Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson or R. A. W. (born January 18, 1932) is a futurist thinker, libertarian, and author of the Schrödinger's Cat trilogy; (1979), a complex spoof of conspiracy theories.He also co-authored (with Robert Shea) the Illuminatus! trilogy (1975), which humorously examined American paranoia about conspiracies. These books mix true information with imaginative fiction to engage the reader in what Wilson called "Operation Mindfuck". (Much of the odder material was derived from letters sent to Playboy magazine while Shea and Wilson were working as editors there.) In (1977), he made Discordianism, Sufism, futurism, the Illuminati and other esoteric or counter-culture philosophies accessible to larger audiences. He is also a proponent of Timothy Leary's eight-circuit brain model and neurosomatic/lingustic engineering, which he writes about in Prometheus Rising (original copy, 1977, most recent, 1997) and Quantum Psychology (1990), books of practical techniques to break free of one's "reality tunnels". With Leary he helped promote the futurist ideas of space migration, life extension, and intelligence enhancement technologies; he is arguably a more cogent and persuasive exponent of Leary's "imprinting circuit" theory of psychological development than Leary was himself.
Other fictional books by Wilson include The Historical Illuminatus series - The Earth Will Shake (1982), The Widow's Son (1985), and Nature's God (1991) - and the screenplay Reality Is What You Can Get Away With (1996). His nonfiction books include Quantum Psychology, The New Inquisition (1994), and two other volumes of Cosmic Trigger. He co-wrote (1998), an encyclopedia of conspiracy theories, with Miriam Joan Hill.
In a 2003 interview with High Times magazine, R.A.W. described himself as a "Model Agnostic" - a term physicists use to describe someone who is not committed to any one model of how the world works. Wilson says that he is the first to apply this to the social sciences.
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