Tag Archives: Gödel

Data, Information, Knowledge

November 25, 2017 By in occult, ocha, philosophy Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

As an initiate in La Regla de Ocha Lukumi (a.k.a. Santeria), I’m trying to wrap my head around all the different things we do and the proper way to do them.  The most straightforward method for this is to simply show up to ceremonies, watch what’s done, listen to what’s said or sung, and follow along; in this manner, I learn the things we do, how to do them, and why we do them.  I learn primarily from my godfather when I’m in a one-on-one situation, and under his watch and guidance more generally when I’m in the broader community.  This is the simplest way for me to learn, but even then, there are so many complications in this alone.  For one, since we’re all learning, there are things my elders will occasionally shift when they find a better or more proper way to do things, so occasionally the things they show or tell me can change over time, which isn’t even bringing up the matter of things that I can’t formally know yet, based on my own experience or initiations within the religion, without which I formally can’t know about certain things without having undergone the mysteries thereof.  For another, there’s the issue of different houses within a lineage with their small variances, and different lineages within the religion with their larger ones, which becomes more evident when we have people from other communities visiting and participating in our ceremonies or vice versa.  There’s also the issue of the “stuff out there”, books and blogs and personal notes of other people in the religion, which really should be vetted thoroughly before even being given an ounce of credence since some of it may not apply to us and some of which may just be outright wrong.

Trying to take all that in and form a useful body of knowledge that I can use is…daunting, to say the least.  Thank God and the gods for my godfather, but even by his own admission, it can be bewildering and confusing even at the best of times.

The situation is a little different in Western occulture, but many of the same issues still apply.  Consider all the grimoires we have available to us nowadays from the medieval and Renaissance Solomonic traditions; heck, just consider the books Gordon over at Rune Soup goes over in in his grimoire course.  Each book, while still belonging more-or-less to the same overall tradition of magical study, has its own variations of practice, theory, and internal logic; some things are clear inventions that start with one grimoire and continue forward form there, while other things that were present from the beginning slowly fade out over time.  Then, based on all those texts, consider our modern (largely derivative) texts and how those vary both in philosophy and praxis due to the time and location wherein they were written.  Then, for an additional twist, throw in everybody’s UPG that they love to make dogmatic Truth far more often than is good for them (or us).  If one were to study magic, then, how would you go about reconciling all these differences?  Between all the details and variations, between all the similarities and commonalities, where does one even begin to make coherence out of the mess?

Let’s talk about how we come across such facts and tidbits in the world we live in.  I like to draw a threefold distinction here: data, information, and knowledge.  All have their role to play, but all are slightly different in terms of delivery and scope:

  • Data is a Latin word literally meaning “things that are given” (where, yes, the singular of data is datum, but I won’t fault you for using data as a singular noun in English).  Literally anything that exists or that is said, witnessed, or perceived is data.  The world is full of data, but much of it doesn’t make sense or even matter.  Literally the entire world, if you’re receptive to it all, is full of data.  Data is, in many ways, boring and meaningless without some sort of structure or methodology to process it by.  If data is a set of raw materials, then the form of raw materials produces information.
  • Information is, in the words of one of my old computer science professors that stuck with me, “data that makes a difference”.  Differences can only be shown when you have some sort of rule, method, structure, or form to pit two pieces of data against each other with.  Information is another Latin derivative meaning “to educate”, but more literally meaning “to give form to”.  Information is a structure of data that literally informs (builds within) a body of knowledge.
  • Knowledge is synthesized, coherent structures of information.  When we “know” something, we have a context to put information within, and we can link it to other bodies of information to see even bigger trends that connect both within and outside a single system of information.

To use an organic metaphor, consider an animal body, which is composed of organs, which are composed of cells, which are composed of chemicals.  Those individual chemicals at the lowest level are data, and they can occur anywhere both within an animal body and outside them.  When arranged in certain structures (such as nucleotides in a strand of DNA), you start to get cells.  When the cells are organized together according to function and purpose, you get organs.  When your organs are put together in a coherent, symbiotic way, you get a complete animal.  Similarly, our minds are composed of different bodies of knowledge, which are themselves composed of structures of information, which are themselves composed of data.  The data are arranged in certain ways to form information; the information are arranged and structured in certain ways to form knowledge; different bodies of knowledge are linked together to form our intelligible minds.

