Skepticism and Buddhism

Skepticism and an interest in Buddhism shows up in many of Robert Anton Wilson's writings. After reading a mention of the Greek Skeptic philosophers in Chapter 6 of Quantum Psychology, and a mention of the Greek Skeptic philosopher Pyrrho in a recent blog post at Overweening Generalist and looking up Pyrrho in my Oxford Classical Dictionary, I remembered reading a review in Bryn Mawr Classical Review of a book arguing that Greek Skepticism was derived from Buddhism. The book is Pyrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism by Adrian Kuzminski.

The reviewer, Jerker Blomqvist,  regards the thesis as interesting and plausible but not quite proven: "Undoubtedly, Kuzminski raises an important question regarding the ancestry of Western philosophy. He records an impressive number of parallels between Greek and Indian philosophy, and in particular his analysis of the analogy between Pyrrhonist/sceptic ataraxia and Nagarjuna's 'emptiness' is notable. However, analogies, similarities, parallels or whatever you will call them are one thing, concrete proof of influence and interdependence is another. We do not know enough about the contacts between Greece and India in order to make the interchange of ideas a proven fact. Explicit references in the preserved texts are missing and, unlike durable artifacts, ideas leave no traces in the archaeological remains. Traveling between the two regions obviously did take place. It is not unlikely that it had an impact in the intellectual sphere too, so, like genuine followers of Pyrrhon, Sextus and their adherents, we have reason to continue searching (skeptesthai) for reliable knowledge in these matters. Kuzminski's book points the way."

Pyrrho and other Greek philosophers apparently accompanied Alexander the Great, whose army reached India.

Blomqvist notes that while Kuzminski's book was the first in English to posit a connection between Greek Skeptical philosophers and Buddhism, two previous books had argued for a connection, one in Romanian and one in French.

Here is a publication at Project Gutenberg on Greek Skepticism.

Quantum Psychology, Chapter 6

[I'm hoping the exercizes will work for us and I have not made any changes -- Tom]

1. Weather permitting, leave the house, go outside to the street and look around. How much of what you see would have existed if humans had not designed and built it? How much that "just grew there" would look different if humans had not cultivated and encouraged (or polluted) it?

2. Look at the sky. If you can distinguish stars from planets, can identify some of them, etc., try to forget this knowledge and imagine how the sky looks to very intelligent animals without human science. Then look at it again with your knowledge of astronomy back in focus.

3. If a meteor passes, how does it make you feel when trying to see without scientific glosses? How differently do you feel when you allow  yourself to remember what you know of meteors?

4. Go back inside and discuss this:
If all TV shows about the police (about 20 a week in most areas) went off the air and instead we had an equal number of TV shows about landlords, would this change the average American reality-tunnel?
In how many ways would the reality-tunnel change?
What would Americans "see" (or remember that they now tend to ignore? What would they become less aware of? What would they become more aware of?

5. Try to figure out why there are so many TV shows about police and virtually no shows about landlords.
Who decides this? Why have they decided it this way? (Attempt to avoid paranoid speculations or grandiose conspiracy theories, if at all possible.)

Oz Fritz on E.J. Gold

I spent a good chunk of my morning today reading Oz Fritz's four part blog entries on "How I Met E.J. Gold." Part one is here, and you can take it from there. E.J. Gold is a jazz musician, the  son of famed "Galaxy" editor H.L. Gold and a spiritual teacher recommended by Robert Anton Wilson. He is the author of American Book of the Dead, which Oz highly recommended in a previous post. I didn't know much about E.J. Gold before reading Oz's piece and found the Wikipedia article useful. Oz always makes very interesting connections between music and spiritual consciousness and he does a good job of presenting some of RAW's best videos.

Michael Johnson on the Cosmic Schmuck Principle

Michael Johnson at the Overweening Generalist blog writes about Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Schmuck principle and then shows how the work of various social scientists and philosophers hews closely to the principle. For example, Michael writes about Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow; I wrote about Kahneman previously, relating the book to Wilson's skepticism and model agnosticism. 

