Prospect and Foreign Policy’s list of the world’s top 100 public intellectuals is, of course, hugely dominated by the west and above all America. Thirty years ago Europe would still have been in contention and Marxists and Freudians would have been far more visible. Could this list in fact mark the end of the age of the great public intellectual?
Vote for your favorite public intellectual! Who’s the nerd prom king?
As a worldview, secularism has defined itself in opposition to the whirling absurdity of religion. Like atheism (with which it is more or less interchangeable), secularism is a negative dispensation. Being secular is not a positive virtue like being reasonable, wise, or loving. To be secular, one need do nothing more than live in perpetual opposition to the unsubstantiated claims of religious dogmatists. Consequently, secularism has negligible appeal to the culture at large (a practical concern) and negligible content (an intellectual concern). There is, in fact, not much to secularism that should be of interest to anyone, apart from the fact that it is all that stands between sensible people like ourselves and the mad hordes of religious imbeciles who have balkanized our world, impeded the progress of science, and now place civilization itself in jeopardy. Criticizing religious irrationality is absolutely essential. But secularism, being nothing more than the totality of such criticism, can lead its practitioners to reject important features of human experience simply because they have been traditionally associated with religious practice.
Robert Anton Wilson “is” one who is not “is.” Perhaps we may describe him as a psychedelic philosopher, a postmodern trickster, an intellectual comedian, a twister ripping through the psyche. He first came to prominence as an editor of Playboy in the 1960s. During that time of magick he got involved with the Discordians, a “new religion disguised as a complicated joke,” or “a complicated joke disguised as a new religion.” Along with Robert Shea, he co-authored the Illuminatus! trilogy of novels, a work of mind-bending (fiction?) that weaved together multiple conspiracy theories and elevated Discordianism to true cult status. A close friend of Timothy Leary, he shared Dr. Leary’s passions for radical psychology and futurism. His book Prometheus Rising melded model agnosticism to Leary’s 8-circuit model of the brain to create a system that taught people how to deconstruct dogmatic personal belief systems. His numerous other books explored topics such as quantum mechanics, alternate universes, non-Aristotelian logic systems, sex magick, Wilhelm Reich, James Joyce and Orson Welles. His model agnostic approach to inquiry makes him a unique writer, one of few who can slip seamlessly from rationalist scientific thinking to non-materialist metaphysical speculation.
While he has struggled with post-polio syndrome in recent years, he remains active in propagating his various passions. Lance Bauscher, Cody McClintock and Robert Dofflemyer’s 2003 film Maybe Logic explored and presented Wilsonian concepts wrapped in subtle yet explosive color and rhythm, a fitting tribute to his ideas. This project spun off into the Maybe Logic Academy, a learning institute that is “grounded in the philosophy and perspective of maybe logic, an approach which emphasizes the fallibility and relativity of perception and tends to approach information and observations with questions, probabilities and multiple perspectives rather than absolute truths.” New Falcon Publications will soon be releasing his new book Email To The Universe.
This essay by social philosopher Geoffrey Hill provides an in-depth, critical examination of the school of thought known as New Thought. This includes positive thinking, Christian Science, Religious Science, Mind Science, Science of Mind and the philosophies of Robert Schuller, Tony Robbins, the motivational industry, and the philosphy behind commercial materialism. According to Hill, it has much to do with our culture?s massive disease of selfishness and denial.
I think maybe I’ll join a cult, cut my balls off and kill myself with my beloved brethren as we await a spaceship to take us to paradise on the trail of a comet. Or, if I don’t want such a severe delusion, perhaps I’ll just do like the majority of persons in our culture, and join one of the most successful, but unrecognized cults ever invented: the very popular and rewarding cult of selfish, pathological denial and mass, delusional conformity.We seem shocked when thirty nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult kill themselves due to a destructive group delusion. We are likewise appalled that millions could follow a psychotic madman like Hitler into a bizarre march toward mass destruction. Yet, we don’t stop to realize that the insanity of such religious and political cults is merely an extreme extension of what the majority of us do in our own respective group delusions. The difference between these extreme mind-control groups and the conformity of the majority is only a matter of degree.
