Aprblog 2024

Hate crime

I love Scotland but I HATE the Scottish National Party for its hypocrisy, its economic and geopolitical illiteracy or wilful misrepresentations, its lousy management of Scotland, its culture of anti-British resentment, and its compulsive Wokeism. I hope it gets trashed at the next General Election. Under their current leader they can no longer even play the ethnic tartan romanticism card.

If they can get away with it, the next step taken against free speech by the SNP will likely include the criminalisation of any thought-speak that might offend a newly created ‘protected group’ - career politicians such as themselves.

Nicola Sturgeon always struck me as a duplicitous career politician for whom Scottish Independence merely provided a flag of convenience for her own advancement. The same goes for Alex Salmond although he also seems to have been motivated by the possibilities of some slap and tickle as well. Let’s hope they’re both eventually tried for treason. Technically we retain the death penalty for treason, although we have commuted it for mere murder.

I have blood and treasure in the Highlands. I will let you know if I need crowdfunding or special forces to secure my escape if arrested for hate crime on my next trip to Inverness.

Trans-Antipodal light and the CMBR

The sixth equation of Hypersphere Cosmology

https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/322-equation-6

shows how light become redshifted or frequency reduced as it travels across the universe by the universe’s small positive curvature which acts as an omnidirectional deceleration A.

It shows that light coming directly from the antipode point of any observer will lose all of its frequency and become unobservable: -

f_o  = f_e (1-(d/L))   where f_{o =} observed frequency, f_e = expected frequency, d = astronomical distance and L= antipode distance.

However, due to the counter-factual indefiniteness of the frequency of a photon in flight, an observer can still receive  photons from trans-antipodal sources so long as such photons undergo some form of interaction enroute, perhaps reflection or absorption and re-emission, in which case the  mechanism works re-iteratively: -

f_o  = f_e (1-(d₁/L)) (1-(d₂/L)) (1-(d₃/L)) etc,   where d₁, d₂, d₃, etc, represent the distances travelled between interactions.

Clearly, if   d₁ + d₂ + d₃, etc > L  then light can still reach an observer without its frequency reducing completely to zero.

The CMBR represents the light from incandescent hydrogen at around 3,000 Kelvin downshifted by a factor of about 1100 to just 2.7 Kelvin, and it comprises a dominant proportion of the photon count of the entire extra-galactic background light (EBL) spectrum.

Now assuming that starlight does ‘bounce around’ occasionally in the course of epic journeys including perhaps multiple trans-antipodal journeys, then we can perhaps expect ordinary starlight to reach thermodynamic equilibrium with the background temperature of the universe and supply the relatively intense Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation that we observe.

Thelemic Symposium, September 2024

https://www.visible-college.org/symposium

Don’t expect me to attend. Chaos has already won the argument with Thelema methinks: -  

https://theblogofbaphomet.com/2014/04/15/exploring-thelema-and-chaos-magick-with-pete-and-sef-part-1/    (part 1 of 10, the other nine lie scattered forward in the same archives)

and there seems little point in trying to further promote the paradigm change to those determined to cling to the shreds of Crowleyanity.

Just a few published comments from some of the key speakers indicates the regressive flavour: -

Chaos Magic comes in for criticism for its ‘Extreme Relativism’. Ha ha, well once you have realised the relativism of anything you can never go back to absolutism about it with any shred of intellectual honesty.

Chaos Magic comes in for criticism for its ‘Lack of Initiatory Knowledge’. Ha ha again, does this mean the non-secrets of the sex magic of the Argentum Astrum and the Ordo Templi Orientalis, or does it also include the contrived Apophenia of ad-hoc Kabalas? Chaos Magic has no secret initiatory knowledge because we published it all.

Magic(k) has been redefined as ‘The art, science, and culture of experiencing truth’. Truth eh? Please do tell, otherwise we can only interpret ‘experiencing truth’ as the misuse of Gnosis to manufacture transcendentalist beliefs, the usual old religious tactic. Aiwass, the supposed bringer of ‘The Book of the Law’ seems just another of the masks of Nyarlathotep, the archetype identified by H. P. Lovecraft as underlying all manipulatory and exploitative cults. This archetype consists not of any kind of truth, but rather of a bag of tricks.

And again – ‘Chaos magick is not an enlightenment tradition and its affiliation with the tenets of post-modernism has rendered it narcissistic and egocentric in many respects. It doesn’t admit the Absolute, and therefore it doesn’t have the means to entertain even the concept of enlightenment.’

Indeed it doesn’t. Whenever you meet anyone claiming enlightenment ask them precisely what they have enlightenment about.

My Final Frontiers

At 71 I have a fair chance of living another decade, or maybe two, or just possibly three. The years seem to pass with increasing speed, yet I have more time free from mundane matters, but will it prove enough to find answers to the two big remaining questions about existence that remain for me? : -

1) Can we have a Quantum Ontology?

2) Do we need a Quantum Model of Minding and Parapsychology?

1) Hypersphere Cosmology arose from a dissatisfaction with the conventional LCDM Big-Bang model of the universe. The conventional model depends on rather too many concepts that may prove purely Epistemological – concepts that explain cosmological observations in terms of phenomena that may not actually exist, for example singularities, inflation, dark matter, and dark energy. Hypersphere Cosmology attempts to present a more Ontological model in which the stuff that we have a high confidence of actually existing, actually interacts on slightly different principles.

The development of Hypersphere Cosmology seemingly involved a two decade diversion from the two great remaining existential questions, yet it brought with it a change of metaphysical perspective to finite but unbounded time (and space) which itself has implications for esoteric philosophy and probably for Quantum Ontology as well.

So, what would, or should, a Quantum Ontology look like?

Well, it would have to model all the observable types and all the observable behaviours of the quanta that we have discovered and predict the existence of others if they exist. However, we already know that the ‘things’ apparently underlying reality do not seem to behave like ‘things’ at all. Or as Niels Bohr put it, "Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. To a reasonable approximation we can conceptualise atoms as miniature cannon balls. Yet we cannot describe the quanta inside of all atoms and the quanta of energy (including light) that fly between atoms Classically -  as always having definite masses, positions, momentums, spins, and causal relationships in three dimensional space and one-way one-dimensional time.

Ontology conventionally implies a Classical style Epistemology that seems suficiently convincing that we can regard it as a description of what actually exists or happens. Yet no attempt to describe quanta in such purely Classical terms can yield a viable Quantum Ontology.

We do however have extensive and extraordinarily complicated Quantum Epistemologies expressed largely in mathematics that do not readily translate into words or mental images. These epistemologies give better predictions in some areas than others: - Quantum Mechanics can give accurate but probability based predictions of the wave/particle behaviour  of quanta, and these imply that we have to abandon one or more of the principles of causality, locality, or of quanta existing definite states between interactions or measurements. Quantum Electrodynamics  gives a serviceable description of the behaviour of light and matter, but it introduces the questionable idea of virtual particles. Quantum Chromodynamics more or less describes much of what happens when we try to smash nuclear particles, but the theory of Quarks remains a horrendously complicated mess with poor predictive power. Quantum Field Theory attempts to encompass all of the above – with limited success, and with questionable mathematics in its renormalisation procedures, and at the price of positing up to 20+ novel fields that permeate the entire universe. No Quantum Epistemology yet convincingly includes gravity, and none seems likely to do so under the current set of assumptions.

I suspect that quantum theories in general have taken a wrong turn and/or missed something crucial. Hypersphere Cosmology developed from the insights that cosmological redshift does not necessarily imply cosmological expansion, and that the Godel’s exact solution to the equations of General Relativity deserves more attention than it got.

So, what might our conventional Quantum Epistemology have misinterpreted or missed?

Many Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics strive towards Ontological goals, they seek to create a visualisable picture of what really goes on at the quantum level. For me, the least extravagant and most economical interpretations involve temporal reversibility and three dimensional time.

All the equations of physics except those involving entropy look reversible and will work equally well forwards or backwards in time. The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics explicitly uses this idea to explain how individual quanta can interfere with themselves and how quantum entanglement could work. This scenario preserves causality and locality but in weakened forms. Causes and effects remain correlated, but we cannot regard either as the ‘true cause’ of the other. The lightspeed limit remains, but effects can also propagate at ‘reverse lightspeed’ when going backwards in time, creating simultaneity in entanglement. However, in this interpretation quanta remain in indefinite wavelike states until they interact probabilistically in an interaction that builds up ‘extra-temporarily’.

The ‘extra-temporality’ of the wave function collapse to particle mode suggests extra time dimensions. The sine functions of the fields and amplitudes associated with quanta suggests rotations in extra dimensions, and extra time dimensions may well act as pseudo-spatial ones that allow more to happen at a given instant of what we recognise as ordinary time.

Hypersphere Cosmology suggests that we should perhaps not regard quanta as point particles of zero size which exhibit wavelengths and frequencies, but as hyperspheres of exceedingly small size that can have spins in spatial and pseudo-spatial time dimensions. If so, the vorticitation of matter quanta around the cosmic hypersphere means that they flip between matter and anti-matter on a 13 billion year cycle.

Yet any final TOE, Theory of Everything, may well prove useless at explaining or predicting the emergence of complex structure. The total spins and electric charge and nuclear charges of the cosmos almost certainly all add up to zero. The total mass-energy of the universe may well equal zero as well if we enter gravity with a negative sign. Time may become understood as the negative of Space. The Entropy and the Information content of the universe may well also summate to a constant zero. If so, the final theory of everything simply becomes: -

                                                                                                                                    1 – 1 = 0

                                                                   Or as some dualistic mystics have put it,    0 = 2

Yet such a TOE would give us no clue even as to the (random?) symmetry breakages that underlie the apparent existence of hydrogen, neutrinos, and light in space and time, although we can very roughly account for most of the rest of the observed material phenomena in the universe after that.

2) Anomalies show us that we do not know everything. Occult phenomena always point towards something we do not understand. Some argue that ‘consciousness’ remains the most mysterious and anomalous phenomenon of which we have consciousness in the known universe. Some argue that consciousness always implies consciousness of something, and that consciousness must consist of a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘being’, and we should regard it as an intermittent activity of the brain, in much the same way as we can say that we do not ‘have a mind’ as such, but rather a brain that (sometimes) does minding.

Panpsychists assert the non-anomalous nature of consciousness by claiming that all matter from atoms to plants, animals, mountains, planets, and stars has consciousness, on the basis that they can perceive or intuit some minding behaviour in these phenomena.

Either way, consciousness or minding behaviour must have some sort of quantum basis if it depends on the activity of matter, but can the classical behaviour of quanta in bulk entirely explain it, or do we need to invoke the specifically quantum phenomena of indeterminacy,  superposition, entanglement, and non-locality as well?

Can Indeterminacy guarantee ‘free will’ if we choose to claim agency for the random components of our thoughts and actions?

Can Superposition account for indecision or overlapping contradictory thoughts?

