You could read A. E. van Vogt’s Le Monde des Ā (The World of the Null-A — Null-A for “non-Aristotelian). Even though the colonization of Venus in this science fiction book uses unpractical 1940’s ideas, the book is worth a read since the terraformation of Venus is central to the story and somewhat relevant to today’s humanity’s existential crisis. End of comment, and I beg your pardon for the remaining thoughts-clarifying that your text initiated.
The thoughts below are somewhat relevant to your story since, in my view, we will not save ourselves by colonizing space. For this, we need a viable well-developed “Homebase,” for which our economy is not yet set to produce since, for this, we first need to “revolutionized” our ways of thinking about our relation to reality in a “Non-Aristotelian” fashion.
The World of the Null-A is a profound book based on Korzybski’s general semantic non-Aristotelian idea that “The map is not the territory.” It is a science fiction book that could be as relevant to the 21st century as 1984 has been to the 20th.
I avidly read van Vogt’s “The World of the Null-A” and skimmed Korzybski’s “Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics,” 50 years ago. This later book was already unconventional at the time. I skim through it, and although I did not get its full gist, it must have been influential to me since I am presently writing in absentia — after two general BA and one unspecialized MA in ZooAnthropoSociology — and as an outsider generalist, a PhD dissertation uncovering scientists’ and philosophers’ psychological inertia created by the mass of knowledge accumulated on an “Aristotelian” misunderstanding of “time,” which preclude them from understanding the true nature of reality — thus preventing humanity to reach the level of “sanity” needed to solve the present crisis created by our misplaced need to grow in time.
A. E. van Vogt’s book is pretty impressive. Korzybski, who influenced it, was a paradigm-shifting proponent before the term was used for this purpose, an advocate of the need to develop a new non-Aristotelian way of thinking to avoid humanity’s future devolution.
I am finalizing Korzybski’s work in my PhD dissertation “De evolutionibus res naturas: An Attempt to Save the World from Scientists’ Closed-Mindedness and Philosophers’ Plagiarism of the Past.” For your information, I am a liberated generalist aware that philosophers and scientists are still wholly engulfed in Kant’s philosophy even though it is Aristotelian by nature and irrelevant for the present human paradigm shift needed to save ourselves from ourselves.
Indeed, his crucial ideas of an “a priori” mode of thinking independent of experience doesn’t take into consideration the millions of years it took our mind to evolve a notre insu (without our knowledge) confronted as we have been for millions of years to an “objective reality” that we were ab initio “experiencing” but that we could not define. Aristotle wasn’t aware either of this long period of gestation through which we had to go thought to eventually become self-aware when he proposed that the telos of humanity, its ultimate goal, should be the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake. A telos, which is still guiding science and philosophy today, even if we have become aware that in nature, the ultimate purpose of knowledge is survival.
Thus our ingrained ignorance of the human mind buried deep in our “nurture.” I say nurture because this mind of ours is not a product of our biology as the influential Chomsky’s “LAD” (Language Acquisition Device) and the controversial Pinker’s theses erroneously assert, but a “transcendental tool” that we developed culturally among ourselves and amid a total ignorance of reality. A profound ignorance that is still with scientists and philosophers today and which is precluding them from formulating in solvable terms the problems that this ignorance has created.
This ingrained ignorance of theirs will be resolved when “body” and “mind” will be unified along with “perception” and “understanding” on the same paradigmatic foundations as quantum mechanics, related to mind and understanding, and classical physics (gravitation) related to body and perception.
That is what my dissertation attempts to do, and succeeds according to me, in terms understandable by a nine-year-old. (I’m no Einstein who’s genius could do it for a six-year-old). I am indeed showing in my thesis that our minds, which are observing, “measuring,” at each instant, are thus ‘collapsing” reality at each moment for our purpose and our purpose alone, thus “de-entangling” ourselves from an altogether entangled reality, and creating hence all the problems to which our species is confronted at the moment.
This last paragraph is addressed to physicists, who will get it but won’t be able to use it until they realize that the “dimensions” they use in their theories are “misplaced concreteness” as “epicycles” and “crystalline spheres” were when we believed to be at the center of the universe.
I am deeply sorry to have brought you this burden, but since my theory is a ToE, I cannot not use it to explain everything.
I hope that you are not offended by my using you as a test subject to measure my capacity to express my findings in terms understandable by everybody at a different level of comprehension.
