THIS IS A TEST…
OF YOUR REALITY BROADCASTING SYSTEM

After countless back-n-forths with She Who Can Fit Into My Pocket - an objectivist friend debating me over what she believes to be my subjectivist opinions - using Robert Anton Wilson's Neuro-semantic KH Table, I came up with a test to find out if your mind is infinite or do you only grasp absolutes?
I don't really believe truth is subjective, just ever-changing. And when it comes to memory, forget it. Each person's reality-tunnel is structured by their emic-reality -- emic-realities are thoughts, feelings and sense impressions created in the mind when communicating with one another, and reality tunnels are no more than one or more emic-realities established as a vivid metaphor transmitted into symbolism and traveling across the neurons of your brain.
Yes, the Aristotelian logic of "A is A" is correct, but I'd like to add that the letter A has different pronunciations.
To put it simply, there is no actual past as you remember it. The past that has happened, has just that…happened, but your memory is not an exact representation of it.
Yesterday, I awoke at the crack of dawn, put on some clothes and went out to have a quiet word with the garbage men about what they keep leaving behind. She Who Shares My Bed may remember me waking up in the middle of the night, running out half-naked to yell at the garbage men for their shitty work ethics. While the garbage men themselves may remember me as some crazy-looking skinhead in a t-shirt and boxers trying to criticize them in the middle of their work day, on something they've heard a thousand times that morning already.
The above example is a bit too simplistic, but we're coming up on the test.
Is your world a two-dimensional dualist tug-of-war between right and wrong, or multi-dimensional?
You can answer each question immediately, or stop and think.
Is the answer true or false… or could it be something else? And if so, what?

1) Water boils at 100 degrees centigrade.
2) P Q = Q P
3) Any set, which is part of another set, is smaller than the set of which it originally came from.
4) Paris Hilton is an ugly slut.
5) There is a tenth planet beyond Pluto.
6) "Destroy My Ass Volume III" is a dirty flick.
7) Vapors saturate my dreams in a colorless fashion.
8) The Pope is infallible in matters of faith and dogma.
9) Salvador Dali is a better artist than M. C. Escher.
10) Entropy increases in all closed systems.
11) The statement below is false.
12) The above statement is true.
13) All men are created equal.
14) A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim.
15) All mathematics can be deduced by Set Theory.
16) The women I fuck are the best looking women in the world.

I was going to post the answers in another blog about two weeks later, thinking this article would be too long, but to hell with that.
Here goes…

1) "Water boils at 100 degrees centigrade." - Conditionally true. Water does boil at 100 degrees centigrade, but only at sea level. This would be false on Mount Llullaillaco, or if you're halfway digging to China.

2) "P Q = Q P" - This is true only in ordinary mathematics. This is false in the Quantum Math employed by John von Neumann to describe subatomic events. A human-scale analog of quantum logic would be as such: Imagine an entire ghetto of welfare cases where P equals marriage, while Q equals pregnancy. In most of the inhabitant's reality tunnels PQ (marriage into pregnancy) does not equal QP (pregnancy into marriage).

3) "Any set, which is part of another set, is smaller than the set of which it originally came from." - This is true, but only in finite sets. Now, Georg Cantor has created a "proof" this is false when applied to transfinite sets. Some mathematicians laugh at Georg, while most are actually unsure of the final result. Therefore it is false in his reality tunnel, and true for others, while indeterminate for the rest.

4) "Paris Hilton is an ugly slut." - However passionately you may agree, this comment is neither true, false, nor indeterminate. There is no know scientific procedure which can help us deduce truth in this statement, so it must be classified as "self-referential", otherwise known as opinion - a statement showing how the speaker's reality tunnel is functioning. A multi-dimentionalist would have stated, "To me, Paris Hilton is an ugly slut."

5) "There is a tenth planet beyond Pluto." - This was false for some time. Later gravitational math implied that there was another planet beyond Pluto, so this statement then changed to indeterminate. As of 2001, it is now true, and math shows there may even be an eleventh planet in our solar system.

6) "'Destroy My Ass Volume III' is a dirty flick." - This is again "self-referential". If one sees this as being true, they are confusing what is going on in their own nervous system for what is measurably out there, on the screen for others.

7) "Vapors saturate my dreams in a colorless fashion." - With this statement we cannot measure my dreams, said vapors nor define what is "colorless fashion" so this statement is considered neither true, nor false, nor indeterminate nor self-referential, but instead it is meaningless.

8) "The Pope is infallible in matters of faith and dogma." - This is neither true, false, indeterminate nor even self-referential. This is a game-rule. Many Catholics who read that statement are too weak-minded or brainwashed to use their own opinions, or any self-reference against that statement. It has been indoctrinated in their minds enough to where this statement is a truth to those playing the Papist game. Plus, he is not infallible - he's dead.

9) "Salvador Dali is a better artist than M. C. Escher." - This is not self-referential (nor is it actually opinion), but an evaluation. Here one is not trying to evaluate one's own aesthetics, techniques or emotions, but another's.

