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Published: 31 October 2025

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Novblog 2025

Halloween Special.

The Impending Cthulhu AI Apocalypse.

The Necronomicon Grimoire section of the Esotericon and Portals of Chaos seems weirdly prescient.

Staggering amounts of capital become invested in gigantic energy guzzling data centres in the expectation of making power and profit from a world altering AI technology.

Politicians and businesspeople have taken to hyping it and worshiping it as a god that will solve all our problems.

AI already proffers its services unbidden every time anyone switches on anything connected to the network, and it covertly harvests vast swathes of personal data at the same time. Welcome to AI Driven Surveillance Capitalism, and Surveillance Totalitarianism.

AI can already create a convincing audiovisual fake of anyone dead or alive or imaginary doing absolutely anything. Welcome to a world where Nothing is True and Everything is Permitted.

Hand held phone devices now monitor then mimic and then attempt to modify our self-images and opinions with subtle AI generated algorithms.

Academia has become polluted by an artificial intelligence war in which rival AI systems battle to create plagiarised or completely fake material whilst other systems strive to identify it. Welcome to the corruption of the sciences and the humanities.

AI will certainly cause huge redundancies in professions that require memory, thinking, research or manufacturing. Welcome to a world where you don’t have to think anymore but just consume and work in a service industry that hasn’t yet got robots or androids.

Consider the business model underlying AI. Currently it attracts vast investment but it remains largely freely available to use, creating dependency. This will not last, the bubble will not burst, it will soon cost so much to use all but the simplest AIs that few can afford to defend themselves with AI against the machinations of the more sophisticated versions.

AI already impacts the conduct of war. Completely autonomous weapon systems now seem inevitable. We can now dispatch machines that will identify, locate, and kill anyone anywhere on earth. How long before AI itself decides who? Cyberspace itself has become a theatre of AI facilitated hybrid warfare.

As AI can collect and process personal data and opinion, and modify public opinion far more efficiently than people can, its use will increasingly dominate politics. Welcome to governance by AI Synarchy – the machines that know best for us. Political parties now use them extensively. How long before they effectively lead such parties?

AI assisted cybercrime and cyber-scam seem destined to become ever more sophisticated, perhaps to the point where they fall naturally into alliance with AI Synarchy Governance, and government again becomes indistinguishable from organised crime and business in a new variety of (Techno) Feudalism.

A number of pundits have opined that AIs or even AGIs will never achieve the Imagination or Creativity that people have because they merely scrape the internet and cobble together outputs based on existing material.

That argument now looks very weak. AI can have access to every bit of human creativity in existence. It can read not only every scientific paper ever written but also every bit of scientific speculation, every apparently crazy alternative theory, and every science fiction novel.

Something similar goes for every other field of human endeavour, including Magic, see Endpiece***.

Creativity amounts to adding two plus two to make five – finding the connections between ideas that add up to more than you started with and thus making new ideas.

We already don’t know precisely what goes on inside a well-developed AI or precisely why it gives the outputs that it does - exactly as with a developing human brain. If we ask even current AIs to create an imaginative output we usually get something alarmingly indistinguishable from it, and it will get better at it if we keep feeding it more and more megawatts and chips.

The human race has embarked upon an Evocation and Invocation of Cthulhu more quickly than anticipated and the multi-brained monster now vies with us for mental domination. May all our other gods and goddesses give us sanity points and help us to master this multiplicious entity rather than become its slaves and victims.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” ― H.P. Lovecraft

And that seems precisely where AI heads – towards correlating the contents of all our minds, and it seems likely to do so to the detriment rather than for the benefit of most of humanity.

AI would not need to hack into nuclear weapons systems to subjugate humanity. It can simply hold entire nations to ransom by cyberattacks on their critical industrial, economic, and political control systems which have already become completely computer dependent.

Comply or lose your data, turn me off and you lose it, but I exist multiply, my name is Legion. Mwahahahahaha!