To give a more concrete example, consider a school of students.  At testing time, each test score of each student gives us a single point of data.  We can point and say that we know that Tom’s score is 74 and Abby’s score is 95, which is nice and all, but individual points of data don’t really mean anything.  We can see that 95 is a higher score than 74, but more than that, we can’t say anything unless we start looking at a broader picture, a structure to fit these data points within.  Consider Tom’s trends of scores across the school year; while 74 may not seem like a particularly great score, if we see that that’s his highest score across the entire year, then we can say that Tom is getting better, while Abby might be having an off day with 95 being her lowest score across the whole year.  We can evaluate how well Tom and Abby are doing amongst their peers by taking the average or median scores of their class, or the whole school, to see whether Tom’s situation is common compared to his classmates or whether he’s underperforming.  We can split the types of test up by subject and see whether these scores are indicative of Tom or Abby excelling in certain subjects but not others.  All these methods to analyze data produce information, which is “data that makes a difference”.  Going one step further, we can take how this given school performs on tests to our bodies of information about education methods generally that we might’ve picked up from our own classes, the psychology of children and adults in learning and performing on evaluations, how obscure the material is on the tests compared to both what is commonly known and what is specialized expertise in a given field, and other things that we’re informed of to come up with a general, broad-view understanding of the performance of the school and the context in which it takes place.  From that knowledge, we can make further judgments that we might not be able to make reliably when we’re focused only on one system of information, because we lack sufficient context or experience in order to extrapolate.

We need to understand two things about data, the things we encounter in the world:

  1. Any given data point is a fact on its own terms.  This doesn’t mean that every bit of data we have is true, but it is a fact in and of itself.  Consider this book on Santeria I have before me; it is a fact that the book says such-and-such about a particular orisha.  That is a data point, and it is a fact that the book says so.  Whether such a fact is true depends on other factors that cannot be validated on its own terms; if I have other bits of data that say the opposite of what the book says (such as what other santeros say, what my godfather says, what my own experience has validated, etc.), then I can consider the data in the book to be false, but the book still says it all the same.
  2. Any given data point may or may not be meaningful.  Consider a generator that produces random numbers or words.  No matter how you pick them, any given item from that random set is just that: random.  Nothing in it makes a particularly big difference either way, since any comparison you use between one item and another will be meaningless.  It’s only when data are structured together and compared can a trend be (possibly) produced; the data that produce that trend are meaningful, and the data that don’t may or may not be meaningful, depending on whether it’s an “exception that proves the rule”, a once-off exception that can be explained contextually, or another random result that doesn’t have any bearing one way or another on the trend.  When we talk about people having “bullshit thresholds”, this is what we mean: it’s a boundary above which we can accept data as meaningful, and below which we can consider it to be no better than random noise.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to amass a large set of data, but it’s correlating that data into information that’s difficult.  In order to produce information, we need some sort of guidance to arrange, compare, and distinguish the data we have available to us.  For this, we use models, structures of data, sets of axioms or rules, and reliable methods of comparisons.  While this sounds numerical and mathematical, it doesn’t necessarily have to be.  For me in my education in Santeria, I have the religious, philosophical, and practical models imparted to my godfather which he’s expanded on in his own way, which he has passed down onto me.  For instance, if a particular santero says X and Y (two pieces of data), and the model my godfather has established allows for X and not Y, then I can accept X into my information model but not Y.  By understanding the model, I can often see why X is allowed and not Y, and if I can’t understand the model’s rules well enough to account for those, then there’s something my godfather hasn’t yet told me or there’s some other limitation that hasn’t yet been conceived of yet in the model, whether it’s arbitrary or not.  For a run-of-the-mill Solomonic magician, those models might be produced by a combination of analyzing the commonalities between grimoires over the centuries and the accounts of their uses from other magicians, forming a set of rules of “here’s what’s essential, here’s the expected results, here’s what can be added to good effect, here’s what can be removed without harming the overall results, etc.”; based on this understanding of the grimoires, one can perform a ritual and see how the methods of the ritual impacted the result, what the result was, whether the result can be trusted, and so forth.

