Apophenion by Peter J Carroll

Author:Peter J Carroll
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781869928841
Published: 2012-07-31T03:00:00+00:00

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Part 3.

General Metadynamics and magic

A few months' examination of a library of magical books might well give the impression that the whole subject appears abominably complex and impossible to reduce to any sort of comprehensible structure. However if we ignore for a moment the mythos and symbolism and metaphysical paradigms adopted by various traditions of magic and concentrate instead upon the actual objectives sought, and techniques used, then it all begins to look a good deal simpler.

The basic ideas of magic, which have remained with humanity since the dawn of thought, and which the earliest traditions of shamanism seem to have preserved, reduce to five core ideas: -

1) Divination. The idea that certain practices can reveal information by non-ordinary means.

2) Enchantment. The idea that certain practices may encourage desired events to occur by non-ordinary means.

3) Evocation. The idea that by certain practices people can command 'spirits' to assist with divination or enchantment objectives.

4) Invocation. The idea that by certain practices people can enter into some sort of identification with, or possession by, 'spirits' to achieve divination or enchantment objectives.

5) Illumination. The idea that certain practices enable people to gain special knowledge and powers that ultimately seem to reduce to divination or enchantment.

Thus divination and enchantment remain the basic measure of magic because we know enough about the mechanisms of evocation, invocation and illumination by now to understand that these practices act as psychological mechanisms to support attempts at divination and enchantment.

Debate of course rages about the 'certain practices' that give the best results in each of these five activities. These 'certain practices' actually remain rather uncertain and somewhat ad hoc and rule of thumb at the time of writing. However the hypothesis of physiological 'Gnosis'16 and the hypothesis that 'Sleight of Mind'17 can unleash the subconscious, have helped to refine the practices towards something approaching a reliable toolbox.

Divination and enchantment constitute the core of what some have called parapsychology. This word has perhaps less usefulness than it seems, because if its effects exist, then it implies something more general about the universe that goes beyond mere psychology to imply a whole Para-Physics which begins in the quantum domain and protrudes capriciously into macroscopic reality as magic.

The General Metadynamics interpretation of quantum physics provides a paradigm that can model the divination and enchantment effects underlying what we call parapsychology if we add the concept of Decoherence.

Decoherence explains why quantum effects do not dominate the macroscopic world. A photon lucky enough to fly from Sirius to your eye without hitting anything along the way can remain in entanglement with the electron that emitted it on Sirius a decade or so ago. This can happen mainly because few particles get in its way in the intervening space.

On the other hand Schrödinger's hypothetical cat, whose fate depends on whether or not a quantum event triggers its death inside a sealed box, almost certainly exists at all times in either a dead or an alive state inside the box, irrespective of our observations or lack of observations.

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