RAW: GENERAL SEMANTICS AT WIKIPEDIA

Connections to other disciplines

General semantics has important links with analytic philosophy and the philosophy of science; it could be characterized without too much distortion as applied analytic philosophy. The influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, and of early operationalists and pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce, is particularly clear in the foundational ideas of general semantics. Korzybski himself acknowledged many of these influences.

The concept of "silence on the objective level" attributed to Korzybski and his insistence on consciousness of abstracting are parallel to some central ideas in Zen Buddhism. Korzybski is not recorded to have acknowledged any influence from this quarter, but he formulated general semantics during the same years that the first popularizations of Zen were becoming part of the intellectual currency of educated speakers of English. On the other hand, later Zen-popularizer Alan Watts was influenced by ideas from general semantics.

L. Ron Hubbard is widely believed to have used the theory in his creation of Dianetics and later to have incorporated it into Scientology, and acknowledges this in several texts; the first of these two movements in turn introduced General Semantics to a wider audience in the early 1950s, including popular science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt, personal growth theorist Harvey Jackins and his movement Re-evaluation Counseling and movements like Gestalt therapy. The founders of these movements did not themselves credit Korzybski for their ideas.

Albert Ellis (1913-2007), who developed Rational emotive behavior therapy, acknowledged influence from general semantics and delivered the Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture in 1991. The Bruges (Belgium) center for Solution Focused Therapy operates under the name Korzybski Instituut Training and Research Center.^[42]

During the 1940s and 1950s, general semantics entered the idiom of science fiction, most notably through the works of A. E. van Vogt, The World of Null-A and its sequels, and Robert A. Heinlein, Gulf. The ideas of general semantics became a sufficiently important part of the shared intellectual toolkit of genre science fiction to merit parody by Damon Knight and others; they have since shown a tendency to reappear (often without attribution) in the work of more recent writers such as Samuel R. Delany, Suzette Haden Elgin and Robert Anton Wilson. In 2008, John Wright extended van Vogt's Null-A series with Null-A Continuum.

Neil Postman, founder of New York University's media ecology program in 1971, edited ETC.: A Review of General Semantics from 1976 to 1986. Postman's student Lance Strate, a co-founder of the Media Ecology Association,^[43] served as executive director of the Institute of General Semantics from 2007 to 2010.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics#Connections_to_other_disciplines

Joyce Pound Shaw and Ulysses in Porno-mags

SNIPPET FROM: An end to bad heir days: The posthumous power of the literary estate

By Gordon Bowker

The question of rights in Joyce's work was a fraught one even during his lifetime. Fearing prosecution, no one would publish Ulysses complete and unabridged until Sylvia Beach, the American bookseller in Paris, bravely did so in 1922. But Joyce's notoriety attracted pirates , and at one time he was unprotected by good contracts or good law. In November 1925, he found that without his permission Ulysses was being published serially in the magazine Two Worlds by Samuel Roth, the New York pornographer. His protests went unheeded. Roth simply sent a cheque for $1000 which Joyce refused to cash.

Among his literary friends and supporters, only Ezra Pound and Bernard Shaw were unsympathetic. Pound said that Joyce had only himself to blame for not registering his copyright in America. He advised him "to write letters to the press denouncing Roth", or alternatively, "organise a gang of gunmen to scare [him] out of his pants". But Roth, he warned, was a ruthless capitalist driven by avarice, not easily stopped.

Joyce was incensed, and with the aid of friends composed a letter of protest which was circulated among writers, attacking unjust American copyright law. Pound refused to sign, as did Shaw, who suspected a Joycean stunt.