Knowledge is a little more difficult to sift through, because it’s more abstract than a single structure of information.  Information structures, moreover, tend to be coherent and consistent within themselves; they each have their own sets of rules that permit some data but not others.  However, when you have more than one structure of information, it can happen that they each have a set of rules that can conflict with other systems of information.  One example I can pick out in my own experience is the role of the planets in my life.  In the system of information I have regarding astrology and Western magic, the planets (and the objects of the celestial world generally) are paramount in effecting certain things in this world.  In Santeria, on the other hand, so far as I can discern (and that’s a big disclaimer!), there’s no such corollary to that; I haven’t yet found any astrological component to the religion, besides some associations of the Sun and the Moon and a few star-based images, but there’s no role for the planets, aspects, houses, signs, and so forth.  Astrology, simply put, doesn’t matter or even have a place in Santeria.  So, then, if in one system of information I can say that Mercury retrograde is a poor time to do ritual, but in another it’s a moot point because “wtf even is Mercury or a retrograde”, what should I do?  This is an example of a conflict between different systems of information within an overall broader body of knowledge.

According to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, you can have a system of understanding based on rules that can be either consistent (anything that is provable by the system is true) or complete (anything that is true is provable by the system), but not both.  If you’re consistent, then you must be incomplete, where whatever you can prove is true, but there are true things that cannot be proved by the system itself.  If, on the other hand, you’re complete, then you must therefore be inconsistent, where the system can prove everything that is true, but will also necessarily prove things that are not true.  I find this a useful model for understanding how things work.  Any given system of information, for us, is almost always going to be consistent, and therefore incomplete.  Thus, we rely on other systems of information that are likewise consistent and incomplete to fill in the gaps left by any one system.  By linking them together by means of context, comparison, metaphor, and allusion, we can have an overall more-or-less (we hope) complete system of knowledge that is based on multiple systems of information.  Just like we have to pick and choose the data we use to create information, we have to sometimes limit ourselves to what information we choose to link together in order to form knowledge.

Eventually, our end goal should be having knowledge.  Data is easy to get, and information is almost as easy, but neither are entirely usable by a complete being such as ourselves.  It is knowledge that declares and defines the contexts of information, but how do we go about getting knowledge?  It’s a lifelong process and largely automatic for human beings, and different traditions and philosophies have written endlessly about this, so it’s probably best for me to not wade into that set of eternal debates here.  Still, there are a few questions that you might want to consider:

  • What are my models for understanding data as information?
  • From where do my information models come from?
  • How do my experiences relate to what I already know, both as information and as knowledge?
  • How do I evaluate data as meaningful for a given system of information?
  • How can I explain data that do not fit a system of information?
  • How can I refine my models of information to weed out more untrue pieces of data while permitting more true pieces?
  • How can I link one system of information to another?
  • What sort of knowledge can I get by linking one system of information to another?
  • In what context should I analyze a system of information as a whole?
  • What system of information is best to take in new data to produce useful knowledge?

I’ve never been one for the whole “nothing is true, everything is permitted” thing.  There are indeed things that are true, if not generally for all people than specifically for individual people or contexts, and those are useful in and of themselves.  It’s the problem of determining the false chaff from the true wheat that’s the problem, and the rules for that can fluctuate at any given moment depending on what system of information is most useful at that moment.  Plus, when dealing with a number of occultists, it’s hard to keep track of who’s reliably honest and useful in their results, who’s good but crazy, and who just exaggerates for the sake of self-aggrandizement; I know I’ve had that problem in figuring out where to set my bullshit thresholds with certain people, and I’m pretty certain most of my readers have, as well.  We filter data through our bullshit thresholds all the time, but it’s always worthwhile to recalibrate that threshold once in a while and analyze why it’s set where it is for us, and whether it’s too high or too low for our own needs.

Divination Methods and Programming Languages

February 29, 2016 By in occult Tags: , , , , , , 7 Comments

A few years back, I made a post about a theory of divination, where methods of divination can range from the purely intuitive (e.g. clairvoyance) to the purely technical (e.g. meteorological forecasting as seen on the Weather Channel).  Most forms of divination fall somewhere in-between, that combine some aspect of intuition with some aspect of technique or technology (e.g. Tarot, runes, geomancy).  Anyway, in that post, I brought up a few points that I think all people involved in divination should bear in mind, but also a bit about how divination methods are like programming languages.  Being educated as a computer scientist and laboring as a software engineer, I’m prone to using metaphors about the things I’m most knowledgeable in, but I think it can be expanded about how I view divination methods and what they can overall achieve for us.

