General Semantics, Dune, and Whole-System Thinking

Some of the most important works in the field of consciousness has been done by mathematicians.  Even to name a few:  Lewis Carroll, Arthur Koestler, Buckminster Fuller, Alfred Korzybski, Heisenberg, Bertrand Russel, and P D Ouspensky; all mathematicians.   According to Korzybyski, founder of the Science of General Semantics; mathematics is a language. 

So what is language, then?  Language is a model.  It is an internalized conceptualization of the world around us.  Thankfully, as an internal map, it takes up no physical space.  But as a map of an observer-observed based reality, it must include the observer within it.  In other words: your own all-inclusive map of reality includes you.  And here we are then, back to the concept of self-reflexivity, one of the major tenets, I believe, of consciousness.  *Note:  All-inclusive in this context should be understood as "not leaving anything out"  or  attempt-at all-inclusive internal map.  Korzybski stressed the importance of the fact that our internal map does not cover all possible experience or sense-data.  The reader must be willing to go up and down the ladder of abstraction, so to have "Consciousness of abstraction." 

According to Korzybski, the internal map is a generalization, or mental projection, based on experience.  As such, it cannot contain all experiences.  Korzybyski also stresses the importance of awareness of the level of abstraction present in a given conceptual model, which is what he means when he states “the map is not the territory.”  There is a component of abstraction present in all verbal models.

Not only is math a language, but as such a model, it is a more accurate representation of reality than is accessible through the semantically-flawed colloquial English most of us have used since birth. The reason these men, these mathematicians, were able to see straight to the core of the consciousness issue was because they were given a sixth sense, that is:  an alternative conceptual model with which to view Universe.  

“As words are not the objects they represent, structure, and structure alone, becomes the only link which connects our verbal processes with the empirical data.” - Korzybyski

One of the fist impasses I came across when I began to read Buckminster Fuller were his bizarre coinages, omni-inclusive concepts, and strict attention-to-precision.  Bucky’s language-model of the universe was a direct result of his own concept-model of the universe.  Simultaneity and all-inclusiveness, relativity of motion, space-time, inside-outness, (rather than upside-down-ness, as there is no up/down in a relative system) these are all concepts that Buckminster Fuller had internalized as part of his world view.  Buckminster Fuller understood the importance of concept-models, real and imagined.

It’s no good to shoot holes in somebody’s battleship if you aren’t going to even give him a dingy to paddle home in.  Such is the state of General Semantics today.  There is no ready-made language that one might learn which would solve all the ills of our outdated (Korbzbyski called them Aristolean) language systems.  You can’t discuss the state of politics in the Middle East in pure mathematics.   

According to Korzybski, the best ways to understand his theories are to explain them to others.  Frank Herbert might have taken this idea to heart when he took some time out of his own schedule to write articles for General Semantics advocates in San Francisco.  Of the many ideas that Herbert fused together to create Dune, such as Ecology, Politics, Eugenics, Natural Selection, and so on, General Semantics is often forgotten on the wayside.  I think what impresses people most of all with Dune is this: Herbert’s Dune appears to have the complexity of a real universe:  Vastness, Intrigue, but most of all: (and important enough to repeat) Dune is COMPLEX.

There is already an article written on Dune and General Semantics, by Ronny Parkerson.  It appears in the magazine “A Review of General Semantics.”  It is available online, but it doesn’t cover a lot of the connections which I saw between Herbert’s and Korbzybski’s work.  Considering that this is a topic which droves of books could be written about, I think this scholarly article falls short, at least in my way of thinking.  Following are some of my own thoughts on the Dune-General Semantics connection.

Dune has always sent the semi-mystical neurons of my brain firing:  What is the Weirding Way?  What are the secret inner- teachings of the Bene Gesserit?  How did Paul become the Kwisatz Haderach?

G.S. themes are all over Dune, and their influence is subtle, but Frank Herbert turns subtlety into a force, a theme even.  For example, when Paul chooses his name among the Fremen, he chooses the name “Muad'Dib” after the Jerboa mouse, a subtle, silent, and omnipresent creature, which is “wise in the ways of the desert.”

If you read Science and Sanity, Korzybyski’s major G.S. text, you will observe a specific, almost Nietzschean delineation he makes between two types of possible people: Human and Animal.  This, mind you, is the same exact wording that Reverend Mother Gaius Mohiam uses when she is testing Paul with the pain-box.  “We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans.”  Now this is a highly loaded remark, considering the Bene Gesserit are the orchestrators of a Universe-wide Eugenics program, breeding for certain traits.  Subtlety-upon-subtlety, we later find out that these three people present, before testing with “the box,” are actually grandmother, mother, and son. (Mohiam, Jessica, and Paul, respectively)  This scene is the first and probably most memorable happening in the entire book.

