alex_antonin | Entries tagged with robert anton wilson

To my mind, a true Mandela Effect isn't a simple thing like people misspelling Berenstain Bears or getting Fruit Loops and Froot Loops mixed up. Going back to the original event that started the Mandela Effect as a meme: some people were surprised to be getting recent news of Nelson Mandela while he was free and apparently the President of South Africa -- nay, not merely surprised but SHOCKED because they remembered him dying in prison. This wasn't a simple "He's still alive?" thing like happens to me a lot. No, they specifically remembered him dying in prison. Many of them also remembered a televised funeral for him after he died in prison. So when they later saw he was alive, free, and the President of a country, that wasn't just "Oh they dropped off the radar so I assumed they'd died," that was more like "BUT I ATTENDED HIS FUNERAL!!!"

Like, it's still explainable as "human memory is absolutely ridiculous and shouldn't be trusted for anything," but like... the whole reason people started associating the Mandela Effect with the possibility of going full Worf Son of Mogh through the multiverse is because it's one thing to accept that "oh I was just misspelling that thing" or "oh I guess they were alive after all" after assuming for no real reason that someone was dead... it's another thing entirely to accept that your brain not only decided someone was dead but also fabricated a false memory of an entire news cycle and televised funeral about someone's death and then completely missing for years the very real news about him being freed from prison and made President of an entire country.

THAT is a Mandela Effect. Not "oh this brand wasn't named what I thought it was" or "that brand's logo isn't how I remembered it." No, a Mandela Effect is when your brain for whatever reason invents a false memory so specific and elaborate that you'd sooner believe you're going The OA through alternate universes than admit your brain is capable of bullshitting itself so hard.

Another good example is the Bible quote about the lion laying down with the lamb: I've seen even hard-core Bible scholars go apeshit about the fact that that quote isn't in the Bible, at least not in that form. The real quote is "The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them." Though this one admittedly is borderline, only making it as a Mandela Effect because so many people including people who study the Bible for a living have misremembered the quote so wildly.

My point is, true Mandela Effects are abso-fucking-lutely bizarre, so fricking wild that even people who know how horrible human memory is should be like "Okay yeah that's creepy as fuck." I have over the years come across more than a few Mandela Effect instances that made even me go "Oh there's no WAY human memory is THAT bad! Maybe there's something to this 'lost in the multiverse' idea after all."

On that note, while bizarre specificity is a good sign of a true Mandela Effect, the BEST Mandela Effects not only have bizarre specificity but also have multiple people around the country or around the world independently remembering the exact same oddly specific false memories. It's one thing for lots of people to remember Nelson Mandela having died years before he did for real, it's another thing entirely for hundreds or thousands of people around the world to specifically remember weeks of news coverage of his death in prison, and for all of them to remember watching his funeral on TV, only for him to turn up alive, free, and the leader of the very nation that had imprisoned him to begin with. That is bizarrely specific to start with, and then on top of that, so very many people remembering the same oddly specific false memory? It truly does boggle the mind.

(There are better examples I'm sure, but I can't recall any at the moment.)

There have been a lot of things that have happened over the years since Robert Anton Wilson died that I would have loved to see his perspective on, and the Mandela Effect is one of those things, because it ties in so well with his philosophy about how our brains create their own reality tunnels, but the coincidences of the same complex and oddly specific memories being generated independently by so many different people around the world would fascinate him, as would the conspiracy theory angle.

A Tumblr interaction:

themixtrovert:

“i can’t do that because of my religious beliefs”

okay

“you can’t do that because of my religious beliefs”

not okay

therepublicofrapunzel:

Morality is not subjective. If the Bible says x is wrong, x is wrong whether you are a Christian or not. You’re not exempt from the truth because you don’t believe it.

pishposh-habberdash:

Except if you’re not a Christian you don’t believe that the bible is truth so….

therepublicofrapunzel:

Yeah and if you’re colorblind you don’t think the sky is blue.

The sky is blue whether you believe it or not. The Bible is true whether you believe it or not.

cheshireinthemiddle:

The sky is actually black. You specifically perceive it as blue and a colorblind person may perceive it as orange or grey. A mantis shrimp sees it as colors that you cant even comprehend.

Your views =//= absolute truth

burningonyx: (Me)

therepublicofrapunzel Well my Bible says Y is wrong and X is right, and since my Bible is the One True Bible, if it says Y is wrong, then Y is wrong whether you are a Satanist or not. You’re not exempt from the truth because you don’t believe it. So now imagine a world where Satanists (as you likely think we are, not as we actually are) force our beliefs on everyone, the way you want to do to everyone.