It seems to me that Wilson ought to have illustrated the Cosmic Schmuck principle with an example or two of when he himself was a Cosmic Schmuck. It would not have been too damaging to his reputation, I would think, to admit that his criticism of Bob Dylan, for example, was perhaps not the whole story. One of most affecting features of Kahneman's book is the examples he gives of times when he was wrong. For example, he once embarked with several other scholars on a textbook for Israeli schools on how to make good decisions. They discovered after they had begun work on the book that writing a textbook often takes several years. They should have abandoned the textbook at that point, but they persisted and finally completed it -- after several years. By that time, Israeli education officials had lost interest in the book.

Rather than simply insisting that everyone has should give an example of when they were mistaken, I will give an instance of when I was very wrong. After 9-11, I, in common with many other Americans, because so angry at the slaughter of so many Americans that I was ready to  hit back. I supported the war in Afghanistan (which doesn't seem totally irrational to me even know -- I didn't know we'd occupy the country for more than 10 years) and even supported the war in Iraq. Much of my politics since then essentially has been an expression of remorse for my Schmuckiness. 

And didn't you like the moment in Nixon in China when Richard Nixon sings, "I was wrong"?

Mushroom site comments on Quantum Psychology

At a forum on a site devoted to -- I kid you not -- magic mushrooms, various participants debate the merits of Quantum Psychology, the book that sombunall of the folks who hang out at this site are reading and discussing. I enjoyed the interplay between the RAW skeptics and the RAW fans.

William Burroughs photos at Dangerous Minds

Dangerous Minds,  the pop culture and lefty blog, has posted a series of photographs of William Burroughs with a variety of other folks.  Some of the pictures surprised me. Kurt Cobain? Hüsker Dü?

I asked for a Robert Anton Wilson picture in the comments, and someone known only to me as "Effy" (no link for more information) obligingly posted a link to the above photograph. (Click on it for a bigger picture.) Thank you, Effy!

Brion Gysin, sitting next to RAW, invented the cut-up technique for rearranging prose. Burroughs popularized it, and then Wilson used it for ILLUMINATUS! and other works. I hope I have that right, this time.

Eric Wagner on RAW and Burroughs is here.

A meeting with RAW, colorized

I often drop by the "Manic Doodlings" cartoon site from artist Steve Bellitt. (For those of you who don't know Mr. Bellitt, he describes himself as a "self-unemployed-indolent-amateur-cartoonist-chronic malcontent and all-around good egg.") Here is his cartoon about meeting RAW, updated and colorized for 2012.

Celebrating Robert Anton Wilson

The blogger FeralTech celebrates Robert Anton Wilson Day (which was Monday) with an essay explaining the origins of the day. 

Excerpt:

July 23rd coincides with the rising of “the Dog Star”, Sirius (the root of the term “Dog Days”) which has mystical significance for ancient cultures from the Egyptians to the Romans, to the African Dogon tribe. For me, it is has always been time for the greatest interaction with the “the cosmos”. The night skies are spectacular. The days are long, but getting shorter- garden and outdoor projects take on a greater urgency. At the same time, the heat, and all of the related malfunctions both personally and technologically that come along with it, tend to add to the “weirdness” factor. Cell phones, computers, cars etc. tend to go “on the fritz”. Animals act strangely. Insects are in full assault on all fronts. This year, the Midwestern drought adds to the biblical (or Mayan) “end times” vibe, while the skies around our little organic compound are abuzz with crop dusters bombarding the corporate monocrop corn/bean fields with pesticides, hoping to rescue what they can from the parched genetically-modified franken-plants.

Quantum Psychology, Chapter Five

[The exercizes for Chapter 5 work fine for an online group, so I've made no changes -- Tom]

1. Let the group look back at Exercize 1 at the end of Chapter Two. Try to decide how many of the propositions there, which I then asked you to force into the two categories "meaningful" and "meaningless" might fit just as well into the category of Game Rules or the resultants of tacit (unstated) Game Rules.

2. Meditate upon the following quote from Lord Russell's Our Knowledge of the External World (page 24):

The belief or unconscious conviction that all propositions are of some subject-predicate form -- in other words, that every fact consists of some thing having some quality -- has rendered most philosophers incapable of giving any account of science and daily life.


Consider the subject-predicate form as a Game Rule.

3. Contemplate the following typical subject-predicate sentences: "The lightning flashed suddenly." "It is now raining out." "I have an uncontrollable temper."