According to Korzybyski, the term “time binding” is a non-elementalistic term which refers to any and all factors which “as a whole make man a man and which differentiate him from animals.” (My own emphasis)

Therefore what we are seeing in the “pain box test” is verification that the teachings took root, so to speak, in Paul’s consciousness.  To answer the above posed question “What are the secret inner-teachings of the Bene Gesseret?”  I believe these are the teachings of General Semantics.  Herbert goes on to add a little sci-fi extrapolation to these semantic skills and states that the Bene Gesserit can use them to manipulate people against their volition and even without their knowledge.  Frank Herbert calls this ability “Voice.”

Another byproduct of an advanced Semantic model, in Dune may be “Truthsense or Truthsay”  The most common example of this concept in the real world are “poker tells,” which are a result of the physical body (or perhaps right brain) rebelling against its own conscious verbal deception.  This concept has been brought to full extension in the “lie detector machine.”  Frank Herbert implies that a mastery of semantics could result in a human lie detector.  This Truthsense, as Herbert calls it, should be understood as separate from Paul’s developing oracular sense, such as he experiences in precognizant dreams. 

Additionally, we will remember, Paul was being trained as a Mentat.  Now, this is really important, and I’ll refer directly to Dune for the definition of Mentat:  “that class of Imperial Citizens trained for supreme accomplishments of logic.  “Human computers.””  Paul was trained from youth as a Mentat, and we see the fruition of several mutually complementary disciplines in Paul, culminating with drinking the water-of-life and becoming Kwisatz Haderach.  The Kwisatz Haderach is said to be the “male Bene Gesserit who could bridge space and time.” 

According to Korzbyski, the mathematical semantic model is vital for understanding the problems of the world.  “…without the help of professional mathematicians who will understand the general importance of structure and mathematical models, we shall not be able to solve our human problems in time to prevent quite serious breakdowns, since these solutions ultimately depend on structural semantic considerations.”

Korzybyski believed that only young people (as opposed to retrained older-people) who had not been permanently altered by the Aristolean semantic model would be able to employ the new semantic models intuitively and seamlessly, to their fullest value.

Duke Leto explains to Paul, that they have been, without Paul's own knowledge, training him as a Mentat:  "Your mother wanted me to be the one to tell you, Son. You see, you may have Mentat capabilities."  Paul stared at his father, unable to speak for a moment, then: "A Mentat?  Me? … [] …the special training from Hawat and his mother --the mnemonics, the focusing of awareness, the muscle control and sharpening of sensitivities, the study of languages and nuances of voices -- all of it clicked into a new kind of understanding in his mind.”  -Dune

Paul was the Kwizach Haderach, but born a generation too soon.  Mohaim states that Jessica was ordered to bear only Female Children, and the plan of the Sisterhood (Bene Gesserit) was to marry a “female Atreides to a male Harconnen” and bridge the gap.  Another couple of concepts come into play here.  We will remember that at the time of Jessica’s conception of Paul, she was Bene Gesseret, but was not yet a Reverend Mother.  This is a significant fact.  While every single Reverend Mother has a slight varying volition, there appears to be among them a common will.  This collusion could be interpreted as representing the common will of the entire female line, or even the Anima of the human species.  When Jessica chose the sex of her child, Paul, she did this as a personal choice, out of love.

In the later novels in the Dune Series, Chapterhouse, especially, we see that the Sisterhood uses more than just Voice (Semantics) to manipulate Kings.  At the time of Chapterhouse Dune, the Sisterhood is practicing a well developed method of sexual bonding and enslavement.  When the Sisterhood states that they want a Kwisatz Haderach that they can control, this is one nuance of the meanings present.

You can also see some structural similarities between the writing styles of Dune and Science and Sanity.  S&S starts all of its chapters with a few cerebral quotes, often from mathematicians, sometimes from philosophers.  Herbert takes the same format by heading his chapters in Dune with fictional excerpts from fictional holy-books, historical documents, or quotes/commentary from relevant characters.  This has the effect of setting the mood and also proving the validity of ideas that may not be familiar to the general reader.

What is the Spice?  How does it change consciousness? 

The Spice is an amalgam-symbol for the relationship that human beings have with drugs.  There are similarities between “the spice” and Aminata Muscaria, which has a history of Shamanistic and Mithraic use (that is, use in the worship of Mithra), possibly due to the function of muscimol as a GABA agonist.  But really, the way that Spice is used in Dune, it really appears to bear just as much a resemblance to Caffeine or Nicotine.  Paul states at one point that the spice is in everything on Dune.  In our everyday life, humans are coevolving with a huge, innocuous, and ever-present prevalence of mentally-altering substances, in just about everything we eat. 

