Think of a Paradigm Shift as a change from
one way of thinking to another. It's a revolution, a
transformation, a sort of metamorphosis. It just
does not happen, but rather it is driven by agents
of change.
For example, agriculture changed early primitive
society. The primitive Indians existed for centuries
roaming the earth constantly hunting and gathering
for seasonal foods and water. However, by 2000 B.C.,
Middle America was a landscape of very small
villages, each surrounded by patchy fields of corn
and other vegetables.
Agents of change helped create a paradigm-shift
moving scientific theory from the Ptolemaic system
(the earth at the center of the universe) to the
Copernican system (the sun at the center of the
universe), and moving from Newtonian physics to
Relativity and Quantum Physics. Both movements
eventually changed the world view. These
transformations were gradual as old beliefs were
replaced by the new paradigms creating "a new
gestalt" (p. 112).
Likewise, the printing press, the making of books
and the use of vernacular language inevitable
changed the culture of a people and had a direct
affect on the scientific revolution. Johann
Gutenberg's invention in the 1440's of movable type
was an agent of change. Books became readily
available, smaller and easier to handle and cheap to
purchase. Masses of people acquired direct access to
the scriputures. Attitudes began to change as people
were relieved from church domination.
Similarly, agents of change are driving a new
paradigm shift today. The signs are all around us.
For example, the introduction of the personal
computer and the internet have impacted both
personal and business environments, and is a
catalyst for a Paradigm Shift. Newspaper publishing
has been reshaped into Web sites, blogging, and web
feeds. The Internet has enabled or accelerated the
creation of new forms of human interactions through
instant messaging, Internet forums, and social
networking sites. We are shifting from a
mechanistic, manufacturing, industrial society to an
organic, service based, information centered
society, and increases in technology will continue
to impact globally. Change is inevitable. It's the
only true constant.
In conclusion, for millions of years we have been
evolving and will continue to do so. Change is
difficult. Human Beings resist change; however, the
process has been set in motion long ago and we will
continue to co-create our own experience. Kuhn
states that "awareness is prerequisite to all
acceptable changes of theory" (p. 67). It all begins
in the mind of the person. What we perceive, whether
normal or metanormal, conscious or unconscious, are
subject to the limitations and distortions produced
by our inherited and socially conditional nature.
However, we are not restricted by this for we can
change. We are moving at an accelerated rate of
speed and our state of consciousness is transforming
and transcending. Many are awakening as our
conscious awareness expands.
In every Aeon, magicians have borrowed from the
paradigms of their native cultures when they felt
the need to explain how magic worked. Thus in
shamanic times, magicians assumed that they somehow
interacted with the animistic essences intrinsic to
natural phenomena, plants, animals and people. This
idea finds perhaps its fullest development in the
classical Greek doctrine of Platonism where all
outward forms which manifest to our senses, merely
reflect, somewhat imperfectly, certain ideals which
reside in some sort of superior realm. Thus all
observable cats reflect, to varying degrees of
perfection, some sort of cosmic feline principle. To
the modern mind this looks rather like an excessive
fascination with the ability of the human mind to
form abstract concepts. Nevertheless Platonism, and
its fuller flowering as Neo-Platonism, had a
profound influence on magical and religious thought
for two thousand years.
Early Christianity initially incorporated
neo-platonic ideas wholesale, and its traces remain
in the Orthodox ideas of Christ as the Logos and in
the sanctity and power of icons. In the Catholic
Church, the doctrine of literal transubstantiation
and the veneration of relics remains an influence.
Despite the philosophical and monotheistic gloss,
such ideas hark back to animistic ideas like eating
the hearts of brave warriors to acquire their
powers.
Alchemy arose as a quest to find the essences of
things. It would have seemed quite reasonable to the
medieval mind to try to distill the essential
principle of Metal out of lead or mercury, or the
essential principle of Generation out of menstrual
blood. Of course none of this seems to have got very
far until some alchemists had the humility to
observe the actual rather than the imagined and
abstract- idealized qualities of various types of
base matter.
Animistic style thinking still colours the way all
humans think, we all still have to weigh up any
phenomenon from the idea of an atom to our ideas of
a particular a person in terms of similes and
metaphors and analogies, what powers it has, and
what else it resembles. In other words we want to
know what something ‘is’, to give us some kind of a
handle on it. For the purposes of manipulating the
world by physical means, such animistic thinking
does not work very well if you restrict your
vocabulary of analogies and archetypes to such
abstractions as earth, air, fire and water. Adding
Aether does not help much and adding the sephiroth
of the cabbala or the signs of the zodiac just
multiplies the illucidity.