Can Entanglement explain why minding or consciousness does not subjectively feel to have a single point source for most of the time, and perhaps explain Apophenia and Sympathetic Magic as well?

Can Non-Locality account for psi effects at a distance?

Some argue that the above quantum phenomena operate on the wrong scale to have any effect on minding behaviour and that the classical behaviour of quanta in bulk can explain it, and that no case for psi exists to answer. Yet I remain fascinated by the anomalies I have experienced and those that others have recorded.

Marblog 2024

Sortilege

Elective Democracy increasingly displays all its weaknesses in the face of pressure and finance from powerful interest groups and propaganda from powerful media. It encourages the formation and dominance of political parties and it spawns career politicians more intent upon re-election than good governance.

The classical Athenian Greeks rejected it for precisely such reasons.

About half of the world holds elections this year. In many cases such elections simply enable de-facto dictatorships to shuffle their cronies and weed out dissent. Yet in countries with supposedly free elections, the choice of candidates usually remains effectively determined by non-representative cliques, factions, political parties, and the media.

Thus, we now face the unedifying prospect of national elections in the UK and USA in which most voters would probably tick a ‘Neither of the Above’ box if it existed but will otherwise vote only to deny power to whoever they consider the worst alternative.

The vulnerability of Elective Democracy to abuse by self-interested cliques and oligarchs and career politicians led the classical Athenian Greeks to choose Sortition Democracy instead.

In an ideal Sortition system, representatives become selected at random by some sort of lottery to form a government. They serve for a fixed period as a public duty and cannot seek re-selection. Such a system would create parliaments that proportionally reflected all adult age groups, social classes, ethnicities, and genders within a society.

Such parliaments would ideally debate openly but vote by secret ballot. At a stroke this would break the stranglehold of political parties and eliminate most forms of corruption and lobbying by self-interested pressure groups. We could pay the members of a Sortition Parliament well to turn up for debates and votes and have an independent judiciary to eliminate any last vestiges of corruption. Sortition selected representatives would have no other motivation in debate or in voting than their own consciences and the long term benefits to society.

A Sortition Parliament could have half of its members replaced every few years so that it does not have to restart with completely inexperienced members after a complete sortition. It could call upon any number of experts to advise it and it would have a civil service to do so as well.

A Sortition Parliament would of course contain a small percentage of liars, idiots, self-deluded narcissists, criminals, and psychopaths, but far less than the current elective system throws up.

We should not give power to those who seek it.

We could perhaps trial the Sortition system in the UK by replacing the House of Lords with a randomly selected second chamber that has absolute power of veto over the first. It would act as a Citizen’s Jury that acts as a check and balance to the flaws and abuses that become increasingly apparent in  elective systems.

Religiophobia.

There seems zero evidence that any religion has ever caused a net improvement in human behaviour. Every bit of charity and compassion promoted by any religion seems more than cancelled by the oppression it has self-righteously enforced.

In our theoretically secular societies, it seems perfectly acceptable to loathe political philosophies like fascism or communism which have very grim and ghastly track records, yet rather bizarrely it becomes increasingly taboo to discriminate between religious philosophies, no matter how bad their recent track records.

So now we have the peculiar spectacle of secular British politicians trying to make capital (and votes) out of accusing each other of phobias against religious philosophies that neither side has any genuine sympathy with.

Richard Dawkins famously described Roman Catholicism as the world’s second worst religion. Should we hate all religions equally or do some seem currently more despicable than others? Surely the more patriarchal, misogynistic, authoritarian, anti-democratic, intolerant, anti-liberal humanistic, and anti-rational ones deserve all the derision, criticism, and discrimination we can heap upon them.

This is Chaos. The Draft Manuscript has Landed!

The publisher has received all the written contributions to the Chaos Anthology and responded with a resounding Huzzah! There will now follow a period of editorial work to arrange it all in suitable form and sort out the illustrations, footnotes, and citations, hopefully it will appear sometime later this year.

Contributors include Ronald Hutton, Peter J Carroll, Jaq D Hawkins, Jozef Karika, Julian Vayne, Jacob Sipes, Aidan Watcher, Ivy Corvus, Dave Lee, Lionel Snell, Mariana Pinzon, Carl Abrahamson, Sinobu Kurono, and Sanhre Daffowt.

FSW8 ‘Magic’.

I have always had a fascination with designing and building board games. Analysing and trying to model historical, real world, and fantasy scenarios seems a productive way of stimulating strategic, tactical, imaginative, critical, and counter-factual thinking.

What rules do the actions of a system imply? What systems will emerge from a set of rules?

People keep asking me why I don’t write novels as well as books on magic and physics. Well, I tend to read, and I would naturally write, plot driven novels of ideas rather than character and drama driven stories. So boardgames have become my novels of ideas, my ‘what-if’ stories, and they also allow for endless experimentation with alternative rules and multiple possible endings.

For years I have experimented with modelling magic in a boardgame. It seems that any game system of ‘magic on its own’ can only lead to some kind of quest scenario where you use magic just to gain more magical ability, either cooperatively or competitively. In most game systems, magic or psi works as a ‘rule breaker’ in the sense that it acts as a combat modifier or a mobility modifier or that it distorts the probability of what would normally happen in some other way.

That seems reasonable enough because in the modern view, Magic - whether in enchantment or divination, consists of the art and science of modifying probabilities. (In divination it modifies the probability of guessing the right answer.)

The latest add-on to Frontier Space Warfare, the Psi Weapon Tournament Rules reflects this view. Factions may invest in various Psi facilities and wand like markers denote their presence on the board. Most act as production, combat, or mobility modifiers, but one has a function perhaps unique in game systems.

The power of Prescience allows a vessel or a flotilla of vessels to launch an attack in which, if it fails, the player can cancel it completely and restore the situation before the attack, but at the cost of the loss of the Psi weapon used. It may seem odd to call this Prescience, but this effectively models prescience because it gives a player the ability to explore what would happen if they did something, and then of either going for it or of avoiding doing it.

Herewith the Aquarian faction with a complete set of all 8 Psi weapons. The ones which have a non-local effect remain on the Aquarian homeworld, the expeditionary flotilla on one of its smaller systems carries the local effect combat and mobility modifying Psi weapons.

The Psi weapon tournament rules appear in the FSW8 rules appear in the games section and below.

 Psychopath’s Chess

With his attempted conquest of Ukraine bogged down into an attritional stalemate and a contest of endurance with the West, Vladimir Putin must surely have dreamed of opening up a second front to distract the attention, resolve, money, and resources of the West.

Putin has cultivated an alliance with the Iranian government, based on little more than the dictatorial and pariah status of both regimes. Iran sponsors, trains, and arms both Gazan Hamas and the Yemeni Houthis. It seems unlikely that either would have gone to war without Iranian approval, and most likely that they both went to war on Iranian instructions.

Putin likes sending messages by dramatic and violent means. Hamas launched its attack on 7^th October, Putin’s birthday. He probably considers it a very worthwhile pawn sacrifice.

Amphibia

Climate change continues to confuse the wildlife, we have had an unseasonable period of exceptional rainfall, frosts, and warm days; some plants have flowered alarmingly early. During the unsettled weather of the last weeks, frogs and newts have appeared only fleetingly in the pond at Chateaux Chaos and then disappeared again. Nevertheless, we have healthy looking clumps of both frogspawn and toad spawn. Let us hope that the ferocious dragonfly larvae do not scoff the lot when they emerge, as they did last year.

Febblog 2024.

(Note that a Janblog 2024 does not appear, not because nothing happened but because too much did, what with seasonal festivities in Scotland, family gatherings, an abundance of birthdays (why did so many of the people I know get born at this time of year?), the demands of coordinating 15 others in the creation of the This is Chaos anthology, the writing of Interview with a Wizard 2, embarking on a course of silversmithing, masses of magical correspondence, and surprising responses from some quantum and cosmological physicists.)

Well, the year has ostensibly started very badly with wars raging in Europe and the Middle East in which none of the protagonists seem to have a realistic exit strategy, Humanity seemingly committed to burning increasing amounts of fossil fuels until Climate Catastrophe overwhelms industrial civilisation itself, Elections looming in the UK and the USA that do not look likely to produce results that inspire widespread optimism, The UK seemingly tacitly committed to both maintaining a permanent housing crisis and the long-term-idiotic policy of importing ever more people to shore up its dodgy economy.

On the positive side The Dark Energy Survey https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02929

Came out as a preprint on January 5^th. This resumes the data on 1,500 new type 1a Supernovae, some with redshifts exceeding Z =1.

Conventional cosmologists will interpret the raw data in terms of Flat Universe Theory in an attempt to confirm their ideas about so-called Dark Energy driving an apparent accelerating expansion of the universe.

As soon as the raw data becomes released upon acceptance of a paper, it will go into the algorithms of Hypersphere Cosmology to refine the measurement of the Antipode Distance in its model of a non-expanding hyperspherical universe that appears to us in stereographic projection because of its small overall positive curvature.

Dark Energy Survey data should hopefully confirm not the presence of Dark Energy in the conventional LCDM or wCDM models but the Curvature of the Universe within the HC model.

This paper shows the processing of older type 1a supernovae within the HC model.

https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology/item/270-type-1a-supernovae-and-hypersphere-cosmology

This graph following shows the resulting antipode length results for the above data with estimated errors shown for apparent magnitude (blue) shown as + (red) and – (green). Horizontal scale redshift, vertical scale distance (metres).

Plainly two of the supernovae apparent magnitudes do not fit well, but despite the difficulties of apparent magnitude measurement all the rest give a reasonable fit to an Antipode distance of ~1.23 e26 metres or almost exactly 13 billion light years or 4 giga-parsecs.

I confidently expect the forthcoming DES data at higher redshift will confirm and refine this.

Brian Cox Horizons Tour – A twenty first century space odyssey.

https://briancoxlive.co.uk/

We went to this in Bristol recently and enjoyed it immensely. How refreshing to discover just how widespread interest in Cosmology has become. Cox lectured to a big packed venue in front of a screen full of spectacular images from near and deep space and out to the limits of observation from space based telescopes. Whilst I have  multiple issues with many of the conventional interpretations of the images and data that he presented, and particular doubts about the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, I particularly liked the second half where he became more speculative and philosophical about life the universe and everything, and our beautiful planet, let us hope that the 99% unicellular slime hypothesis does not apply to the trillions of planets potentially capable of supporting life.

Under Construction

An Apophenia Ring in 1.5mm 925 Silver – Sawing the shank out of a sheet of silver seemed easy enough, bending it into a circle proved tough going, cutting out the Apophenia symbol with little files took many hours, soldering them together took mere minutes. I may later add a Chrysoberyl or Alexandrite cabochon in the circular part of the symbol which invokes the esoteric inspirations of Ouranos and Venus, with touches of Mercury and the Moon.

Herewith a rather delightful sci-fi image of Apophenia, I don’t know anything about the site it appears on.

https://www.apophenium.com/p/welcome-to-apophenium

Hopefully Apophenia, the goddess and muse of strange connections and the imagination will assist with the project below: -

A Quantum Ontology – Can we have such a thing?

