What do you REALLY believe?

[Thurnez Isa]

Intelligent people who practice madgliguqte understand this. They know that they are monkeying around in their head to alter how they interface with the universe. Most occultists know that they can't shoot lightning bolts - reminding them that the universe has a rather unyielding material nature isn't an argument against the majority of occult practices.

The Barstool metaphor (to me) is an argument against belief systems which poorly describe reality -- like the Breatharians who think they can get all their daily nutrients from proper breathing techniques. A rational person who prays, tosses a penny into a wishing well, or carries a magical fetish to make him more attractive is not living in a total fantasy world. As opposed to the guy in the barstool story who thinks the universe is intangible, and finds out he's 100% dead wrong.

There's a difference between crazy quirky superstitions, if there is acknowledgment that in reality your probably not effecting the physical world and believing you are effecting physical world. IE I still do the wishing well but don't believe it.

Now if rituals that were once influenced by magical rituals are used to effect the temporal lobe as a sort of less destructive way of gaining a spiritual experience then, lets say, drugs then that's all well and fine.

But the word magic implies that a supernatural energy is used to effect the natural world... those you are making a naturalistic claim on how the universe is scientifically structured... thus you have to prove your case

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

You most certianly do not need to explain it from a Scientific Materialist paradigm... that's no less a single model than believing in Transcendental or Magical paradigms. To crib from RAW: "The only thing I believe in that the Universe is far more complex than I will ever understand."

That (in some form or other) the only base level you need to be able to work from.

[BabylonHoruv]

I think this is getting a little out of hand. BH is not trying to reject all science. I think he's (she's?) stating that some beliefs are more useful at different times than others. I don't have any issue with that.

I think some people are forgetting that science is not how the universe works. It is a model of how the universe works. You can cast aside that model and still live in a universe where things fall at a constant rate or whatever. You just don't describe the rate of falling using the same language. That doesn't make you wrong.



Also, I think the Barstool metaphor is being used incorrectly. The lesson of that story is, "Just because you believe in crazy shit, it doesn't change how the universe fundamentally operates."

Intelligent people who practice madgliguqte understand this. They know that they are monkeying around in their head to alter how they interface with the universe. Most occultists know that they can't shoot lightning bolts - reminding them that the universe has a rather unyielding material nature isn't an argument against the majority of occult practices.

The Barstool metaphor (to me) is an argument against belief systems which poorly describe reality -- like the Breatharians who think they can get all their daily nutrients from proper breathing techniques. A rational person who prays, tosses a penny into a wishing well, or carries a magical fetish to make him more attractive is not living in a total fantasy world. As opposed to the guy in the barstool story who thinks the universe is intangible, and finds out he's 100% dead wrong.

He, although admittedly I do have a girl's name.  And that is what I am stating, some beliefs are more useful at certain times than others.  With fun as a subset of useful.  I also gave out the beliefs that I subscribe to the most often, which have to do with magic, and deities, and fairies, and are completely irrelevent to science.

I can tell that most of you are having fun with me.  I'm having fun too, except about my percieved reaction from two people, it looked to me like Thurnez Iza was actually a bit upset about me believing the way I do, and Rev. Roger has written me off as a fruitcake.  I did say that at the very root of things I don't think you can really know.  That includes really knowing if the scientific description is really really true though.  I figure if you can't really know you choose which belief structure to apply and act as if it is true and I went with a magical belief structure for my day to day existence.  I do think my cat understands me, so long as I realize that means she understands me on cat terms (Daddy's angry, Daddy is sad, Daddy is willing to play with me, Daddy doesn't realize I am telling him my food bowl is empty and I need to show him etc) rather than on human terms I don't think that makes me a fruitbat.

When I use the word real to describe magic I am using it the same way you are using real to describe the scientific model.  Both are useful tools for understanding the universe, and we can't really know if either is really really true at a deep level.

And if the law of fives doesn't work for you, I'd suggest playing with it a little more.  Numerology can be useful, and the law of fives is kind of like a cheatcode for numerology.

Thurnez, you not believing you effect the physical world is why you don't effect the physical world.

LMNO yup, but Universe Prime strikes me as unknowable. And thinking about it too much makes model shifting more difficult.

[Thurnez Isa]

To crib from RAW: "The only thing I believe in that the Universe is far more complex than I will ever understand."

I agree with statement
We probably only understand 10 percent of the universe... if that
But there is a different in understanding that we don't understand... and filling the in the gaps...

Now if as I said it is personal experience or even philosophy... that is different then that is different from... as I said.. fulling in the just filling in the gaps with ideas and not evidence

[Thurnez Isa]

BabylonHoruv Ive written you off as a fruitcake too...

I haven't written Rat off cause I do believe every time me and rat tango we get caught up on semantics

personally i think me and rat are very close in agreement, but its a sort yin and yang thing

[Cramulus]

LMNO: you make a very interesting point. Answering for myself --  when I "step back" to explain the meta-model idea, I have to pick a model to explain it from. Scientific materialism is usually the default because it's effective for making stuff make sense to the average person. I also operate in scientific materialism most of the time so it feels comfortable as a default. But I don't think the meta-model understanding of the universe necessarily points to scientific materialism.

the "universe prime" in your model is the universe outside of our interpretation of it. I can't say anything definitively about that universe except that it hurts to get hit in the face with a barstool no matter which way you describe what happened.








