My father was a big fan of Robert Anton Wilson.<\/p>\r\n
I read the Illuminatus!<\/cite> trilogy in the summer between 8th and 9th grade (it changed my life). All through high school, I would occasionally pick up one of my father\u2019s Wilson books and read some random bit of it, but aside from Illuminatus!<\/cite>, I never read all the way through them. (I\u2019m not entirely sure I even read all the way through Illuminatus!<\/cite>; there were times when I read bits of that in random order too.)<\/p>\r\n As part of my unread-books-reading project, I\u2019m now finally reading Cosmic Trigger<\/cite>, most of which is more or less an autobiography about how Wilson learned about (and from) drugs, conspiracy theories, humanity being guided by aliens from Sirius, physics, magick, tantra, Crowley, Leary, synchronicity, metaprogramming, psychic abilities, cryonics, and more.<\/p>\r\n I\u2019m finding it reasonably interesting, especially now that I have some more context for some of what Wilson\u2019s saying than I did when I was in high school. (For example, I don\u2019t think I understood at the time that he was an ardent Libertarian.)<\/p>\r\n But one thing I see him doing over and over in this book is to assume that two things that have a point of (possibly metaphorical) similarity are essentially the same.<\/p>\r\n For example, he takes it for granted that some aspects of physics are equivalent to some aspects of mysticism. He doesn\u2019t quite explicitly say \u201cboth of them involve energy, so they\u2019re the same thing,\u201d but he comes pretty close to that. Another example: he claims that Castaneda\u2019s \u201cMescalito,\u201d a peyote spirit, \u201ctakes many forms in many myth-systems,\u201d including Peter Pan and Mr. Spock; my impression is that he\u2019s saying that any being who has pointed ears and\/or green skin is a manifestation of the same idea. (The picture of Peter Pan that he includes appears to have pointed ears.)<\/p>\r\n I recognize the allure of this general approach to things. Similarities are cool, synchronicity is neat, metaphors and analogies can be very useful, and combining disparate things into a simple unified system is very tempting.<\/p>\r\n And yet, if you make an analogy but then forget that it\u2019s just an analogy<\/em>, you\u2019ll often end up coming to incorrect conclusions. Over and over again, I feel like Wilson is essentially saying something like the following:<\/p>\r\n \u201cI\u2019ve heard of this thing called a couch. Sources that talk about it say that it has four legs and a back, and you sit on it. Obviously that\u2019s the same thing as what our culture refers to as an \u2018elephant.\u2019 Therefore, we can conclude that couches have trunks and tails, and sometimes stampede. For the rest of this book, I\u2019m going to make casual references to couch stampedes as if they were a scientifically proven fact.\u201d<\/p>\r\n #Unread<\/p>\r\n #CouchStampedes<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-science"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17987"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17988,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17987\/revisions\/17988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}