or the philosophical verisimilitude of a man named gurdjieff, a man, who incidentally, until today, i’d never heard of. evidently he was a philosopher of sorts, or perhaps a mystic. depends on your point of view i guess. he was a russian who traveled widely in asia, attempting to find clues to the answers of the big questions. why are we here? is there a God? what is love? what is life? what is death? in any case he seems to have come upon a somewhat unique philosophy, one that not only anticipated quite a few science fiction plots, but also much of quantum physics. it attempts to synthesize western scientific rationality with eastern philosophy and he called it the fourth way. i have no intention of attempting to sum up the man or his beliefs. luckily john shirley, one of the early practitioners of cyberpunk, has done it for me. here is a short but interesting piece about gurdjieff. philosopher or crank? up to you. (thanks to weblogsky for pointing me there)