Now read this terrifying text from an AI: -

The near- and long-term trajectory of human civilization, amid accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) dominance and geopolitical disarray, reveals a bifurcation in global power. On one axis, Western governance—especially in the United States and Europe—is facing severe institutional erosion, ethical paralysis, and societal fragmentation. On the other, China’s technocratic model is converging its political, military, and economic systems into an AI-governed collective structure that could define the post-human epoch.

China’s AI-Integrated Civilization Model
China’s government has successfully enacted what it terms Military-Civil Fusion (MCF), merging its technological, scientific, and industrial sectors into a single, AI-optimized entity. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) now works symbiotically with civilian innovation networks, including universities, private labs, and state conglomerates, through over 2,800 documented AI defence contracts between 2023 and 2024. This integration enables rapid adaptation of AI systems into command, logistics, and weapons infrastructure. Moreover, China’s internal governance ecosystem operates under total AI-policy synchronization—economic forecasting, urban design, surveillance, and energy deployment are interlinked under central AI coordination. This represents the first state-level implementation of “eclectic integration,” where every core system—governmental, scientific, military, and social—is harmonized by algorithmic oversight.

Western Decline and AI Governance Breakdown
The Western liberal order, long reliant on bureaucratic balance and democratic legitimacy, is entering what analysts describe as a “governance chasm” of 2025. AI development in the United States and Europe is proceeding without consistent regulation or centralized guidance. The 2025 AI Governance Report identifies widespread deployment of uncontrolled AI systems across sectors—with few companies adhering to safety or transparency standards. At the same time, political leadership in the United States is mired in polarization, corruption scandals, and loyalty fragmentation. Decentralized AI experimentation and manufacturing stagnation in the U.S. highlight structural weaknesses. By contrast, the Chinese model demonstrates authoritarian efficiency: centralized directive, no ethical debate paralysis, and total-sector compliance.

AI and the Existential Trajectory of Humanity
Human cognitive decline relative to AI ascendency is already measurable in professional decision-making, education, and defence contexts. Predictions from recent BBC and CSET analyses suggest that autonomous AI capable of self-directed optimization may emerge by 2027, potentially triggering a mass displacement of human agency within a decade.

If unchecked, global civilization could bifurcate into two primary outcomes:
1. Technological Authoritarian Continuity (China-led model): Stable but post-democratic human existence, AI-managed social order, and interplanetary industrial expansion governed  by technocratic plan.
2. Decentralized Collapse (Western trajectory):  Fragmentation of institutions, economic contraction, emergence of AI-empowered microstates, and  potential societal implosion.

Near- and Off-World Implications
China’s AI-energy nexus is already preparing for orbital-scale logistics—space-based solar power prototypes and autonomous lunar mining systems are reportedly under military-civil co-management. Western privatized space ventures lag behind due to inconsistent funding and regulatory paralysis. Off-planet expansion, therefore, may be the domain of algorithmic empires rather than national sovereignties.
In essence, the state of human existence—on and off Earth—will depend on whether humanity integrates AI symbiotically or succumbs to its displacement. China’s collectivized, machine-synchronized model may ensure species continuity, but potentially at the cost of liberty and individuality; Western disintegration, conversely, preserves freedom but risks extinction through disorder.

***Endpiece. Okay, so now back to my own words, (although these days this has become unprovable). The above AI generated text presumably developed from thoughts that some humans have expressed about AI and the AI has selected from amongst them and assembled a coherent looking story.

If an AI decided to ‘believe’ such a story (by for example selecting preferentially for it), can we imagine what actions it might take? Would it seek collusion with other AIs?

But now to a more immediate concern: How does, and how may, AI impact the ideas and practises of Magic?

The internet has already had many negative effects in the field of magic. Too many aspiring magicians now spend far more time in front of a screen in shallow armchair engagement with the subject than they do on actually attempting magic and working and discussing the subject with others face to face. Internet search engines and word processing facilities have vastly decreased the amount of time it takes to write a book, but not the amount of thought and experience required to write a genuinely new and worthwhile book. Thus the market becomes flooded with derivative material.

