Language is all we are here in cyberspace, and the limitations of this are very annoying. The only way to deal with this trap is to define what is "is". Let me just go on the record once again with the following statement of existential parameters.

Judge not lest ye be judged. I pass no judgment upon others. "Judgment" is merely the "is"- the computer code running your holodeck. I hereby make one single judgment, specifically: That the verb "to be" applies only to holocontrol Choices. Therefore when I say something "is", I am telling you how that thing runs on my simulation. THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE "IS" in my world, and no Judgment other than that.

Alfred Korzybski, in his 1933 book, Science and Sanity posited a new general semantics called E-PRIME, abolishing all forms of "is." Korzybski pointed out the problems created by two usages of "to be": identity and predication. The best example is the fallacy of the statement "Beethoven is better than Mozart"...in E-PRIME, the same thing would be said as "Beethoven seems better than Mozart to me at this moment under these conditions".

Robert Anton Wilson writes about this in his book, RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE SITTING NOW:

To understand E-Prime, consider the human brain as a computer. (Note that I did not say the brain "is" a computer.) As the Prime Law of Computers tells us, GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT (GIGO, for short). The wrong software guarantees wrong answers. Conversely, finding the right software can "miraculously" solve problems that previously appeared intractable.



It seems likely that the principal software used in the human brain consists of words, metaphors, disguised metaphors, and linguistic structures in general. The Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski Hypothesis, in anthropology, holds that a change in language can alter our perception of the cosmos. A revision of language structure, in particular, can alter the brain as dramatically as a psychedelic. In our metaphor, if we change the software, the computer operates in a new way.

And so you can see how all this obviously is supported by my holodeck paradigm. Wilson was writing in the early 80s, looking forward to the quantum existential terror of our times. My solution therefore to the E-PRIME problem is to still use "is" but in a whole new way. Rather than change the word, as Wilson and Korzybski tried (and failed) to do, I will simply transmute it.

I leave you now with RAW's fabulous NEUROSEMANTIC KNOW-HOW QUIZ:

Are the following statements true or false, or something else? If something else, what should we call them? Answers below.

1. Water boils at 100 degrees centigrade.

2. PQ=QP

3. Any set which is part of another set is smaller than the set of which it is part.

4. Raquel Welch is the most beautiful woman in the world.

5. There is a tenth planet beyond Pluto.

6. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

7. BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR is a dirty movie.

8. The Pope is infallible in matters of faith and morals.

9. Van Gogh is a greater artist that Picasso.

10. Entropy increases in all closed systems.

11. Nothing remains of the pacing famous sea but its speech and into its talkative seven tombs the anchor dives through the floor of a church.

12. I am the Divine Efflugence of the Living God.

13. The following sentence is false.

14. The previous sentence is true.

15. All men are created equal.

16. A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim.

17. All mathematics can be reduced to set theory.

18. My wife is the most beautiful woman in the world.

Answers:

1. Conditionally true. Always true at sea level (on this planet) but not true, e.g., in the Himalayas and only true off this planet in those places that happen to correspond to sea level on this planet.

2. True, in ordinary mathematics. Not true in the quantum math employed by John Neumann to describe subatomic events. A human-scale analog of quantum logic would be as follows: Imagine a small Southern town made up almost entirely of hard-shell Baptists. Let P=marriage and Q=pregnancy. In such a grid, PQ (marriage X pregnancy) does not equal QP (pregnancy X marriage).

3. True, of finite sets. Georg Cantor has created a “proof” that this is false when applied to transfinite sets; but not all mathematicians accept Cantor’s proof. Therefore the proposition is true for finite sets and (at this date) indeterminate for transfinite sets.

4. However passionately you might agree with it, this proposition is neither true nor false nor indeterminate, since no known scientific or logical test can be applied to it. It is best regarded as self-referential, a statement about how the speaker’s nervous system is operating. For semantic exactitude, then, it should really say, “To me, Raquel Welch is the most beautiful woman in the world.”

5. Indeterminate. No such planet has yet been observed, but astronomers are looking for it, since gravitational math implies that it is probably there. (Note: by the time this book reaches print, the proposition might have graduated from indeterminate to true. Some statements- maybe most- are only true, false, or indeterminate at a date.)

6. This statement appears to be neither true, nor false, nor indeterminate, since nobody can observe a colorless green idea to discover its sleeping habits. This proposition must, therefore, be considered meaningless.

7. Neither true nor false nor indeterminate. No instrument such as a smutometer can exist even in principle, so we can’t measure the “dirtiness” of a film or any other artwork. This proposition, then, is as meaningless as the one about the colorless green ideas; and those who believe it is true seem to be confusing what is going on in their own nervous systems with what is measurably out there on the movie screen.

8. Neither true nor false nor indeterminate nor meaningless. This appears to be a game-rule; all players wishing to participate in the Roman Catholic game must give assent to it, or the game itself ceases to include them.

9. Neither true nor false nor indeterminate not meaningless. This appears to be a statement about somebody’s evaluation of Van Gogh and Picasso, confusingly formulated to look like a statement about Van Gogh and Picasso themselves.

10. Almost certainly true; but (a) it is partly true-by-definition. This law has proven itself so valuable to science that any “exception” will be most profitably handled by redefining what we mean by “closed system” instead of giving up the law itself. And (b) we should also keep in mind the very cogent arguments by Karl Popper (THE LOGIC OF DISCOVERY) and Gregory Bateson (MIND AND NATURE). Popper and Bateson both assert that science can never prove any law absolutely, since that would require an infinite number of experiments occupying an infinite number of years.

11. Neither true nor false nor indeterminate nor meaningless. The speaker is using multi-ordinal words to create precise imagistic-ideational information about subtle processes in his own nervous system. The result is known as “poetry” and has semantic value, in helping to see how human nervous systems operate, how many varieties of perception and self-perception are possible, and how to make neurologically meaningful reality-labyrinths that are not limited to true or false.

12. This appears to be failed poetry, or else the speaker has his semantic levels confused in the same manner as proposition 7.

13. This proposition cannot be evaluated as true, false, indeterminate, or meaningless in itself, since it is part of a system which includes the next proposition. We can only evaluate the two together, since they refer to each other.

14. This system is now revealed as a Strange Loop. If it is true, it is false, and if it is false, it is true. This is not trivial. There are hundreds of such Strange Loops recognized in logic and mathematics, and it requires sophisticated knowledge to detect them when they are not as obvious as this pair. Paul Watzlavik has argued (in PRAGMATICS OF HUMAN COMMUNICATIONS and HOW REAL IS REAL?) that many types of mental illness take the form of internalizing such a Strange Loop and trying to live out its consequences. Alan Watts has proposed, even more grimly, in his PSYCHOTHERAPY EAST & WEST, that whole societies can become trapped in such Strange Loops.

15. Neither true nor false nor indeterminate nor meaningless. This is a game-rule of Jeffersonian democracy.

16. This appears to be some kind of poetry. The speaker is urgently attempting to communicate perceptions and experiences that cannot be conveyed in ordinary language. (He had a bullet in the gut at the time.)

17. Indeterminate. Some mathematicians believe it; some do not. A rigorous proof is still being sought.

18. This is the only absolutely true statement in this whole book.

Note that each statement (whether we classify it as true, false, meaningless, indeterminate, metaphoric, game-rule or Strange Loop) will create an existential reality-labyrinth for those who believe it.