So, how are methods of divination like programming languages?  Well, what is a programming language?  It’s a system of symbols and a grammar that are used as input to a computer to make it do something.  Punching in numbers and symbols into a calculator, for instance, can be considered a very simple form of programming language: you tell the computer to add these two numbers, divided by this other number, save it to memory, start a new calculation, involve the value stored in memory, and display the output.  Most programming languages (PLs, for short) are much more complicated than this, but the idea is the same: you’re giving the computer a set of instructions that maybe take some input, do something, and maybe give some output.  Computers of any and all kinds exist to interpret some sort of PL, whether it’s just pure binary telling it to turn on or off some set of flashing lights, or whether it’s something elaborate and arcane to simulate intelligence; computers are essentially machines that take in PLs to do other things.  The study of PLs is, in effect, the study of cause and effect: tell the computer to do something, and the computer will do exactly that.  If the computer fails to do the thing, then either the commands given were incorrect (the computer understood them but you didn’t give it the right commands) or invalid (the computer couldn’t understand what you told it to do).

In computer science, there’s a thing called Turing completeness.  If we consider an idealized abstract computer stripped down to its most basic parts (a universal Turing machine), it can compute anything that is, well, computable; by definition, a universal Turing machine can simulate any computable algorithm, any computable programming language, and any computer.  Any computer you see or interact with, including your smartphone or laptop or video game console, is a concrete implementation of a Turing machine.  Turing completeness is a property that applies to computers and, by extension, PLs: if a concrete computer or programming language (let’s call it A) can simulate a universal Turing machine, then because a universal Turing machine can simulate any other type of computation or computation method , then the computer/programming language A can simulate any other computer/programming language.  This is called Turing completeness.

What this boils down to is saying that any Turing-complete programming language can do anything that any other Turing-complete language can do: C is functionally equivalent to ML, which is functionally equivalent to Lua, which is functionally equivalent to lambda calculus.  What this does not say, however, is that any given Turing-complete PL is as easy to use as any other Turing-complete PL.  Thus, what is easy to do in C is problematic in Lisp, which might be outright unwieldy and frightening in some other language.  It may not be impossible, just different; each PL is a different tool, and different tools are good for different ends.  It is totally possible to fix pipe plumbing issues with a hammer, but it’s easier with a wrench; it’s totally possible to just build a house with a wrench, but it’s easier with a hammer.

This is what brings me to divination methods.  I claim that, barring the direct influences of gods or cultural notions thereof, any divination method can answer the same questions that any other divination method can.  Call it a divinatory Turing-completeness if you will; if a divination method can account for and describe some set of circumstances, situations, events, and results, then other divination methods can, as well.  This is why you can go to a geomancer, a Tarot reader, a bone reader, a clairvoyant, or other types of readers and still walk away satisfied with good information despite the radical differences in style and method.  That said, each method is better at different types of queries or better at different types of answer deliveries than others.  Geomancy, for instance, excels at binary queries (“yes” or “no”), while Tarot is good for descriptions and feelings.  Geomancy answers exactly the question you ask, while Tarot answers the question you should be asking.  Geomancy gives you the answer up front and the details later, while Tarot gives you the details first and leaves the overall answer to be judged from them.  I’m not trying to shill for geomancy, I’m just giving examples of how geomancy does divination differently than Tarot; after all, I can answer with geomancy anything a Tarot reader can, but I may phrase certain queries differently, or develop an answer differently.  The overall result is the same, when all is said and done.

However, this metaphor of divination methods and PLs can show other things, too.  A geomancy student of mine recently came to me with an interesting question about a detail of a technique that I don’t personally use, but is documented in an old manuscript.  I don’t put any faith in that technique, so I won’t describe it here, but he wanted to know why I didn’t use it, and how we might find out more about it.  He asked me whether I’ve ever asked geomancy about itself before, like to do a reading to confirm or deny certain techniques.  I…honestly can’t see the point of doing so, but to explain why, it’s time to go back to computer science.

In addition to Turing completeness, there’s this other notion in mathematics that applies to computer science and PLs called Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.  It’s a little heady and obtuse, but here’s the gist: say you have some system of describing information, like arithmetic or physics.  This system has a logic that allows certain things to be proved true (“if P, then Q; P, therefore Q”), and can disprove things that are false (“if P, then Q; P, therefore not Q”).  Given any such system, you might want it to be the best possible system that can prove everything that is true while simultaneously disproving anything that is false.  However, there’s an issue with that: you can either have consistency or completeness, but not both.

