After five days straight of partying, my cirrhosis and black lung disease hasn't killed me, so I guess that can only make me stronger.
Behold - the greatest music video of the 21st Century - absolutely brilliant! Weezer are the kings of sincere power-pop rock. I'm beginning to appreciate them much more. Especially when the lyrics are so cheekily self-referential you can't help but smile.
Welcome to Part 4 of my exploration of my introductory series on General Semantics.
The Structural Differential
Korzybski wrote about 500 pages in his Science and Sanity before he touched upon the Structural Differential, since people were so entrenched in their way of confusing words with objects, partial facts with total realities. In Science he says that adults would have a hard time digesting the various premises of the Structural Differential, declaring it more useful in the education of children, so their semantic reactions could be corrected before they were entrenched in thinking and acting using Aristotelian logic by adolescence.
Here it is, in all its odd shaped glory.
E stands for an event in space-time. The event or object has multifarious and indefinite characteristics on the microscopic and macroscopic levels. The scene which one sees/hears/feels is not the complete picture. (O - object, non-verbal reaction) This is all one can sense on the objective, silent level. The strings tie our awareness of this information to the different levels. As you can see, some strings from the E level do not make it to the objective "O" level. Then, once we introduce words to label such an event or object. (D - verbal name) For instance, using Hayakawa's example of "Bessie the cow" we identify Bessie (D) as a "cow" (I1 - inferential level) which is part of an abstraction "livestock" (I2 - general level) which can be abstracted even further to "commodity" (I3 - higher-level abstractions) which can continue indefinitely. Using the Structural Differential is essential in developing the consciousness of abstraction.
This consciousness is the awareness that words cannot ever accurately describe the totality of an object, event or person etc., (what Robert Anton Wilson would call "sombunallism" - that we can only know some, but not all of what we know) and that we abstract certain parts of our experience without touching an objective, non-verbal level (the "silence" in your mind when one perceives something) that can develop imbalances in our thinking, neurosis and what Korzybski struggled all his life to prevent - unsanity.
Next time: Preventing unsanity - GS and its links to therapeutic and cognitive psychology
References
Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, Alfred Korzybski, Institute of General Semantics, 1950, 4th edition.
Language in Thought and Action: Fourth Edition, Samuel I. Hayakawa, Harcourt, 1972.
The New Inquisition, Robert Anton Wilson, New Falcon Publications, 1986.
I got the new Opeth, Kataklysm, In Flames and Children of Bodom albums in the mail yesterday. Three of them jewelcase retail releases, one promo. Free, except for shipping and the inevitable reviews I'll have to write by the 28th. Great - but I've sort of run out of room in which to put them.
I've been writing metal reviews and interviews since high-school. My heady, wide-eyed and overeager reviews won't be posted here for your viewing (dis)pleasure, because they're so shoddy I doubt you'd be reading a review - it would be more like a heavy metal hagiography. I've collected most of them, save for a few that I sold on eBay for tidy and criminally overpriced sums. (They were horrible sounding records. Truly terrible.) I own a bed with a bookshelf in the bedhead. It used house a mixture of books and CDs. Then the books were overrun and had to be relegated to another bookshelf. Now it's full of CDs. Inside the bookshelf and on top, with overflow residing on my bedside table (with duplicates and "unworthy" discs, for example: the original CD release of British Steel by Judas Priest sits there - the re-master takes pride of place in the "real" CD collection.) I have about 300 CDs, promos included. Promos I can't really sell, because they aren't groundbreaking/awesome/decent enough for anyone to give a shit about.
This really does give me comfort, because it's probably the most daunting obstacle I believe I face in the world today. It's tangible. The problem can be seen, not abstracted. Everything else is pretty much imaginary.
A year ago, I'd break a sweat because one of my friends could have possibly sort of given me a blank stare instead of a wistful silence. A friend told me "your psychology helps a lot" after giving her an impromptu session (because I'm a wanker like that) the other night. I'd like to think its helped me too, but I can't tell if it has or not. I spose that's a fairly good thing.
Catch and I are working on a new project. He's always wanted to become a stand-up comedian, and I'm helping him write some material. I think i've got some fucking killer jokes and anecdotes from encountering people and what they do. A fundamental element of comedy is making light of other's misery, and another is conflict. Combine the two and you just cannot fail. It's impossible.
“The universe is change, life is what our thoughts make it.”