To manipulate the material world indirectly you need
something far simpler and more basic than the earth,
air, fire, and water concepts. You need something so
simple that you will often find it very difficult to
see it in the seemingly complex real world. You will
need an abstraction based on an idea so
mind-numbingly trivial that you can easily Discount
it, (pun intended). You will need mathematics,
either intuitively to throw a stone, or formally to
hurl a rocket to the moon.
However when it comes to interacting with the world
directly (by magic), the animistic style of thinking
may have advantages. If we assume that the mind or
the complex functions of the brain can somehow, and
to some extent, mesh directly with the world to find
things out or to influence them, then we have a
mapping problem, or what magicians call the problem
of the magical link. How can something inside of our
heads have any kind of one to one correlation with
the phenomena outside? This problem has bothered
philosophers since the inception of their
profession. We have imperfect senses, but when we
enhance them with careful observations or machines
the problem just gets worse because we then begin to
see an awesome complexity in the simplest of things.
Thus we inevitably must resort to some kind of
conscious analogical modeling of the phenomena in
our reality because our conscious minds cannot
digitize anything but the simplest of our
experiences, although our unconscious minds may have
a greater ability to do this. The unconscious mind
plainly stores vastly more information than it makes
available to the conscious mind. When you meet an
old friend your subconscious immediately confirms
their identity through matching hundreds of their
features which you could not consciously describe,
let alone sketch from conscious memory.
Animistic style thinking can thus offer a useful
kind of data compression. Assuming that one cannot
consciously remember enough for a decent magical
link then a classification in terms of say an
earthy/aquatic nature with jupiterian influences
moderated by the sign of Sagittarius might serve as
a sigilistic type of shorthand for interacting with
the target event by psychic means. However for this
kind of thing to work the operator must maintain a
pretty tidy and unequivocal symbol system. Modern
people rarely do this, they think too much.
Animistic systems rarely have explicit models of a
purely animistic ‘extra dimension’ or whatever,
through which the powers inherent in physical
phenomena act on the world. Where such animistic
dimensions exist they tend to become identified
either with alternative states of consciousness that
the shaman induces by various means, or with some
sort of spirit realm.
The hypothesis of spirits arises naturally out of
the human propensity to form a ‘self image’ and a
‘theory of mind’. We would find it almost impossible
to live without a self image. Somehow we have to
develop a model of ourselves inside of our heads so
that we can separate our perceptions into those
relating to self and to those relating to the
outside world. As we develop, our self image becomes
more sophisticated as we incorporate abstract
concepts into it, and we become very dependant upon
it to structure our lives, we cannot imagine its
absence and so we may come to believe that it must
exist as an immortal soul. You can turn off the self
image with certain mystical practices or large doses
of hallucinogens, and then you seem to become
everything that you perceive, the object placed in
your hand becomes part of your body; you become one
with the tree in your field of vision, or with a
religious notion in your thoughts. People with a
seriously impaired self image cannot act effectively
in the world and we regard them as mad.
We would also find it very difficult to deal with
our personal worlds if we did not, at an early age,
develop the hypothesis that other people had
intentions and perceptions that their actual
behavior often conceals or only partially reveals.
Autistic people seem to lack this ability to various
degrees of severity.
Our inbuilt propensity to form a self image and a
theory of mind leads quite naturally to the idea of
souls and spirits and gods, or ‘sky fairies’ as some
atheists unkindly call them.
We cannot imagine ourselves dead nor what happens to
the self we ascribe to other people when they die,
we perceive the natural world as capricious and
perhaps therefore possessed of minds (gods) or
perhaps one big mind, (God).
The theory of spirits, or spiritism, crept up quite
quickly on pure animism and held a dominant position
in magical theory until scientific analogies began
to take over. The old pagans saw mind everywhere,
and personified natural phenomena as gods. Household
gods for small matters and bigger gods for more
serious matters like storms, mountains, oceans,
cities, and the afterlife. Having imputed mind
everywhere, the ancients could at least try to enter
into negotiation with it. Prayer and sacrifice to
the big gods thus become the staple religious
activities whilst magic offered some latitude for
trying to push around and command the smaller ones.