10) "Entropy increases in all closed systems." - This is almost certainly true, especially when looking on human-scale terms, say prison. This law has proven itself so valuable in physics and mathematics that any variation or exception would have the scientific community scrambling to redefine "closed systems".

11) "The statement below is false." - For the time being this must be indeterminate, as this statement cannot yet be valued. We cannot evaluate the truthfulness of this statement under any dimension until we conclude the next statement to be indeed true, false, or whatever.

12) "The statement above is true." - This has now revealed to us what is known as a "strange loop". If it were true, it would be false, and if it were to be false, it would be true. Sounds trivial, but it isn't, as there are hundreds of strange loops in logic and mathematics. So many that it requires sophisticated knowledge of them to detect them. In Paul Watzlavik's "Pragmatics of Human Communication" and "How Real is Real?" he argues that many mental illnesses are internalizations of such strange loops and are attempts to live out their consequences. Alan Watts also proposed, a bit more grimly, in "Psychotherapy of the East and West" that whole societies can become trapped in such strange loops. I have a good example too… When asked why we were in Israel during the first Gulf War, Congressman Mel Levine answered, "We are stationed there to protect them from Arab attack." The strange loop here is the war was between Iraq and the US, and the bombs did not fly Israel's way until the United States stationed themselves there.
Another (though fictitional) example would be in George Orwell's "1984", where the giant pyramid reads: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

13) "All men are created equal." - Another game rule. This one of the Jeffersonian age. If you are not playing that game, it doesn't apply and is therefore false - to you. If you agree, it's true. If you don't even understand it, it's meaningless.

14) "A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim." - This statement is a steam-of-conscious / poetry and makes it meaningless to anyone, but who originally spoke those words. Mind you, Dutch Shultz did have a bullet in his stomach at the time he spoke those words, but it's still poetry nonetheless.

15) "All mathematics can be deduced by Set Theory." - Indeterminate. Some mathematicians believe it, some do not. Proof is still being sought.

16) "The women I fuck are the best looking women in the world." - This is the only absolute truth in this entire article.

Now, each statement made - whether true, false or whatever else - will create an existential reality-labyrinth for those who believe it. So remember, what you believe imprisons you… convictions cause convicts.
Here we're trying to cover the opposite effect, as in the Vedic Tantric mantra, "nâdevo devam arcayet" - translation: "by none but a god shall a god be worshipped."
Simpler still, if you don't like the truth… go out and make some of your own.

The Strange Loop Theory

The Strange Loop phenomenon is simply a paradigm involving a forward moving system, which somehow finds itself back at the starting-point, and was made popular for finding paradoxes in logic in 1987 when college professor of Cognitive Science, History and Philosophy of Science, Douglas R. Hofstadter began to use it in his writings.
A great example is broadcast media vs. the FCC. A booby threw us back to square one.
It turns out that because of these Strange Loops, you and I cannot communicate. The Strange Loops in normal conversation and everyday logic sets up biases and mental blocks for any set-logic, which may differ from our own - making all others into crooks and cheats, liars and thieves.
Setting ourselves up to tear the fabric of this society in a fit psychosis, all by our own madness we will not control… but could.
A society, by loose definition, is a group of unequal beings organizing to meet common needs, but boy has our current herd of cattle had a number worked on them…
According to psychologist Paul Watzlavik, normally sane people can behave in totally irrational and sometimes borderline psychotic episodes due to a society based on systematic lying (superstitions, media, politics, even commercials).
Psychiatrist R. D. Laing claimed systematic lying is possibly one of the highest factors in informational psychosis and breakdowns of personal, one-on-one communications.
In other words, we ourselves are stuck in a Strange Loop - society is driving us nuts.
As one grows up feeling they are being lied to constantly, two disorders arise which are carried in the psyche throughout life and may get worse with adulthood:
1) "disinformation situation" - where those lied to begin to distrust and demonize everyone else, including those who were previously and usually honest, which in turn causes "indirect alluding", which is where one believes all statements have underlying meaning besides what is literally meant.
Example: One may have second thoughts or cold feet about a project and the listener will take that as a direct threat against any previous promises, instead of seeing it as a simple reaction to fear, sorrow or common indecisiveness, active only for that moment alone - at least until a confirmation or breaching of said contract, correct?
2) "projection" - seeing (or reading into something) what you believe you should expect to see or even want to see, first theorized by Sigmund Freud, but also poeticized by Friedrich Nietzsche with the simple line, "We are all greater artists than we realize."
Example: One writes to another "it gets me laid," and the reader thrusts their own fantasies (or insecurities) - of say promiscuous sex, tawdry affairs and filthy liaisons - onto what is being read, believing the writer to be a sex maniac.
In this age of real-time electronic communications and microwave-able dinners, these two symptoms of systematic lying help many forget we need to "psychologically" go back a few centuries, reorganize our metaprogramming and return to living in a literal society. Where words mean what they mean, without the prejudices we place behind them on our own.
A man was once only as good as his word… now, he's only as good as the lie he can get away with.

2005