Try to identify the subject, "it" in  the sentence: "It is now raining out."

See how subject-predicate Game Rules influence the other two sentences. Can any of you restate them in  more phenomenological language?

Does any of this help you see the trick in the two-heads (or infinite heads) argument?

Also, we are supposed to give each member of the group a chance to think of a new dualism for dividing up the 13 objects listed in Chapter Four. (The list, with links to photos, is  here.) Mike Smith, a prolific recent commentator, has suggested dividing them into objects that can be used by themselves vs. ones that require something else for use.

Alexander Cockburn, RIP

The often iconoclastic and often funny leftist writer Alexander Cockburn has died; Jesse Walker has a good appreciation up at Reason's Hit and Run blog.

I'm guessing that RAW might have enjoyed some of Cockburn's writings, but can't think of a reference to Cockburn in any of RAW's books, except for this passage, from Chaos and Beyond, written by contributor Timothy Leary. In "How to Publish Heresy in Mainstream Publications," a guide to writing satirical letters to the editor under phony names, Leary writes, "If somebody like me -- or Alex Cockburn, or Noam Chomsky or even Gore Vidal -- were to submit a truly dissident essay, no matter how convincing the facts or witheringly brilliant the logic, there is very little chance that it would be published."

Beethoven -- two quotes and two links

"Anyone who understands my music will never been unhappy again," Ludwig is alleged to have said. Some biographers doubt the source from which we get this; but it doesn't matter. If he didn't say it, he might as well have; the music certainly says it for him. -- Robert Anton Wilson (from "Beethoven As Information" in The Illuminati Papers.

Beethoven's String Quartet No. 16 was the last major work he composed. It contains all the wisdom I'll ever need. -- Roman Tsivkin

Legal download (from Borromeo String Quartet) of Beethoven's 16th String Quartet. Lots more free, legal downloads of Beethoven, Mozart and other RAW favorites here.

No more acceleration of knowledge?

At Reason magazine's "Hit and Run" blog, Brian Doherty writes about Peter Thiel's recent public debate with Google's Eric Schmidt, and about how Thiel repeated his thesis that there has been a slowdown of development of new ideas in many areas of the economy. (This is also the thesis of Tyler Cowen's book, The Great Stagnation.) Writes Doherty, "Especially grim for those of who read too much Robert Anton Wilson in the early 1980s and began beliving in a "jumping Jesus" phenomenon in which our knowledge and mastery of the world would begin doubling in quicker and shorter increments, and whose retirement plans thus depended on the allegedly around-the-corner world of endless techno-wizardry that make energy production and matter manipulation as cheap as a value meal."

Obviously, some of RAW's short term technological prophecies have not panned out; we aren't migrating to space yet, or on the threshold for physical immortality. Perhaps RAW's thesis needs to be amended to note that the acceleration of knowledge doesn't apply to all fields of endeavor. (Cowen argues that the undoubted rapid development of computer technology and the Internet masks a slowdown of innovation in other areas, such as transportation.) Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson (another favorite of mine) has argued that we've failed to "think big" in recent decades; we could go into space now and do wonderful things, but we've become too risk averse.

Then again, perhaps RAW's point remains valid, even if the timetable should not be taken too literally; I  would think that advances in private space exploration such as the SpaceX company, continued developments in the Internet, biotechnology, green energy research, nanotechnology and other fields should be produce something interesting in the next decade or two. Could Thiel, Cowen, et al. be exaggerating the problem because policies that promote innovation are the most promising way to aid the economy?

Last year, I wrote a post noting that Thiel and RAW appear to have many similar interests.

Also at Hit and Run, Jesse Walker writes about the history of anti-Mormon paranoia,  noting that it has largely receded.

Synthetic drug ban already not working

Wired magazine reports that a new federal ban on synthetic drugs is already failing, because the ban can't keep up with the new formulations coming onto the market.

The obvious solution to all of the dodgy new chemical formulations — legalizing marijuana and regulating it — of course isn't on the table. RAW's Guns and Dope Party still seems a long way away. (My regular drug of choice these days is coffee -- I  do drink one beer every few days -- and I own no firearms. I am endorsing freedom, not any particular substances or weapons.)

Hat tip, Supergee.