Oh, are you horrified and terrified right now? Good. That’s how I feel when you pull shit like this. Because that thing where you try to make everyone subject to your shitty religion’s beliefs? Do you know what they call that when Muslims do it? It’s called Sharia Law. Congrats, therepublicofrapunzel, you are a proponent of the Christian version of Sharia Law.

“The sky is blue whether you believe it or not. The Bible is true whether you believe it or not.”

The sky “is” blue because that’s how most humans in our current culture see it. Funny thing, though, the ancient Greeks - who physically saw the same range of colors we do - didn’t have a word for blue. What we now call blue was lumped in with some reds and purples as “wine colored.” There are cultures alive today who don’t see blue the way we do, who see it as a shade of red, or as a shade of gray or black, even though they’re physically seeing the exact same color you are. We can even see this sort of thing in our own culture; how many straight women can clearly distinguish colors like “mother of pearl,” “creme,” and “eggshell” as distinct from “white”? Quite a few. But guess what? Men can be taught to do the same. Color is cultural. It is subjective.

And hey, maybe our sky “is” neon octarine to the people of Betelguese 5, and we humans only *think* the sky is blue.

This is why philosophers like Robert Anton Wilson need to be taught in school. Nothing is absolute, nothing is objective, everything is relative and subjective. If objective reality exists, we have no way of perceiving it because everything we perceive will always and forever be subjective, due to the limitations of our senses. Nothing short of becoming God ourselves will change that.

What you see when you look at an apple is not the apple itself; you are seeing your brain’s interpretation of the light bouncing off an apple (or other sensory data like touch). That shiny red apple “is” nothing more than a hallucination your brain generated based on a tiny percentage of a wee sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. Apples would look very different if you could see infrared, or ultraviolet, or X-rays. Apples would look very different if you could see in more than just three dimensions; even a 4-dimensional shape is nearly impossible for the human mind to comprehend without being able to see it, and the only human people who *might* have seen a 4D apple are people on psychedelic drugs. But I guarantee when they come back to our reality, that sight will be like a half-forgotten dream to them at best.

THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY! REALITY IS (MOSTLY) A HALLUCINATION, A SHARED DELUSION!

https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/blog/burningonyx/185194811990

Crossposts: https://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/724705.html

Does anyone know where to get ebook versions of Robert Anton Wilson's non fiction? I never finished one of his books I was reading, because I can't put a paper book down and read it while it's down when my arms get tired of holding onto it.

I'm especially looking for "Right Where You Are Sitting Now," though I also need to read "Coincidance." There's a bunch more of his stuff I haven't read yet, either.

Crossposts: http://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/604111.html

Been reading "Right Where You Are Sitting Now" by Robert Anton Wilson. In one article/chapter, he talks about how the Real Knowledge of the world has been doubling, how that affects civilization, and the rate it's been doing it at. And of course there are hubs of growth, where this Real Knowledge creates Real Capital, and where the warring elites are most localized. What's more, there's a pattern to the growth; it started in and around India, and started moving west and sometimes north, but mostly it moved west. It moved from India and China to Babylon, from Babylon to Phoenicia and Egypt, from there to Greece, from Greece to Rome, from Rome to the rest of Europe, and from Europe to the UK. The British Empire did well for a while, under the trade the "New World" opened up and then industrialism, but then the growth shifted over to the northeast coast of the US. And at the time he was writing the book, the growth was in the process of shifting to the west coast, with the east coast and west coast elites fighting for control. (I think that's still true.)

I bring this all up because he then said that he thought the growth, having nowhere left on the planet to go, would head up into outer space, into orbiting habitats; and that if it didn't go up there, it would just stay where it was. But that was in the 80's, and I've noticed that the westward pattern continued, if you keep in mind that "west" is a relative direction; the US empire is failing, and the growth is shifting over to China and Japan. With this in mind, I guess as long as civilization doesn't utterly collapse, the growth will continue going west again, unless we do something to shift it into space, or work to even out the growth so everyone on the planet can be comfortable, which Wilson keeps pointing out we have the technology to do.

Crossposts: http://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/559844.html

Anonymous asked: “Can you help me create an argument against the Flat Earth Society? Thanks!”

Me:

That’s a tough one. Robert Anton Wilson found that, if you’re looking for evidence that the earth is round, you’ll find it. But if you’re looking for evidence that it’s flat, you’ll find that as well. Hell, it goes further: if you’re looking for evidence that the surface of the earth is actually the inside surface of a concave hollow sphere in some giant cave, you’ll find it. So you can’t trust the human nervous system.

