio of paradigms to switch in-and-out of (with occasional distress). I likewise appreciate his deconstruction of 'meaninglessness' or 'noise.' What's amazing about Wilson's philosophy, so far, for me, is how it doesn't completely de-realise or de-stabilize for acceptance; on the contrary, it's rather liberating by way of limitation. But takes a lot of thought.
3. He opens by conferring that one would better learn neuroscience to understand quantum mechanics than basic physics, and I'm inclined to agree. Every page following is genius - how these perceptual gambles (Transactional Psychology) relate to Disinformation Systems, UFOs, Lepufology, and even Cryptozoology. I also appreciate his relaying of what a 'reality tunnel' comprises, though I assumed based on etymology. Fascinating stuff.
4. Briefly and (occasionally) succinctly delivers the idea of everything having deeper meanings depending on a point of view. Mental maps will always fail in certain areas unless they can map out every single aspect of the subject, and that's impossible, so we compartmentalize information. Likewise, our statements and symbols are only microcosmic abbreviations of the macrocosm that is reality and will never completely demonstrate true, chaotic, or nebulous meaning. I'm likely phrasing that poorly, but I understand what Wilson means.
5. This chapter concerns our having 'two heads' and touches on themes of self-referentiality and incompleteness, a'la Russel & Hofstadter (or my short story collection, Deliriums) in a way that makes me think of Zeno's paradoxes of motion.
6. How our tools of relative measurement (sensorium, nervous system, brain) are ordained by their own self-referentiality and therefore condemned to bias, or nicely: oriented/calibrated towards different ways of experiencing. This makes me wonder whether the influx and availability of art has altered the strange loop levels of contemporary human brains. This really amounts to: what appears self evident might not hold under scrutiny.
7. Concerns strange loops, infinite regression, and the applicability and viability of quantum psychology in day-to-day interaction. I particularly liked his dismantling of Aristotelian yes/no thinking into a more mathematic modus. I know sombunall of what he's discussed so far, but appreciate both the reaffirmation and his vocabulary and sources. Brilliant.
Part II
8. More or less builds on the previous concept of quantum logic - IE breaking the binary and recognising a continuum. "People ignore the quantum maybe because they have largely never heard of quantum logic or Transactional Psychology, but they also ignore it because traditional politics and religion have conditioned people for millenniums — and still train them today — to act with intolerance and premature certainty."
9. Concerns the 'Seven Forbidden Words' resulting from a causal spiral of self-referentiality wherein they're deemed indecent and then believed and supported as indecent by audiences that therein maintain the illusion of their indecency. Wheels within wheels. This is a metaphor for a lot more than seven naughty words, of course, but also political belief and identity persuasion.
10. Then he discusses how people act upon their interpretation of words (despite interpretation being governed by relativity and game language). For instance, the shooting of Rushdie, the Londonderry/Derry incident, and a circumstance involving a man overreacting to his dog being called a 'fussy mutt.'
11. Shortest yet, basically summarises how there is no equal to 'the universe' as everything comprised within it is, well, within it. Any abstraction, philosophy, religion, or concept, will be governed by being contained within the system it is trying to judge. It will be a neuro-ideology first and foremost, forever.
12."Because the snake's umwelt or reality-tunnel differs so fundamentally from mammalian reality tunnels, friendships between humans and snakes occur much less frequently than friendships between humans and mammals.
The belief that the human umwelt reveals "reality" or "deep reality" seems, in this perspective, as naive as the notion that a yardstick shows more "reality" than a voltmeter, or that "my religion 'is' better than your religion." Neurogenetic chauvinism has no more scientific justification than national or sexual chauvinisms," is pure goddamn genius. I'm learning quite a bit of trivia to help with projects down the line (while getting my head blown every few pages, as I'm sure he'd like to hear).
