Personal Time-Binding

An aspect of time-binding involves each of us learning from ourselves, learning how to make the most of our individual experiences. My wife has referred to this as "personal time-binding." Becoming conscious of yourself as a personal time-binder, you can recognize that you communicate with yourself as well as with others.

We talk to ourselves a lot. We can use this internal chatter for worse and better. When we label ourselves “stupid” or with similar negative higher-order abstractions, we create a negative environment for ourselves. When we make perfectionistic demands on ourselves, unconditionally and absolutistically telling ourselves what we “must” do, we diminish our chances of fully realizing our potentialities. Instead, as Albert Ellis has emphasized throughout his writings, we can extensionalize our internal chatter, just as we extensionalize our talk with others. Ellis’ books provide valuable material for learning how to talk to yourself in this way.

For example, I can change absolutistic demands, such as “I must have good relationships” into probabilistic preferences, such as “I prefer to have good relationships but I don’t absolutely have to have them.” Rather than absolutistically ‘shoulding on myself,’ I can use conditional or non-absolutistic shoulds instead. So I can tell myself that “If I want good relationships, I probably should accept other people and take responsibility for how I act. However, it is not absolutely guaranteed that people will accept me just because I accept them and act responsibly. Moreover, I am not a total ‘shit’ if I fail to do this perfectly all of the time even if it might seem more preferable.”

In learning how to talk to yourself this way, you not only take greater responsibility for your behavior, but take responsibility for treating yourself well. Thus, you can learn how to use your capacities most effectively by cooperating with yourself — enhancing your realistic self-acceptance.

Your personal time-binding includes both the environment you create for yourself and others as well as the personal legacy you leave for future generations. As you act in such a way as to bring your legacy to fruition, you contribute to your own and others’ daily well-being. Time-Binders — go for it!

[Adapted from the article Living Extensionally, published in ETC.: A Review of General Semantics, July 2004]

"Words As Symbolic Communication In The Healthcare Setting"

In an excellent article, "Words As Symbolic Communication In The Healthcare Setting," Christopher Bear Beam writes about his experiences as a hospital chaplin and as a patient and how he has used general-semantics notions to help himself and others. He notes:

Today, after a number of years of doing this work, I have concluded that those people who work in the field of the Healing Arts often are not equipped with the understanding of how their words are symbolic forms of communication having great import in their client’s minds. Since they are often seen as the experts in the field (this is starting to change as healthcare moves to more of participatory process, but there still are huge gaps in its practice) there is a primary accountability for taking the lead in communicating in a healthy way. I guess what I’m also saying is that it would be helpful for medical professionals to learn the principles of General Semantics that would give them more tools to work with in dialoguing with the people they serve. Another way of saying this is that it would give them a supportive means of symbol making that leads to more healthy outcomes.

As a veteran physical therapist and general-semantics scholar/practitioner I heartily agree.

The entire article is worth reading, printing out, and studying. And I don't mind that he plugs my wife's and my book Drive Yourself Sane: Using the Uncommon Sense of General Semantics, Revised Second Edition. 8-)

Read Words As Symbolic Communication In The Healthcare Setting

The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge

The following excerpt from my forthcoming biography of Alfred Korzybski discusses some issues that were coming to the fore immediately after the 1921 publication of Manhood of Humanity. During the winter of 1921-1922, Korzybski was staying at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California at the invitation of Scripps founder, biologist William Emerson Ritter. He was interacting with a lot of the scientists visiting and working there.:

The contacts, correspondence, and mutual recognition between Korzybski and the people he was meeting in the winter of 1921-22 gives a reasonable picture of the kinds of relations he had with scientists and other brain-workers throughout his career. From the beginnings of his efforts, he saw what he was attempting to do—found a new field of human engineering (as he was calling his efforts then)—as a scientific enterprise. Despite attempts later on by people like journalist Martin Gardner to picture him as a crank, Korzybski was never isolated from nor did he isolate himself from the scientific community. He sought and received advice and approval from many of the leading scientists and mathematicians of his day. Nonetheless, it was apparent even in La Jolla that what he was doing was outside the realm of conventional scientific categories.

Since Korzybski was trained as an engineer, he had no credentials in the academic fields that his work seemed to touch upon the most. He had called it “mathematical sociology” to start with, which didn’t help much. But his coinage of “human engineering” didn’t fit into many people’s conceptual boxes of engineering either. Figuring out what he was up to was a problem for a number of the people with whom he came in contact. It was a problem for Alfred as well. The scope of Korzybski’s concerns—so general yet so practical—attracted some people but puzzled, or even repelled, others.