Monotheism arose as the pagan systems collapsed
under a cacophony of too many gods and an expanding
sense of self image. Pagans did not attribute their
lusts and their warlike impulses, for example, to
their own sense of self, but rather to the gods, so
they could only expand their own sense of agency and
identity by adding more gods to their pantheons to
explain themselves to themselves. Replacing all this
with a unitary deity had the advantage of enlarging
the self image, but at the expense of condemning a
large amount of socially dubious behavior to the
demonic realms. You do not see many temple
prostitutes in monotheist institutions for example.
However this in itself brought a political dividend.
Social control gets much easier if you only have one
priesthood, one consensus identity, and one set of
rules.
Magic within the monotheist spiritism becomes
legally perilous. The priesthood rarely tolerates
freelance negotiation with the spirit realm so folk
magic goes underground, but the priests themselves
usually develop a characteristic type of spiritist
magic of which we see examples in Kabbala and Goetia
and the Islamic Djinn or Genies. Here the magician
commands lesser spirits by invoking the power of
God. As most monotheisms, (at least in their youth),
tend to leave a host of lesser spirits in charge of
mundane matters, the priest/magician can conjure for
almost anything by the double proxy of God and
lesser spirit.
Given the belief that mind suffuses everything, this
all makes perfect sense. In modern terms it still
makes a certain amount of magical sense if we assume
that ensigilising phenomena as spirits renders them
easier for the mind to interact with. The spiritist
paradigm that sees mind in all things will probably
always influence human thought if only because human
thought remains the tool by which we investigate the
world. Not a few scientists have exclaimed that the
universe consists entirely of thoughts or mind
stuff, but they had mostly been calculating too hard
or overdoing the nitrous oxide.
In terms of its value as a magical theory, the
spiritist paradigm has very little real explanatory
or predictive power. We all know what ‘the spirit
realm’ means, it means whatever the spiritist wants
it to mean. In other words it has fantastically
complicated and more or less arbitrary and variable
properties. Thus it cannot tell us anything about
possible or impossible, or probable or improbable
forms of magic.
The materialist-scientific paradigm spawned a host
of neo-scientific explanations for various
parapsychological, spiritualist, occult, and magical
phenomena. These fall more or less neatly into the
categories of occult aethers, occult energies, and
occult information paradigms. Occult aethers or
ethers seem to have begun with Eliphas Levi, a
nineteenth century French cleric who dabbled in
magic and Kabbala. He proposed the Astral Light, a
sort of medium for the transmission of thought and
the support of spirit. Then came the rather more
elaborate doctrines of the etheric and astral planes
and ectoplasm, and so on, in response to the
scientific ideas of the luminiferous ether and the
dimensions of space current at the time. Before the
popularization of Einstein’s ideas it appeared that
gravity could operate like an astrological influence
at a distance, and that light and electromagnetic
radiation in general would need some kind of a
medium to cross space.
From such mighty misconceptions, puny occult
explanationisms developed.
Science constrains the concept of energy with a very
tight definition of its properties and this makes it
useful. Unfortunately ‘occult energies’ suffer from
exactly the same problem as with spirit realms, they
mean anything anyone wants them to.
As the so-called information age dawned, it did seem
at last possible to nail down an irrefutable
explanation of magic in terms of a hidden exchange
of information between material structures,
including brains, assuming that information had some
power to modify the structures involved, and
assuming that quantum physics allows the information
to find its way to wherever the magician wants in
space and time.
I must confess myself guilty of the above, during
the folly of my extended youth.
I fell into the trap of making the paradigm so broad
that it would do anything I wanted, despite the fact
that I could not always do what I wanted by magic.
Now, reviewing my casebooks and my theory books, I
can see the need to both limit and to extend my
frames of reference.
I suspect that time has a richer structure than we
commonly imagine and that a Multiverse or Omnium of
realities caused by quantum entanglement and
superposition surrounds us in three dimensional
time, and that particles travel both backward and
forward in time. In this scenario we do not need
‘disembodied information’ to account for the
functioning of the universe or the phenomena of
magic, the exchange of ordinary particles of matter
and energy will do the trick given the extra degrees
of temporal freedom.
See the Quantum Irreality Paper on this site, for
the arguments leading to the above.
When the magician divines he interacts primarily
with future versions of himself. In divination he
basically taps into what he may know in the future.
A curious circularity seems to exist in divination;
it only seems to work if at some point in the future
you will end up knowing the result by ordinary
means. This explains why the best results in
divination seem to occur for either very short term
divinations about unlikely things that will happen
in the next few seconds, or for events which are
heavily deterministic, but not yet obvious, in the
further future.