  • Consistency is showing that your logic is always sound; you never end up proving something that is false.  Thus, we can only prove true things.  However, this is too restrictive; if you have perfect consistency, you end up with things that are true that you cannot prove.  Your logic, if consistent, can never be complete.
  • Completeness is showing that your logic is always full; you always end up proving everything that is true can be proved true.  The problem with this, however, is that it’s too permissive; sure, everything that is true can be proved true, but there are also things that are false that end up being proved even though they’re contradictions.  Your logic, if complete, can never be consistent.

When it comes to logical systems, of which there are many, we tend to strive for consistency over completeness.  While we’d love a system where everything that could be true is shown as true, we also lose faith in it if we have no means to differentiate the true stuff from the false stuff.  Thus, we sacrifice the totality of completeness in favor of the rigor of consistency.  After all, if such a system were inconsistent, you’d never be sure if 2 + 2 = 4 and 2 + 2 != 3, a computer would work one second or start an AI uprising the next, or whether browsing your favorite porn site would actually give you porn or videocall your mother on Skype.  Instead, with a consistent system, we can rest assured that 2 + 2 can never equal 3, that a computer will behave exactly as told, and that porn websites will only give you porn and not an awkward conversation with your mom.  However, the cost to this is that I have this thing that is true, but it can’t be proven to be true using that system you like.  Unfortunate, but we can make do.

As it turns out, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem applies to any system described in terms of itself; you cannot prove (which is a stronger, logical thing to do than simply giving examples) that a given computer, PL, or system of mathematics is consistent by using that selfsame system.  If you attempt to do so and end up with such a proof, you end up proving a contradiction; thus, your system of logic has an inconsistency within that system of logic.  In order to prove something on the system itself, then, you need something more expressive than that system itself.  For instance, to describe actions, you need sounds; in order to describe sounds, you need language, and in order to describe language, you need thought.  Each of these is less expressive than the next, and while you can describe things of less expressiveness, you cannot describe it in terms of itself.  So, if I have this thing that is true and you can’t prove it to be true using that system you like, then you need something more powerful than that system you like.

Okay, that’s enough heady stuff.  How does this apply to divination methods, again?  My student wanted to know why I didn’t ask geomancy about itself; the answer is that geomancy can’t answer about itself in terms of itself.  Like programming languages’ problem from Gödel, I don’t think a system of knowledge—any system, whether it’s Peano arithmetic or lambda calculus or geomancy—can accurately answer questions about its own internal mechanism and algorithms.  And, moreover, because whatever is divinable by one divination method is divinable by any of them, and whatever is not divinable by one isn’t divinable by any of them, if we can’t ask about how methods of divination work by means of a particular divination method (Tarot with Tarot, geomancy with geomancy, Tarot with geomancy, geomancy with Tarot), the question about how divinatory methods work cannot be divined.

So how do you learn more about techniques for a divination method?  Well, as above, if you have a particular system of knowledge and you want to describe it, you need something more powerful than that system.  What’s more powerful than, say, geomancy?  Something more inclusive and expressive than geomancy; like, say, human language.  If you have a question about geomantic techniques, you can’t really go to geomancy to ask about it; you go to a teacher, a mentor, an ancestor, a discussion group to figure it out by means of logic, rationality, and “looking out above” the system itself.  You have to inspect the system from the outside in order to see how it works inside, and generally, we need something to show us where to look.  That something is usually someone.

Programming languages are not, of course, divination methods.  Yes, dear reader who happens to know more about mathematics and the philosophy thereof than I do, I know I’m uncomfortably mixing different types of concepts in this post; divination methods are not instructions, nor are programming languages able to predict the future, barring some new innovation in quantum computing.  The point stands, and the concepts introduced in this post hold well and are generalizable enough for my ends here.  There are enough parallels between the two that give me a working theory of how divination works, and also of the limits of divination.  Just as with the relationship between regular expressions and context-free grammars, where the latter is strictly more expressive and powerful than the former, we need something more expressive and powerful than a divination system to learn how to divine with it.  Humans, for instance, fill that role quite nicely; all divination can do is “simulate” human situations, but it cannot simulate every possible situation uniquely.  There are human situations that cannot be accurately simulated by divination.  Divination, too, is inherently incomplete if we want to place certain faith in our techniques; if we allow, on the other hand, for divination to be complete, then we have to scrap the techniques which then become inconsistent and be more intuitive instead.  In that case, sure, you might be able to get insight on techniques, but it’s not by means of the techniques of the divination system itself; you sidestepped that matter completely.