As a spiritual philosophy, positive thinking is a distinctly American phenomenon – can one imagine such an approach to life taking root, say, in the former Soviet republics? And it is perhaps more innate to American religious impulses than the punitive doctrine heard from many quarters of fundamentalism. But does it have a convincing place in the world today – that is, in a shrinking world in which the effects of wars and tsunamis can make its claims seem cruelly na?ve at times?
By the early twentieth century, positive thought gained expression through a wide array of ministers and spiritual thinkers, who used Scripture and personal anecdote to extol its creative power. The mid-century metaphysician Neville Goddard captured the movement’s soaring optimism: “It is not what you want that you attract; you attract what you believe to be true.”
From Sub Rosa
More on positive thought: BELIEVE, The power of positive thinking, Beyond New Age Thinking: An Appreciation and Critique, The Triumph of Positive Thinking, Positive Thinking: Limits and Possibilities, A Realist’s Guide to Positive Thinking,and The Placebo Effect.
Human beings are oppressed by their finitude, but can’t bear to think about this for too long, so they attempt not to mind, or to avoid being reminded of it at all. This is achieved through the cultivation of indifference to most of reality and obsessional interest in human society. As a result, when their frustration with being finite surfaces, it is expressed as hostility towards each other, rather than hostility towards the human condition itself.
That is the portrait of human nature running through three of the most neglected philosophical works of this century:
The Human Evasion, The Decline and Fall of Science, and Advice to Clever Children. I have never seen the ideas in these books engaged with, anywhere. They are not even controversial, they are simply unknown, a circumstance quite consistent with the theories of their author, Celia Green. (‘The human race’s favourite method for being in control of facts is to ignore them.’)
One could read these books as a trilogy: the study of a state of mind called ‘sanity’; the elaboration of its social and intellectual consequences; and the development of an alternative. In what follows I will try to provide a sketch of the worldview found in these books, but of course many more points are made than I can reproduce here, and I may have passed over many subtleties.
Sanity is first observed to be unmoved by certain facts which one might call corollaries of ‘the principle of total uncertainty’. As the skeptical philosophers discovered, one cannot be certain of the veridicality of one’s memories and perceptions, or of the accuracy of one’s reasoning. All the regularities of past experience in themselves prove nothing about the future (Hume), and for all we know everything could cease to exist right now. The perceived world might be pure hallucination (Descartes); perhaps yours is the only consciousness.
Sanity is indifferent or hostile to such considerations, and tends to confuse ‘reality’ with, say, ‘that portion of reality of which humans can conceive’, or even ‘that portion of reality with which humans have the opportunity to interact’. This confusion is held to be a side-effect, so to speak, of a general scheme of reality-evasion, put into practice for psychological reasons – to avoid confronting the frustrations of finitude, which is to say, the frustrations of having limited power and knowledge.
From the Deoxy Archive
In the beginning was the word and the word was god and has remained one of the mysteries ever since. The word was God and the word was flesh we are told. In the beginning of what exactly was this beginning word? In the beginning of WRITTEN history. It is generally assumed that spoken word came before the written word. I suggest that the spoken word as we know it came after the written word. In the beginning was the word and the word was God and the word was flesh … human flesh … In the beginning of WRITING. Animals talk and convey information but they do not write. They cannot make information available to future generations or to animals outside the range of their communication system. This is the crucial distinction between men and other animals. WRITING. Korzybski, who developed the concept of General Semantics, the meaning of meaning, has pointed out this human distinction and described man as ‘the time binding animal’. He can make information to other men over a length of time through writing. Animals talk. They don’t write. Now a wise old rat may know a lot about traps and poison but he cannot write a text book on DEATH TRAPS IN YOUR WAREHOUSE for the Reader’s Digest with tactics for ganging up on digs and ferrets and taking care of wise guys who stuff steel wool up our holes. It is doubtful if the spoken word would have ever evolved beyond the animal stage without the written word. The written word is inferential in HUMAN speech. It would not occur to our wise old rat to assemble the young rats and pass his knowledge along in an aural tradition BECAUSE THE WHOLE CONCEPT OF TIME BINDING COULD NOT OCCUR WITHOUT THE WRITTEN WORD. The written word is of course a symbol for something and in the case of hieroglyphic language writing like Egyptian it may be a symbol for itself that is a picture of what it represents. This is not true of an alphabet language like English. The word leg has no pictorial resemblance to a leg. It refers to the SPOKEN word leg. so we may forget that a written word IS AN IMAGE and that written words are images in sequence that is to say MOVING PICTURES. So any hieroglyphic sequence gives us an immediate working definition for spoken words. Spoken words are verbal units that refer to this pictorial sequence. And what then is the written word? My basis theory is that the written word was literally a virus that made spoken word possible. The word has not been recognised as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host…(This symbiotic relationship is now breaking down for reasons I will suggest later.)