In enchantment the magician basically aims to select
a future where his wish has come true. The
entanglements between the magician, his past and
future selves, and his environment can provide many
channels for the modification of events towards the
desired objective, so long as it does not remain
ridiculously improbable. This explains the
observation that enchantment tends to work best when
used over longer periods of time.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, witches and wizards,
may I believe, constitute the beginnings of: -
A New Magical Paradigm.
It may not greatly alter the way we attempt to do
magic for some time, but it may alter the way we
think about why it works, and that may eventually
improve our practice.
Perhaps for the first time it offers a potentially
testable model, particularly where it relates to
divination, and one that we could potentially
quantify with a view to eventually wrapping some
mathematics around it.
As an afterthought I should perhaps mention the
traditional ideas of evocation and invocation once
again. Whilst I accept the psychological and
sigillistic value of the animist and spiritist
paradigms, to me the proof of the pudding in both
evocation and invocation remains the quality of the
divination and enchantment arising from such
activities.
General Metadynamics 1.
Note, read the Quantum Irreality paper first.
Abstract. General Metadynamics attempts to provide a
paradigm of Science and Sorcery. To do this it shows
how the three dimensional transactional time in the
HD8 interpretation of quantum and particle physics
could allow divination and enchantment to occur.
Metaphysics concerns itself with our ideas about the
ultimate nature and reality of phenomena. Any
serious enquiry into such matters should in
principle, begin with an examination of underlying
metaphysical assumptions and end with their
reconsideration. Few people actually bother with
this exercise because metaphysics embodies a fatal
flaw derived from the structure of language that has
a tendency to render the exercise pointless.
Metaphysics traditionally includes Ontology, our
ideas about the existence or being of things.
Ontology studies our ideas of what things really
‘are’. We could perhaps call this Metastatics
instead, to differentiate it from Metadynamics, the
study of our fundamental ideas about what phenomena
actually ‘do’.
No phenomena actually exhibit being. You can never
catch anything in a state of just ‘being’.
Everything has internal movement, at least on the
atomic scale, and everything exchanges energy with
its environment to maintain its existence.
Thus Ontology or Metastatics remains an illusory and
pointless exercise except where it generates useful
similes that we can use as a sort of shorthand for
descriptive purposes. When we ask what something
‘is’ we really want to know what it does, or what
properties it has, or what history it has.
Metadynamics, the study of our fundamental ideas
about what phenomena actually do, has become perhaps
humanity’s most powerful and least recognised tool
for understanding the universe. The great concepts
of causality, chance, probability, symmetry, and the
conservation laws, all fall within the remit of what
I would call Metadynamics, and they all dominate the
way we perceive the world and act in it, to such an
extent that we rarely stop to question these
concepts.
Now people exhibit a range of differing metadynamics.
Scientists have a fairly formal consensus
metadynamic, although quantum physicists often have
eccentric versions of it. Ordinary westernised
people usually have diluted and informal versions of
the scientific metadynamic. Religious people often
have metadynamics which lack self-consistency (gods
act mysteriously). Magicians and occultists often
have metadynamic concepts that conflict radically
with scientific ones.
Religious belief systems usually disguise their
inconsistencies with metastatic concepts. Gods and
dead people can apparently get away with just
‘being’ instead of doing. Occultists usually fall
into a similar mire and fill up their paradigms with
all sorts of planes of being and disembodied forces
and energies that conveniently explain everything
and nothing, depending on what actually happens.
Can we develop a General Metadynamic which
reconciles what we know about the fundamental
activities of the phenomena of the universe from our
knowledge of both science and magic? We need not
include most of the phenomena of religion within
such a metadynamic because mere psychology explains
them. Only ‘miracles’ offer any justification for
the inclusion of religious data, and magic offers a
better explanation for miracles than does religion.
We do not need to erect a false metastatic/ontological
distinction between mind and matter either. We know
enough about the behaviour of the brain to
understand that it acts as an information processing
machine, albeit a very complicated one, and that it
creates the necessary subjective illusions of self
and consciousness for perfectly good evolutionary
reasons.
Do we have enough data for such a General
Metadynamic?
Well science may have got pretty close to describing
the behaviour of matter at its apparently most
fundamental quantum level, however the ideas we get
from the description can lead to a variety of
interpretations, few of which make much sense. The
HD8 interpretation does make a kind of sense
although at the price of adding extra degrees of
temporal freedom with three dimensions of
transactional time.
I find some justification for what I have attempted
in HD8 in a quote from Professor Sir Roger Penrose,
and they don’t come much more brilliant and
illustrious than him.