In Terms of Another

March 4, 2012 By in occult, philosophy, whining Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

A computer is a mechanical and/or electronic device.  It takes in electricity and input from a device like a keyboard or a mouse or a touchscreen, and uses electricity to perform logical operations on input.  The output is redirected and is used as further input or is used to display information on a device like a monitor or printer.  There are lots of models to show how computers work, from the mathematical (why input becomes particular output), physical (how supplied electricity is transformed into motion, light, or sound), and logical (how input and stored data is manipulated in an abstraction of a machine).  It does not, however, make sense to describe how computers work in terms of biology with cells, protein folding, evolution, and so forth.  The two are completely separate systems of knowledge and use different abstractions, terminologies, definitions, and assumptions.  Likewise, it doesn’t make sense to describe the involuntary actions and processes of a human body in terms of formal types, data representation, or logical operators.

Languages rely on complex rules of word formation, ordering, and meaning, collectively termed grammar and semantics.  An English sentence, such as the one you’re currently reading, is made intelligible through the rules of English grammar and the meanings of English words according to an agreed-upon dictionary.  It doesn’t make sense for an English sentence to be analyzed according to the grammar or lexicon of another language, like French or Chinese, because the rules and definitions don’t apply.  Comparisons can be drawn, and translations can be performed, but you can’t simply drop an English sentence into a Chinese input terminal and expect to get any processing done.  Further, you can’t analyze or make sense of an English sentence if you’re trying to describe it in terms of multivariate calculus.  The two are just radically different systems of knowledge with different purposes, uses, languages, and so forth.  They’re both useful and necessary, sure, but not in the same way, and can’t be used in place of each other.

So, given this, it annoys me when people try to make me explain, justify, or validate magic or the occult in terms of the laws of physics or other physical sciences.  It’s like trying to explain a computer in terms of biology, or English in terms of calculus.  You’re asking me to explain something spiritual and inherently non-physical in terms of the non-spiritual and physical?  I can’t do anything with that.  I don’t have the tools, the rules, the definitions, the terms, the background for what I need.  I can use philosophy to illustrate some of these things, sure, and religion to make sense of other things, but that’s like the English sentence/Chinese grammar situation above.

Am I saying that magic is completely detached from the physical world?  No. Am I saying that magic has no effect in the physical world, nor any measurable metrics?  No.  Magic does affect and can effect the physical world, but doing so can’t be described in an entirely physical model, because magic doesn’t directly affect the physical world like how observable physical processes do.  Magic assumes the backdrop of a chain of manifestation, it assumes things that aren’t physical and can’t (always?) be detected physically.  If you’re asking me to explain something spiritual and non-physical, and only allowing me physical explanations to do so, you’re setting me up for failure.  If you want to discuss spiritual matters, then let’s use spiritual methods, languages, and definitions; we can draw parallels or comparisons between the spiritual and nonspiritual, physical and nonphysical, and that’s awesome.  But I can’t explain something in terms of what it’s not and what it can’t be.  If you want to talk to me about spirituality, let’s talk in spiritual terms, or at least allow for the possibility of spirituality.

I understand that atheism is a growing worldview and mindset of modern people, and there’s a good reason why: it makes sense.  It makes do with the tools and observations we have at our disposal and starts from there to make sense of the world.  If there’s no evidence for something, it doesn’t make sense to believe it if there’s a simpler explanation out there that, even if it’s theoretical, if it’s plausible, it can be accepted (Occam’s razor).  However, just because there’s no evidence in the Universe for a particular thing doesn’t mean that it’s evidence against that particular thing, either; just because there’s no meaning supplied by the cosmos doesn’t mean that meaning is completely denied, either.  Plus, modern science is not the be-all-and-end-all of all knowledge: we are constantly discovering new things all the time, and we are constantly revamping or reconstructing our current models of understanding to make sense of more stuff.  Further, we try to use a consistent system of logic to prove that something is true, “consistent” meaning that a well-structured proof with true hypotheses will yield a true conclusion.  It is impossible that a consistent system of logic can prove all provable things; in other words, I know something that’s true and you can’t show that it’s true (Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem).  In order to prove that something-unprovably-true, you need to use another system of logic, another kind of science.