To be entirely honest, there’s no real proof - beyond a doubt - that the Earth is round. But here is some good evidence:

The shadow the earth casts on the moon is round.

If the earth were flat, we would be able to see, from a high enough mountain, the entire world. There would be no horizon.

Edited to add: There are pictures from space of the round earth.

Astronauts have reported that the earth appears round from orbit.

The “round earth” model works best for getting satellites and other stuff into orbit. With some models, like quantum physics, all the actual proof we have is the fact that the model works, and seems to contain no massive flaws. If there were any real flaws in quantum theory, there are many technologies that wouldn’t work at all or would have exploded horribly by now. The same goes for the round earth model: if there were a flaw in the round earth model, we would have found it by now, because gravity, orbital dynamics, and so on would work so differently if it were wrong, that we wouldn’t have Internet, or satellite TV, the ability to phone people across the planet, etc. A scientist could explain better the details of how things would be different if the earth really were flat, but that’s a good gist. And the theory that the earth is a concave hollow sphere is so absurd it makes flat earthers look reasonable. The gravity in a hollow sphere cancels itself out; if the earth were a hollow sphere, there would be no gravity: we would float away. (This, by the way, debunks the “hollow earth” theory as well. Even more so, because a hollow earth would have fallen apart billions of years ago.)

Keep in mind that the earth is not *perfectly* round.

Nature always takes the path of least resistance when it comes to anything. The mathematical models for how gravity, orbital dynamics, etc works tells us that the path of least resistance in planetary formation results in solid or semi-solid rock spheres, or in gaseous spheres. Only some great technological civilization, or a God, could make a flat earth happen in the real world. (And for most flat earthers, that’s all the evidence they need to support their theory.)

Ask them “if the earth is flat, how come nobody has fallen off the edge of the world yet? Or uploaded proof of the edge of the world on YouTube?” With the prevalence of cell phone cameras and so on, and the expanding coverage for data transfer on cell phones, if the world were flat then there would be video proof of it by now. The fact that there isn’t, is very telling.

If you want to see what life on a flat planet would be like, read the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett.

I hope this answers your question. There may be other arguments, but those are all I can think of for now.

Crossposts: http://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/319741.html

EVE HUBBARD FOR PRESIDENT!

Those who read “The Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy” by Robert Anton Wilson should know what I mean by that. :-D

Crossposts: http://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/318128.html

Several weeks ago, I've decided I prefer "Nudipan Narrans," aka "the naked, story-telling ape," to "Homo Sapiens Sapiens," ("Wise man"? BS.)

Well now, after reading much of "The Schroedinger's Cat Trilogy" by Robert Anton Wilson, I have decided I am not going to use the term "human" anymore, either. It implies that our species is better than other animals. So instead, I am going to use every possible opportunity to call humans "domesticated primates."

In that vein, I want a shirt that says, in large font, "DOMESTICATED PRIMATE." Then, in italics and smaller font below that, it will say Nudipan Narrans Domesticus.

Crossposts: http://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/317801.html

My favorite author, currently, is Robert Anton Wilson. I have been (in my free time) reading everything of his I can find. His writing has given me so many insights, and I highly recommend all of his writings.

However, I don't believe everything he says any more than I do anyone else (which I'm sure he'd be thrilled to hear). There are¹ a couple examples:

1. He makes a good point about how the political correctness movement sometimes goes too far (he wasn't opposed to the movement completely, just criticizing them a little). One of his examples (in "Cosmic Trigger III") was related to the gay pride events. He said that if anyone tried to have a "straight pride" event, that they'd get lambasted or worse for it. (This isn't to say he was against homosexuality; far from it, Wilson was perhaps the most open minded person in the world while he lived.) While I agree with the larger point he was making (that political correctness can be taken too far), he seems to have missed the point of gay pride events. He seems to have failed to grok the fact that such events are necessary in a mostly heterosexual society because, as the vernacular goes, "Every day is a Straight Pride Parade." So Gay Pride events become a way of opposing the status quo. Gay Pride events are a way of smashing open people's usual reality tunnel and invading. As a Discordian, I think if Wilson had understood this, he would have given it two thumbs up.