Korzybski’s fellow Pole, sociologist Florian Znaniecki, discussed the various kinds of scientific workers in his 1940 book, The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge. In Znaniecki’s terms, Korzybski was clearly following the path of a “scientific explorer” a “creator of new knowledge.” “… All new developments in the history of knowledge” Znaniecki wrote, “have been due to those scientists who did more in their social roles than their circles wanted and expected them to do.” [Znaniecki, p. 164]

According to Znaniecki, two broad and overlapping areas were open for scientific explorers: the discovery of new facts and the discovery of new problems. Although he had studied the facts of history—including that of scientific and technological developments—and made use of accepted facts from the scientific studies of others, Korzybski had not discovered any new facts. Instead, with his theory of time-binding, he had discovered a new way of looking at those facts and a new set of problems.

If humans by definition ‘bind time’, then every area of human life—including people’s personal lives—is affected by the growth or stagnation of knowledge and its applications. In studying the mechanism of time-binding, Korzybski was focusing on people’s methods for gaining knowledge: understanding facts, formulating theories, and approaching problems. So he was interested not only in the content of what mathematicians, scientists and other scholars had discovered but also in the pathways and pitfalls of their acts of discovery.

In addition, although he was focusing on mathematics and science, especially the exact sciences, he realized that the areas of study that were relevant to the study of time-binding spanned the humanities and sciences. Indeed, he believed that the study of time-binding and its mechanism would help achieve the Leibnizian dream of unifying the various fields of knowledge. At the start of 1922, Alfred wrote the following to H. D. Brasefield, an Oakland, California high school principal interested in his work:

"…My aim is to unify science, and give a base for the brainworkers to unite around some constructive scientific as is possible doctrine. As a matter of fact we all speak about a “brotherhood of man” but such thing is impossible as long as we will not have a “brotherhood of doctrines”. Our mental processes are so scattered between the thousands of doctrines which each one is leading somewhere else. …The old system is breaking down, what next? No new doctrine is workable for the time being. …What [is] the way out? To provide a new method of analysis which would show clearly the valuations and thus help all to unite toward the same end. My book makes obvious that what we need today is more the RE-EDUCATION of THE EDUCATED than the education of the masses. … "[AK to H. L. Brasefield, January 5, 1922. A.K. Digital Archives (I.G.S), Folder 8, item 691]

In an era of growing specialization, his problem was to find an audience that would consider his unifying vision on its own terms without trying to stuff it into the container of one or another different, and more limited, standard discipline. He had special hopes of interesting mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. But there was no getting around one fact—as a scientific explorer and theoretical synthesizer, it didn’t seem likely that the formulator of time-binding would find an adequate home in any particular academic field.

"The Language of Confusion" by Rabbi Yonason Goldson

I'm guessing that this commentary by Rabbi Yonason Goldson will probably offend some of my readers in some way. So be it. I find it interesting and pertinent to this blog so am posting a link to it here. Rabbi Goldson contends the following: that 60 years later, Orwell's dystopian vision is more prophetic than ever.

A snippet from his essay:

"Teachers, be careful with your words," warns the Talmud, "lest the disciples who follow you will drink of evil waters and die." When the waters of wisdom become polluted with confusion and contradiction, it is society's youth who will pay the price through the erosion of moral clarity and moral principles.

I think Korzybski would agree to that. I know I do.

Here's the link for those who have an interest: The Language of Confusion

General Semantics-A Theory of Metacognition

In an article entitled Bridging the Research-Practice Divide: Using General-Semantics in Physical Therapy Practice I wrote the following which I still think applies. I shamelessly quote myself:

General-semantics constitutes a theory of metacognition, a working theory of how humans construct their perceptions, beliefs, theories, etc. Metacognition, thinking about thinking, has traditionally been considered part of the branch of philosophy called epistemology, the theory of knowledge.

Over the years many philosophers such as Plato and Descartes have speculated and theorized about how we know what we know. These theorists lacked much empirical knowledge of the human nervous system, psychology and other relevant areas of knowledge such as how scientists and mathematicians actually behave in order to gain knowledge. As a result their views were often riddled with untenable assumptions such as that of a `mind' separate from a `body'. Among other things, what distinguished Korzybski from these theorists was his effort to bring to bear studies in neuroscience, behavioral/social science, natural science, mathematics, linguistics and other fields to develop a scientific and thus up-to-date and open-ended, applied epistemology.

Reflections about Reflections

Korzybski would usually wrap up the lecture part of his seminars by reciting several quotes related to self-reflexiveness, one of the central formulations of his system. Self-reflexiveness involves the notion that you can make a map of your map, talk about your talking, abstract from your abstractions, 'think' about your 'thinking', etc., ongoingly.