Thought and language remain heavily structured by the preconception that phenomena (must?) consist of ‘something doing something’, yet we can only observe the doing and hypothesise (perhaps erroneously) about any underlying being.

Can we conceptualise something fundamental as exhibiting both doing and being?

Or do fundamental phenomena consist only of their doing and have no sort of substructure?

If  fundamental phenomenon have no substructure, then does causality not apply any further?

If, as according to quantum field theory, a near infinite number of quantum harmonic oscillators pervades all of space, and all fields, waves, and particles consist of excitations of these oscillators, does that make such oscillators truly fundamental? If so, what oscillates? Spacetime itself?

Does our model of cosmology influence our quantum epistemology?

IF the Transactional Interpretation of quantum physics can model bosons (energy wave/particles such as the photons of light) as closed loops of particle-antiparticle in spacetime -  

And IF the Wave Structure of Matter of Milo Wolff https://www.spaceandmotion.com/Wolff-Wave-Structure-Matter.htm can model fermions (matter wave/particles such as electrons) as the points from which outgoing waves subtend wavelike fields to the extremities of the universe and at which such waves reconverge in inverted form, AND the universe has a hyperspherical geometry; -

THEN – Could all quanta (or the spinorial twists that compose them) consist of closed loops in spacetime? This would at least sidestep the problem of fundamental phenomena and causality, as such phenomena would then appear as the causes of themselves – at least within our common 3+1 dimensional reference frame.

Decblog 2023.

Seasonal Greetings! - Well why not, the weather (to the extent that we can rely on it these days of climate disruption) usually becomes dismal in the temperate latitudes of the northern hemisphere, our gardens look like blasted wastelands, the deciduous trees look mournful, the golden leaves of autumn have turned to mush and mud beneath our feet. The squirrels have given up on the last pickings of this year’s unusually abundant hawthorn berries. The news seems worse than usual.

So, eat, drink, and be merry, because we do not have the physiological adaptations to hibernate it all away. Happy Mithrasmass, Christmas, Winter Solstice, Hogmanay, or whatever you celebrate your survival of another year and your intentions for the future with.

For a bit of cheer, I send my seasonal greeting cards, Firstly, Aurora Borealis as seen recently from the hills surrounding Loch Ness. Those charged solar particles certainly do make gorgeous ionisation patterns in our atmosphere. We approach a solar maximum in the coming year, so expect unpredictability, mayhem, and ‘interesting times’. Secondly, the Mandragora Autumnalis in the greenhouses of Chateaus Chaos brighten the winter world with an unseasonal burst of green, Boris (centre) seems particularly ebullient in his new individual pot.

Esoteric News: -                                                                                                                

The Dean Radin & Pete Carroll Rap.

Recently I came into email contact with Dean Radin, a pre-eminent figure in Parapsychology in America and a notable figure in RENSEP, https://www.rensep.org/about/about-rensep/

We had an extended exchange of ideas, herewith by mutual agreement, the fruits of our deliberations, a substantial read : -

https://www.specularium.org/wizardry/item/381-the-dean-radin-pete-carroll-rap

ADDENDUM - HEREWITH THE EXPERIMENT https://www.magicktest.com/

Interview with a Wizard 2. (Or something like that.) Sanhre Daffowt and I approach the halfway mark on another mega Q & A adventure, we may have the finished item ready for the publisher by end 2024.

Chaos Magic Anthology.

Fifteen contributors now labour at this endeavour. From what they have chosen to write about from their various works and researches and experiences, I think we can expect astonishing result.

Geopolitics.  We only get to hear what the various news and propaganda media tell us. Currently, it seems that 37m Ukrainians slog it out with 144m Russians with potentially massive geopolitical consequences, probably 500,000 casualties so far, some very valuable lebensraum at stake, and Putin very clearly in the wrong. Yet this story has become largely eclipsed by the story of ~3m Palestinians slogging it out with 7m Israelis over territory worth very little, with nothing much at stake geopolitically, and neither side seeming entirely in the right or wrong. Do the media find morally ambiguous conflict and polarised opinion more marketable?

Instability in eastern Europe will not end until the neo-feudal gangster regime in Russia eats itself, and the Russian people and foreign allies turn against it. Keep the conjurations coming:

https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war

Science News. The JWST continues to provide confirmation of the Hypersphere Cosmology assertion that: - The universe will appear homogenous and isotropic on the large scale at all points in space AND time (once we have allowed for cosmological gravitational redshift and hyperspherical lensing).

See https://www.sci.news/astronomy/webb-massive-galaxies-early-universe-11680.html#:~:text=Astronomers%20using%20the%20NASA%2FESA,years%20after%20the%20Big%20Bang.

The universe seems full of mature galaxies and galaxies at all stages in their life cycles at all observable distances. This profoundly contradicts the currently official LCDM Big-Bang hypothesis.

Bronze Craft. In addition to a daily program of resistance exercise, an elderly wizard also requires handicraft distractions to survive the rigours of perpetual literary endeavours and scientific and magical research. Herewith some recent creations in Bronze, a couple of Stokastikos signet rings.  They look a very rough, but the beauty of the metal itself compensates, and things will improve with practise.

.

I cheated a bit here by using Prometheus Bronze Clay, a pesky and recalcitrant material which you can shape by hand and then fire with a gas blowtorch in a kitchen or shed, rather than converting an outhouse into a foundry with furnace, crucibles, and moulds.

Have a great festive season.

A dialog about magic* and science by representatives of both traditions

* The word magic in this discussion refers to esoteric practices of real magic, and not to magic tricks or stage illusions.
 

Peter Carroll developed the theories and practices of Chaos Magic, which caused a revolution in magical and esoteric thinking in the last few decades of the twentieth century, and they continue to heavily influence it in the twenty-first century. As the first in a new tradition of Sorcerer-Scientists, Carroll developed a paradigm in which Magic lies far closer to science than to religion. He formed a worldwide magical order to promote and develop the new insights into magic and then largely disappeared from public view to procreate and build a business empire and continue scientific and metaphysical research in private.

Dean Radin is a scientist who has studied psychic phenomena for four decades, most recently as Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). He is also Associated Distinguished Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and cofounder and Chairman of the genetic therapeutics company, Cognigenics. Prior to joining the IONS research staff in 2001, he worked at Princeton University, Edinburgh University, and SRI International, where in the mid-1980s he worked on a classified program exploring the application of psychic abilities for espionage.

Preamble: Peter Carroll was invited to this dialog by Andrea Centore, who sent an email to him that said in part, “I am honored to introduce myself as the co-founder and Managing Director of the Research Network for the Study of Esoteric Practices (RENSEP), a non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing scholarly exploration of esoteric practices. At the heart of RENSEP’s mission lies the commitment to propel esoteric research through financial support and fruitful collaborations. In pursuit of this commitment, a remarkable initiative has been launched this year, aligning us with the distinguished Dean Radin, Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Notably, Dean Radin will be leading experimental investigations into the efficacy of sigil magick. As he navigates the complexities of his endeavor, he is eager to engage in an illuminating discussion with practitioners of expertise.” 

Peter Carroll: I do not participate in parapsychology experiments, and I advise my students not to do so. Magic works capriciously and non-repeatably. We should not squander our abilities on things that do not really matter to us.

I refer you to the equations of magic, where all factors lie on a scale of 0 to 1:

P_m = P + (1-P)M^1/p  and M = GLSB.

The first equation quantifies the difference to the probability of an event that an act of magic M can make, and it’s not much unless the magic value lies close to unity. The second equation qualifies what you need to put into an act of magic - Gnosis, Magical Link, Subliminalisation, and Belief, and these remain impossible to objectively quantify and problematical in laboratory conditions.

I prefer the mass of humanity not to believe in magic, that way we do not get persecuted for it or end up working behind barbed wire. I make fun of magic to most of my friends and acquaintances, so they don’t fear me or make impossible requests, even so, quite a few seem jealous of my improbable successes in life.

Trying to objectively prove that sigils or any other kind of spell actually works seems as problematical as trying to simply prove that ‘some wishes sometimes come true’.

Having said that, I remain interested in collaboration for knowledge for its own sake.

Dean Radin: Please allow me to explain a bit about my interests in magic. I've been involved in parapsychology (psi for short) as a scientist for about four decades, working in academic, industrial, and government positions. In those settings, I've run and published dozens of controlled psi experiments, and as part of my job and personal interests I've studied esoteric traditions and practices, I've been a meditator since the 1970s, and I've lectured about psi at Cambridge University, Stanford University, Princeton University, etc. I've used practices derived from all of the above to create and sustain a scientific career that, from a mainstream view, isn't supposed to exist. I.e., my interest has always been to put magical concepts to the test, although until recently I've avoided using that term. My 2018 book, Real Magic, explains all this in some detail.

The bottom line is that I see little difference between the interests of magicians and scientists who are engaged in psi research. We are both studying or using the same underlying phenomena. We just take different approaches.

Thus, your equation of magic makes perfect sense to me. And elements of that equation are regularly put to use in experimental tests. The stereotype of the controlled study of psychic abilities is based on how ESP card tests were run in the 1950s. Most modern psi tests have moved beyond those designs and are focused on what you've described as the GLSB factors. Some of these factors are less easy to objectify than others, but it is possible to study them all, and the results of those tests support your model  

You've noted that magic works capriciously and non-repeatedly. The same is often said about psi studies, and this does appear to be the case if one examines each study in isolation. But since the 1990s we've known that this is merely a matter of statistical power. That is, from a cumulative perspective, using modern meta-analytical techniques to assess the repeatability of an experimental outcome, there is little doubt that these effects are independently reproducible. Experiments that require conscious responses, like ESP card tests, generally result in smaller effect sizes than those that rely on unconscious responses, like physiological measures, because the all-important elements of GLSB are difficult to optimize when asking someone to consciously “be psychic” (or “do magic”) on demand.

Regarding your comment, "I prefer the mass of humanity not to believe in magic," most worldwide surveys show that the majority already believe in magic. So that cat is already out of the bag. High levels of belief also occur among scientists as long as the surveys are anonymous, and the wording of the surveys avoid use of sensitive terms like magic or psi or psychic.

You also offered that, “Trying to objectively prove that sigils or any other kind of spell actually works seems as problematical as trying to simply prove that ‘some wishes sometimes come true.’” I can see why it might appear to be that slippery, and yet, this is precisely what lab studies investigating mind-matter interactions do. We cannot guarantee that any given “wish” comes true, but we can test if a bunch of wishes headed in the same direction do manifest. And so, from a cumulative perspective we do indeed find that wishes (operationalized in terms of an assigned intention) do modulate objectively measurable aspects of the physical world. The intentions and target systems used in lab studies seem to differ quite a bit from the spells found in a typical grimoire. But that's just a matter of semantics.