13. This lengthy chapter details E-Prime as a functional language, and I completely see the benefits. I've tried, throughout my life, to aim for that level of precision - but it's difficult to do that while permitting an un-obstructed stream of consciousness. "Even Aristotle, despite the abuse he has suffered in these pages, had enough common sense to point out, once, that "I see" always contains fallacy; we should say "I have seen." [...] Aristotle only noted that "I see" actually means "I have seen." Modern neuroscience reveals that "I see" (or "I perceive") actually means "I have made a bet." In the time between the arrival of signals at our eye or other receptor organ and the emergence of an image or idea in our brains, we have done a great deal of creative "artistic" work. We generally do that work so fast that we do not notice ourselves doing it. Thus, we forget the gamble in every perception and feel startled (or even annoyed) whenever we come up against evidence that others do not "see" what we "see.""
Part III
14. Concerns (though he doesn't list these people) the Rosenthal/Golem effect, performance anxiety, and self fulfilling prophecy, and how those symbiotic interactions can create a consequence via antecedent seeding (an ouroboros of causality, whereupon 'blame' is spiralled). Telling someone they are stupid can make them believe it can make them act it can make more people tell them they are stupid.
15. This part then follows on from that, discussing psychosomatic medications, placebos, and the self-fulfilling prophecy nature of them; and how these spontaneous remissions are hardly documented (as of 1900), despite their prevalence. There is also a huge amount of optimism required on behalf of the individual to overcome their malady. Ends with a brief introduction to metaprogramming.
16. How our supposed 'objective' (etic) realities are imposed upon by our imagined (emic) realities. How reality-tunnels differ across cultures, and how self-fulfilling prophecy can break from reason. Surety brings ruin.
17. The necessity of 'psychosomatic unity' is as necessary to the mind body division RE mental health, placebo, or existence, as 'spacetime' was to the dichotomy of space and time. Likewise, Neuropeptides operate both as hormones and neurotransmitters, acting somewhat like photons in quantum mechanics (waves and particles). "As O'Regan points out, op. cit., we now have reason to believe that almost all medical treatment throughout almost all history worked on placebo principles. In other words, modern biochemistry indicates that before the discovery of antibiotics, (i.e., before the 1930s) virtually all the medicines used by doctors had no actual effectiveness. The patients got better, when they did, because the doctors believed in their useless potions and the patients acquired the "faith" from the doctors.
This last paragraph has more than historical interest. According to the Office of Technology Assessment, only 20 percent of established medical procedure in the U.S. today has been validated in rigorous randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies. 1 Thus, 80 percent of what our doctors do rests simply on precedent and high hopes. Since more than 20 percent of us survive American medicine, a great many placebo cures must still occur daily, as they did before the 1930s."
You are what you eat. Fake it till you make it. Be who you wanna be.
Part IV
18. How we all possess multiple personalities with their own intrinsic memory storage (I feel this emphatically but Wilson might be overapproximating others, or atleast their self-awareness, which isn't the same thing). He also discusses neophilia and neophilic imprinting within the Oral BioSurvival System of young age (quite like psychosexual development paired with Adorno ideas). The Anal Territorial System which is what it says on the tin and is expressed through dominance, in Wilson's eyes, among other things. The Semantic Time-Bending System is language and its interplay with spatiotemporal variables (and how we can learn this and even manipulate it, even subconsciously).
19."Every person lives in a different umwelt (emic reality) but every self within a person also lives in a different reality-tunnel.
The number of universes perceived by human beings does not equal the population of the planet, but several times the population of the planet. It thus appears some sort of miracle that we sometimes find it possible to communicate with each other at all, at all."
He ends the chapter by propounding the connection between EWG or Coppenhaganistic multi-verses and the psychological belief of a self comprised of an assortment of selves - all common sense in the 21st-century (if not someday, if pop culture indicates anything).
20. Touches on the 'Sim-Balls' and 'Careenium' (spelt wrong?) of Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop without realising it. Discusses nonlocal correlation (makes me think of all the advancements in the field the past three decades, Mirror Neurons, and a ton of other associated concepts. Ah, to speak with him...)
"So, then, alternatively, the photon doesn't leave the star 1,000,000 years ago "until" in a sense the result of our measurement today travels nonlocally in time "back" to the star and "adjusts" the photon to correlate with the other photon from the candle.
What did I just say?