READ ON HERE

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/an-end-to-bad-heir-days-the-posthumous-power-of-the-literary-estate-6285277.html

Semanto-phonetic writing systems

Semanto-phonetic writing systems
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/semanto-phonetic.php

The symbols used in these semanto-phonetic writing systems often represent both sound and meaning. As a result, these scripts generally include a large number of symbols: anything from several hundred to tens of thousands. In fact there is no theoretical upper limit to the number of symbols in some scripts, such as Chinese. These scripts could also be called logophonetic, morphophonemic, logographic or logosyllabic.
Semanto-phonetic writing systems may include the following types of symbol:

Pictograms and logograms

Pictograms or pictographs resemble the things they represent. Logograms are symbols that represent parts of words or whole words. The image on the right shows some examples of pictograms from the Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic and Chinese scripts. The Chinese characters used to look like the things they stand for, but have become increasingly stylized over the years.

Ideograms

Ideograms or ideographs are symbols which graphically represent abstract ideas. The image below shows a number of ideographic Chinese characters.

Compound characters

The majority of characters in the Chinese script are semanto-phonetic compounds: they include a semantic element, which represents or hints at their meaning, and a phonetic element, which shows or hints at their pronunciation. Below are a few such compound characters which all share a semantic element meaning 'horse'.

Sometimes symbols are used for their phonetic value alone, without regard for their meaning, for example when transliterating foreign names and loan words.

Semanto-phonetic writing systems currently in use

Chinese (Zhōngwén)

Japanese (Nihongo)

Semanto-phonetic writing systems used mainly for decorative, ceremonial or religious purposes

Naxi

Semanto-phonetic writing systems that are no longer used

Akkadian (Cuneiform)	Ancient Egyptian Demotic	Ancient Egyptian Hieratic
Ancient Egyptian Hieroglypic	Vietnamese (Chữ-nôm)	Jurchen
Khitan	Linear B	Mayan
Sumerian (Cuneiform)	Tangut (Xīxìa/Hsi-hsia)

Please note

transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) are used extensively throughout this website. The IPA transcriptions are the letters and other symbols which appear in square bracketts, like this [b], [p]. etc.
You can learn which sounds are represented by these letters and symbols at:
http://www.unil.ch/ling/page30184.html
http://www.unil.ch/ling/page12580.html (en français)

Other types of script

Abjads, Alphabets, Syllabic alphabets, Syllabaries, Semanto-phonetic writing systems, Undeciphered scripts, Alternative writing systems, Your con-scripts, A-Z index, Direction index, Languages by writing system, Language index

The Jumping Jesus Singularity

Thanks to Bobby Campbell for bringing this into my head. RAW on his jumping Jesus Hypothesis with some great visual accompanyment.

How drugs helped invent the Internet

Jason Silva seems to me to be a smart motherfucker who's touching on a large chunk of 'the tale of the tribe' and a large part of RAW's interests: linguistics, life extension, computers and neural-networks, philosophy and most importantly, i think, Techno-Optimism, as we enter 2012.
Fresh!
--Steve fly.


"The phrase that leaped to mind when I first saw Jason was ‘existential jazz’; like a trumpet player or modern-day digital Mingus, he jams, riffs and rhapsodizes through a tumbling thicket of ideas with such a sharp and vital alacrity that it can take the breath away. He’s a modern performance philosopher, reviving the vibe of Tim Leary and Buckminster Fuller and revivifying the dialogue that they started decades ago.--http://thisisjasonsilva.com/reviews/

McLuhan letter to Ezra Pound Dec.21st 1948

ON THE EZRA POUND/ MARSHALL MCLUHAN CORRESPONDENCEby EDWIN J. BARTON

http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss1/1_1art11.htm

"The only problem with this mode of thinking and presentation, as McLuhan was to discover, lay in the resistance with which it was met, and continues to be met, by Western intellectuals. For, as McLuhan put it in a letter written in 1948, this way of writing and thinking is inaccessible to those whose mentality is "incorruptibly dialectical."

The American mind is not even close to being amenable to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this. America is 100% 18th century. The 18th century chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy-the basic fact that as A is to B so C is to D. AB : CD. It can see AB relations. But all relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to a deep occultation of all human thought for the U.S.A. (21 December 1948)

It was precisely this structure and action of the metaphorical analogy, of course, that enabled McLuhan and his son Eric, many years later, to arrive at tetradic model of laws with which to study media "scientifically."--EDWIN J. BARTON.