My interest in conducting a test involving magic is because the experimental design I’m using addresses a long-standing problem in mainstream physics (the quantum observer effect), and if it turns out that magical practices can enhance the results of such an effect, then that would be an interesting advancement for both magical practitioners and for physics.

Peter Carroll: We are both of a very similar age and both of us have had the privileges of a science education and exposure to counter cultural ideas in our formative years. We have both presented our ideas to the public in a way that acknowledges the scientific rather than the religious worldviews of our cultures and this seems reflected in our overlapping audiences.

You say that – “most worldwide surveys indicate that the majority already believe in magic.” I would agree to the extent that “magical thinking” always remains present to some degree in all individuals – we all believe to varying extents that “thoughts have effects” and that “phenomena have essences.”

Science on the other hand begins with the assumptions that an observer’s thoughts should not affect experimental outcomes and that phenomena consist only of their behaviour.

You have made a career out of trying to persuade others of the reality of parapsychological effects – mainly that thoughts and intents can have a direct effect on reality by mechanisms as yet unrecognised by science, and that reality can be perceived by the mind by unrecognised mechanisms, and that minds can communicate by unrecognised mechanisms.

I have made a career out of trying to persuade myself and others that we can do extraordinary things if we believe we can, by both recognised and unrecognised mechanisms. We both stand condemned by science for selection bias and confirmation bias, and for our inability to elucidate upon the unrecognised mechanisms.

Your approach seems based on the idea that if you could prove the effects then the as yet unrecognised mechanisms would require acknowledgement and investigation. My approach has been to embrace selection bias and confirmation bias more or less openly, on the basis that belief enhances capability. (Yes, I know that’s a quasi-religious tactic.)

Concerning parapsychological mechanisms – I have no good answers here, the old spiritual theories have little or no explanatory or predictive power, and the quasi-scientific ideas of astral light and various aethers seem little better. Quantum physics superficially looks as though it might have much to offer, but the deeper I look into it (and I do so rather obsessively) the more problematical it becomes.

Your statement that – “My interest in conducting a sigil test is because the experiment is aimed at addressing a long-standing problem in mainstream physics.” - intrigues me, would you care to elaborate?

Dean Radin: First, let me address your comment, “Science on the other hand begins with the assumptions that an observer’s thoughts should not affect experimental outcomes and that phenomena consist only of their behaviour.” Yes, that is true for classical physics. But not for quantum physics. Observer participation in the physical world is one of the two radical breaks from the classical worldview that we’re still struggling to understand. The second break is entanglement (or equivalently, nonlocal or superposition states). It is probably not a coincidence that nearly all of the founders of quantum mechanics were deeply into mysticism, and that from a mystical perspective both of these “new” ideas are not really new or radical at all. A case can be made that core ideas underlying quantum mechanics, including its equations, were actually founded on mystical concepts.

And next your comment, “you have made a career out of trying to persuade others….”  I suppose this is how it might appear. But I’m really not interested in persuading anyone other than myself about anything. Trying to persuade others who don’t want to be persuaded is an excellent recipe for frustration.

So, like most scientists, I am interested in understanding the nature of reality and our role in it. One can do this by exploring the leading edge of the already understood, but I’ve done that and find it mostly boring. What is not boring are the anomalies that don’t seem to fit any (mainstream scientific) theories at all. And among the basket of anomalies I’m aware of, I’ve found psi to be the most interesting because unlike spontaneous things that go bump in the night, many psi experiences are perfectly amenable to careful study in the lab. I’m not concerned about the sporadic nature of psi, or its generally small magnitude, because all of the empirical sciences rely on statistical methods, which when used properly can provide high confidence even for extremely subtle or weak effects.

The reason I’ve given hundreds of talks and interviews, and why I write popular books, is that I’ve been annoyed by the astonishing amount of misinformation, disinformation, and general nonsense one finds in college textbooks, academic articles, and pronouncements by people who claim to know what they’re talking about (regarding psi), but don’t. I also seek to educate lay and professional people who are sincerely looking for reasoned arguments and data about these topics, rather than polemics. Based on the feedback I’ve received, I know I’ve reached many who fit that description. That’s good enough for me.

Regarding your comment, “We both stand condemned by science for selection bias and confirmation bias, and for our inability to elucidate upon the unrecognised mechanisms.” I would revise this slightly by saying that the condemnation I see comes not so much from scientists (although some are definitely curmudgeons), but from amateurs who have unwittingly fallen into the cult of scientism. Many academics are also uncomfortable about appearing in public to be sympathetic to the reality of psi. Their concern is reasonable, because it is dangerous to challenge what everyone knows to be true (but ain’t, as Mark Twain quipped). Expressing such sympathies could prove damaging to one’s career. But in private, it’s another story. I know this by having given many invitation-only presentations to serious professional audiences in academia, business, military, and government circles.

The long-standing problem in quantum mechanics that I mentioned is the measurement problem, aka the observer effect. From a materialistic perspective, the observer effect makes no sense at all. Likewise, the “hard problem” of consciousness has also proved to be completely intractable. These two puzzles revolve around the nature of qualia and quanta.

From an idealistic (or panpsychist, or dual-aspect monist, or etc.) perspective, these puzzles are much easier to resolve. More importantly, adopting a worldview where consciousness is as fundamental as matter/energy (or maybe more so) is not a rejection of materialism. I.e., we should not throw away our existing physics, chemistry, and biology textbooks. All we need to do, and which has been done throughout the history of science and scholarship, is to simply recognize that all of our theories are special cases of a more comprehensive theory that will one day arise. E.g., classical physics still works perfectly fine in certain limited circumstances. But now we understand that it is a special case of a more comprehensive physics. This sequence whereby a “theory of everything” morphs into a “special case model” is found in all scientific disciplines, and for most scholarly disciplines as well. It even happens in religions, as much as theocracy tries to hold on to orthodoxy.

With that as a brief background, I’ve dubbed the study I’m working on the SIGIL experiment, where that title has two meanings. One is an acronym, a Scientific Investigation of Gnostic Interactions with Light, where the term “gnostic” means deep intuitive knowing, similar to the term “noetic.” The other meaning is reference to the practice of sigil magic.

This experiment follows up on a decade of studies we’ve conducted exploring whether observation by the mind’s eye (understood as imagination, or clairvoyance) that is assigned to focus on a double-slit optical system can cause a change in an optical interference pattern. The bottom line, after some two dozen experiments using a range of different designs, lasers, etc., and replicated in four other independent labs so far, is yes, gnostic or noetic-type observation does seem to matter. This in turn implies that mind directly interacts with matter. The effect is modulated by ability to focus, by belief, and by several other factors, all of which are, again, consistent with your model of how magic works.

The specific magical element comes into play in the SIGIL experiment because I want to recruit participants who are practiced in maintaining tightly focused attention, in suspending their disbelief about what is or is not possible, and who have experience in mentally manipulating the world to some degree through magical methods. Those who use sigil magic nicely fit that bill, and so they’ll be part of the candidate pool I’ll draw upon. Other participants will be meditators, martial artists, or others who have similar high attention-training skills, but do not use magical techniques.

I might add that I’ve conducted some of my previous double-slit experiments online, which provided interesting results. Those studies provided nearly perfect control over the “matter side” of the experiment because the apparatus was secured in our lab and the participants were located at distances ranging from 1 km to 18,000 km. But online studies cannot provide tight control over the “mind side” of this study because we could not control or even monitor what people were doing during an experiment. Maybe a person started the experiment, and a cat finished it.

This is a problem because the mind side is at least as important as the matter side in this type of study, and so I’ve built a batch of custom-designed optical systems, and I will mail one to each of the selected participants. This will allow them to directly work with the actual physical target in the comfort of their home, and to gain immediate feedback about their performance. The devices include an optical interferometer as well as a number of other sensors that can measure many aspects of the ambient environment, and it also incorporates ways of securing the integrity of the resulting data.

The fun thing about this experiment is that if it is successful then it will simultaneously provide evidence that magic (at least cast in terms of a practical psi application) works, and that magic is also relevant to understanding the quantum measurement problem. Two “impossible” outcomes in one.

I realize that magic is not easily controllable. But neither is psi, and I believe for the same reasons. Fortunately, psi still works well enough on demand, and in a controlled context, that with sufficient data and refined analytical methods, you can still see it.

Peter Carroll: Many interpretations of quantum mechanics exist, and I tend to regard quantum field theory as another possible interpretation rather than as something qualitatively new that supersedes quantum mechanics. Adding 20+ different quantum fields to the array of particle/waves just to model the annihilation and creation of quanta may prove unnecessary. Yet on the other hand field excitations below the quantisation level may explain the effects attributed rather clumsily to so called virtual particles, particularly if, like the supposed fields, they can act non-locally.

I find John Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics attractive; in this, “quantum handshakes” occur between emitter and absorber both forward and backward in time and the process becomes complete and irreversible when a whole quanta has become exchanged. This seems to model the double slit experiment, interference, and entanglement quite neatly, at the price of allowing temporally reversed “advanced waves” to travel backwards in time (Maxwell’s equations do permit this). Such temporary temporal reversibility could supply the non-locality that most interpretations of quantum mechanics require.

The “measurement problem” seems to come down to the problem of “what do quanta do whilst not interacting?” Quanta “fly as waves but take off and land as particles.” We cannot actually observe the waves directly because if we try to observe them, we stop them and force a particle-like interaction, causing what we call a “collapse of the wave function.”

I do not believe that an observer is necessary to force an interaction, quanta do it all the time to each other, but we can make choices about how and when to make a measurement that creates an interaction.

To me the real measurement problem lies in what the results of interactions tell us about “what do quanta do whilst not interacting?”

At present the consensus asserts that except at the instant of interaction, quanta cannot have definite properties, definite position, definite momentum, and to some extent any definite quantum numbers at all. When they do interact, they show evidence of having selected from amongst their possible properties on a basis that seems entirely random, but in some cases anti-correlated with the properties of quanta they had entanglements with.

Unfortunately perhaps, the randomness seems to prevent the non-local exchange of  meaningful information. I have speculated on a possible way around this here, but I may have based it upon a misunderstanding:

https://www.specularium.org/3d-time/item/338-delayed-choice-quantum-eraser-ansible

Anyway, whilst I have preached that the apparent chaos/randomness underlying the substructure of the universe frees us considerably from fate and determinism, I do often wonder precisely how we can force the hand of chance or rescue luck from chance, and to what extent “free will” depends on some capacity for quantum randomness within ourselves.

Paradoxically perhaps, chaos magic implies some form of hidden causality which can somehow modulate the quantum randomness. I have wondered if the properties of quanta depend on various “spins” in extra pseudo-spatial temporal dimensions that we do not generally recognise despite the seeming indispensability of “imaginary” and complex numbers in modelling wave functions. If interactions cause quanta to momentarily drop out of fast spinning states into definite measurable orientations, then their behaviour would appear completely random to us if their rates of spin were huge compared to the timescales we can measure.