Yes, we now have a backward-in-time causality, not necessarily as the literal truth in some Aristotelian sense, but as the only kind of model that makes sense in terms of the data we now have."
Amazed me. For as long as I can remember, 'I've felt other people see themselves as a bullet having been launched out of a gun, one day fated to crash into a wall; whereas I see myself and my life as a bullet re-assembling, ricocheting off a wall, and retreating backwards, gaining speed as it reaches the gun and slides into the chamber.' (message I sent to a friend weeks prior to reading this book.)
"We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And, lo! It is our own."
By far my favourite chapter. I can hardly put to words my feelings towards it. This also conforms in my eyes with the big bounce interpretation of the big bang.
21. My introduction to Wigner's Friend which serves account for the observer in Schrodinger's Equation. This, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, and Von Neumann's Catastrophe of the Infinite Regress, are all entirely linked by their self-regressive paradox. Self-fulfilling programming can be a thing if we believe it to be a thing. "Non-Aristotelian logic deals with existential/operational probabilities. Aristotelian logic deals with certainties, and in the lack of certainties throughout most of life, Aristotelian logic subliminally programs us to invent fictitious certainties. That rush for fictitious certainties explains most of the Ideologies and damned near all the Religions on the planet, I think."
Part V
22. Bell correlation, nonlocal causality (of space AND time), and how to account for Hidden Variables within a 4th-Dimensional interpretation of space.
"If the computer and brain metaphors have not made the implicate order clear enough for the reader, try another model: a performance of Beethoven's Ninth has all the characteristics of hardware or the explicate order. You can locate it very precisely in space-time — at 9 p.m. on Tuesday at the Old Opera House, say — and if you get these space-time coordinates confused you will miss the performance.
But Beethoven's Ninth also has an implicate, enfolded existence as software, which does not exactly correspond to Dr. Bohm's implicate order but approximates to it. If every printed copy of the symphony could have a date and locale affixed — "We found this one in Lenny Bernstein's summer home on Sunday November 23," etc. — some aspect of the Ninth would still remain non-local because we can't say, exactly, how many heads contain all or part of it.
[...]
Bohm has avoided speculating about this parallel between his math and ancient Oriental mysticism, but others have not. Dr. Capra in The Tao of Physics uses a Bohmian non-local model of quantum theory as the "true" model (ignoring the physicists who prefer EWG or Copenhagenism) and then points out, quite correctly, that (if we accept this as "the only true quantum model") quantum theory says the same things Taoism has always said.
Indeed, Lao-Tse's famous paradox, "The largest is within the smallest" only begins to make sense to an Occidental after she or he has understood what non-local information means in modern physics.
Dr. Evan Harris Walker goes further. In a paper, "The Compleat Quantum Anthropologist" (American Anthropological Association, 1975) Dr. Walker — a physicist, not an anthropologist, by the way — develops a neo-Bohmian Hidden Variable model in which "consciousness" does not exist locally at all but only appears localized due to our errors of perception. In this model, our "minds" do not reside in our brains but non-locally permeate and/or transcend space-time entirely. Our brains, then, merely "tune in" this non-local consciousness (which now sounds even more like Huxley's "Mind At Large")."
23. And we end with a discussion on the future. The tampering with the Neurosomatic System and benefits therein, the Metaprogramming System (which I'm well aware of). "Metaprogramming will give us Higher Intelligence." The Morphogenetic System (again, well familiar with) "It will probably take a long, long time — maybe a quarter of a century (i.e., not until around 2015) before we learn the art and science of using the morphogenetic system for fun and profit. And the Non-Local Quantum System, discussed in the previous chapter.
At times, overwritten and unaware of things that had came before, but actually genius. I mourn not seeing Wilson write in the 2010s or 2020s - the leaps and bounds of mind he could have enacted had he access to the internet at its current state...
tartancrusader's review against another edition
5.0
I'd recommend this book to just about anyone. Rather than teaching you what to think, it tries to prod you in a new direction of how to think. It doesn't insist on the correctness of any particular world-view but rather tries to instruct on the possibilities of alternate view-points. It's genuinely insightful and, if you'll let it be, revelatory.
