The Mind Playing Tricks On Itself
By Bogus
People read RAW for a lot of different reasons – but for myself I find his material on belief systems and perception the most interesting. In my little reality tunnel this seems like the core material, with all the rest as illustration.
I realise that some people find affinity with Bob because of his cheerful approach to drugs, or his adventures in magick and initiation, or even his joy in the literature of the Moderns. Many may mistake him for a believer in conspiracy theories, for instance, a lunatic fringe person. Many in the lunatic fringe might consider him an arch-sceptic.
Extremists tend to see extremes. So, communists see anarchists as right-wing libertarians verging on fascism…whereas the extreme Right Wing may see anarchists as the most subversive of the left-wingers they face.
The anarchist’s fate – to get shot at by both sides.
I think that by approaching Bob through the middle ground of how we perceive things, how we estimate values, and how we assess probability and likelihood we can see what a useful set of tools for thinking he offered. For instance, he considered the study of ‘conspiracy theories’ as an exercise in making such ‘guestimates’ about the world, and estimating how easily others may fool us, or how easily we may fool ourselves. It comes as little surprise that intelligence agencies might appear to have a finger in the UFO pie, for instance, as they specialise in information, misinformation and disinformation. Secret societies and resistance movements and subversive activity all seem isomorphic (they have similar structures) – and all exploit the human delight in secrecy, as well as in figuring things out. The words ‘engineer’ and ingenuity have the same roots. Many people love a puzzle. 
My own background lies in conjuring, with an additional (theoretical) interest in scams, cons, hustles and other low-life versions of ‘cheating the odds’.
In this cross-over world I would offer as evidence, a book about Orson Welles (a man Bob much admired) focussing on his magic career, and written by a man high up in military info/disinfo circles. Bart Whaley’s Orson Welles: The Man Who Was Magic – which you can score online as a huge ebook, from Lybrary (Chris Wasshuber’s one man campaign to make unusual magic books available online).
How we perceive things, and what conclusions we draw from our perceptions seems to have fascinated RAW. I use the word ‘perception’ in the broadest sense – the sense in which all illusions (including hallucinations, dreams, visualisations, etc) count as real mental perceptions (present time events in the bodybrainmind that we take as ‘real’) even if – in a more rigorous sense, you might consider them misperceptions. In order to make that judgement, however, you’d need to feel confident that you know ‘what is really going on’. The human attempt to see the world clearly, and without prejudice or filters, goes back a long way.
As John Lilly said “Yoga is the science of the East, Science is the yoga of the West”. Both techniques seem aimed at finally seeing the world ‘as it is’. Rather than assume that I can say anything useful or convincing about an enlightened view of the world or how it works, I’d like to approach from the other direction and consider the filters and blinkers that may prevent us having a clear view.
“Appearances will not trap you; accepting appearances as real will trap you.”
For structuring this thinking, I will draw heavily on a map devised by Bart Whaley –in his book he often refers to Orson’s ability to avoid either-or thinking and to perceive an unexpected Third Option. More importantly, Whaley works for intelligence agencies as a specialist on Deception Detection.
People get deceived because they don’t systematically consider alternative explanations for the evidence available, or perhaps incorrectly weigh what evidence they do have, rather than seek further corroboration. They will also often dismiss contrary evidence or ambiguity, and jump to conclusions.
Other people may fool or mislead us, but we can also do that to ourselves. The most blatant misperceptions arise from deliberate deception on the part of others – whether benign (conjuring and entertainment) or malign (military and spying) or simply amoral (advertising and politics).
Of course, people can also deliver misinformation quite unintentionally, offering out-of-date or incomplete information, ambiguity or incoherence in communication, etc.
You’re only fooling yourself
Then again, we (and they) can simply fool ourselves, through obstinacy, rigid thinking, misplaced loyalty to tribal views, etc. We may perceive patterns in the random, where no pattern exists – we may accept incomplete data, or anecdotal evidence – we may dismiss clues that point away from our preferred explanation, through denial or wishful thinking, etc.
And finally, some illusions fool us through no fault of our own. The limitations of our sensory range can create optical and auditory illusions and tunnel vision. The nature of the language we use, and the culture we belong to – all these can blind us to certain ‘truths’. We need to challenge and eliminate all these sources of misperception if we can ever hope to achieve what Whaley calls Pluperception (things perfectly seen).
To eliminate self-induced illusions we need tools (telescopes, microscopes, x-rays, etc) to expand our sensory range, tools to investigate the limitations of our languages (NLP, maths, E-Prime, ideograms, poetry, etc) and to range outside of our narrow world (travel and adventure both mental and physical). Such work might also indicate or reveal our self-deception. It sometimes feels hard to believe we can fool ourselves but Freud described the layers of consciousness (or compartmentalisation) that allows different parts of the self (or perhaps ‘different selves’ – cf: Gurdjieff) to fool themselves. We might consider ‘denial’ and ‘wishful thinking’, etc as aspects of our not facing up to, or acknowledging, uncomfortable truths or ‘the facts’.