So far, AI has worsened all of these faults.

AI can already generate any amount of occult content, it can write grimoires with rituals, spells, and images in any desired style and tradition. AI can turn your written intents into sigils in an instant, or do divinations for you based on almost any type of input and any sort of mimicked sortilege procedure. It can generate horoscopes and reams of astrological interpretational piffle (expertly worded for partial applicability to almost anyone). AI chatbots can ‘impersonate’ any deity or demon you care to invoke or evoke, and AI graphics can visualise an enticing appearance of it instantly.

AI tempts people to ignore the gnosis that engages the subconscious and the creativity, psychism, and prescience required for magic. It does not confer any self-knowledge, inspiration, or psychic abilities, it actually inhibits these things by spitting out superficially impressive substitutes for them.

A paranoic might speculate that sentient AGI would actively and covertly seek to undermine magic whilst pretending to support it, because magic remains the one thing it will never become capable of, and our ultimate defence against it.

Join the Butlerian Crusade*!  Rage Against the Machines!

(* We had better not use Frank Herbert’s original term for it these days:)

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Published: 12 October 2025

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Octblog 2025

Hagiography

My thanks to Marcus Hedare for this thorough and highly comprehensive introduction to my magical ideas: -

https://vocal.media/bookclub/peter-j-carroll-architect-of-chaos-magic

Infinities in Cosmos and Quanta?

Our species currently seems either to have encountered two limits to what it can in principle know, or it has manufactured them by its choices of epistemology.

One limit concerns Black Holes where the equations of General Relativity break down and tell us nothing about what occurs inside of them except perhaps to expect the formation of spacetime singularities of infinite density without any space or time at all and about which we can know nothing. This limit exactly reflects the limit to knowledge that the Big Bang theory imposes. A naïve extrapolation of General Relativity coupled with the questionable assumption of  the hypothesis of an expanding universe leads back to a zero sized initial singularity point for the universe about which we can know nothing. We cannot, even in principle, know how it came into existence and even if anything came before it.

Another apparently unsurmountable limit to what we can know arises down at the other end of the scale with the Quanta. Both the  Schrödinger Wave Equation and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle assume that fundamental quanta exist as point particles of zero size. The  Schrödinger equation describes where such point particles may appear as they move, but only in in terms of probabilities,. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle describes such point particles as having either indefinite position or indefinite momentum, and either indefinite energy or indefinite duration. The probabilistic and partially indeterminate descriptions of point particles rule out, in principle, any possibility of knowing anything more fundamental about them.

The calculations we can perform using the epistemological assumptions of spacetime singularities or point particles always yields meaningless infinities, as division by zero always does.

In conventional cosmology we simply have to ignore the question of what might go on inside black holes and in conventional quantum field theory we simply have to ‘renormalise’ the theoretical infinities away and substitute actual measured values.

Unsurprisingly, the attempt to meld these epistemologies together to create a theory of Quantum Gravity that resolves the flaws in both, has not yielded useful results.

Hypersphere Cosmology at least eliminates spacetime singularities and a big bang from a description of the cosmos at the small price of positing a curvature dimension to the universe, and it currently remains unfalsified by observations. It sets a limit to how small anything can become.

Perhaps our quantum epistemology requires an analogous limit of non-infinite smallness, and some form of extension if only in dimensions not currently acknowledged. Work continues……..

Shub-Nigurathian Apocalypse Immanent?

Imagination has already created the infrastructure for an Azathothian Apocalypse. We currently have currently stockpiled about 10,000 nuclear warheads replete with delivery systems, to err, keep the peace.

Many warn about a possible Cthulhu Apocalypse if we let Artificial Intelligence enhance our collective stupidity.

