From the Stray Thought Bin - "The Pursuit of Sanity"

The pursuit of sanity is a never-ending effort to hit an ever-moving target. 

Stoicism – General-Semantics' Family Tree

Marshall McLuhan proposed one way (among others) to understand any particular human innovation: asking what earlier innovations, inventions, form(s) of media/technology, does this recall? An interesting exercise to do with Alfred Korzybski's General-Semantics (GS). 


Despite its potentially confusing name, GS is not primarily focused on language and 'meaning' as commonly understood.
Korzybski explicitly said that he was investigating human nature, i.e., time-binding, which he considered the defining activity of human existence. After his first, 1921 book Manhood of Humanity, where he explored time-binding and it's implications, he spent the rest of his life exploring the mechanism of time-binding, how it works and the practical application of this understanding by individuals. 


It boils down to the old stoical adage: live according to nature. Which means in part, finding out about your own species and individual natures. The stoics, saw human capacity for 'reason' as what differentiated us from animals, and they taught their students practical ways to apply 'reason' in their lives. 


I have found no better way to understand Korzybski's work and its place in the long span of human intellectual achievement, than to see him as one of the great figures in the stoic tradition though he did not emphasize that. His work appears to me a great contribution to that still living stream of practical wisdom for living. 

From the Stray Thought Bin – 'Agreement'

The only thing they could agree on was that their incomprehension of each other was mutual. 

From the Stray Thought Bin - 'Word Is Not Thing'

Words as words can qualify as 'things' as well. And the words about those things are not those things either. Some people, strangely, seem to have difficulty understanding that. Words seem quite slippery things, don't they? 

From the Stray Thought Bin - 'Don't Assume'

The only assumption I tell people not to assume is the assumption that they can have no assumptions. 

From the Stray Thought Bin - 'Troubleshooting'

To some people, a great troubleshooter may just look like a big trouble-maker. 

From the Stray Thought Bin – 'The Speed of Thought'

‘Thinking’ does not occur in a timeless, fleshless void; if relativity has abolished infinite speeds in physics, then the speed of ‘thought’ is not infinite either. 

From the Stray Thought Bin – 'Bad Students'

Do you realize that a 'bad student' may be a good learner? 

From the Stray Thought Bin – 'Foresight'

Without memory, there can be no foresight.