I’m beat as fuck. It’s 12:21am, and I’m crashing soon.
I spent today in Orange County for the memorial service of my friend Charles Lewis of tapout.
I’ve got a lot of thoughts about funerals and memorials, including today’s, but I’m pretty exhausted and I think the subject deserves my full attention.
Tomorrow I’ve got a really interesting meeting about an online show we’re working on that I’ll be able to announce soon as well.
I don’t want to leave you with nothing to entertain you, so check out this video from Robert Anton Wilson. It’s some pretty fascinating shit on the use of words and logic.
See you people tomorrow…
Hi, my English isn’t so good and neither is his. It is hard for me to understand him. Can somebody summarize what he said so I could understand it clearer?
I don’t get you Joe, you rightfully bash Ned, but you give props to this guy? Let me explain. Robert Anton Wilson is basically a “New Age” guy. New Ageism rose out of the 60′s sexual and cultural revolutions (before all of them sold out to corporate America [not that this is a complete bad thing, just hypocritical]). Our latest incarnation of New Ageism is the self-help crowd. Basically the same group of people except now they sell peace and love to the masses for $29.95 a pop.
The New Age (now self-help) movement is a bunch of folks who gather scrapes of knowledge from different groups, gain a cursory understanding of that knowledge, and then they attempt to synthesize this knowledge and regurgitate it in a New package. The result is complete bullshit. Wilson, John Grey (fake degree), Tony Robbins (used to be a janitor, taught relationship success among other things, and got a divorce), Dr. Phil (had his license revoked for ethical reasons and cannot legally practice psychology, but advised Oprah during her “Beef” trial on how to behave so got a show), “The Secret” (like the Make a Wish Foundation but without people who actually make the wishes come true); take your pick. They all steal from others, misinterpret the information either out of stupidity or intentionally to make a buck, and sell a completely misguided form as a new brand of Truth.
The common flaw they share is that they give up an old objective system and only replace it with a new objective system. They exchange their notion of one Absolute Truth for a slightly different Absolute Truth. All of this, starting with the 60′s revolutions, was a result of Existentialism, or a philosophical shifting from Platonic thinking to Kierkegaardian thinking, from the absolute to the relative. This entire movement from then to now is the popular face of this shift in thinking. And as with most things that get in the hands of the general populace, they fuck up a lot of the thinking.
As regarding Wilson, he got his PhD from an unaccredited college that closed its doors. And based on what he states here and elsewhere, he clearly has no clue as to what he is actually talking about. He borrows notions from various philosophers and theologians and recycles them as his own. But because he doesn’t quite understand what he steals, he really has created some fucked up lines of reasoning (a bit like stealing a joke and fucking up the set up or punch line).
On one side he argues for relative thinking. Now I’m a complete relativist, and I can tell you that we are a very rare breed (even most existentialists only point out the absurdity of Platonic objectivity yet still practice it). A relativist mindset for most people is incomprehensible because it is quite different from most world cultures. Wilson argues against absolute “truths”, for which I agree but for better reasons, and then arbitrarily picks on the word IS because he has no fucking clue about the world of linguistics or even the world of psychology for which he holds his “degree”.
He also peppers his talk with logical sounding phrases, but his arguments are based on unsound premises. He fails from a psychological side in recognizing that the human brain stores information based on the function of the word IS. We create associations between two concepts like grass and green which in logic is often represented with the operator =, which itself shares a similar function as equality in mathematics. If Wilson had even an elementary understanding of logic, he would quickly get the problem of assigning blame to an operator, rather than where is proper, on the operands.
In other words, real relativists recognize that it is words themselves that have varying meaning. The subtle difference is that we do not negate IS, but understand that IS “is” a cultural convention (not that we bring up the word “is” at all). It is an arbitrary and often tacit agreement within a culture for the sake of communicative exchange. We write dictionaries, put letters together to form words and assign (IS) meanings to these words.
If we take Wilson’s argument to its extreme (a simple test for absurdity in arguments), then we would have to negate language itself. Linguists recognize that words and language only facilitate meaning, it is only a tool to attempt to transfer thought from one brain to another.
Another logical representation for “IS” is within set theory where we understand that the statement “x is y” means “x is a member of y” or that “x is in the set of y things”. In other words, by set theory, when we state that the grass is green, what we are stating is that “grass” (x) is in the set of “green things” (y), logically. Linguistically we understand that we are not assigning some absolute value to grass, some Platonic “greenness”, but what we are doing is simply stating that the grass shares a property (quality of visual perception or color for simplicity) with other things in the set of green things. So we are saying something very different here.
A major problem of Wilson’s is that he only cursorily stole from one logical system, which appears to be a bi-valued logic system. Logicians have long recognized that this system does not adequately describe reality, so several multi-valued logic systems have been developed including three-valued logic, finite valued logic, and general fuzzy logic. What has changed is not the language, but how we DESCRIBE the language. Simply put, Wilson is talking out of his ass and doesn’t have a fucking clue.
To make matters worse, Wilson plugs in New Age mumbo-jumbo into his “reasoning”. This is how people once figured out that witches floated and proceeded to tie up people they didn’t like and throw them into the nearest lake. Oh, and wars ARE NOT fought because of words. They are fought for power. So many many many things wrong with everything that came out of Wilson’s mouth, so little time.