While we're on belief systems....

I'm going to go out on a limb and add some more ointment to the stew,

the pet belief system I'm trying on this year is the one pushed in the Art of Memetics, where we're basically just a point of consciousness suspended in these nested egregores. And we ourselves are not a singular person, but a nested multiplicity of ideas and identities.


So at a very fine level you have cells. If you zoom in to see just cells, they look like like individual entities.
-zoom out and you see tissue
--zoom out and you see a person
---zoom out and you see a group of people
----zoom out and you see a business, religion, nation...

there's intelligence at all levels. This is fractal logic. Your body has circulatory, nervous, and immune systems. Your country has them too. We're all parts of the same giant entity.

(I'm being a bit too literal though... I should be talking about memes as the smallest unit, not cells)

AoM talks about how overall changes in the whole system happen as a result of microscopic internal events. The way that an influential individual can change an entire business' policy is the same process as how an influential memes can change a human's overall attitude.

MAGIC, as Ed and Wes pragmatically describe it, is nothing more than fine tuning the signals you are broadcasting and receiving within the egregore. It is literally a signal detection experiment. There's no hocus pocus about it, and the "magic" is almost indistinguishable from merely being effective at what you're doing. They don't even use the word magic because it has so much baggage and bad connotation.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

To crib from RAW: "The only thing I believe in that the Universe is far more complex than I will ever understand."

I agree with statement
We probably only understand 10 percent of the universe... if that
But there is a different in understanding that we don't understand... and filling the in the gaps...

Now if as I said it is personal experience or even philosophy... that is different then that is different from... as I said.. fulling in the just filling in the gaps with ideas and not evidence

I have no idea if we understand the universe at all... I think we have very good documentation of observations made by humans about the perceived Universe... but there may be a billion reasons why our observations are terribly flawed. Humans once believed the Earth to be flat and the sun and moon to go spinning around us. The Earth and Sun and Moon and pretty much the biggest things we humans can see... and we only got that right after thousands of years of observing and documenting what we observed.

Yet, new theories postulate that the earth may not be round and go round the sun... instead we might all be 2D and only see 3d because we're projected holographs. Maybe that theory is bull shit, maybe its right, maybe its just another model trying to explain some observations...

There are so many reasons why our 'understanding' of even 10% of the Universe may be horribly flawed.

Hell, look at Causality, Cause and Effect.  That doesn't really exist any more so than 5's and 23's. There are many, many actions and most of cause some sort of effect... but those effects are actions which cause other effects and the action that first caused this.... was the effect of many other actions. At best, we can presume that the linear order we process data in is correct, but even that must rely on our human brain and what it can grok based on our current understanding of things. IF we say "What was The Cause?", we're really saying "Go find me some Starbucks pebbles, so I'll feel like I have some control over my life".  

Rather than a universe of Cause and Effect, it may be a universe of causal feedback, where causes create effects which interact with the Universe creating more effects which do the same over and over again. If this is the case, our assumptions about many things may be wrong.

Scientific materialism is really useful for modeling some things. However, to think it is the Base from which we must work, seems as silly as actually believing in faeries.

[BabylonHoruv]

BabylonHoruv Ive written you off as a fruitcake too...

I haven't written Rat off cause I do believe every time me and rat tango we get caught up on semantics

personally i think me and rat are very close in agreement, but its a sort yin and yang thing

That's ok.  I've written you off as a fundamentalist.

[Cramulus]

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2564638/The-Art-Of-Memetics

here's some text I liked from the intro to AoM:




[This] is a book that is much needed in the occult community because it shows other magicians how to take memetics, semiotics, writing, and other related pursuits and adapt them to magical practices, while also pushing those magical practices into new directions. Magic is no longer restricted to ceremonial tools and garb. Magic is something more. Magic, in this book, is about taking the cultural forces around us and using them to shape reality.

That's pretty powerful. In fact, it's a recognition that if magic is to continue to evolve; it has to evolve with the technology of the time, while also using that technology in ways that most people will probably never think of. The magician is a person who fits into any time, any space, and does so by choosing to take on the available tools and cultural mindsets and use them to achieve what s/he desires.

...

Magic is perhaps the most loaded term we use throughout the text, and we propose the same definition Taylor Ellwood puts forth in his book Multi-Media Magic: "Magic involves making the improbable possible.  It's learning how even the slightest change you make can have a radical effect on the internal system of your psychology/spirituality, and the external system of the environment and universe you live in."

...

Magic was once a much larger field of study.  Over the years most of the ideas that were once confined to magical theory and practice have been isolated and reformulated in different fields of study.  Magicians are left guarding only a few nuggets of practical application that remains unique to magic.  For the most part, interaction with essences generated from patterns, the manipulation of belief to alter subjective experiences, and non-local action of thought and will are all that remain solely under the banner of 'Magick' and even these few ideations are being carted away into other disciplines.   So why not just study those other disciplines?