‘It is my opinion that our present picture of
physical reality, particularly in relation to the
nature of time, is due for a shake up – even
greater, perhaps, than that which has already been
provided by present –day relativity and quantum
mechanics.’
Stephen Hawking brilliantly observed that entropy
increases with time because we measure time in the
direction in which entropy increases. We simply
adopt the entropy increasing direction as our
temporal reference direction, and so we do not
usually notice the orthogonal components of time.
Entropy (or increasing disorder) defines our forward
direction I time so order propagates backward
through time, thus we can see why the theory of
causality works so well in reverse but not so well
forwards. We can always find a reason for something
that has happened but we can rarely predict
precisely what will happen. Things often happen for
insufficient causes in forward mode, but afterwards
both we often construct sufficient causes and
reasons.
I suspect that the orthogonal components of time
correspond to net entropy changes no larger than
those that could slip through at the quantum level.
We could write an equation with entropy and
orthogonal time as another pair of complementary
terms in an Heisenberg style
uncertainty/indeterminacy relationship thusly:-
DST Dti ~ h
Where D(delta) ST means entropy change (at a
particular absolute temperature),
D(delta) ti means imaginary (orthogonal) time,
h means Planck’s constant (an exceedingly small
number).
This provides a key to understanding
three-dimensional time and the association of
quantum weirdness with exceedingly small energy
differences. It means that you can have as much
orthogonal for a process as you like, so long as
entropy changes remain minimal, but I digress.
Most magical descriptions of reality still require
some nebulous extra component to the universe beyond
the matter and energy that science can measure.
Spirit, spirits, astral planes, occult energies,
morphic fields, and disembodied thoughts or
information have, at various times, all filled this
role.
If the HD8 interpretation of physical phenomena
remains un-falsified then it remains as a valid, if
highly eccentric, description of fundamental
physical behaviour which could form part of the
metadynamic. The problem then reduces to one of
describing the phenomena of magic using only the
extra degrees of temporal freedom afforded by three
dimensional transactional time, and avoiding the
traditional spooky immaterial explanationisms.
A General Metadynamic including magic would have to
offer an explanation of only divination and
enchantment, for these lie at the root of all
magical phenomena.
Divination presents the simplest case. If at some
point in the future the diviner can know the answer
to a question, then that answer can feed back from
the future to the present. However because the
universe behaves with a degree of randomness and
chaos, several different futures can feed back to
the diviner’s present to give mixed results. In some
cases the diviner’s choice of one particular item of
feedback could even act to increase the likelihood
of that future becoming more probable. Thus
divination can work as enchantment by
self-fulfilling prophecy.
Pure divination works best in pursuit of a fixed but
concealed future. As a simple example consider the
case of a well shaken dice. If you slam the dice cup
upside down over it without looking and then try to
guess the number showing, the number remains a fixed
element of your future (except to an extreme quantum
solipsist). If however you try to guess the number
that will appear before even shaking the dice, then
all six futures exist at the time of divination and
only enchantment offers any hope of obtaining a non
chance result. In practise the former type of
divination works far better than the latter.
Dowsing provides a classic example of how divination
actually works. The dowser basically divines what
effect digging a hole in a certain place will have
on his future perceptions. It plainly does not
depend on mysterious geomantic energies emanating
from water or minerals because experts can dowse
from mere maps of the terrain.
Note that in this metadynamic of divination we do
not require anything immaterial to pass between the
diviner and the target. The diviner functions as a
collection of superposed states entangled with the
superposed states of his past and future. As the
‘particles’ of the diviner move forward through time
they simultaneously move backward through time as
well,(because they actually consist of
particle/reversed-particle pairs), however we do not
normally notice this.
The metadynamic of enchantment (making things happen
by magic) has symmetries with that of divination but
it also demands something else.
The collapse of quantum superpositions and
entanglements remains officially indeterminate and
random, but macroscopic phenomena often behave with
deterministic chaos according to general scientific
consensus.
‘ Deterministic chaos’ means that the behaviour of a
complicated system like the weather exhibits extreme
sensitivity to its initial conditions. Change the
airflow or the temperature just a tiny bit and you
may change tomorrow’s weather quite a lot, this in
turn could change next weeks weather totally. This
gives rise to the rather poetically named ‘Butterfly
Effect’, in which a butterfly changing course over
Belgium could result in a hurricane devastating
Cuba, or not devastating Cuba, sometime later. In
another age we recognised this as the horseshoe nail
effect, for want of a horseshoe nail, the horseshoe
was lost, and hence the horse, the messenger, the
message, the battle, and the whole empire became
lost, for the want of that horseshoe nail.
