Quantum Psychology, Chapter Four

With apologies to the ghost of Robert Anton Wilson and to Eric Wagner, this is another chapter in which it is difficult to follow the exercizes as written. So I will post one, and pose a question of my own. The first is from the book (I've adapted it slightly and linked to a Picasso)

1. Let every member of the book mentally "acquire" the following 13 items:

a toy fire truck
a Barbie doll
a reproduction of a Picasso painting
a brick
a screw-driver
a hammer
a turkey feather
a piece of balsa wood
a rubber ball
a piece of hard wood, such as birch
a "ghetto blaster" (portable stereo)
a pornographic novel
a philosophical treatise by Bishop George Berkeley

Place these items on the floor and let everyone sit around them. First divide them into two groups: Red things and not-red things. See how many times ambiguous cases arise (e.g., should a book with a red-and-white cover go in the red pile or the not-red pile?

Let the 13 objects be divided  into another two groups -- useful objects and toys. See how many ambiguities arise. (Does art belong among toys? Does pornography?)

Each week, as long as the group continues, let somebody think of another dualism and divided the 13 items into two piles according to that new dichotomy. [Each week, I will ask one person who had been participating to do this -- Tom.]


Note each case where two things fall into different groups according to one dualist system fall into the same group according to another dualist system. (E.g., balsa wood and hard wood will fall into the same group if one divides "wooden things" from "non-wooden things" but will fall into different groups if one divides "things that float" from "things that do not float").

Note how the Aristotelian argument "It 'is' either an A or a not-A" appears after you have found several things that belong on the same side of one dualism but on opposite sides of other dualisms.


Some suggestions for other dualisms: "educational things" and "entertaining things," "scientific things" and "non-scientific things," "good" things and "bad" things, "organic things" and "inorganic things."

See how many odd and imaginative  dualisms the group can create.

At this point, an obvious fact seems worthy of special emphasis. Actually doing these exercizes  in a group, as suggested, teaches more than actually reading about them.


2. Robert Anton Wilson writes, "Joyce's Ulysses mutated the novel by describing one ordinary day, not as an "objective reality" in the Aristotelian sense, but as a labyrinth in which nearly a hundred narrators (or "narrative voices") all report different versions of what happened. Different reality-tunnels." Please give another example of a novel that uses this strategy.