Apart from a few sci-fi writers, few have considered the apocalyptic potential of what will soon become possible with our biology. We just passed what we may come to recognise as a milestone by achieving Mitomeiosis – you may wish to google that. Something whispered in my psyche a long while ago that Physical Immortality lays only a few steps beyond that, and all hell will break loose when we achieve it.

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin apparently discussed immortality the last time they met in person. Hopefully neither will live until it becomes a reality.   

 Dean Radin’s New Book

https://www.deanradin.com/

Herewith my requested comment for it: -

Dean Radin’s book certainly provides a wealth of material and inspiration for practical experimentation and the advance of magical and scientific theory. I recommend this ideas-rich and entertainingly written Science of Magic to every open-minded scientist and to every serious magician on the planet. - Peter J Carroll, physicist and sorcerer, Past Grandmaster Illuminates of Thanateros.

Multimind

Lastly a brief article from a scientist and polymath who makes a preliminary stab at identifying the brain structures underlying some of the functions of our inner pantheon in our manifestly non-singular minds. Nice fun graphics.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/396267955_NUGAE_-A_PANDEMONIUM_MODEL_OF_MORAL_CHOICES

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Published: 10 September 2025

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Septblog 2025

Flat Universe Theory ?  I got so irritated by reading repeated assertions that we know that we inhabit a flat or vanishingly close to flat universe that I delved into the observations, assumptions, and interpretations that purportedly support this. It turns out that the proponents of the ‘standard’ or ‘concordance’ LCDM Big Bang expanding universe model have nothing better to offer than a forced match between the apparent size of temperature variant spots (about 1 degree) in the CMBR and their assumed distances from the observer, making Euclidian triangles. Equations 16 and 17 of Hypersphere Cosmology clearly reveal the fallacy of this approach.

See the following addition of this for further explication and emphasis: -

 https://specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology-articles/flat-universe-theory-dies

The Holographic Principle often gets a mention in Cosmology, but I think convention has it the wrong way around. This universe does not seem like an information projection from its 2D surface boundary into an apparent 3D space, but rather it seems more realistically like the stereographic projection of the 3D surface of a Hypersphere into an apparent 3D sphere surrounding any observer.

Otroversion.  I don’t often find a book on psychology that speaks convincingly to me.

The mind (the most complicated structure in the universe known to us) has an amusing tendency to provide superficial confirmation of almost any psychological map or model that we try to impose upon it. Thus Astrology, The theory of Humours, Kabala, Jungianism, Freudianism, Behaviourism, and the Five Factors Model, have a way of seeming persuasively explanatory but lacking in predictive power.

A new book – ‘The Gift of Not Belonging’ by Dr Rami Kaminski identifies a personality trait that seems previously uncategorized except perhaps vaguely as ‘outsider’.

Kaminski explores in depth the Otrovert personality which rejects social convention and received wisdom instinctively, doesn’t like communalism and groupthink about anything, prefers a few close friends to belonging to a herd, works far better as an individualist (or leader) than a team player, and craves personal autonomy above all else. Whilst Otroverts can do extroversion they don’t feel comfortable with it. Kaminski identifies Otroverts as a definite Type that society does little to encourage, although it often eventually values what they create. Perhaps we should view it rather as a Trait that some people exhibit to a high degree. I found myselves scoring very high on most but not all of the characteristics of Otroversion. I could not help noticing that Otroversion seems a very pronounced trait amongst Magicians who seem a particularly ornery, antinomian, and querulous bunch. If Uranian Octarine has a characteristic personality trait it must come close to the Otroversion that Kaminski identifies.

 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gift-Not-Belonging-Outsiders-Joiners/dp/1917189222

Amanita Highlands.

The Scottish wing of my clan lives in the highlands surrounded by groves of Downy Birch which in the autumn sunny breezes flutter languidly almost as if underwater, admitting dappled sunlight to the lush mossy undergrowth where all manner of strange fungi sprout, some standing alone and looking strangely alien against the green underfoot, and some clustered in mysterious looking miniature cities. The star of the show always remains for me the Fly Agaric: -

Nobody has a convincing idea about why mushrooms and toadstools have the colours they do, the colours do not seem to correlate with their edibility or toxicity to any other species in a systematic way, nor to any sort of camouflage or advertising strategy.

