Quotes About Interpretation

Concretely, two people can be in the same existential situation but experience two very, very different reality-tunnels.

Even if you tied yourself to the ceiling with ropes and looked down, you would not see what the architecturally correct blueprint shows. You would see some degree of perspective (three dimensionality), and the perspective would vary depending on what part of the ceiling you looked down from. If the whole class tied themselves to the ceiling, their drawings would have as many different perspectives as the drawings made from ground level.

Ask them about a particular apple and they will tell you about the gross national product; ask about this chair right here and they'll go on at length about the evolution of furniture. They are not avoiding the subject; they are looking at it philosophically, in the round, as it were. The specific information you are seeking never comes through.

Sigismundo Celine, in the woods of Ohio, meditated. To him all phenomena were real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.

Yeah. I don't believe in monistic conspiracy theories where you pick out one group and blame everything on them, but I do tend to believe that conspiracy plays a larger role in human history than conventional historians admit.

We do not all live in the same universe. Millions live in a Moslem universe and find it very hard to understand persons living in a Christian universe. Millions of others live in a Marxist universe. Most Americans seem quite happy in a mixed 19th Century Capitalist and 13th Century Christian universe, but the literary intelligentsia lives in an early 20th Century Freudian/Marxist universe, and a few well-informed scientists evidently actually live in a 1997 universe. Etc.

If you hypnotized somebody and told him not to use the word "nose," and then asked him to explain the sense of smell, you would get the same kind of drifting linguistic snow banks in his answers. Intellectuals, who have more abstractions stored in their biocomputers, are more skilled at this than most, but all can do it to some extent.

is both amusing and frightening. It reminds us that each of us sees the world through perceptual structures (biochemical- neurological) which were laid down accidentally in our earliest moments. It raises the uneasy suspicion that...we may be simply chasing the particular Ping-Pong balls which, at those sensitive shutter moments, had been imprinted on our cortical film.

Ultimately, what we find in any experience, sexual or otherwise, depends upon our own emotional energy field. We can see a small mountain above a deep valley, or a shallow valley with a tall mountain towering over it.

Rewriting in English Prime we find John appears unhappy and grouchy in the office and John appears bright and cheerful on holiday at the beach. We have left the realm of spooks and re-entered the existential or phenomenological world of actual experiences in space-time. And, lo and behold, another metaphysical contradiction has disappeared in the process.

It seems to me that existence — at this point I have doubts about the universe — is a lot like a Rorschach ink-blot. Everybody looks at it and sees their own favorite reality-tunnel.

I think when a critic is baffled, he becomes angry. And since a great deal baffles them, they are usually angry.

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. Time always elapses between the impact of energy on the eye and the creation of an image (and associated name and ideas) in the brain, which explains why three eyewitnesses to a hit-and-run such as we postulate here may report, not just the blue Ford of the first speaker, but a blue VW or maybe even a green Toyota.

If you think about it from the perspective of E-Prime, the world consists mostly of UFOs and UNFOs. Very few things (space-time events) in the air or on the ground give us the opportunity to identify them with certainty.

It begins to seem that no one reality-tunnel is adequate for the description of all human experience, although some reality-tunnels are better for some purposes than others are.

Let us remember that Transactional Psychology has proven that, contrary to common sense and the prejudices of centuries, our minds do not passively receive impressions from the external world. Rather we actively create our impressions: out of an ocean of possible signals, our brains notice the signals that fit what we expect to see, and we organize these signals into a model, or reality-tunnel, that marvelously matches our ideas about what is really out there.

Can we begin to ask "how much truth does this book contain?" or "how much fiction does this book contain?" instead of the Aristotelian "Is it true or false?

To the Idolator, events really are what they appear to be as coded into his or her favorite reality-tunnel. Any other reality-tunnel, however useful it may appear to others with different purposes and different interests, must then be mad or bad — delusory or fraudulent. Anybody who disagrees with such an Idolator must be, by definition, a loony or a liar.

Unless you stop to ask what coincidence means. I think it means two incidents are associated: co-incidence: coordination of incidents. So, then, to explain two associated incidents (prayers for rain followed by rain) by saying coincidence is to say that the two incidents were associated because the two incidents were associated. That may be soothing enough, but it is hardly analytical.

Must have been dual hallucination. If one person sees a blasphemy, that is simple hallucination. Two people — dual hallucination. Many, many people — mass hallucination

Which would you consider more real — the abstract Architect's floor plan — which shows something nobody ever sees in experience but which all can agree serves a useful function — or the various drawings from individual perspectives, which show the plural realities that people actually see, but which have no practical function?

It is accepted by all schools of philosophy that the world presents only appearances to us. Facts are deduced from the appearances, according to the various factions, by PR (pure reason) or by a combination of PR and SD (sense data) in tandem, or by PR and SD aided and abetted by creative intuition, but in any case, they are deduced, not given. Hume and Nietzsche seem to be alone in claiming that what is called a fact is just another appearance which somebody has decided to believe is a fact.

Dr. Jack Sarfatti offers a different interpretation. The medium of the Bell interconnectedness, he says, is not consciousness but information. Now, information is very abstract in communication theory: it is the negative reciprocal of entropy, which means roughly that it is the opposite of disorder. It is almost what we call system or organization in daily speech. Information, Sarfatti proposes, is not bound by the same laws as energy and not subject to Einsteinian limits.

Dr. John Archibald Wheeler, called the father of the hydrogen bomb in some circles (others attribute paternity in that regrettable case to Dr. Edward Teller) has repeatedly urged that the simplest, most honest explanation of quantum paradoxes holds that the known universe results from the observations of those who observe it. This observer-created universe bears an uncanny resemblance to some of our data about self-fulfilling prophecies, it begins to appear.