As the properties of quanta can remain entangled over arbitrarily large distances this perhaps suggests rather paradoxically that the apparent randomness and chaos of the behaviour of the quanta may actually depend on the extreme precision of their behaviour. If so, then psi would seem to require that the operator become somehow entangled with the experiment.  

Your experiments with double slits and interferometers intrigue me. I have some understanding of the kit involved, what exactly are you trying to influence, photon counts at detectors or patterns on screens or what?  

Consciousness - does any information processing device that can monitor both some parts of its environment and some of its own internal states, have consciousness to some degree? If so, we cannot completely deny consciousness to almost anything.

Qualia - don’t these subjective experiences depend on the associations we make between experiences – aka Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory. For me ‘Redness’ seems the summation of all the associations I have with it, - not primarily an abstract thing in itself.

Dean Radin: Regarding, “I do not believe that an observer is necessary to force an interaction, quanta do it all the time to each other,” my reaction is -- maybe. An “observational theory” (OT), developed by parapsychologists in the 1970s, predicts a retro-PK (psychokinetic) effect whereby observation is necessary to convert possibles into actuals, and it doesn’t matter when that observation takes place. That is, the prediction of the OT was that if you record a batch of quantum indeterminate random bits without looking at them, then the unobserved bits will remain in a superposition until they are observed. So, on Monday you record the bits, and on Tuesday you play them back while an observer watches the output. As the prerecorded bits are being observed, you give the observer instructions to intend, or will, say, more 1 bits than 0 bits. What you will find, on average over many trials, is that the already-recorded but not-yet-observed bits will in fact conform to instructions created after the bits were already recorded!

This retrocausal idea was not previously observed or even imagined, but nevertheless experiments conducted to test it from the 1970s through the 1990s (including a few I participated in) significantly supported the prediction. This is evidence that something about observation really does seem to be important in converting the wave-like quasi-real world into the particle-like everyday world, and this effect is acausal in the sense that it does not take place in everyday spacetime. The retro-PK experiments suggested that quanta remain in a superposed state until they are observed. However, I also agree that human observation is not the only way that a quantum system can be “collapsed.” But exactly what constitutes a measurement, or who or what entails a proper observation, remains a puzzle.

Regarding your experimental proposal, I don’t think it would work because with current spontaneous parametric down-conversion technology it’s not so easy to create entangled pairs. I.e., most of the pairs are classically correlated, not quantum entangled. Only a few pairs in a million are entangled. Also, the pairs that are entangled can be identified as such only by comparing their polarizations. So, if you have one of a pair of photons on Earth, you can’t know if its partner on Alpha Centauri is entangled until you compare them both, and you can only do that at light-speed. Now, if a super-high-fidelity device could generate say 99%+ of entangled photon pairs, then what you’re proposing might work. Someone might eventually be able to make such a device, but we’re not there yet.

By the way, we did an experiment to see if mind could influence the correlation strength of entangled photons. Bottom line: yes, apparently it can.  Here's the article

Radin, D., Bancel, P., Delorme, A. (2021) Psychophysical interactions with entangled photons: Five exploratory experiments. Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition. 1 (1-2), 9-54. https://journals.lub.lu.se/jaex/article/view/23392/20892

Regarding your comment, “Psi would seem to require that the operator become somehow entangled with the experiment.” Yes, and I believe this happens through meaning, similar to how even a mind-blowing synchronicity can be viewed as a coincidence, but one that is seasoned by the spice of meaning. In this sense, all psi phenomena, whether spontaneous or created in the lab, can be thought of as synchronicities: meaningful coincidences created on demand.

You asked what people do in our double-slit experiments. We ask participants to mentally imagine that they can see photons passing through the double-slit (so as to gain which-path information), or to pay attention to a real-time feedback signal based on an aspect of the interference pattern. This signal rests upon metrics like fringe visibility, or a Fourier Transform of the interference pattern, or in the case of single photon studies the count of the number of photons at a specific location of the interference pattern. These metrics are then compared during periods when people focus their mind toward the optical apparatus vs. away. If the resulting differential measure is significantly different from chance expectation, and the apparatus is well-calibrated, so we know how it behaves when no one is mentally interacting with it, then that provides evidence that the mind interfered with the interference pattern.

You suggested that any information processing device that can monitor both parts of its environment and some of its own internal states may have consciousness to some degree. And if that is the case, then we cannot completely deny consciousness to almost anything. I agree. It’s one of the reasons why a growing number of scientists are reconsidering the notion of panpsychism and the importance of including aspects of consciousness into our understanding of the physical world.

Among my many projects, I’m currently working on a second book on magic, again from a scientific perspective. I’m at the earliest stages of thinking about this, but so far I have yet to find anything within the magical traditions (bypassing the religious dogma and superstition) that contradicts what parapsychology has empirically established, or that would in some way help to significantly inform it. But I may well have overlooked something that might change my mind. What am I missing?

Peter Carroll: I think I can see what your entanglement experiment consists of and what it seems to show, although the details of the data processing do seem very tortuous and complicated.

It surprises me that you asked participants to increase entanglement as any observation of, or interference with, entangled states tends to reduce entanglement., because decoherence is the bane of quantum computing.  On the other hand, a psychic “which path observation” of a single photon in a double-slit apparatus may perhaps allow for the psi exploitation of superposition collapse, if you can use single photon detectors.

I’ll answer your question about what I think may be missing from parapsychological research from a magical perspective by speculating on what I might do to try to show a statistically significant PK type effect:

Recruit 400 participants. Invite them to turn up with a dollar to throw a pair of D20 Icosahedral dice just once. If they throw double 20, they get $400. If not, you keep their 1 dollar entrance fee. Or recruit 8,000 and use three D20 for an even more exciting prize of $8,000.

I rather suspect you might not break even as statistically predicted but might lose a fair bit of money and get a psi-positive result. It would also be interesting to see if overall the number of 20s thrown exceeded statistical expectations. I suggest this for several reasons, magical link – participants handle the dice and watch them fall. Emotional involvement – you are offering something they would really want to win. Gnosis – the heightened state of concentration arising from only doing this important thing once.

If you can ensure that the setup ensures the dice have to tumble at least 7 times before coming to a halt, then apparently this makes their final position theoretically indeterminate and not open to “ordinary” forms of cheating.

Dean Radin: In the entangled photon experiment, the details of the data processing may seem tortuous and complicated, but that is just a consequence of the nature of the raw data. Measuring entanglement strength requires a series of 16 polarization measurements, so the data is necessarily a time sequence with unavoidable dependencies, and that requires some fancy mathematical footwork. Still, after the appropriate analysis it showed remarkably clear results.

We asked participants in the entangled photon experiment to increase rather than decrease entanglement for a few reasons. One is that decoherence is not a one-way street. There’s also recoherence. Here’s an article on this topic that was published in Nature: 

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep15330

Second, if entropy were the only thing ever observed in thermodynamics, then life would never have evolved. As you know from mathematical chaos theory, complex open systems can and regularly do produce negentropic effects. We’re here because order can arise out of entropic systems. The same is true for quantum decoherence. Under the right circumstances, systems can recohere. So, we hypothesized that whatever focused awareness is, it appears to have an ordering quality, or a form of coherence. Thus, in light of the body of evidence for PK on many types of physical targets, holding the mental intention to increase entanglement strength was viewed as plausible.

A third reason for that particular task is that if we could show that the mind could push entanglement strength above the Tsirelson Bound, then that would demonstrate that whatever focused consciousness is, it is not accounted for by orthodox quantum theory. Alas, we didn’t see that outcome, but in retrospect to exceed the Tsirelson Bound we’d have to have been Merlin to overcome the constraints imposed by the optical apparatus we were using.

Regarding your suggested psi experiment, studies involving dice were conducted ad nauseum for about 50 years, with some success. Different kinds of dice were used, with different numbers of faces, use of monetary rewards, etc. Over the years methods were progressively improved to overcome valid criticisms (like you absolutely cannot have a subject handle the dice – it’s too easy for a skilled trickster to game the outcome). In fact, the stereotype of the sterile psi test largely evolved because it was found that all sorts of unintentional biases (to say nothing of intentional fraud) could produce results that were not psi, but just inadvertent flaws. Fortunately, over the last half-century new methods have been devised to provide high confidence that results of a study would not be due to one or more flaws, and at the same time methods being used today are approaching ecologically valid contexts that more closely match how psi manifests in the real world.

I published a meta-analyses of the dice tests a few decades ago.  Effects of consciousness on the fall of dice: A meta-analysis.  Journal of Scientific Exploration, 5, 61-84. (Click on the title to retrieve the paper.)

I’ve also attempted to amplify the magical link factor in a voodoo-type experiment, which resulted in such a strong effect that it scared everyone on the team.  Remote influence of human physiology by a ritual healing technique.  Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 6, 111-134. (Click on the title to retrieve the paper.)

The gnosis element has also been tested in many experiments involving altered-states, like dreaming, meditation, and the ganzfeld environment, and the evidence there shows that it is superior to ordinary states of awareness.

Thus, some elements of your magic equation have been explored over the last century or so. That said, it is rare to find a single study that tried to optimize all of the factors you’ve identified. This is not because of a lack of interest, but a lack of resources.

In the SIGIL study, funded by the Bial Foundation and RENSEP,, the key aim is to demonstrate a remote observer effect on optical interference. I’ve been working that problem for quite a while, and to date my team has conducted something like 20 experiments. Here’s one writeup: https://journals.lub.lu.se/jaex/article/view/24054/21777

The sigil magic component of this test involves recruiting people who have experience using a magical technique, and that have some reason to believe that it works for them. Finding such people, with real talent in mind-matter manipulation, is a challenge, so I’m guessing that tapping into the magical world where people already believe that this sort of effect is real based on their experience, would be a step in the right direction.

Testing magical skills is, as you’ve noted, not straightforward nor easy, so to help optimize the important motivational element of your magic equation, I’m sending each participant the physical target itself rather than conducting a test online, and they’re encouraged to adopt whatever state of gnosis they wish during the experiment. They can also arrange the set and setting however they wish. I realize that the task itself is still rather abstract, but to help overcome that the experiment provides real time feedback on their performance with sound, a graph that show real-time performance, and a color-changing LED. I’ve found that this improves how well people can focus on the task. Of course, I realize that an experiment of this type is still far from the typical magical goal, so it’s up to me to convince the participants that this experiment is very important, and thus help to optimize the motivational factor.

Peter Carroll: I have looked at your entangled photon experiments. I do wonder if the Tsirelson Bound represents a natural limit of natural magic (at the quantum scale), so if you try and play around with events limited to that scale you only have that much wriggle room. Trying to calculate how the Tsirelson Bound for quanta could scale up via the butterfly effects of so called deterministic chaos to give a measure of the wriggle room for macroscopic events seems a tough call.

It amused me that “operator hand thrown dice” is considered to degrade the value of a result in the eyes of science, whereas exquisitely delicate hand manipulation of apparatus seems acceptable and indeed necessary for so many scientific experiments. If I could subconsciously cheat at well thrown dice, I’d call that magic.    