I'm not saying it's all wonderful. I consider myself to be a 'hard' scientist. I have little (i.e. no) tolerance for hand-waving mysticism or woolly 'explanations' of the "God Did It" type. And there's some of the former in this work, certainly. But if you approach this with a genuinely critical outlook and carefully scrutinize its statements you will, I absolutely guarantee, find much in its pages that will surprise, delight and maybe, just maybe, enlighten.
It's worth the price of admission for the section on E-prime, alone.
I'm not saying it's all wonderful. I consider myself to be a 'hard' scientist. I have little (i.e. no) tolerance for hand-waving mysticism or woolly 'explanations' of the "God Did It" type. And there's some of the former in this work, certainly. But if you approach this with a genuinely critical outlook and carefully scrutinize its statements you will, I absolutely guarantee, find much in its pages that will surprise, delight and maybe, just maybe, enlighten.
It's worth the price of admission for the section on E-prime, alone.
vonmustache's review against another edition
3.0
The first half of this book accords fairly well with my own epistemology at this point. Wilson argues that we must recognize the limitations of our perception, and the impossibility of accessing any kind of Aristotelian reality outside of the subjective lenses of Human nervous systems of tools. The only kinds of statements we can meaningfully make, Wilson argues, are experiential/operationalist descriptors (ex: « this metal is hard » vs « to my soft and squishy human body, this metal appears hard »). This is fascinating, and posits a transactional relationship between observer and object. Every observation reveals observer and object alike; nothing can be proved to possess an essence « in itself » because we can’t verify statements like « this metal is hard » except through the lenses of our perceptions.
The book loses me a bit in the second half - I feel as though Wilson’s notion of the self-fulfilling prophecy appears to suggest an essentialist vision in several cases (not to mention, in my view, an inaccurate and indeed racist one). Ex: someone told They are lazy will exhibit symptoms of laziness, according to Wilson. But « lazy » as a definitional category is a label imposed by an observer, which can include the self, but which lacks any kind of rigid materialist definition. What « is » laziness?
For that matter, Wilson outlines a typology of 4 basic selves that each have their own reality tunnel. Perhaps this model is sufficient. But I certainly don’t see why these selves should be inflexible. Why does a person always have a « bottom dog » temperament, once they get one? Couldn’t support later in life change our self conception? (Or perhaps a more grisly but concrete example: couldn’t a horrible and dehumanizing experience like torture make a « top dog » personality a « bottom dog » one?)
Still, the subjectivism and the importance of recognizing the observer-created nature of reality (which is not to say, solipsistically, that there IS no other reality - only that I have no way of proving it, because I remain trapped within my own brain) is very intriguing.
The book loses me a bit in the second half - I feel as though Wilson’s notion of the self-fulfilling prophecy appears to suggest an essentialist vision in several cases (not to mention, in my view, an inaccurate and indeed racist one). Ex: someone told They are lazy will exhibit symptoms of laziness, according to Wilson. But « lazy » as a definitional category is a label imposed by an observer, which can include the self, but which lacks any kind of rigid materialist definition. What « is » laziness?
For that matter, Wilson outlines a typology of 4 basic selves that each have their own reality tunnel. Perhaps this model is sufficient. But I certainly don’t see why these selves should be inflexible. Why does a person always have a « bottom dog » temperament, once they get one? Couldn’t support later in life change our self conception? (Or perhaps a more grisly but concrete example: couldn’t a horrible and dehumanizing experience like torture make a « top dog » personality a « bottom dog » one?)
Still, the subjectivism and the importance of recognizing the observer-created nature of reality (which is not to say, solipsistically, that there IS no other reality - only that I have no way of proving it, because I remain trapped within my own brain) is very intriguing.
hinda26's review against another edition
4.0
hahahah a very fun and funny book. can't say anything is true can't say anything is nontrue, i guess that's what makes the book so magical and entertaining
jjenkins's review
2.0
I did enjoy some of the questions that this book brings up, but I found it extremely repetitive. Definitely lost interest by the end.