How much sleep do you have to get before you type “Don’t Drink and Drive, Kids”? love, MP
Greetings Joe Rogan. You are an interesting human. I first heard of you on Fear Factor and instantly disliked you, but later realized it was a mistaken judgement and the show was what I really disliked. Then on UFC you started commentating and I then knew that you were a special kind of human. Your commentary was perfect in its objective bias. You would honestly say, fighter A is a striker, fighter B a wrestler, both very skilled, but fighter A is more likely to win a standup and fighter B more likely to win a ground match. You would not say one fighter is superior to the other, but you would simply lay out the probability that each fighter is more likely to win in their own particular specialty.
Then I, fascinated with Terrence McKenna, searched on youtube for ‘DMT’ and found your 5 minute interview talking about your experience with DMT. I was always intrigued about whether the ‘self-transforming jeweled objects’ the elves show you was some sort of archetypal ‘vision’ that all people see on DMT/ ayahuasca, or is it a sort of ‘copycat’ vision which Terrence McKennas made so famous that subsequent trippers invariably experienced the same trip. Unfortunately, I’ve never met or heard of someone who tried DMT before hearing about Terrence McKenna’s experience with it. How about yourself, did your elf trip preclude your hearing of the elfs?
What piqued my interest in you as a person, was your comment on how you find it ironic that some people can instantly denounce the possibility of God, but will except the alien, or 2012, with the same amout of zealoutrous fervor that a Bible thumper will of God. This comment hooked me. I then knew that you were a human of interest, a person to watch out for and that you had access to egoless reason, which meant you were a person to learn truth from.
I remember at age 5 despite conditioning to the contrary, I realized there was no evidence of God and therefore my belief became atheism. Then at age 19 I realized my mistake. I was making the same mistake that God believers make. I was committing to a belief that was based on a problem with no solution. Nowadays I simply enjoy being open to both possibilities, after all who would really want to know anyways? Its the central mystery that motivates us in our quest to ask and answer more and more questions as we progress and evolve in science and sociology. I don’t want to know, because what then? It actually comforts me to have such a powerful question looming just over the horizon of my human accessability. I’ve always been happiest on the train, in between destinations. Everyone on Earth is agnostic. Anyone who says different is either incapable of deductive reason, or egoically entrenched in their preferred ideology.
Well, I’d like to offer a correspondence friendship to you Joe. I’m a normal guy, 29, I play poker professionally and I do normal guy stuff like say, ‘holy fuck did you just see that highkick by silva?’ or, go drinking with friends in little Italy cafes and pickup girls, or play Call of Duty III and bomb ‘terrorists’ from an AC-130 gunship. In short, I am a normal member of society and I do normal things to bide my time and stake my fair share of the world’s resources for my own personal gain.
But, my sole motivation and goal in life it to learn as much as possible in all disciplines of knowledge before I pass into the next. That’s all. I am an intellectual in the purest sense. Not because I’m other worldly smart or because I’ve memorized every Nietzche book published, hell I don’t even know if that’s how you spell Nietzche. What makes me an intellectual is that learning new information and distilling it objectively into a framework of the world that is accessible to me and to others, is my primary goal and the source of my greatest high. I love questions. You know, the simple questions like how was the Universe created and why? What is the meaning of life and how was it started? And is there a God and what is ‘his’ role? But most importantly, after answering all these questions, I suspect I’ll reach no level of supposed enlightenment, I’ll not be called a guru, I’ll not be called a genius, all that I wish for after answering all these questions, is to be able to sit down in a green flowering field with my girlfriend on a sunny summer’s day and say, ‘hmm, how interesting, how interesting.’
forvey7teen@gmail.com
All high-level conversations welcome.
I would befriend Freedman, he seems cool. (See if you can talk some sense into that Joe guy for me
) Love, MP
Sweet – Robert Anton Wilson. Did you ever take a look at his “Cosmic Trigger I : Final Secret of the Illuminati” book? I mentioned it to you last time you were on Fitzsimmons’ Show – not entirely sure that I got the title correct though.
I couldn’t be happier that you will be back on 420!!! (does Roscoe’s deliver??)
I’m reading “Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior” by Chogyam Trungpa right now and it seems to fit with this blog post. Perhaps it’s harmoniously tangential. Curious how harmony can permeate like that sometimes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqnEGu8VF8Y
A generation of intrepid tripsters leaves … the likes of Robert Anton Wilson, John C Lilly, Ken Kesey,… and a new generation arrives. It will be an interesting decade this one. Books, films, music, like a city map, for directions, the map is not the territory. The (Chinese finger trap) mind is nothing but thought, a by-product of karma appearing in the Self. The Self is Dope.
Your mission, should you decide to accept it… is to transform energy, period.
Joe this is way off subject, you are a fucking bad ass, just watched some of your stand up, my sides are still hurting. im stoked for ufc 97 are you commentating that night? I watched your opinions on the Rua and Liddell fight, i’m really hoping for a great battle. I agree with you statement on intelligence in the ring the best fighters are the ones who don’t take much damage and I have been a huge fan of Machinda for that reason, i think he poses a great threat at the 205 division. Do yo still train mma? Thanks for your time I know your a busy guy.
joe they took the video down
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