I really liked your “voodoo” experiment. It allows for many of the ingredients traditionally considered essential for magic, and it gets a statistically interesting result.

I guess you will be familiar with Sheldrake’s ‘Telephone Telepathy’ experiments, he quotes you in his references: -

https://www.sheldrake.org/research/telepathy/experimental-tests-for-telephone-telepathy

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26048628/

These seem some of the most convincing “scientific” demonstrations of psi that I have come across, with a natural probability of 25% fairly reliably and repeatably bumped up to 40%.

Again, it seems a “magic friendly” series of experiments involving magical links (to friends), excitement, the possibility of both interpersonal telepathy and short term precognition of an unknown but recently determined event, plus of course the pervasive folk belief that it does happen.

In general, I feel far more inclined to participate in experiments that give magic a chance and have perhaps already shown indisputable results that don’t require heavy statistical processing to show interesting anomalies.

I think that if you want to believe in magic and use it in life then you need to work to the strengths of magic and try and enhance them, rather than exhaustively test them in adverse conditions just to try and dent the official scientific null hypothesis.

Dean Radin: I agree that the constraints imposed by scientific methods are not exactly magic-friendly. But, of course, the flip side to that weakness is the methodological strength offered by science. That is, if something interesting happens that seems magical, you can gain higher confidence that it was actually magical, rather than something like a coincidence or a mistake. If I tossed some dice and they landed pretty much the way I’d want them to, then that might look like magic, but we can’t know for sure. That’s why in the laboratory hand-tossing dice or hand-tossing a coin just isn’t good enough.

By contrast, the manual manipulations required to prepare sensitive equipment is an entirely different ball game. After the setup is completed, and certainly while an experiment is under way, manipulations of any part of an apparatus are strictly forbidden. E.g., for the SIGIL experiment I’m preparing, the device will be located with the participant outside of my direct control. So, I need a way to tell if he or she is trying to influence it in a non-magical manner (because a participant might inadvertently influence the system, or intentionally cheat). To accomplish this, I designed the apparatus to provide lots of information about the environment where the device is located. Some of those measures tell me about the state of the interferometer, which is the main point of the experiment. But many other measures tell me if the device is touched, moved, subjected to heat or cold, magnetic fields, electric fields, etc.

I think it’s important to know if magic is really real, not just because it’s curious or for academic reasons. Instead, if magic is real, it means our entire modern civilization is built on a philosophical house of cards (i.e., reductive materialism) that is arguably in the process of falling apart and possibly even poised to wipe out a significant percentage of life on Earth. I would think it is therefore a good idea to try to repair the house of cards as best we can. And if that means accepting that the mind can do things that have been dismissed as fantasy, then so be it.

Acceptance of magic does not mean everything will suddenly become sunshine and rainbows, but it would add to many other holes that are being poked into the prevailing nihilistic worldview. And I view that as a good thing.

I’m familiar with Rupert’s telephone telepathy studies (and his other very clever designs). As he admits, the results of the telephone telepathy experiments cannot strictly exclude people who decide to cheat. And it is a certainty that if the opportunity arises, some people will definitely cheat. So, the impressive 40% hit rate may be inflated to some extent. How much it is inflated is unknown, but again this is why annoying super-strict measures are used in lab studies – so when we get results we can exclude intentional or inadvertent cheating from the get-go. The results are usually weaker than studies that include possible loopholes, but they are not zero. That’s how we know with high confidence that these effects are real. Otherwise, we’d never know for sure.

I exclude from the above comment Rupert’s telephone telepathy studies that were captured on video. The high hit rates in those studies appear to be quite real, perhaps because they included a very strong magical link among the participants (they were sisters). This is why pre-selecting people for talent is very important when doing any sort of psi/magic experiment, even though that aspiration cannot always be achieved.

You suggested that you’d feel more inclined to participate in experiments that gave magic a chance. The way I figure it, magic always has a chance. If magic exists, then yes it will be modulated by all sorts of things that inhibit or mask it. But it’s still there.

And I understand that simple statistical methods are more readily digestible than complex ones, but that’s really just a matter of what one is used to. I am reasonably comfortable with all sorts of statistical methods. But sure, it would be preferable to get results that did not require heavy statistical lifting. And in a few cases, we do have such examples, like in the ganzfeld telepathy experiments. Those studies rely on extremely simple measures (the number of hits vs. misses), and it has been repeatedly demonstrated under high security conditions and in dozens of labs over long periods of time. 

I agree that working to a phenomenon’s strength is always preferable, and that the constraints of some scientific methods can squash those strengths. But I personally also prefer to believe in things where I can gain high confidence – first-hand -- that what I’m observing is actually real. It’s very easy to drop down a rabbit hole and end up believing in all sorts of nonsense. E.g., consider today’s fractious political arena where millions of people have been convinced to believe in things that every objective piece of evidence screams is dead wrong.

Likewise, I think of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s belief in fairies. Sherlock Holmes is the exemplar of a hyper-logical, hyper-aware character, and Holmes emerged from Doyle’s mind. But given the historical evidence that the fairy images were faked, how did that same uber-rational mind come to believe in fairies? I think the answer is that we are all Doyle, anxious to believe in things that we want to believe in, some of which may or may not be true. I believe (we can’t get beyond that) that scientific methods are the best ways we currently have to help us avoid wandering into false wonderlands. If I’m going to drop down into a wonderland, I’d prefer that it was a true wonderland.

Peter Carroll: I’m not sure that getting people to accept the objective reality of magic will improve their moral behaviour. Some will certainly want to weaponize it. Magical fights remain a feature of my magical cultural milieu. Historical cultures which believed in magic do not seem notable for their humanism, and they often persecuted people for magic. Getting people to believe in spiritual and religious ideas has rarely given good results either.

Maybe the problem lies not with reductive materialism in itself but in the whole duality of material/spiritual. Someone once opined that no real difference exists between the viewpoints that “everything is spiritual” and “everything is material.” I’d feel quite happy with the axiom that everything is material (or spiritual) including weird stuff like parapsychology and quantum physics.

Dean Radin: Sadly, I agree that getting people to accept that magic is real will not improve moral behavior. Most of humanity already believes in one form of magic or another, but that hasn’t encouraged the world to become a paragon of morality. And some would definitely weaponize magic, if they could.

However, I do think it’s time to readdress the nihilistic philosophy that underlies modern civilization, and to do this in a secular way that is backed by science. Perhaps such an effort won’t change anything, but perhaps it will. To do nothing and let evolution, raw in tooth and nail, take its natural course would be the easiest approach. But still, I think it’s worth a try.

Thank you for this dialog, and perhaps when I get closer to getting the SIGIL project actively under way, we can pick it up again.

ADDENDUM - HEREWITH THE EXPERIMENT https://www.magicktest.com/

Novblog 2023

Obituary. Ray Sherwin.

I understand from friends that Ray Sherwin died in Las Palmas (Canary Islands) this June past.

I shall remember fondly the year that my wife and I spent in his village of East Morton. We kicked around a lot of the ideas that would become part of Chaos Magic, Ray introduced me to Chris Bray of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and a number of people who would become leading figures in the Chaoist revolution. We had some splendid times trying out new rituals with friends in his attic, and up in the woods around Sunnydale Reservoir.

Ray did not wear his modest literary scholarship lightly, yet his pomposity and arrogance had an amusing and endearing quality to it which brightened many an evening spent in the Busfield Arms in Morton. I considered his attitude towards his longsuffering first Polish wife Marlena rather Neanderthal, even by 1980s Yorkshire standards, my wife considered it appalling. Marlena eventually left him but soon afterwards she suffered a catastrophic stroke.

Ray contributed directly to Chaos Magic mainly by turning his Thelemic fanzine into a Chaoist one called Chaos International and in showing me how to make an edition of Liber Null on a tabletop scale in the days before it became cheap and easy to self-publish books.

Ray’s written contribution to the annals of Chaos Magic remained rather modest at just two small volumes, The Book of Results and The Theatre of Magic. He also seems mainly responsible for a small 25 page book by ‘Paula Pagani’ called The Cardinal Rites of Chaos which details the seasonal rituals of a short lived group he assembled in Morton after I had left. The grandly titled ‘Cardinal Rites’ seem most charitably described as Discordian amateur dramatics.

Yet after he retired with a new younger wife to a small villa in the Canary Islands, Ray published two regrettable diatribes, Vitriol and Ouroboros, both full of conspiracy theory nonsense and invective against his former friends and colleagues and the IOT, despite that I had urged him to desist and check his sources. We never communicated again after he published them.

I rather suspected that he had lost his critical faculties, and friends have confirmed that both Ray and his wife had sunk deeply into alcoholism, poverty, and conspiracy theory, and that their young daughter had become their carer. Having watched my own father drink himself to death decades ago, I concluded that alcoholism results from a Failure of Imagination; failure to realise what it does to you, and failure to imagine doing something else instead.

So, a rather tragic and sad ending to a life, but thanks Ray for that entertaining and highly productive year in East Morton.

For a further commentary on Ray, Vitriol, and Ouroboros see: -

https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/226-two-reviews

Retroactive Enchantment!

“Our Gedankenexperiment thus draws a metrological advantage from effective retrocausation founded in entangled states. While PCTC simulations do not allow you to go back and alter your past, they do allow you to create a better tomorrow by fixing yesterday’s problems today. “
Nonclassical Advantage in Metrology Established via Quantum Simulations of Hypothetical Closed Timelike Curves. Available from:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374681474_Nonclassical_Advantage_in_Metrology_Established_via_Quantum_Simulations_of_Hypothetical_Closed_Timelike_Curves

Does Science become more mystical?

Have a look at this! Io Baphomet! Neo-Panpsychism? Morphic Fields Strike again!

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310223120

Chaos Magic Anthology

One of my publishers has invited me to assemble a team to write an Anthology about Chaos Magic. I have already rounded up many of the veterans from the old guard and some of the more prominent figures from the new generations of Chaoists. We may have space for just one more to join our illustrious lineup, so let me know if you think of contributors I may have missed.

In other news: - The Apophenion, The Octavo, and The Epoch look set to appear in Spanish.

Samhain.  An Eisteddfod Poem.

Summer ends

The veil descends

Darkness begins

A time of fear

Illness, cold, and want

And thus,

A time to laugh at death

Yet the dead still live

Whilst still remembered

Fondly or otherwise.

Leaves fall

Like discarded ideas

I put them in

The compost bin.

Octblog 2023

Poem.

Having recently answered more or less the same question from four different interviewers I put the question and the answer (of sorts) into a brief ditty for the Solstice Eisteddfod at Grove.

Tell me O Sorcerer-Scientist

How does a purely physical mind

Affect the material world?

Well physical theories

Have metaphysics all of their own

Classical physics has cause and effect

Events have definite causes

Realism rules, and thus;

Things always exist as definite states.

Relativity just adds locality

So nothing goes faster than light

And everything consists of particles.