Most theorists of chaos mathematics maintain that
the behaviour of complicated macroscopic systems
remains causal and deterministic, although difficult
if not impossible to predict. However they fail to
reiterate their equations far enough to realise that
the sensitivity to initial conditions for many
systems must eventually extend down into the quantum
domain.
Random events at the quantum level must therefore
lead to random events in the macroscopic world.
However because of the exchange action in
transactional time, something even stranger must
also occur, chosen actions on the macroscopic level
can cause non-random changes at the quantum level.
Of course we accept part of this already, we can
polarise light or make atomic nuclei disintegrate by
doing clever things with lumps of matter, but
temporal reversibility in transactional time
entangles macroscopic action with the quantum past
as well as the future.
The enchanter functions as a collection of
superposed states entangled with the superposed
states of his past and future universes. In theory,
by changing his perception of the universe he can
bring about changes in reality, with two provisos.
Suitable entanglements and suitable superpositions
must exist. The magician will need a magical link;
he cannot conjure successfully in complete isolation
from the target, and the desired result must have
some natural probability of occurrence, preferably
not an excessively remote one.
In practise the magician will need to rely on some
kind of butterfly effect to create substantial
changes in the universe and he will usually have to
rely on his subconscious to intuit where these
possibilities exist. Conversely in divination the
magician will usually have to rely on his
subconscious to pick up the feedback from his
personal futures. We currently understand only the
tip of the iceberg of neuroscience, but I suspect
that many of the functions of the brain depend on
superposition and entanglement. Magicians have
distilled from historical traditions a few pragmatic
‘sleight of mind’ techniques for enhancing
divination and enchantment, but they remain
unreliable if occasionally remarkable phenomena.
This paper merely attempts to explain the mechanisms
that can allow what we call ‘magical’ effects to
propagate across time and space without invoking
some sort of nebulous ether or whatever.
This metadynamic of enchantment does not require any
kind of mysterious occult influence to pass between
the enchanter and his target; it requires only that
the known effect of entanglement and the dynamics of
chaotic systems can extend into three-dimensional
transactional time.
The General Metadynamics paradigm does suggest some
modifications to our approach to practical magic.
In Divination it would suggest that the magician
seeks to visualise the future situation in which he
will know the answer. It may also help if the
magician resolves to visualise sending the answer
back to the time of divination when he has found the
answer or confirmed his divination. This may seem a
very bizarre and pointless thing to do, but in a
number of my best divinatory successes I decided
that I just had to ‘complete the circle’ as it were.
So when I finally received confirmation that I had
divined correctly, I made a point of acting out the
peculiar scenarios in which I had divined myself
getting the answer.
In practical terms you can adapt techniques like
this:-
0) Do not attempt to divine for future events that
remain indeterminate at the time of divination.
(This usually applies to roulette wheels and lottery
devices).
1) Resolve that whenever you receive the answer (by
normal means) to a specific divinatory question,
that you will do something highly specific like
write the answer on a big sheet of paper, whirl on
the spot and scream a specific codeword whilst
staring at the writing. Basically resolve to do
anything that will turn your attention forcefully to
the answer. Plenty of anecdotal evidence exists to
support the view that extreme forms of gnosis often
generate the best results.
2) During the Divination visualise yourself
performing the above actions.
3) Do not even think about not carrying out your
original resolution afterwards!
In Enchantment, General Metadynamics suggests that
the magician should give much consideration
beforehand as to how the desired effect could come
to pass, and to the availability of magical links.
I do not advise conjuring against a static
situation. In enchantment the magician tries to
exploit changes by encouraging changes to manifest
as desired. The magician thus needs to look for
fluid situations or to provoke them deliberately.
The rather delicate power of magic works best when
deployed in situations balanced on a knife-edge, not
on those set in stone.
For a magical link, nothing seems to beat physical
contact or at least visual or vocal contact.
Recorded images seem to work only to the extent that
they provoke remembered images, the same usually
applies to physical objects; they rarely remain
significantly entangled with their origins or owners
for long.
In summary, General Metadynamics attempts to provide
a paradigm of Science and Sorcery. To do this it
shows how the three dimensional transactional time
in the HD8 interpretation of quantum and particle
physics could allow divination and enchantment to
occur.
General Metadynamics has the virtue that it does not
depend on nebulous metaphysical influences that
remain, in principle, impervious to confirmation or
falsification by rigorous means. Thus it constitutes
a proper hypothesis or theory, rather than just a
mere assemblage of beliefs.