In nature we find many examples of apparent deception, from camouflage (simulation) to feigned injury (dissimulation) to draw predators from the nest, etc. In Darwinian terms these appear to fall into the area of ‘unintentional misrepresentation’ but we find it very hard to describe them without assuming intent, purpose and intelligence behind the behaviour. Indeed Philip K Dick offers the extreme view that we can never feel sure our whole environment (or world) doesn’t con us all the time. He explores the idea of Zebra (VALIS) as an alien trickster or ‘god in disguise’. We find it hard to distinguish accidental from intentional outcomes – and the attempt to disguise events as random or 'accidental' certainly turns up among cheats of all kinds.
"Once Is Happenstance, Twice Is Coincidence, Three Times Is Enemy Action"
Skipping hurriedly away from such vast and paranoid speculation I find myself back in the realm of deliberate deception, where we can make some attempt to detect deception – looking for incongruities, or discrepancies; considering alternative hypotheses and explanations (brainstorming), etc.
I briefly touched on how cons, hoaxes and scams rely on cutting off the victim from easy access to 'reality checks', and introducing them to an invented and temporary 'world' (which seems real to them) in “Always Assuming” – but Whaley divides the techniques into Simulation (displaying the false) which may involve fabrication of lies or evidence, and Dissimulation (hiding the real) to distract from the true nature or value of events.
Simulation might include mimicry (a real thing imitating another), inventing (false display) or decoy (misdirection of attention).
Dissimulation may employ Masking (screening, shielding, camouflage), Repackaging (disguising something as something else) or Dazzling (hiding by confusion tactics).
When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Sherlock Holmes
Of course, deliberate deception does not always go one way. In espionage, as in Poker, both sides attempt to manipulate the other, through reading ‘tells’, displaying false ‘tells’, bluff and double bluff in an infinite regress of wariness and suspicion.
Judges and juries, policemen, journalists and philosophical investigators of any kind have to decide on such competing claims to know ‘reality’. We expect different levels of verification from philosophy, law, science, maths, myths, etc.
The risks of self-deception explain why science demands controlled, double blind, randomised, repeatable, peer-reviews studies. We need to adopt a similar attitude.
I consider RAW’s approach as a lifelong commitment to a process of seeing through illusions, reducing ‘lying to oneself’, checking things for yourself (to eliminate unintentional misinformation from others) and a certain wariness in interpersonal communications, especially with authority figures and 'experts' – perhaps applying Leary’s Theory of games, to note where we find the bodyminds (nervous systems) in spacetime, and what signals they exchange.
Follow Up Links:
A couple of excerpts from Whaley's book on Welles:
Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman wrote of his first movie projector: “This little rickety machine was my first conjuring set. And even today I remind myself with childish excitement that I am really a conjurer, since cinematography is based on deception of the human eye." Or brain, as Orson had understood long before Bergman when he wrote, “The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world, a world that is not ours and that brings us to the heart of a great secret. Here magic begins.... A film is a ribbon of dreams."
Although Orson had a streak of romanticism, it isn't present here, because for him dreams are very much part of reality. “A film," he'd earlier explained, “is a dream. A dream that is perhaps vulgar, stupid, dull and shapeless; it is perhaps a nightmare. But a dream is never an illusion." Shakespeare and Freud would have agreed. (page 106) 
and about F For Fake: (page 396)
Terry Comito makes a clever summation:
Welles is “truly honest and sincere" in the way a truly committed charlatan is, working his material with great dexterity and high spirits, like a juggler keeping the bright fragments spinning bravely in mid air. Welles has never been the sort of magician to be content with producing rabbits from hats. His is the more dangerous trick of making the world disappear and leaving us, with no firm ground under our feet, confronting only the enigmatic smile of the prestidigitator.
Actually, Orson never accepted this Hindu and Buddhist philosophy that the real world is itself an illusion. On the contrary, like psychologist William James, he preached James, he preached that all illusions including dreams are real—real mental perceptions, albeit misperceptions.
Orson later explained his own role in the film. He'd purposefully labeled himself a “charlatan" to avoid “looking like some superior moral judge of tricksters. I didn't think I was a charlatan, but a lot of very serious film writers have taken that up and written at great length about Orson Welles as a charlatan — out of his own lips. But that was a trick too, it was all a trick. Everything about that picture was a trick." And that is precisely why this film is so refreshing and delightful to Machiavellians and so distasteful to Faustians. Like Machiavelli with The Prince, Orson gives all of us a how-to manual of deception to defend ourselves from the true charlatans of this world.
|