Democritus at least got that bit right.

But we have two physical theories

The quantum one seems rather weird,

It contradicts all the above

Events have probabilities,

Unobserved events remain indefinite,

Entanglement works instantly in time

And oblivious to distance,

And everything consists of waves.

Dirac and De Broglie intuited that.

Both theories seem true

From a particular point of view.

We can only measure the particle reality

We can only imagine the wave reality

If our epistemology reflects ontology

Reality needs both

To do anything at all

So how does a physical brain

Interact with a material world?

Classically, or Weirdly as well?

Can experiments tell

What theories work best?                       

Therein lies our quest!                                                            

Antimatter down.

Observation of anti-hydrogen made in particle accelerators has recently shown that it falls downwards as expected, and not up. If it had fallen upwards in response to gravity the physics community would have reacted with shock and horror rather than levity, and all sorts of paradoxes would have arisen. Both mater and antimatter react identically to gravity, but that still leaves conventional cosmology with the headache of trying to explain why a big bang did not produce equal amounts of both.

I suspect the answer to the question of why the universe seems matter dominated has nothing to do with the supposed big bang and everything to do with the chiral asymmetry of the weak force arising from the Majorana Fermion nature of the Neutrino, i.e., it consists of a single type of particle that can either spin clockwise or anticlockwise with respect to its direction of propagation and that alone determines whether we categorise it as matter or antimatter. Furthermore, various particle’s spins in higher dimensional spacetime account for their electromagnetic and nuclear charges and our attribution of matter or antimatter status to them. Work continues on this idea.

JWST.

The James Webb Space Telescope went up primarily to investigate the unexpectedly vast number of galaxies at extreme distances that the Hubble Space Telescope first caught faint glimpses of. The big bang hypothesis predicts or at least heavily implies that galaxies like our own fully formed one should not exist at extreme distances in space and time because they will not have had time to form since a big bang.

It becomes increasingly clear from the JWST data that galaxies just like our own seem to exist everywhere out to the present limits of observation. Hypersphere Cosmology predicts that the universe will appear isotropic and homogenous on the very large scale at all points in space and time. It will look the same everywhere and everywhen, once we have factored in the redshift and the gravitational lensing arising from a small overall spacetime curvature.

Meanwhile the LCDM big bang theorists strive to add yet another ad hoc patch to their creaking model, by modifying their hypotheses about galaxy formation.

Resisting AI in Magic.

I have just written a somewhat critical appraisal of a forthcoming book on the use of Artificial Intelligence in Magic, I have read a book on magic written almost entirely by AI, and I have also watched a colleague getting AI to create sundry invocations and incantations online in seconds.

Herewith my verdict: -

AIs scour the internet for material created by humans and then attempt to compound a grammatically correct mash up from what looks like the most the most popular or readily available material. AI does not seem capable of creativity or of differentiating between popularity and quality.

Consequently, what it produces seems lumpen, verbose, predictable, generic, derivative, and uninspired. Don’t expect it to come up with anything surprising, memorable, or quotable yet. It has no spark or bite to it. It currently seems best suited to composing dull advertising copy for dishwashers or creating rather run of the mill travel brochures.

AI generated material makes magic look ridiculously easy to do, and this will lead some to engage with it in a far too casual manner, and to get poor or negligible results. Internet-itis (decreasing attention span) will follow, leaving enthusiasts to drift from one passing fad to another. Never underestimate the value of the work that goes into designing your own spells and rituals and entities for yourself and launching them with Gnostic levels of mental intensity.

It seems likely that some of the magic pages of the internet will fill up with a blizzard of mediocre and formulaic AI generated imagery, text, and rituals, which will rapidly turn off all but the most dim-witted dabblers. The fightback against AI generated magic text and imagery will soon follow.

Arcanorium College may institute new protocols for the submission of Batchelor of Magic Theses. We may eventually require that candidates write them under examination conditions inside Faraday cages with quill pens, but presently AI generated material looks fairly easy to spot.

New Book (eventually)

Following the publication of ‘Interview with a Wizard’, I established contact with another writer (this time a practising Chaos Magician) who wanted to conduct a further interview. This second interview has mushroomed into another mega-inquisition with the simple ground rule that he cannot ask a question already asked in the first interview.

As we recently passed question one hundred and seventy, I enquired of Mandrake, the publishers of Interview with a Wizard, if a second long-form interview book would interest them. I got a very enthusiastic yes to that. So, when have done another hundred and seventy or so in another year or more, we will submit it for publication. Watch this space for ‘Interview with a Wizard 2’ or similar title.

Chaos Magic in Japan.

My colleagues in Japan (who I have yet to meet in person) have requested that I place two articles here which they will later use in a Japanese book on introductory Chaos Magic. As the discussion of magical and metaphysical concepts can present difficulties when conducted across a cultural and linguistic divide, I have kept this as simple as possible.

Utilizing the Chaosphere, its application, and the underlying theory.

The Chaosphere consists of a three dimensional representation of the Eight Rayed Star of Chaos.

The Eight Rayed Star of Chaos has manifold scientific-metaphysical, psychological, and magical meanings. It can support the imagination of many symmetries and dualities.

Herewith one from recent Chaoist research for my Japanese colleagues: -

In basic science the eight arrows can represent the four axes of ordinary three dimensional space and one dimensional time. These represent our degrees of physical freedom in a universe with a simple Newtonian metaphysic.

In advanced Quantum-Relativistic Hypersphere science the eight arrows can each represent the degrees of freedom in our universe of curved three dimensional space and curved three dimensional time. (We can usually ignore the curvature ‘dimensions’ of space and time on the human scale, but it does affect the spacetime topology of the entire universe and the likelihood of alien intelligences existing). In this representation, all of the eight axes lie orthogonal (at right angles) to each other, implying the full higher dimensionality of the universe.    

Three dimensional time provides the key to understanding the quantum-probabilistic nature of our partly chaotic physical reality, and of how magic works.

In psychological terms, the Eight Rays represent the eight major impulses that we as biological organisms have evolved: Sex/Death, Fear/Desire, Love/Hate, Solar Ego/Magical Self.

In magical terms the Eight Rays represent the Eight Magics that derive from the human condition and which we can equate symbolically to Pagan Deities and their symbolic planets and colours.

Sex Magic – The Moon – Purple. Attraction, the inspirations of sexual desire and ecstasy.

Death Magic – Saturn – Black. The motivation that awareness of mortality brings.

Fear Magic – Orange – Mercury. Intellect, quick thinking, inventiveness, cleverness.

Desire Magic – Blue – Jupiter. Acquisition of wealth, power, status.

Love Magic – Green – Venus. Empathy, attachment, loyalty.

War Magic – Red – Mars. Vitality, aggression, competitiveness, combat.

Ego Magic- Yellow – Sun. Charisma, radiance, persuasiveness.

Pure Magic- Octarine- Ouranos. Magical research, esoteric and antinomian knowledge.

Chaos Magicians can place a Chaosphere on their altars to affirm their commitment to developing all of the powers and abilities latent within themselves.

A Chaosphere symbolises the random creative powers of the universe and of humans. The central orb represent the formless personal Kia or life force and the arrows represent its many possibilities of direction. The magician can impale various spells on the spikes.

Concentration upon the Chaosphere in thinking meditation can lead to new insights into the structure of reality and the human experience. Concentration on the Chaosphere in ‘no-mind’ meditation can lead to resonance with, and inspiration from, transpersonal and extraterrestrial sources of Chaoist insight and enlightenment.

How do you perceive Positive Thinking and the Law of Attraction?

People who cultivate many personal contacts and who remain open to new ideas and opportunities usually have better luck than others who do not. This seems more important than simply thinking positively and wishing for good luck.

The world has a lot of randomness in it, some of it can affect us negatively, some of it can affect us positively, but we can look for positive opportunities in whatever happens to us.

The subconscious and unconscious parts of our minds have a strong effect on what we do, and they can also have a direct magical effect on reality. If we keep thinking conscious positive thoughts these thoughts will gradually become part of the subconscious and unconscious mind. This can take a lot of time, but magical techniques offer some shortcuts.

Magical Spells, Rituals, and Invocations can achieve much deeper and quicker alterations to the subconscious mind than simply trying to think positive conscious thoughts for long periods.

Subconscious and unconscious desires have more powerful effects than conscious desires. Conscious desires tend to get mixed up with other thoughts and doubts, particularly if you keep consciously thinking about them.

Magicians should aim to concentrate their positive thinking into Spells, Rituals, and Invocations and then not consciously think about them afterwards and let their subconscious and unconscious minds create the magical effects.

Mandrakes.

In the greenhouses of Chateaux Chaos, ‘Boris’, one of the three Mandragora Autumnalis plants, has sprung from the underworld as the equinox passes and we enter autumn. Perhaps we shall see some mandrake seed pods later. The project to repopulate southwest England with them has fallen far behind schedule.

Septblog 2023

Conspiracy Theory.

Illuminati update No 23. We note substantial incursions into the terrestrial noosphere at this time. These seem to originate from adolescent space lizards using the popular but frowned upon ‘Mayhem and Havoc’ Role Playing Game System here on Earth.

The three rules seem simple enough.

1) Pick a fairly primitive planet with only level three sentience, the sort of place where the inhabitants still believe in things like gods, money, nations, or the big bang hypothesis.

2) Select one or more inhabitants as avatars and see who can wreak the most mayhem and havoc.

3) Don’t tell your parents.

We currently seem to have six major players or teams of players in action experimenting with the following game challenges here on Earth: -

A) Reduce the most powerful nation to a laughingstock or to a civil war by using a single avatar that can only bluster bombastically and tell ridiculous lies.

B) Elevate the second most powerful nation to the top position regardless of internal and collateral damage, use a committee of avatars if required.

C) Use the third most militarily powerful nation to initiate major wars, and if possible worldwide war, using only a single misanthropic psychopath as avatar.

D) Using multiple avatars ensure that the planet’s potentially greatest alliance of nations descends into a corrupt ineffectual bureaucratic squabbling shambles.

E) Set the planet on fire, burn all the combustible deposits, wreck the climate, decimate agriculture and the population, use any number of avatars.

F) Pick a handful of major or minor religions or philosophies and see how much division, strife, and murder you can create with them, use multiple avatars.

All conspiracy theories, no matter how apparently absurd, reveal something about our responses to the order-chaos-disorder, and weirdness going on in our worlds. They usually do this by metaphor or analogy that displaces blame elsewhere because people do not wish to acknowledge or confront the more probable causes.

Hardline Christians started a Satanic Ritual Abuse scare some decades ago. Negligible real evidence of abuse ever appeared, but a tsunami of real evidence of abuse eventually emerged  concerning, - you guessed it -  Hardline Christians - both within the catholic church and within many protestant sects.

The professional and managerial classes in the USA have severely degraded the prospects of the children of the blue collar class, so we have a conspiracy about powerful satanic child abusers controlled by lizards.