Three dimensional transactional time explains the
apparent ‘spooky action at a distance’ of
entanglement which so annoyed Einstein, and the
apparent ‘multiple states of being’ of superposition
which together have bedevilled scientific
understanding of quantum phenomena.
It also has the virtue that it explains why Science
usually works reliably whereas Magic often works
erratically if at all. Science deals mainly with
large entropy change events of high probability.
Magic relies mainly on the low entropy changes
associated with orthogonal time that often have low
probabilities of occurrence.
On a practical level, conjuring within the General
Metadynamics paradigm means looking at your own
future(s) in divination, and seeking good magical
links to fluid events in enchantment.
General Metadynamics does not of course constitute a
complete theory of either science or magic for each
has a huge repertoire of disciplines, techniques,
and data. Rather it offers a way of looking at our
core ideas about what kinds of events can occur in
this universe.
Most previous attempts (including some of mine) to
model magic and parapsychology using quantum physics
have proved inadequate because they assumed the
reality of quantum ‘spooky action at a distance’ and
then used it too freely to assert a general case for
any kind of occult phenomena without limit.
Chaos Magic has accumulated a cornucopia of ritual
and sleight of mind tricks over the years and a
wealth of mixed results and metaphysical hypotheses.
Most of the experimental data used to create General
Metadynamics have come from results generated by
working with Chaos Magic techniques.
I thus offer General Metadynamics as a paradigm that
can supply the theory of how the parapsychological
effects of Chaos Magic actually occur, in a way that
does not contradict what we can know from science.
General Metadynamics 2.
General Metadynamics and Strong Emergence.
Abstract. A rather metaphysical debate rages about
how the universe works between the proponents of
Reductionism and the proponents of Emergence,
particularly in the field of Complexity research.
Can we derive all the complex behaviour that we
observe in the universe from a few simple laws, or
do other laws somehow emerge at higher levels of
complexity?
General Metadynamics throws a fresh perspective on
the principle of strong emergence that may interest
both scientists and sorcerers.
General Metadynamics 2, the case for Strong
Emergence.
The Reductionist paradigm states that we can in
principle derive all the complex behaviour that we
observe in the universe from a few simple basic
laws. At the time of writing the candidates for
these basic laws officially come down to quantum
mechanics and gravitation. Thus life reduces to
biology, biology reduces to chemistry, and chemistry
reduces to quantum mechanics. As cosmology reduces
to astrophysics and astrophysics also reduces to
quantum mechanics, plus gravitation, (in a way not
yet fully understood), we can in principle derive
the existence of snowdrops and their blossoming in
spring, this paper, your reading of it, and the
Great Wall of China, from just a few basic quantum
and gravitational laws. The calculations and
derivations might prove fiendishly difficult but
reductionists maintain that a sufficiently detailed
picture of the initial conditions and sufficient
computational power would reveal the entire past and
the entire future of the universe and all its
contents, to any desired degree of detail. Thus to a
hardcore reductionist we inhabit a rigidly
deterministic clockwork universe, and we advance
towards a perfectly predictable future, if only we
could measure and calculate with sufficient
precision.
Two particular problems exist with the Reductionist
paradigm. Firstly quantum physics seems to show that
we could not in principle measure the initial
conditions of any system to an arbitrarily high
degree of precision because down at the quantum
level, events simply do not exist in a sharply
defined manner. Secondly we cannot have arbitrarily
large computational power because either the
universe has a finite size (if it does not expand)
or because we can only have access to a finite
amount of it (the part of it restricted to us by a
finite lightspeed in an expanding universe). We
could never in principle achieve a computational
power better than the Landauer-Lloyd limit of 10^120
bit flops even if we commandeered every particle in
the universe for computational purposes. Despite the
enormous size of this number it does not exceed
2^400, so the theoretically available computing
power of the entire universe could not in principle
tell us what a group of just 400 elementary
particles, each in one of two possible states, might
do.
The idea of Weak Emergence gives something of a
boost to the reductionist paradigm. Weak emergence
occurs when complex behaviour arises directly from
simple rules and laws. The Mandelbrot Set for
example, emerges in all its complex beauty from the
reiteration of a very simple mathematical formula.
Similarly, cellular automata in the so-called Game
of Life can produce very complicated images and even
patterns that reproduce and evolve, from a few
simple rules.