We feel there is still value in the study of magic; in particular the language system that has been built up dealing with subtle connections, forces, and objects of the psyche.  We believe that with grounding in the theory and experience of causing the improbable to become possible, an individual becomes empowered to reverse-engineer the hyperreal world of post-modern discourse.  We believe that magic is much more than sleight of hand or sleight of mind, and know that what has been carted away into the sciences of harmonics, of chemistry, of quantum physics still haunts the spectral core of this abstraction labeled sorcery, magic, thaumaturgy, mojo, hoodoo...  and in precisely the same way, magic haunts sciences, both hard and soft.  One doesn't need to dig far to find elements of wizardry in neurolinguistic programming, or marketing, or psychology.  We do not react directly to the world but rather the world as it is filtered by our nervous system's habits of punctuation. We break down the world according to what we expect to find, how we move indicates what is important to pay attention and what our word systems point out or hide. This is what Kenneth Burke
refers to as the terministic screen, and is very similar to what Robert Anton Wilson meant when he discussed Reality Tunnels in his work
Quantum Psychology.

Understand that this book is created from the viewpoint of two authors who have spent years examining the occult with a critical, albeit subjective, stance.  This is an attempt to bring together trends in marketing, infoprenuership, and the occult so we ourselves could best understand how and where these trends converge.

[LMNO]

Ok, maybe i overstated my case.

"Universe Prime" (U') in the above case may be just another model.  But if you are going to believe in model switching, then U' is the model which contains and allows for the other models.  And if you want to examine and try to objectively (as much as possible) describe and dissect the subjective experience of those sub-models, then U' needs to be constructed in a certain way.

When I attempt to define how U' is constructed to allow for model-switching and objective dissection, I seem to be leaning towards a scientific model.

[BabylonHoruv]

Ok, maybe i overstated my case.

"Universe Prime" (U') in the above case may be just another model.  But if you are going to believe in model switching, then U' is the model which contains and allows for the other models.  And if you want to examine and try to objectively (as much as possible) describe and dissect the subjective experience of those sub-models, then U' needs to be constructed in a certain way.

When I attempt to define how U' is constructed to allow for model-switching and objective dissection, I seem to be leaning towards a scientific model.

A universe in which believing in Jehovah as the ultimate authority is a valid approach to making a concrete change in reality doesn't sound like the normally used scientific model.

A universe which is unknowably complex strikes me as in direct contradiction to the scientific worldview.

Also thanks for the book link Cram.  I am really into both Memetics and magic, so I am sure this is gonna be interesting, and probably useful.

[Thurnez Isa]

@ Rat

One thing: Accurate predictions: thats how we know
We make predictions and take in new evidence, or preform experiments, if the models are correct the prediction will also be correct
that's how we know

and to a smaller degree peer review: Objective minds looking at the same experiment in an attempt to destroy it's validity. Smart people are very good at convincing themselves of very dumb things, and you need an objective mind to explore pretty much anything with accuracy

Also the models are complimentary to each other. Elastic Rebound Theory would not be correct if the Theory of Plate Tectonics was incorrect. It's like a puzzle. One piece fits because the other piece is in the correct location.

[Cramulus]

Ok, maybe i overstated my case.

"Universe Prime" (U') in the above case may be just another model.  But if you are going to believe in model switching, then U' is the model which contains and allows for the other models.  And if you want to examine and try to objectively (as much as possible) describe and dissect the subjective experience of those sub-models, then U' needs to be constructed in a certain way.

When I attempt to define how U' is constructed to allow for model-switching and objective dissection, I seem to be leaning towards a scientific model.

yeah -- but ultimately you're imposing a model on the universe outside of your explanations.   "The Chao that cannot be described" and all that.

and scientific materialism doesn't have a monopoly on rational thought - it can exist within those other models too. That's why I avoid calling materialism the True model even though it has a pretty high resonance with my perceptions.

[Thurnez Isa]

A universe which is unknowably complex strikes me as in direct contradiction to the scientific worldview.

then you gotta go back to school
or take a science course

[LMNO]

Ok, maybe i overstated my case.

"Universe Prime" (U') in the above case may be just another model.  But if you are going to believe in model switching, then U' is the model which contains and allows for the other models.  And if you want to examine and try to objectively (as much as possible) describe and dissect the subjective experience of those sub-models, then U' needs to be constructed in a certain way.

When I attempt to define how U' is constructed to allow for model-switching and objective dissection, I seem to be leaning towards a scientific model.

A universe in which believing in Jehovah as the ultimate authority is a valid approach to making a concrete change in reality doesn't sound like the normally used scientific model.

A universe which is unknowably complex strikes me as in direct contradiction to the scientific worldview.

And yet, if you follow the multiple models theory, there must be universe that contains both.  When you begin breaking down how this can be true, you come to some interesting conclusions.