“As I say at the beginning of my workshops, 'Everything I say here is a lie -- bullshit, in other words -- because anything that you put in words is not experience, is not the experiment. It's a representation -- a misrepresentation.”
Remember the motto passed to us (from G.C.C. via S.S.C.U.): "Cosmic Love is absolutely Ruthless and Highly Indifferent: it teaches its lessons whether you like/dislike them or not."
― John C. Lilly
Anyone on /lit/ familiar with John C. Lilly and his work? He seems to me like a person who saw beyond the illusory nature of language, noting how it could never fully explain the truth of the cosmos. Nature is, as he words it, indifferent and ruthless. And yet we are a society that operates on ideological discourse, making all these various meanings that have nothing to do with nature.
Interview of Lilly here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVf81iwSXT4
>>7867288
>take a lot of acid
>experience sensations you can't rationalize enough to express in English
>decide those sensations were related to real phenomena and spend a lifetime insisting on this
Tedious, to be honest.
>>7867294
Have you ever taken acid?
>>7867298
As a matter of fact, yes. I just have the presence of mind to look at the experience critically afterwards.
>>7867294
I don't think Lilly's ideas came solely from his LSD or K experiences. The man had an M.D. in neuroscientist for Christ's sake. I like Lilly a lot. He (along with Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson) helped people understand what language is and how it influences them on a daily basis. Too many people don't understand how they are being manipulated by language on a daily basis. Lilly's message is a wake-up call to the world. Look to nature and see how it functions. You don't have to believe in the whole ECCO thing in order to understand what Lilly has to say.
P.S. Ecco the Dolphin was a great game. Fond childhood memories there.
>>7867345
>neuroscientist
*neuroscience
>>7867288
I disagree with Lilly when he talks about the infinite bounds of the mind. The mind (and human creativity) is bound by language. And our language is flawed and limited and incomplete. Therefore, our creativity and mind is limited in this sense.
>>7867516
There is very little robust evidence that language has much impact at all on our thought. People have always tried to claim that it does, but the studies just don't support them.
>>7867547
what studies are you referencing, good sir?
>>7867674
For instance Hopi and Whorf and their attempts to support preconceived prejudices about the influence of language on our behaviour; this stuff is the foundation of the whole school of thought that says language shapes the way we think about the world.
To give an example of how silly their evidence is, Whorf tells a story about how an oil drum was linguistically categorised as 'empty' due to its contents having been used, even though it remained full of flammable vapours. Therefore a worker thoughtlessly flicked a cigarette butt into it and started a fire; the accident, according to Whorf, was due to the influence of the word 'empty'; even though the worker should have known better, he was influenced by language to extrapolate from the concept 'empty' (in the sense of 'devoid of its usual contents') that the drum was 'empty' in the sense of 'containing nothing' and therefore inert.
If this seems like a warranted and well supported scientific conclusion to you then I guess we have nothing further to talk about.