2. On page 205 of Cosmic Trigger III, middle of the second-to-last paragraph, he wrote:

"The academic post-modernists always start with the World as Puzzle view and unobtrusively slip into Puzzle Solved view. The latter, the solution to the puzzle, always curiously resembles the works of a second-rate German ideologue named Karlm Marx, whose theories, having failed notoriously in practice, live on only among these academics (and, I must admit, in China and Cuba: two excellent countries to live in, if you want to have Political Correctness hammered into you 24 hours a day.)"

Here Wilson shows ignorance yet again. I find it odd that such a great mind failed to realize that the only kind of communism we've seen in practice has been Leninized communism, which is a bastardization of Marx's philosophy. Further, communism only works if everyone in the society is truly equal. Communism works well in the small tribal model. If it can work in larger, industrialized societies (and I believe it can), then it cannot be done by force. Communism doesn't work if it's being forced upon the people by a government. This is the reason why it hasn't succeeded on a large scale yet. I don't count China and Cuba as truly communist; they are merely totalitarian governments with a vaguely Communist flavor, the same way a dead pig tastes a little like human flesh. Just as the pig tasting like a human does not mean the pig IS a human, the Communist flavor of China and Cuba does not make them true communist countries.

It is my opinion that humans are not yet evolved enough for large-scale communism to ever occur naturally, and work. I think, currently, that a good interim model would be a kind of cross between tribalism and globalism, with anarchism thrown in; humans would organize in tribes the size either of a city-state or into many tribes per city. The economy would be mostly local, with some globalization... global electricity grid, for one; some global trading for rare products; tribes experiencing a surplus of food production would share with those whose luck isn't so good, possibly in exchange for goods or services present or future; other necessities which could be shared would be, if needed (such as labor, if there appeared a labor shortage). There might possibly be some sort of organization or multiple organizations dedicated to mediating disputes, but their word would not be law in any sense.

So yes, Robert Anton Wilson may have had a lot of fascinating insights, but he's got his flaws, too. I still recommend his works highly.

1 = Damn, trying to write in E-Prime "is" extremely difficult. I keep using forms of "to be" and drawing a blank as to how to say it differently. DAMN ARISTOTLEAN LANGUAGE HYPNOTIZING ME SO EFFECTIVELY!

Crossposts: http://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/307460.html

I read recently in one of Robert Anton Wilson's books (Cosmic Trigger III) that some feminists actually believe that Beethoven's 9th symphony is a hymn to rape. This made me think back to the "all men are rapists" Belief System (BS). Because previous parts of the book had been talking about conspiracy theories, I had this thought:

Feminists of that kind are a patriarchal conspiracy to make feminism look bad!

Now, I don't know whether or not I really believe that, per se, but I think this is a good example of how rigid/fundamentalist modeltheism reflects poorly on the model the zealot has so much zeal for.

Crossposts: http://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/305272.html

Some people think they're being deep when they say "A red rose isn't actually red; it reflects red light and absorbs all the other colors of light."

But that isn't deep. I'll show you deep:

The red rose is not red because red light is not red. The real universe has no colors, smells, or anything else of the sort. It "is" colorless and odorless. It "is" just a bunch of particles/waves moving through spacetime. Your senses take readings, the same way sensors on a spaceship in Star Trek do, and relay that data to your brain.

The universe you experience with your senses "is" your brain taking that raw, limited sensory data and creating a hallucination based on that limited sensory data. The way things look to us "is" due to the brain's software. Red looks the way it does because our brain's software "is" programmed by a combo of DNA programming and environmental programming.

The human brain is like a computer; every human brain being unique, it's like if every computer in the world had its own operating system. But because we have to be able to communicate with one another, there are more similarities than differences between brain operating systems. Which is why we can all recognize red when we see it (unless we're color blind or something of the sort). (This is similar to how computers with different operating systems can communicate web pages and other files over the Internet, and understand one another most of the time.)

So, really, the only thing we can truly say about reality is that it exists. The rest is just our brain hallucinating. And because we're all wired more or less the same, that makes reality mostly a shared hallucination.

Crossposts: http://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/301787.html

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"Mandela Effect" gets overused
Repeating this here because Twitter is a PITA
???
Shifting growth
An Ask I recieved about flat earthers.
EVE HUBBARD FOR PRESIDENT!
Domesticated primates.
Don't believe everything you read.
The dangers of rigid thinking.
Deepness is relative.

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Entries tagged with robert anton wilson

"Mandela Effect" gets overused

Repeating this here because Twitter is a PITA

???

Shifting growth

An Ask I recieved about flat earthers.

EVE HUBBARD FOR PRESIDENT!

Domesticated primates.

Don't believe everything you read.

The dangers of rigid thinking.

Deepness is relative.