"It should be obvious to all intelligent readers (but curiously is not obvious to many) that my viewpoint in this book is one of agnosticism. The word "agnostic" appears explicitly in the Prologue and the agnostic attitude is restated again and again in the text, but many people still think I "believe" some of the metaphors and models employed here. I therefore want to make it even clearer than ever before that
I DO NOT BELIEVE IN ANYTHING
This remark was made, in these very words, by John Gribben, physics editor of the New Scientist magazine in a BBC-TV debate with Malcolm Muggeridge, and it provoked incredulity on the part of most viewers. It seemed to be a hangover of the medieval Catholic era that causes most people, even the educated, to think that everybody must "believe" in something or other, that if one is not a theist, one must be a dogmatic atheist, and if one does not think Capitalism is perfect, one must believe fervently in Socialism, and if one does not have blind faith in X, one must alternatively have blind faith in not-X or the reverse of X.
My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where the absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended.
My attitude is identical to that of Dr. Gribbin and the majority of physicists today, and is known in physicists today, and is known in physics as "the Copenhagen Interpretation," because it was formulated by Dr. Niels Bors and his co-workers c.1926-28. The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called "model agnosticism" and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan , "The map is not the territory." Alan Watts, a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy , restated it more vividly as "The menu is not the meal.""
- from the Preface of the New Edition of Cosmic Trigger: Volume 1, Final Secrets of the Illuminati by Robert Anton Wilson
I DO NOT BELIEVE IN ANYTHING
This remark was made, in these very words, by John Gribben, physics editor of the New Scientist magazine in a BBC-TV debate with Malcolm Muggeridge, and it provoked incredulity on the part of most viewers. It seemed to be a hangover of the medieval Catholic era that causes most people, even the educated, to think that everybody must "believe" in something or other, that if one is not a theist, one must be a dogmatic atheist, and if one does not think Capitalism is perfect, one must believe fervently in Socialism, and if one does not have blind faith in X, one must alternatively have blind faith in not-X or the reverse of X.
My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where the absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended.
My attitude is identical to that of Dr. Gribbin and the majority of physicists today, and is known in physicists today, and is known in physics as "the Copenhagen Interpretation," because it was formulated by Dr. Niels Bors and his co-workers c.1926-28. The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called "model agnosticism" and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan , "The map is not the territory." Alan Watts, a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy , restated it more vividly as "The menu is not the meal.""
- from the Preface of the New Edition of Cosmic Trigger: Volume 1, Final Secrets of the Illuminati by Robert Anton Wilson
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