Among Open Source developers and devotees, there’s been a growing
awareness of its impact as a philosophy and practice that extends
beyond the world of software development and distribution. As noted by Thomas Goetz in the November 2003 issue of Wired Magazine:
Q: My main question is: have you thought any more about the problem of time? In the book, it seemed a bit of a challenge to link the subjective time of consciousness back to the emergence of time (and space) from the causal mesh at a more primitive level (sections 10.6 and 14.3.2). Now, it’s very possible I didn’t comprehend some of the arguments there, but I was wondering if there is any other way to address the status of time as something which inherently accompanies (not emerges from) causality and experience?
A: I would not say that I divide time in ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ time. Rather I divide it into ‘subjective’ and ‘intersubjective’ time, with intersubjective time being a relativistic construction from the structure of the causal mesh. That is, one must pick a node in the mesh and then back into a structure for time relative to that node, so intersubjective time is not an ‘objective’ view of time. FWIW, I think this view dovetails fairly well with the treatment of these things in quantum loop theory, which is a theory of physics that I find appealing.
”?.any doctrine which refuses to place human experience outside nature, must find in descriptions of human experience factors which also enter into the descriptions of less specialized natural occurrences. If there can be no such factors, then the doctrine of human experience as a fact within nature is mere bluff, founded upon vague phrases whose sole merit is a comforting familiarity. We should either admit dualism, at least as a provisional doctrine, or we should point out the identical elements connecting human experience with physical science.”
The present modern worldview, the Mechanistic Worldview, has become inadequate to handle pressing concerns of society. It has outlived its usefulness, and hence a new worldview is called for. I develop the Participatory Worldview as a promising alternative, and explore various themes of participatory philosophy throughout the history of Western Civilization.
As I conceive it, the concept of ‘participation’ is fundamentally a mental phenomenon, and therefore a key aspect of the Participatory Worldview is the idea of ‘participatory mind’. In the Mechanistic Worldview mind is a mysterious entity, attributed only to humans and perhaps higher mammals. In the Participatory Worldview mind is a naturalistic, holistic, and universal phenomenon. Human mind is then seen as a particular manifestation of this universal nature. Philosophical systems in which mind is present in all things are considered versions of panpsychism, and hence I argue for a system that I call ‘participatory panpsychism’. My particular articulation of participatory panpsychism is based on ideas from chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics, and is called ‘hylonoism’.
From my undergraduate years through my post?graduate years I was surrounded by materialists. These were scientists whose thought was dominated by the Newtonian worldview. The world was made of billiard ball?like atoms pushed around by each other as a billiard ball is pushed by another on the table. The universe was a gigantic mechanism made up of lesser mechanisms, be they human beings or the physicists’ fundamental particles. All was to be explained in terms of matter and motion.
Sun Tzu on The Art of War
Hello friends,
Allow me to make a few comments on a situation about which virtually nothing can be said, or heard, with any sort of equanimity: the war in Iraq.
What is needed for a mind to fully perceive the structure of
perception? Perception is a process which has 5
components, numbered 0 through 4. The mind needs to develop through
stages to be able to
perceive these components. Many theorists studying the mind,
such as artificial intelligence researchers or cognitive scientists,
are only able to perceive components 0 through 3 and are at a stage of
development where the mind rejects perceptions of component 4. In part,
this paper argues that if such a theorist wants to understand the mind,
it
is necessary to overcome the rejection of perceptions of component 4.
Once all the components can be perceived,
the processes of mind can be studied and worked
with directly.