Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

The third semantic circuit handles artifacts and makes a "map" (reality-tunnel) which can be passed on to others, even across generations. These "maps" may be paintings, blueprints, words, concepts, tools (with instructions on use transmitted verbally), theories, music, etc.

In economics, "The Marxist model seems better to me than the Monetarist model" states a fact (about the nervous system of the speaker, if I must make the obvious even more obvious.) "Marx is true and the Monetarists are refuted" states an opinion disguised as a fact. The former encourages intelligent discussion; the latter virtually incites emotional conflict.

Human beings (domesticated primates) are symbol-using creatures; which means, as the pioneer semanticist, Korzybski, noted, that those who rule symbols, rule us.

There is no government, no industrial-military complex, no economic system, no mass media that can ever reduce us to puppets and robots as thoroughly as the biological and environmental dictatorships have. — F.M. Esfandiary, Upwingers

Like most other experimenters he found only and always what he looked for.

The mechanical nature of the bio-survival circuit is of key importance in brainwashing. To create a new imprint, reduce the victim to an infantile state, i.e., first-circuit vulnerability.

I think it might help to regard this UFO, not as an external event () or a human hallucination () but as the synergetic product () of event-plus-human-interpretation.

Whether we like it or not, many of our pop artists today play post-modernist games with their audiences.

Since words contain both denotations (referents in the sensory-existential world) and connotations (emotional tones and poetic or rhetorical hooks), humans can be moved to action even by words which have no real meaning or reference in actuality. This is the mechanism of demagoguery, advertising and much of organized religion.

I deduce that everybody tends to believe the clock, or alleged clock, that fits his own reality-tunnel.

Most of the world was illiterate until the 1970s. ~•~

Think of the cock-eyed room designed by Dr. Ames where men become giants and midgets, because we cannot reprogram our brains fast enough to change perception accurately when confronted with dissonance, so we choose the lesser of two evils, and accept congenial hallucination, rather than — Chaos and the Abyss.

The tendency to split etiological factors of disease into psychic or somatic components, though heuristic for many purposes, nevertheless perpetuates, at least implicitly, a mind-body dualism that has defied rational solution for centuries. Perhaps what we need is a new formulation of this ancient problem, one that does not propose a formidable gap between the separate realities of mind and body . . .

It appears that life continues to show signs of intelligence (and strict Darwinism is perpetually beset by Lamarckian, Bergsonian, Reichian and other heresies) because the genetic code, like the binary used in computers and I Ching is a logical language and does produce either thought or an analog of thought.

Maybe the world is like a cock-eyed room, and when we cannot believe what we see, we see what we can believe, choosing among hallucinations.

If information processing and transmission is common to both psyche and soma, the mind-body problem might be reformulated as follows: How is information, received and processed at a semantic level, transduced into information that can be received and processed at a somatic level, and vice-versa? That sounds like a question that can be more sensibly addressed than the one it is meant to replace.2

In ordinary language, the semantic circuit is usually called "the mind." (As psychologist Robert Ornstein said in a recent radio show, when we say someone "has a good mind," we generally mean they have a good mouth, i.e., they use the semantic circuit well.)

Experiments in isolation by the U.S. Marine Corps, Dr. John Lilly and others — and the records of shipwrecked sailors, as summarized by Lilly in Simulations of God — show that only a few hours of pure isolation may be necessary before hallucinations begin. These hallucinations, like those of psychedelic drugs, indicate the breaking down of previous imprints and the onset of vulnerability to new imprints.

As Korzybski said once (violating his own ideal of E-Prime) "Allness is an illness." In fact, the F-scale, invented by Adorno and used to measure fascist tendencies, does show a correlation between heavy use of "allness" statements and the fascist personality. Can you imagine a full page by any fascist (or any red fascist) without reckless generalizations about all members of some scapegoat group?

Pornographic novels were novels about the things primates enjoy most, namely sexual acrobatics. They were taught to feel ashamed of these natural primate impulses so that they would be guilty-furtive-submissive types and easy for the alpha males to manipulate. Those caught reading such novels were called no-good shits, of course.

There can of course be no doubt that any sort of addiction, whether to opiates, barbiturates, or alcohol, is always an evil and always involves slavery. Society, however, when it shoulders responsibility for preventing such abuse, treads on very slippery ground. The real situation tends to become clouded by misconceptions, and legislation is often enacted which tends to aggravate the very evils it was intended to prevent. Robert DeRopp, M.D., Drugs and the Mind

The drug culture, as Dr. Lindsmith predicted back in 1967, has learned how to treat its own acid terrors, just as it earlier learned how to treat adverse reactions to pot. Quiet, sympathetic friends with consoling and reassuring voices, aided perhaps by a tranquilizer or vitamin B-3, will almost always abort such flip-outs.

Christian Science — or any other religion that dogmatically insists that God" wants us to he happy and successful — can cure such conditions "miraculously." What the Thinker thinks the Prover proves. Absolute faith that "God" is supporting you, beamed out from the brain all day long, day after day, signals the muscles to relax, and natural buoyancy and health returns.

It is even more amusing to remember that an orange is really sort of blue in the model accepted in optical physics. That is, the fruit has absorbed blue — blue is conducted through its skin. We see orange precisely because there is no orange in the fruit — because orange is being reflected off the skin, to our eyes. The substance or isness of the fruit contains the blue we do not see; our brains contain the orange we do see.