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There are a great many writers and thinkers whose ideas have influenced me over the years.
One of the people who has had the most impact on me is Robert Anton Wilson. He is the author of a variety of fiction and non-fiction books including "Prometheus Rising", "The Illuminatus! Trilogy", and many more.
The following is from an interview with RAW conducted by David Jay Brown. It is taken from the website of Maybe Logic Academy.
- 3) What is "maybe logic"?
A label that got stuck on my ideas by filmmaker Lance Bauscher. I decided it fits. I certainly recognize the central importance in my thinking -- or in my stumbling and fumbling efforts to think -- of non-aristotelian systems. That includes von Neumann's three-valued logic [true, false, maybe], Rapoport's four-valued logic [true, false,indeterminate, meaningless], Korzybski's multi-valued logic [degrees of probability.] and also Mahayana Buddhist paradoxical logic [it "is" A. it "is" not A, it "is" both A and not A, it "is" neither A nor not A]. But, as an extraordinarily stupid fellow, I can't use such systems until I reduce them to terms a simple mind like mine can handle, so I just preach that we'd all think and act more sanely if we had to use "maybe" a lot more often. Can you imagine a world with Jerry Falwell hollering "Maybe Jesus 'was' the son of God and maybe he hates Gay people as much as I do" -- or every tower in Islam resounding with "There 'is' no God except maybe Allah and maybe Mohammed 'is' his prophet"?
- 4) Why do you think politics on this planet is such a huge mess, and human beings are so violent towards one another?
Because most people have never heard of maybe logic and live in an either/or world, which applied to ethics and social policy becomes a good/evil world. Human vanity then determines that all the damned eejit always put themselves in the "good" position and anybody who disagrees in the "evil." Look at any literary/politics journal --any journal of the nonscientific "intelligentsia"-- and you'll see that they all sound as medieval as George W. Bush or Osama bin Laden. Violence comes of self-righteousness and self-righteousness comes of right/wrong logic, without maybes.
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