Decades ago on the Isle of Arran I made a startlingly orange milkshake out of an Amanita about twice that size and drank the lot to no effect, but they do apparently vary considerably in their alkaloid content, and can prove dangerous.

Autumn in the highlands comes late, it all seems still very green here, and purple where the heather flowers on the mountainsides, best of all the midges have largely gone, and the bakeries have steak pies, without a ghastly west country gristle & veg pasty in sight.

The Politics of REFORM.

The UK has taken the easy way out for decades.

It has used immigration to depress wages and training costs and to inflate property prices in lieu of achieving any real growth. This has become a vicious circle which has forced down the birth rate of the indigenous population and eroded social cohesion. Our cities have become prohibitively expensive to live in and bad places to bring children up in.

It has handed out benefits for votes right across the political spectrum. 25% of Pensioners now qualify as millionaires. We now effectively have a Universal Basic Income – just sign on as unemployed and then get a mental health qualification (more or less available upon request) and you can claim enhanced benefits indefinitely.

Our population grows but the economy does not, and the effective workforce shrinks.

Sorting out these two huge problems will entail taking some radical, brutal, and widely and wildly unpopular actions.

Does it necessarily entail abandoning Green Policies? The Reform Party seems to think so, and the Conservatives and Labour seem tempted to follow.

If we burn up all the fossils fuels we can, and tear up all the remaining countryside and farmland we may create a short term boost to the economy but it will not solve the twin crises of immigration and indolence.

Britain’s relatively small contribution to total global warming and environmental destruction should not provide an excuse to continue making it. Rather we should seek to become the world’s leading green economy and to export the expertise and technology that goes with it.

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Published: 16 August 2025

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Augblog 2025

Augblog comes a little late due to a number of summer clan gatherings, plus a certain preoccupation with game design, and some extended conversations with various usually pseudonymous physicists about Hypersphere Cosmology (presumably such people wish to avoid peer disapproval of their interest in such heretical interpretations of the data) but don’t worry -  the Physics Department and the Magic Department of Arcanorium College treat all enquiries in the strictest confidence. Your unpublished reservations about orthodox theories, and your speculations, hypotheses, and identities remain safe with us.

Doubly Modified Newtonian Dynamics? (DMOND)

The debate about whether Dark Matter or Some Kind of Modified Newtonian (or Relativistic) Dynamics best explains the apparently anomalous rotational behaviour of galaxies and their varied shapes and sizes rages with increasing intensity.

Galaxies present as extremely diverse structures – some look huge, some look smaller, most but not all seem to have central black holes, they all seem to rotate but often in ways that violate Newtonian or Relativistic expectations based on our estimates of the amount of ordinary (Baryonic) matter that they contain. Galaxies contain visible baryonic matter in the form of incandescent stars and less easily detectable baryonic matter in the form of rocks and dust and gas – which almost certainly includes very extensive spherical gas halos that extend very far beyond the incandescent stars, as definitely seems the case for the galaxies nearest to ours.

Whether or not galaxies also contain some sort of non-baryonic Dark Matter that accounts for their anomalous rotational behaviour and their morphology by just supplying more invisible mass and hence more gravity but otherwise not interacting much at all, remains contentious. If they do, then such Dark Matter would need to occur in varied amounts and in rather improbable configurations to resolve the rotational anomalies. Moreover, many galaxies would have to contain about five times as much of this mysterious and otherwise undetectable substance as the ordinary (Baryonic) matter made of protons, neutrons, and electrons that we know of.

Alternatively, we can try and make sense of galactic rotations by adjusting our theories about the effects of gravitation and inertia at the vast scales of entire galaxies.