Korzybski presented these favorite quotes of his in the unabridged version of a paper General Semantics, Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, and Prevention, which he delivered at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Cincinnati in 1940. He wrote:

'It should be noticed that in human life self-reflexiveness has even "material" implications, which introduce serious difficulties. Professor Cassius J. Keyser expresses this very aptly: "It is obvious, once the fact is pointed out, that the character of human history, the character of human conduct, and the character of all our human institutions depend both upon what man is and in equal or greater measure upon what we humans think man is." This is profoundly true.

'Professor Arthur S. Eddington describes the same problem in these words: "And yet, in regard to the nature of things, this knowledge is only an empty shell--a form of symbols. It is knowledge of structural form, and not knowledge of content. All through the physical world runs that unknown content, which must surely be the stuff of our consciousness. Here is a hint of aspects deep within the world of physics, and yet unattainable by the methods of physics. And, moreover, we have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature. We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the foot-print. And Lo! it is our own."

'Dr. Alexis Carrel formulated the same difficulty differently, but just as aptly: "To progress again man must remake himself. And he cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor." '

'General Semantics' Wordle

A wordle.com image I just produced from a word-list by my friend and colleague, Milton Dawes:

Mathematical Verse - Zero

Zero –
it holds nothing,
and even nothing has a place.

From The I.G.S. Archives - 'do not make speeches..'

The I.G.S. Archives remain a long-neglected resource of the scholarly world of the human sciences. 'The human sciences' don't know that yet. Neither do many people who consider themselves 'general semanticists'.

Korzybski maintained a massive correspondence with many of the major figures of twentieth-century intellectual, scientific life. These letters, among other archival materials—some of them on microfilm and in digital form, some still only available in original form—now reside at Columbia University and at the Institute of General Semantics.

Among the other archival materials, one can find notes from Korzybski's seminars, recordings and transcripts, letters to and from students, and more—much, much more. These reveal a richness that many people, mainly exposed to popularizations and diluted popularizations of popularizations of Korzybski's work, can barely imagine. Perhaps a Korzybski renaissance will happen as more people realize the depths not yet plumbed in the full extent of Korzybski's work. In the meantime, I remain one of the few people (alas) in the world who has ever delved into these materials with any amount of serious effort (mainly in the course of researching my biography of Korzybski). On this weblog, I will occasionally share some interesting 'bits and pieces' from the I.G.S. Archives that I've found along the course of my research.

Here is a little snippet from a letter that Korzybski wrote on April 11, 1949 to a student he had worked with, giving what he considered some well-needed advice to that person:

"...do not make speeches about G.S. I do not know whether you are well enough to do that. It is one thing to study it, but still another thing to talk about it. It is important for you to continute to study and apply the methods for your own orientation*, but first we have to understand the principles and apply them ourselves, before we can talk about them to others."

*[Korzybski used underlining in his typing to italicize rather than the italics I have used here.- BIK]

Quote of the Day - 'Luck'

"Better one ounce of luck than a pound of gold."
--- Yiddish proverb

From The Stray Thought Bin

I was once a prisoner of language.
But now I am on parole.

Quote of the Day - 'Civilization'

"If civilization is to be measured by the progress of human rationality, we can still use the yardstick of the cynic—which is no longer than a sigh." (1)

(1) Ben Hecht. 1943 (1944) A Guide For The Bedeviled. Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing Co., Inc., p. 38

From The Stray Thought Bin

My life is a work in progress....
with occasional regress.

General Semantics Glossary - Descriptive Level

Descriptive Level: the first verbal level [in an idealized hierarchy of abstraction represented by Korzybski's Structural Differential]; involves statements of 'fact', wherein we describe most specifically our past and/or present experiences.

Note
(1) from Drive Yourself Sane: Using the Uncommon Sense of General Semantics, Revised Second Edition.

What's Happening Now?

in part of the culture, i.e., environment
(neuro-evaluative, neuro-linguistic)
we're living-in/communicating-in/creating,
at apparently ever accelerating-exponentiating speed,
with some new electronic tools/media
like never before...for good and ill.

Get a feel by watching this short Youtube video
(an ad for Sprint but still worth looking at):

General Semantics Glossary - Delayed Evaluating

Delayed Evaluating: our potential ability to stop our immediate, automatic behavior long enough to sufficiently investigate the current situation before acting

Note
(1) from Drive Yourself Sane: Using the Uncommon Sense of General Semantics, Revised Second Edition.

Science and Sanity Haiku 2

What credit goes to
one who places plastic card
where no money is ?

Science and Sanity Haiku 1

Hypnotizing words
revive old deep-grooved patterns—
How to get out? Shhhh!