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I WAS HOPING TO SNEAK in here, because I am a rank amateur at General Semantics, but over the years I have had a memory of an evening with Korzybski at Columbia University years ago. And I, of course, read Science and Sanity.
On the way down here tonight I stopped to ask myself what I had retained. I think I can list very simply what stuck, and I can easily see how it connects with the work I have done since. Clearly, Korzybski was not my only influence-all of us are bombarded by stimuli and ideas from all over the place; but I think that many of the things that I have written are at least compatible with what general semantics would hold.
Among the things that I realized that stuck, were, first, the whole idea of non-Aristotelian logic, which was a completely new idea to me, but made an awful lot of sense. Reality did not come packaged with "eitherors"-at least to me-and I think that is still a part of the way I like to analyze things. I think in terms of multiple models, rather than a single model. I think of things overlapping, blending into each other, and so on; and change, which is my preoccupation, is really a complex process.
The second idea is time-binding. Time has been central to my writing because my writing has focused on the issue of change, and change is a function of time, or vice versa. In Future Shock, I wrote about the acceleration of change, about different cultures' perceptions of time and the different paces of life, all of them being time phenomena. And, of course, as one who is called a "futurist;" I spend a lot of my time thinking about the past as well. It seems to me that one is not fully a person if one does not see oneself in a temporal perspective that reaches back through the eighty...