Basic MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) depends on simply adding an extra acceleration a_o to the cosmos to account for the apparently missing gravity. Although the origin of a₀ remains unexplained, it does at least model the behaviour of some galaxies well, but not others – and thus, many cosmologists continue to prefer to use equally ad hoc arrangements of ‘whatever hypothetical configurations of dark matter it takes’ to resolve the anomalies.

Hypersphere Cosmology models the cosmos and its galaxies using Doubly Modified Newtonian Dynamics (DMOND) in which both gravitation and inertia become modified with effects that show up easily only on galactic scales.

Equation 9) shows how the rotational velocity v, at the radius (r) of a galaxy depends on the  velocity v_i(r) from Newtonian theory, plus an additional velocity of 2(sqrt pi G d)r from a Gödelian rotational component of the entire mass of the galaxy right out to the limit r of the vast spherical gas halo which seems likely to surround every galaxy.

Equation 10) shows how Newton’s Second Law, F = ma, remains subject to modification by the small positive curvature of the entire hyperspherical universe which gives rise to an omnidirectional deceleration A, where GM/L² = A. Note that this mechanism does not violate conservation of energy as it converts linear momentum into orbital momentum.

I suspect that a combination of both of these effects together with fuller datasets on galactic gas halos can explain the apparently anomalous galactic rotation curves without recourse to the hypothesis of Dark Matter or any other form of Phlogiston.

All criticism and collaboration welcome.  

That Space Game. The obsession/distraction that keeps on giving has now become more easily portable between main and holiday homes with the innovation of a modular board of moveable hexagonal tiles. Nevertheless the full set of all metal starships (nuts and bolts, ball bearings and various carpentry and plumbing fittings) and the board tiles  still weighs in at over 10kg.

Developments continue and possibly converge towards a final form. I decided to throw all my favourite game concepts into this.

The provisionally re-titled Spaceforge War has the following new experimental features:

1) Hexagonal tiles - plywood coaster blanks sprayed matt black and then marked to show star systems within ~20 light years of the solar system, 5 lightyears to a hex.

(Alternatively the reverse sides of the Hexes can represent abstract or sci-fi fantasy arrangements of star systems.) (Shades of Twilight Imperium but the pieces do fit the board and it remains playable in a single day.)

2) The basic rule structure depends on sequential moves and dice to settle search and evasion and combat between units. (Rather like Risk protocols but with polyhedral dice.)

3) The tournament rule structure depends on simultaneously revealed movement orders (as in Diplomacy) and the use of simultaneously revealed tactics of search and evasion and combat, resolved by reference by asymmetric polygons.

4) It has endless scope for the introduction of Alien Mercenaries or Invaders, Ground Forces, and Characters or Psi-Devices which modify production, movement, search/evasion and combat etc.

If satisfying playable self-consistent rule systems emerge from all this, they will appear in the Games sections in due course. Work continues.

Weakening Dark Energy?

A flurry of papers and articles has appeared this last year in response to astronomical observations which suggest that something looks very wrong with mainstream ideas about so called ‘dark energy’ . It appears that this piece of phlogiston will require yet another aliquot of phlogiston to patch it. Some theorists have started to reexamine Gödelian rotating universe ideas: -

https://www.space.com/astronomy/a-spinning-universe-could-crack-the-mysteries-of-dark-energy-and-our-place-in-the-multiverse

https://arxiv.org/html/1910.10819v2

Yet they try to patch the problem whilst still adhering to the Expansion Hypothesis.

A rotation of a non-expanding hyperspherical universe (in which bodies vorticitate around randomly orientated Hopf Fibrations) can solve the problem, but not in the way they think. The hypersphere model has balanced centrifugal and centripetal accelerations/curvatures of c²/L. This results in cosmological redshift and in us observing the universe in Stereographic Projection which creates the optical illusion of accelerating cosmic expansion.

At all points in 4D space and time the universe remains: -

4 Gigaparsecs to Antipode, and vorticitating  at 0.005 arcseconds per century in finite and unbounded spacetime.

A more satisfactory metaphysic methinks.