Subtlety and accumulation, the difference between a poison and a medicine is only the dose.  "The spice," [Said Paul], "It's in everything here--the air, the soil, the food.  The geriatric spice. It's like the Truthsayer drug. It's a poison!"  [Jessica] stiffened.  His voice lowered and he repeated: "A poison--so subtle, so insidious . . . so irreversible. It won't even kill you unless you stop taking it. We can't leave Arrakis unless we take part of Arrakis with us."  The terrifying presence of his voice brooked no dispute.  "You and the spice," Paul said. "The spice changes anyone who gets this much of it, but thanks to you, I could bring the change to consciousness. I don't get to leave it in the unconscious where its disturbance can be blanked out. I can see it."  -Dune

From S&S:  “Any factor capable of altering the colloidal structure of the living protoplasm must have a marked effect on the behavior of the organism.  Experiments show that there are four main factors which are able to disturb the colloidal equilibrium” [are:]

1.       Physical

2.       Mechanical

3.       Chemical

4.       Biological

5.       Semantic

Crucially, Korzybski believed the semantic reaction to be equally important as the other four categories!

The Bene Gesserit Reverend Mothers, are able to effect the actions of their internal metabolism on the “colloidal” level by a combination of physical and mental conditioning, as well as by their use of the Spice Drug.  The Spice, were it real, might well fall under more than one of these five categories, by Frank Herbert’s definition of it.

Within the fictional realm of the Dune universe, eugenics is portrayed favorably, as one of the contributing factors to the creation of this Kwisatz Haderach Superman.  Similar undertones (or perhaps overtones) are present in Korzybski’s work:

“…besides the moral and ethical gains to be obtained from the use of correct symbolism, our economic system, which is based on symbolism and which, with ignorant commercialism ruling, has mostly degenerated into an abuse of symbolism (secrecy, conspiracy, advertisements, bluff, ‘live wire agents,’ etc.) would also gain enormously and become stable.  Such an application of correct symbolism would conserve a tremendous amount of nervous energy now wasted in worries, uncertainties, etc, which we are all the time piling upon ourselves, as if bent upon testing our endurance.  We ought not to wonder that we break down individually and socially.  Indeed, if we do not become more intelligent in this field, we shall inevitably break down racially.”

Dune is eminently the most quotable book I’ve ever read.  It reads like a collection of aphorisms put to narrative.  Many of these aphorisms within Dune are prefigured in Korzybski’s Science and Sanity.

For example, compare these two quotes:

 “Growth is limited by the necessity which is present in the least amount.  And naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate.” –Dune

“In all of these cases, [of vitamin deficiency] it is important to notice that the lack of a minute amount of some factor may have the most varied, pronounced and seemingly unrelated consequences.  The symptoms can now be produced deliberately on experimental animals, by diets free from the particular ‘vitamins’ and can also be cured at will by feeding them with the proper ‘vitamins.’” -S&S

The chart above shows Korzbyski’s “levels of abstraction” model.

There is a famous line in Dune where Paul is chastised by his combat instructor for not fighting up to his aptitude, Paul states “I guess I’m not in the mood for it today.”  Halleck responds “What has mood to do with it?  You fight when the necessity arises-no matter the mood!  Mood’s a thing for cattle or making love or playing the basilet.  It’s not for fighting.”

Reaction is faster than action-this deceptive statement is important for a number of reasons.  With higher levels of expertise, and under the action of stress or time-restraint, you default to your “un-speakable,” reactive levels of action.  This is to say, when pressed, your reactions become first-order, thoughtless, and fast.  Heisenberg discussed that reaction is faster than action, and used gunfighting as an example. 

Heisenberg poses this scenario:   Two gunfighters “draw” on each other, one drawing/initiating the action, and the other reacting/drawing on the first, both shooting as fast as they can.  The reaction-based draw “shoots and kills” the other every time.  The reason for this surprising, and demonstrably-provable result, is that “reaction” draws upon more semantically first-order mechanisms to complete the task.

When Gurney Halleck admonishes Paul about bringing “emotions” into the fight, what he is saying is, semantically, emotions, thoughts, feelings, etc. are third order events(see Korzybski’s chart, above) while the happening itself is a first order event.  Therefore, first-order reaction is faster than third-order action.

“The majority of [] creative men reported that they "think" in terms of visual structures.”  Korzybski, here, is talking about a more first-order experience, which is why he puts the word “think” in quotations.  Korzybski is here referring to nonverbal thinking processes.

“[Paul]Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was how to learn. [General Semantics]  And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.  It’s shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.  Maud’Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.”

Sources:

Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski

Dune, Frank Herbert

http://esgs.free.fr/uk/art/ak3.htm  The Role of Language in the Perceptual Process, Alfred Korzybski

Dune and General Semantics, by Ronny Parkerson