I was wandering through Union Square a couple weeks ago when I came across a Holy Man. Well, at least, that’s what his cardboard sign said. Being spiritually-inclined, olive-skinned and occasionally bearded-enough to bear a superficial resemblance to Jesus, I also occasionally consider myself a holy man and I introduced myself as such.

The man, Dobbs, had a lot to say and he seemed exceptionally well-read: an autodidact, he dropped out of his Texas college because he was spending too much time reading. He led me to believe that his adventures recently brought him to NYC, and he was getting by through crashing on friends’ couches and offering hugs, blessings and Tarot readings in exchange for donations. I appreciated that he considers Tarot reading more of a social rather than divine art. I asked him to recommend a book for me to read, and he recommended Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. I was looking it up on Amazon when I got distracted by another Robert Anton Wilson title, Quantum Psychology, which serves as the basis for this post.

Quantum Psychology fascinated me; I might describe it as part physics-lite, part philosophy primer, part psychology text. The things he has to say about non-locality in the context of psychology are extremely interesting, as are his discussions of psychology, but I really only want to delve into one principal concept in this post: English-Prime. To understand it better, let’s first delve into some psychology: top-down processing vs. bottom-up processing.

When we perceive objects, we don’t actually know what we’re seeing. We actually just make a guess as to what we are seeing: our eyes receive a little bit of information and then our brains “fill in the blanks” based on our memory. This could be phylogenetically explained as a much more efficient use of our limited energy and faculties.

Unfortunately, this auto-correction can lead to a lot of thinking distortions. We have trouble accurately grasping the world outside of our mind because although our fill-in-the-blank mechanism works well most of the time, it’s often wrong. For example, we may incorrectly guess what our conversational partner will say next, or we might think a stranger in the distance appears much more attractive (or threatening) than he actually feels when viewed up close (this may lead to “putting him on a pedestal”). Although our shortcut can be useful when our predictions are correct, in many cases it actually holds us back and leads to sub-optimal psychological experience.

For a while, I have wondered: what can we do to slow down this automatic process? I feel like meditation helps, as do other common ego dissipation techniques. Robert Anton Wilson suggests an answer:

Be more precise in our writing and speech, and this change will eventually affect our thoughts. Precision constitutes a large basis of the technique advocated by Albert Ellis in his Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy. And by reducing our use of the word “is” and its various conjugations, we can be more precise.

Edit: Hacker News commenter sharpn helpfully adds,

English uses ‘is’ to refer to a permanent characteristic or a temporary state, depending on context. Other languages have two separate words (e.g. Spanish with ‘estar’ & ‘es’). If the context is unclear, or you want to introduce clarity, say ‘John is being grumpy’ – rather than ‘John is grumpy’ – if you want to convey that John’s surly mood is temporary or uncharacteristic. Avoiding the word ‘is’ often just makes communication needlessly long-winded.

Philosophical arguments about objects in “reality” having a certain metaphysical essence are somewhat dubious. Does wood really have a wood-ness? (No, but certain types of wood have certain properties, especially when examined through human instruments.) Do I really have a fundamental me-ness? (No, my behavior and personalities are situation-dependent and have little to do with Zachary Burt the human being.) Indeed, any description of something has to be argued in such a way that it can be understood or articulated through the faculties of the Homo sapiens: this “is” a definitive boundary for all of our experience. If we want to be more precise, it can be practical to operationally define things, which means defining them as experienced through a human perspective.

Consider this list of alternatives (normal English vs. precise, operationally defined English, also known as English-Prime, English without “is”:

Standard English: The photon is a wave
English Prime: The  photon behaves as a wave when constrained by certain instruments.

Standard English: The photon is a particle.
English Prime: The photon appears as a particle when constrained by other instruments.

Standard English: John is unhappy and grouchy.
English Prime: John appears unhappy and grouchy at the office.

Standard English: John is bright and cheerful.
English Prime: John appears bright and cheerful on holiday at the beach.

It’s clear that the English Prime statements are more accurate and insightful. In the case of the first set of statements (photons), we disarm the photon-wave paradox; in the second set, we avoid the Fundamental Attribution Error (attributing people’s behaviors more to their personalities than to their situation and circumstance). By being more precise in our diction, we’ve increased our accuracy. I think that many arguments could be avoided if they would simply articulate their claims with such specificity. This has some fun implications. If we want to steamroll someone with our rhetoric (this might be classified as evil), we can be sure to use “is” where appropriate and then attack our opponent on grounds of insufficient specificity when their argument appears to defeat ours. If we want to stop pedestalizing someone, when talking to ourself or others, we can be very specific about what properties we find intimidating or attractive.

I’m going to experiment with removing the word “is” as much as possible from my prose.

Link: Quantum Psychology on Amazon.

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