When we perceive the rich and powerful screwing the poor more than usual, Antisemitism often rears its head, despite that Jews make up only a small proportion of the rich and powerful anywhere, and control only one government in a tiny nation.

When a culture war breaks out between factions of the professional and managerial classes, and they start demonising each other and trying to displace each other, we should consider the extent to which those classes have become severely overcrowded.

The popularity of lizard symbolism for demonic or hellishly immoral agents or agencies tells us something about ourselves and the primitive reptilian circuits that lurk in all our hindbrains.

A Fascinating Thesis. I have just received a PhD thesis from Vasilis Meletiadis  of Bristol University, ‘The History of Chaos Magic 1976 – 2000’. He has conducted lengthy interviews with many of us that he writes about, and exhaustive research into the cultural milieu in which Chaos Magic arose. As a rather non-musical, and non-party person myself, I had not realised the huge extent of the overlap between Chaos Magic and the more extreme end of alternative popular music and clubbing culture, nor quite how dark the UK manifestation of Chaos appeared compared to its American cousin Discordianism. Nor quite the extent to which its spread depended on amateur ‘zines’, and the extent to which the advent of the internet changed its method of spread and its structure and practices.

Overall, the thesis seems fair, balanced, and exceptionally well researched and written. Historically it will probably take first place as the definitive history. As soon as it becomes published and in the public domain, I will provide a link to it.

I hope to see a similarly definitive academic history of chaos magic 2000 – 2024 emerge sometime from someone.    

Parapsychology. Dr Dean Radin has a very high profile in the world of parapsychology, having presided over the Parapsychology Association for a number of years, written a number of notable books on parapsychology, presented many lectures on it, and worked with many experiments into it.

We finally got to talk at length and discussed such topics as the desirability (or not) of proving the existence of parapsychology to the satisfaction of scientists, the equations of magic, public belief in magic, Sheldrake’s experiments, the potential weaponization of psi, quantum physics and psi and the possible implications of the Tsirelson Bound, the measurement/observer problem, and the trade-offs involved between the magic friendliness and science friendliness of psi experiments – this last topic remaining a subject of ongoing discussions.

Citation 14/08/2023. Now in about its fifteenth year of operation, Arcanorium College proudly confers the degree of Batchelor of Magic upon a second alumnus!

https://www.specularium.org/arcanoriumcollege/item/273-arcanorium-college-department-of-magic

The course makes awesome demands upon the perseverance and dedication of applicants. Many come forward but few make the grade.

Global Warming. Whilst continental Europe has combusted, we have had a meteorologically lousy August here in the UK, - unseasonably dull, chilly, and often wet, plus one of my autumnal mandrakes (Boris) has woken up at least 8 weeks early and started to push forth leaf shoots, whilst Igor and Circe continue to slumber awhile.

My Sci-fi hobby.

The news that many hundreds of UK schools and public buildings will soon collapse if we don’t spend fifty or more billion pounds on them prompted research into precisely what material the hulls of the Lithonian and Skaron fleets consist of. Its apparently AAC, aerated autoclaved concrete - lightweight, cheap, not very strong, widely used for substandard dodgy building, and occasionally by sculptors. The massive demolition projects that will have to follow will likely ensure that plenty of the stuff ends up floating in Welsh watercourses and ultimately on the beach fronting the spaceship yards.

Herewith the new Lithonian Anti-Matter Dreadnought and its counterpart in the rival Skaron fleet. Both societies have created a single ultimate ‘deterrent’ in the form of a bomb with about a metric ton of antimatter in it – enough to trash a planet or an entire sector of space: -

As this seems to evolve towards an interplanetary game scenario with reaction thrust propelled ships rather than an interstellar one with warp drives, work has begun on a board/backdrop for interplanetary manoeuvring: -

On the larger map, silver washers show the last eight  moves of the two planets in their orbits and the movement of a red ship from the red planet to intercept the green planet. One of the smaller maps shows the gravity well around the green planet and a ship launched from it to intercept the red ship in low orbit.

Obliterating the rival civilisation counts as only a minor victory, forcing its surrender counts as a major victory. Several varieties of a draw remain possible, some worse than others….the game basically models a nuclear standoff.

Augblog 2023

Weird Physics. Herewith a result from evoking Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth simultaneously in an attempt to penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos; the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics integrated with Hypersphere Cosmology.

The idea seems crazy, perhaps crazy enough to prove useful.

At the very least it may lend particle attraction a visualisable mechanism, confirm the conservation of the spins or whatever underlying fundamental quanta and the suspected immortality of the Proton, it may also partially resolve Loschmidt’s Paradox concerning the emergence of irreversible processes (such as entropy) from seemingly reversible processes - because particle attraction does not simply equate to time reversed particle repulsion.

For a fuller exegesis of the hypothesis see: -

https://www.specularium.org/3d-time/item/376-tiqm-and-hypersphere-cosmology

Arcanorium College Department of Magic Update.

The Batchelor of Magic Syllabus has some updates including additional page references for the new Classic Editions of Liber Null & Psychonaut and Liber Kaos.

https://www.specularium.org/arcanoriumcollege/item/273-arcanorium-college-department-of-magic

Sortition.

Elective Democracy seems increasingly beset with problems the classical Greeks identified two millennia ago, plus a few more of modern origin.

Political Parties rather than individual Elected Representatives now dominate the political landscape. This has led to increasing groupthink and polarisation. It has also made it much easier for minority interest lobby groups to exert disproportionate effects on party policy by making donations or skilful use of the media.

Increasingly intrusive media have now completely eroded the personal privacy of anyone entering politics.

Increasingly powerful media now seek to influence opinion rather than to reflect it and disinformation and propaganda now proliferate unchecked.

The pressure to conform to all party policies acts as a severe disincentive to people of integrity becoming professional politicians.

Election pressure frequently forces party policy in the direction of short term popularity rather than the long term interest.

The Classical Greeks recognised the corrupting potential of electing representatives, and they had a ready solution which they regarded as the genuine form of  ‘Democracy’ – (rule by the people), they simply delegated the task randomly by lot amongst the people. That only included freeborn male citizens, a limitation we would not consider today.

A government selected randomly by lot would consist of 50% women and a proportional representation of all social classes and adult ages.

If it voted by secret ballot on any issue it chose to debate, it should prove corruption resistant. Paying delegated representatives a very generous salary and pension for turning up to debates and voting, and having severe penalties for any form of corruption or undisclosed interest should act as an additional incentive to integrity.

Because it remains vanishingly unlikely to become reselected it will likely choose to act in the best longer term interests of society.

A Sortition Democracy would eliminate political parties at a stroke. Few people really like political parties, fewer still actually belong to them, most people vote negatively to merely keep out the parties they most dislike.

The Greeks recognised that elective democracy lay vulnerable to oligarchy and the main political parties themselves have emerged as the oligarchs of political power.

Of course, a sortition government will contain five percent idiots and a percentage or two of selfish and evil people, but that seems a great improvement on what the current system produces.

Perhaps we could try out sortition to select the UK House of Lords for starters, and then think about extending it to reform the House of Commons.

My Sci-Fi hobby.

Down at our retreat on a remote shore in Wales, a rather dismal July and poor surf has occasioned the reopening of the spaceship yards.

Herewith the completed Detritus Squadron of the Skaron fleet (so named because a kind of Scrap-Dalek aesthetic seems to have inspired their design). Only stone from the beach, glue and leftover metal fitments go into their construction as the arms race between Lithonia and Skaron escalates to the point where I shall have to start work on the game rules and backstory.

TIQM and Hypersphere Cosmology.

Abstract.

A conceptual scheme for the unification of the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics with Hypersphere Cosmology that may model both repulsive and attractive forces between quanta.

Diagrams: -

Upper Right – The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (TIQM) asserts that an energy exchange consists of a ‘quantum handshake’ between an emitter and an absorber in which both emit a retarded (forward in time) and an advanced (backward in time) wave.

We can envisage the so called Null-Paths of the retarded and advanced waves as forming forward and backward  Light Cones where the spacetime interval ((s² + (ict²))^1/2 = 0.

Upper Central – The TIQM model of a photon passing from an emitter (red spot) to a receiver (green spot) with both recoiling.

Note that a ‘complete photon exchange’ has both ‘particle’ and ‘antiparticle’ wave components in phase giving it a spin of twice that of a matter quantum. This event occurs only along a Spacetime Null-Path between the emitter and the absorber. Once established the wave function collapses instantaneously at all points along the null path to complete the exchange of a quantum of energy. Beyond the emitter and the absorber, the wave components lie in antiphase resulting in negation of the wave functions or ‘field excitations’.

TIQM accounts for the observed phenomena of  quantum superposition and entanglement by positing the retro causal effects of advanced waves traveling backwards in time down the emission path to modify the emission conditions.

In TIQM the mutual reinforcement of retarded offer wave and advanced confirmation wave builds up in Pseudo-Time, but it appears instantaneous in ordinary observed time.

It seems reasonable to make two further assertions, firstly that pseudo time lies somehow orthogonal to ordinary observed time, and secondly that so called ‘virtual’ energy ‘particles’ consist of partial quantum handshakes that do not have enough energy to achieve the exchange of a complete quantum of energy.

Such ‘virtual particle’ exchanges dominate much of the structure of the universe in such processes as electromagnetic attraction and repulsion and perhaps also in the action of static gravitational fields.

Examples of repulsive effects – by ‘real’ quanta e.g., photons and perhaps ‘gravitational waves’. By ‘virtual’ photons e.g., electromagnetic repulsion.

Lower Central. – Attractive forces between quanta have always presented a problem of apparent ‘action at a distance’, for how can two objects attract each other if they have to do so by passing something carrying momentum between them? This led to speculation from Newton’s time onwards about Shadow Gravity theories in which a universal mutual ‘push’ between all bodies in the universe becomes shielded by bodies in relative proximity leading to a net attractive effect between them. Such theories however run into problems with thermodynamics.

In the lower central diagram, apparently attractive forces arise between quanta when the retarded and advanced waves between the quanta combine in a state of anti-phase cancellation and the retarded and advanced waves beyond the particles combine reinforcingly in phase to carry momentum away from the quanta in directions that effectively push them towards each other.

Examples of attractive effects – by ‘virtual’ quanta e.g., electromagnetic attraction and perhaps static field gravitational attraction.

Lower Right. – In a Hyperspherical universe the retarded (forward in time) and advanced (backwards in time) lightcones of all matter meet at antipode distance, as do the wave functions of the matter quanta themselves.

We can thus conceptualise attractive effects as arising from repulsive effects acting right round the hypersphere of the universe.

In General. - Quanta exist as ‘Particles’ only fleetingly at the instant of interaction. Between interactions they do not have well defined positions and momenta when traveling as waves in space and time between interaction events.

Ordinary matter owes its apparent constant persistence to highly frequent interactions between its constituent quanta, yet between interactions the constituent quanta do not have counterfactual (unobserved but assumed) definiteness.