SPLIT: Magidgique Discussion from Intro Thread

[Eater of Clowns]

I don't know, everyone.  This guy has me believing.

If it's chaos magick that brought him here, it seems to me that there is a great melevolent will behind the whole process that seeks to see its practitioners ridiculed and abased.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I don't know, everyone.  This guy has me believing.

If it's chaos magick that brought him here, it seems to me that there is a great melevolent will behind the whole process that seeks to see its practitioners ridiculed and abased.

There was, but then I took a big dookie, and it's all better now.

[LMNO]

I don't know, everyone.  This guy has me believing.

If it's chaos magick that brought him here, it seems to me that there is a great melevolent will behind the whole process that seeks to see its practitioners ridiculed and abased.

There was, but then I took a big dookie, and it's all better now.

Hate-Space is curved in relation to TGRR's dookie.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I don't know, everyone.  This guy has me believing.

If it's chaos magick that brought him here, it seems to me that there is a great melevolent will behind the whole process that seeks to see its practitioners ridiculed and abased.

There was, but then I took a big dookie, and it's all better now.

Hate-Space is curved in relation to TGRR's dookie.

My shit tells space how to bend, and space tells my shit how to move.



TGRR,
Dancing on Einstein's grave.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I think I've found a way to express what I've been trying to say.

If you want to know how the universe works, ask a physicist, not a priest.

If you want to know how the economy works, ask a crack dealer, not an economist.

If you want to know how people work, ask the guy who takes care of the monkeys at the zoo, not a psychologist.

[Cramulus]

That's a useful framework...To expand on that --  a physicist is best for learning how the material universe works. Mythological narratives do have their uses.. mainly in that they help us understand what the fuck people are up to. To illustrate, here's a snippet from Chaos Marxism:

http://chaosmarxism.blogspot.com/2010/08/narrative.html

A childish mind believes that the world acts like a story.

An adult mind knows better, and believes that stories are "just stories".

An enlightened mind knows that stories, narratives and myths don't describe how the world works, but precisely and accurately describe psychological processes - and therefore explain how people work.

The commies out there will have noted that this is a pretty neat Hegelian dialectic, with the last step being the negation of the negation (also in the sense that an enlightened being will have to have both adult and child minds operating in complementary fashion). The story world is a refraction of the Real World of Horrible Jobs. The menu is not just words on paper, even though you can't eat it; if you can use it properly, you can gain delicious things to eat.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

That's a useful framework...To expand on that --  a physicist is best for learning how the material universe works. Mythological narratives do have their uses.. mainly in that they help us understand what the fuck people are up to. To illustrate, here's a snippet from Chaos Marxism:

http://chaosmarxism.blogspot.com/2010/08/narrative.html

A childish mind believes that the world acts like a story.

An adult mind knows better, and believes that stories are "just stories".

An enlightened mind knows that stories, narratives and myths don't describe how the world works, but precisely and accurately describe psychological processes - and therefore explain how people work.

The commies out there will have noted that this is a pretty neat Hegelian dialectic, with the last step being the negation of the negation (also in the sense that an enlightened being will have to have both adult and child minds operating in complementary fashion). The story world is a refraction of the Real World of Horrible Jobs. The menu is not just words on paper, even though you can't eat it; if you can use it properly, you can gain delicious things to eat.

1.  Yes, that's why I separated people out in the third line.

2.  I still think any given monkeyhouse gives a better description of how groups of people behave.

[Adios]

Prior causality can be subtly altered by will.

How?  What physical mechanism does this?

Asynchronous non-linear acausal disturbance of distribution fields prior to decoherence.




As if you didn't know...

I know this is wrong of me......but all I saw was I am Maxwell Smart.

[Phox]

Prior causality can be subtly altered by will.

How?  What physical mechanism does this?

Asynchronous non-linear acausal disturbance of distribution fields prior to decoherence.




As if you didn't know...

I know this is wrong of me......but all I saw was I am Maxwell Smart.

I like LMNO, I really do. It's bad enough that I already read his posts in the voice of Paul Lynd. Now Don Adams? I swear to fucking Christ, if it's GeorgeTakei next, I will fly to Boston and kill EVERYONE. Seriously.


(Do not test me, LMNO. I will do it.)

[Cainad (dec.)]

Well, chaos magic is based on incompleteness of knowledge.

So is Southern Baptism.

So too, in a rather different way, is science.


So we have:

• Mahdjique
• Southern Baptism
• Science

One of these things is not like the other.

[Telarus]

Crowley would say that "one of these things is not like the other" is no excuse to not have a ménage à trois.


Southern Baptism is going to come out with a whole new gleam in her eye, tho.

[Slyph]

Look if you're going to practise magick at least have the balls to do it big stanky caldrouns of eye of newt and shit.

Also, is anyone else reminded of the Emperor's New Clothes?

[hooplala]

Also, is anyone else reminded of the Emperor's New Clothes?

I don't know that story, is it anything like The Generalissimo's New Thong?

[Triple Zero]

Science :

Cons - You have to learn math.  You have to prove your idea.  It has to survive peer review.

Pros - It works.  Will not get you laid with fat, smelly trustafarian college girls.

Um, the two bolded bits are contradictory, as has been repeatedly shown. Current hypothesis is "monkey business".

Seriously. There's one thing I would like people to stop conveniently forgetting all the fucking time and that is that science is, for a large part, a steaming pile of politics. Sure, there is some hypothetical theoretical enlightened science "the way it's supposed to work", but the same thing goes for democracy, and neither has ever actually been reliably observed in reality. Which makes "science the way it's supposed to work, works really well" more like a theory than anything else.

Don't get me wrong, just like democracy, science is probably "the best we've come up with so far that sort of kind of works", but also keep in mind where democracy got us.

The whole peer review business is crooked, if the theories are inconvenient or unpopular enough. Even if they're backed by an endless stream of cold hard facts, the committees deciding what is a peer review, what gets peer reviewed and what get published as peer reviewed can and have been rejected for whatever reasons on many occasions across different fields of science.

In astronomy, there was this guy who made measurements that didn't match the ideas of red/blue shift, his alternate theory would have pretty much made all distance measurements of far away stars invalid--very inconvenient. The guy was doing proper science, and he felt like he stumbled upon something really big. But instead of proving the guy wrong, the community ridiculed him and banned him worldwide from astronomical observatories. Dunno how it ended, I think they figured it out by now, what or how to explain the guy's measurements without having to ditch the whole really really useful red-blue shift analysis of star distance measuring. But only two or three decades later after ruining the guy's scientific career.

In the Ki thread, Telarus posted this article about a neuropsychologist observing his wife doing "energy work", from which he derived some acu-pressure methods which get very real not-quite-entirely-understood but fully repeatable (by anyone after 15 minutes of instruction, regardless of whether they are "in tune with the cosmos" or not) results on subjects suffering from PTSD, with much less chance of relapse than traditional methods. This method was already known and practised in alternative medicine in the 80s, which gave it a bad name because the people doing it had huge egos and were suing their students for using their Methods etc, and by the time these psychologists had some proper scientific results they wanted to put up for peer review, the committee refused it because it was "dubious subject matter", even though the data and experiments were scientifically sound and repeatable.

[Cain]

Chaos magick is stupid.

Empiricism is stupid.

Everyone ITT is stupid.