UNCOMMON SENSE: The Ultimate Nature of Reality: Korzybiski, Russell, Bryson -- and Lakota Elder Dan

With his "General Semantics," Alfred Korzybiski was trying to overcome the inherent science-blocking aspects built into languages, languages which had evolved way before the basic scientific models of reality existed. Particularly blocked by those old language habits and forms -- and the psychology connected to them -- is an understanding of the inherently dynamic and ephemeral nature of "reality" reflected in the assumed atomic and sub-atomic structure of matter -- not to mention energy, space and time.

Here's how Bertrand Russell put it -

"Our raw material consisted merely of events; but when we find that we can build out of it something which, as measured, will seem to be never created or destroyed, it is not surprising that we should come to believe in "bodies." These are really mere mathematical constructions out of events, but owing to their permanence they are practically important and our senses (which were presumably developed by biological needs) are adapted for noticing them, rather than the crude continuum of events which is theoretically more fundamental". --Bertrand Russell, "ABC of Relativity," pg. 117

Bill Bryson explains it this way:

It is still a fairly astounding notion to consider that atoms are mostly empty space and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion. When two objects come together in the real world -- billiard balls are most often used for illustration -- they don't actually strike each other: "Rather," as Timothy Ferris explains, "the negataively charged fields of the two balls repel each other ... were it not for their electrical charges they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed." When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy. --Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, pg. 141

Lakota Elder Dan explains the problems we modern language users have because of those language habits Mr. Korzybski's "General Semantics helps you break - - -