Quotes About Perspective

You asked me what linguistics I find most pernicious. I started with is. The either/or habit is very pernicious. It seems very pernicious to me, I mean. Two-valued situations are relatively rare, actually.

Tentative Model #1: The perceived universe is a mixture of the "real universe" and our own "Thinker" — proving its pet beliefs.

From the Sufi: Mullah Nasrudin once entered a store and asked the proprietor, "Have you ever seen me before?" "No," was the prompt answer. "Then," cried Nasrudin, "how do you know it is me?

The Buddhist says: the mountains are real. The mountains are not real. The mountains are both real and not-real. The mountains are neither real nor not-real.

Many a novel or play written in 1930, which seemed brutally realistic then, now seems a little quaint and unreal in places, because we no longer live in the semantic environment of 60 years ago. Joyce's Ulysses escaped this trap by not having a point of view at all, at all — his multiple narrator technique gives multiple points of view — just as post-Copenhagen physicists escape it by what they call model agnosticism, not accepting any one model as equal to the whole universe.

The fruit is orange, to ordinary perception. The fruit is not orange, to Galileo's analysis. The fruit is both orange and not-orange, to those who recognize that the existential and the scientific grids each have a kind of validity. The fruit is neither orange nor not-orange, to those who recognize that all grids are human inventions.

The same would apply to a Dominican inquisitor in the middle ages who lacked the capacity to "see" witches everywhere. In such authoritarian situations, it is important to see what the Top Dogs (alpha males) see; it is inconvenient, and possibly dangerous to see what is objectively happening.

The agnostic principle refuses total belief or total denial and regards models as tools to be used only and always where appropriate and replaced (by other models) only and always where not appropriate.

As Charlie Chaplin said once in a morbid context, Numbers sanctify. The more I pile up such monstrosities, the more likely it is that some readers will start to believe them.

ETIC REALITY: the hypothetical actuality that has not been filtered through the emic reality of a human nervous system or linguistic grid. If you have anything to say about Etic Reality without using words or any other symbols, please send a full description of it to the author at once.

It is a well-known idea, not just among mystics, but among modern psychologists, that the sad person lives in a sad world, the angry person in an angry world, etc. Then the sad person reads sad books and the angry person reads angry books? Even if those books seem funny and optimistic, say, to other readers?

This book is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out.—Lichtenstein. Does that refer to one book only, or to all books?

In 1919 at Fatima, Portugal over 100,000 people saw a bright light descend from the sky, rose petals fell, everybody smelled perfume, and saw lights flashing. The rationalists say "mass hallucination." The Catholics say it's "a miracle by the Blessed Virgin." I say "it's some unknown property of the human mind.

REALITY-LABYRINTH: existence regarded as a multiple-choice intelligence test; the sum total of reality-tunnels available to an open-minded or non-Fundamentalistic human at a given time and place.

Malraux invented the term and concept of the "museum without walls," which sees modern art as developing, not from previous Western traditions alone, but from African, Hindu, Chinese and various other Third World traditions also. I consider him the godfather of multi-culturalism.

REALITY-TUNNEL: An emic reality established by a system of coding, or a structure of metaphors, and transmitted by language, art, mathematics or other symbolism.

As Dr. Leonard Orr has noted, the human mind behaves as if it were divided into two parts, the Thinker and the Prover.

Please remember that Dr. Mermin's position differs from my claim, which holds that the moon does not appear in our observed universe until somebody looks, but I do not assert we can make meaningful assertions about either existence or non-existence in the real universe and can only make meaningful utterances after somebody looks at the observed universe.

I suggest, following some ideas in semantics and modern logic, that Marilyn Monroe was the most beautiful woman of her time should be considered a self-referential statement. That is, it refers to the nervous system of the speaker. Properly, it should be phrased as Marilyn Monroe seemed the most beautiful woman of her time to me. Stated thusly, it is true (unless we want to be so tricky as to assume the speaker is deliberately deceiving us).

Such self-referential truths are valid for only one person at a time, or one group of persons, and do not refer to anything but the nervous system or nervous systems of those who espouse them. This does not mean that they are false, but only that they are even more relative (and subjective) than legal proofs, for instance, and that they are very, very different from scientific or mathematical truths.

The path up is the path down. The way forward is the way back. The universe inside is outside but the universe outside is inside.

If perception is not absolute, no deduction from perception can be absolute. No matter how ingeniously one juggles with approximations, they do not magically turn into certainties; at best, they become the most accurate possible approximations.

An elementary example: I can give a physicist, or a chemist, a book of poems. After study, the scientist can report back that the book weighs x kilograms, measures y centimeters in thickness, has been printed with ink having a certain chemical formula and bound with glue having another chemical formula etc. But scientific study cannot answer the question, Are these good poems? (Science in fact cannot answer any questions with is or are in them, but not all scientists realize that yet.)

Furthermore, what you can say about what you saw depends on the structure of your symbolism — whether you describe it in English, Persian, Chinese, Euclidean geometry, non-Euclidean geometry, differential calculus or quaternions. This explains why, in Dr. Jones's words, whatever we are describing, the human mind cannot be parted from it.