Nevertheless in both these famous examples of
emergent behaviour, all experimenters who start with
the same initial conditions and the same rules will
get exactly the same result, because in these two
examples we can specify the initial conditions and
the rules precisely. The results may seem unexpected
and richly fascinating, but they remain rigidly
deterministic.
The proponents of Strong Emergence however, insist
that many of the complex behaviours that the
universe exhibits do not arise as directly
deterministic consequences of the basic laws
governing the behaviour of matter and energy acting
upon certain initial conditions. Thus given the laws
of quantum mechanics and gravitation and a vast
amount of elementary particles, Snowdrops and the
Great Wall of China do not have to happen at some
precise point several billion years later.
Proponents of the Hard School of Strong Emergence
often seem to imply that the laws of the universe
actually evolve with time.
Thus instead of the universe running exclusively on
bottom up principles, where simple initial rules and
conditions fix the entire future, we have a scenario
in which a certain amount of top down rule making
also occurs.
Theorists disagree about what, if anything, causes
the seemingly random collapse of quantum wave
functions when particles drop out of entanglement
and superposition at interaction or measurement.
Some suspect that minute gravitational influences
might tip the balance; some suspect that
consciousness or at least deliberate choice of
measurement can affect the issue.
Some Emergentists have intriguingly suggested that
some sort of top down effects occur in complex
systems. A complex system thus modifies the quantum
behaviour of its components!
Personally I doubt that quantum physics can entirely
specify chemistry or that chemistry can entirely
specify biology. I would defy anyone to derive the
exact melting point of aluminium oxide from basic
quantum mechanics.
The Strong Emergent idea of Top Down causation
augmenting lower level laws smells strongly of
Magic, or at least the of the General Metadynanics
paradigm which seeks to provide a metaphysic for
both science and magic.
In General Metadynamics, causality can work
retroactively, or top down, backwards in time,
because all changes consist of a probabilistic
exchange of particles/reversed particles across
time. Thus if a complex system evolves some form of
higher order behaviour, perhaps just by chance, then
that behaviour can feedback to modify the behaviour
of the starting materials to establish that new
behaviour as a physical law, or at least as a
convention that could grow stronger with time.
General Metadynamics can thus explain the phenomenon
of Morphic Ressonance and also point out some
limitations to the accompanying theory.
Morphic Ressonance undoubtedly occurs, the
manifestation of any novel phenomenon does seem to
facilitate the subsequent occurrence of that
phenomenon, but it does not require the agency of
some sort of spiritual nebulous Morphic Field that
so horrifies scientists. The top down causation
implied by Strong Emergence and explained by General
Metadynamics will do nicely.
Some Emergentists claim that consciousness provides
a prime or even the sole example of Strong
Emergence.
I have to say that I do not understand the meaning
of the term consciousness, although I understand
that both I and other people can have awareness of
all sorts of things. I receive sensory imputs from
within my body and from outside of it, I do thinking
and emoting, I can do thinking about thinking,
emoting about thinking and vice versa, and emoting
about emoting, I take decisions, I perform actions,
during dreamless sleep I do nothing except
metabolise and snore, apparently. I do not seem to
have something that I can identify as separate from
all of these activities as consciousness. Instead I
seem to have a brain in which a surprising capacity
for information processing has emerged.
I suspect that nobody has consciousness and that the
word does not really mean anything at all, although
people can have awareness of all sorts of things
including their internal states, as can any
sophisticated information-processing machine.
Evolutionary biology suggests that the
decision-making capacity of brains has evolved by
weak emergence from the large information processing
facility that they provide. Simple animals thus
display complicated but ultimately predictable
behaviour. However at some uncertain point,
something else seems to happen, the brain acquires
the capacity to modify itself and the realisation
that it can do so. At this point, Strong Emergence
comes into play. We recognise this as free will,
(although it rarely acts completely without
reference to previous experience). It does not of
course mean that we suddenly have some sort of
indefinable consciousness or an immortal soul.
Watch a baby develop into a child and then through
adolescence into adulthood, and you can see the
Strong Emergence gradually kicking in.
Not all adults behave like babies in big meat
overcoats, although this does provide a useful rule
of thumb. Sometimes more means qualitatively
different.
General Metadynamics offers a mechanism by which
Strong Emergence can occur.
Basically, once a complex system has evolved a novel
behaviour by stochastic means (random trial and
error) or by deliberate means (in the case of
thinking organisms), then retroactive causality can,
to some extent, modify the subsequent behaviour of
the system or the universe as a whole, to establish
that novel behaviour as a convention or even as a
hard physical law.
Subsequent papers will examine the implications of
this idea for magical theory. |