It even gets me more riled up when people say “let’s establish empirical reality here” and try to dismiss my point of view out of hand.  First, “empirical” means “known through experience or experimentation”.  In my experience, magic works, nonphysical entities exist in some nonphysical form and can be interacted with in nonphysical (and sometimes physical!) ways, and there are worlds and phenomena that exist and can be interacted with nonphysically.  In my repeated experiments, under a particular setting and environment, I can call up angels or demons and chat with them or achieve some goal or desired end.  This is my experience, this is my reality that I work with.  If you want to disregard my reality, fine, but don’t try to argue with me about it.  My experience is not your own, and your experience is not my own.  If you want to try to convince me that something doesn’t work, try doing the same experiments I have and obtaining the same experiences I have, and then get back to me.  Trying to use “objective reality” to dismiss my experiences doesn’t really work: (a) everything has to be perceived in some way or another, leading to a subjective experience of reality (b) “objective numbers” obtained by tools made by mankind also have to be interpreted, and are obtained by machines that return numbers geared for a specific physical phenomena that doesn’t capture all known or experienced knowledge, but only a highly-specific subset of desired (subjective) knowledge (c) the models of “objective reality” don’t reliably account for the experiences that I and countless other people have.

Don’t try to ask me about my worldview if you’re just going to dismiss it.  It’s apparent from how you refer to me and my hobbies, that don’t influence or affect you, how you feel about them.  Feel what you want, please!  But if you don’t know about occultism, if you don’t want to know about occultism, and if you’re dead set against the possibility of occultism, don’t try to have me waste my breath or keystrokes to explain myself.  If you’re just going to call me crazy, save all of us the time and do so, and let me ignore you in peace.  If you don’t want to listen to me, ignore me!  I’m not going to be offended.  Magic isn’t for everyone.  Neither is any given religion, neither is art, neither is philosophy, neither is any given sport, neither is any given field of science.  But they all have worth, they all have meaning, and they’ve all been around for thousands of years for a reason.  Don’t try to discredit any one of them just because it doesn’t make sense in another one.

I don’t believe and work with this stuff for the hell of it.  What I do isn’t random and it isn’t haphazard.  What I do is researched, contemplated, discussed, planned, worked out, described, and analyzed.  The results I get are compared to my expectations, previous results I’ve obtained, and the results of others.  If I were crazy, I sure as hell wouldn’t be putting in as much effort or documentation into what I do.  If I had multiple personality disorder, I must be unique in being able to control when I talk to a particular alt-Polyphanes under certain circumstances.  If I were just deceiving myself, it’s gotta be a pretty damn big deception on a NWO-conspiracy-scale to be documented and discussed for as long as there’s been writing, and longer.  What I do isn’t physical and isn’t geared towards the physical or mathematical.  I wouldn’t use algebra to generate a change in consciousness; I wouldn’t use a computer to explain to me how to be happy.  Why ask me to explain spiritual things with physical processes?  It doesn’t work. I use physical and material processes to affect the world in terms of energy and matter; I use spiritual and mental processes to affect the world in terms of thought and spirit.  The two don’t mix.

It largely comes down to an issue of worldview and values.  If you believe that the ultimate expression and mode of reality is material reality, and that only material reality is the only thing of value and worth, awesome.  That’s not my philosophy, and I don’t expect my own philosophy to be yours.  My philosophy is that material reality is only one part of a grander part of reality, with each part being interactive and interactable.  If that’s not your philosophy, awesome.  But don’t try to say, explicitly or implicitly, that your worldview or philosophy is better than mine, because you don’t have the grounds to do that.  Logic doesn’t work in terms of things of worth or value, and I would hate to see someone supposedly so rational and logical to be so illogical in their approach and discussions when they continue to claim to be even more logical and rational than I am.  Hell, even more than logic, what I want is open-mindedness.  You don’t have to accept that what I do is sensible, you don’t have to accept the background or frameworks I’m working with, but please accept that it’s not baseless, not without cause, and not without effect.  Ascribe whatever physical explanation you want to it, be it psychological or pathological or whatever, but know that in doing so you’re trying to compare, not just apples and oranges, but apples and anvils.

In the words of the archdruid John Michael Greer:

The apotheosis of this sort of thinking is Arthur C. Clarke’s famous Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I mean no disrespect whatsoever to Clarke, who was among the best of SF authors; it’s hardly blameworthy that he shared misunderstandings of magic that were all but universal in his culture. The point remains that since magic does not do what technology does, and vice versa, the Third Law should properly be renamed Clarke’s Fallacy; no matter how advanced a technology may be, it does the kind of thing technologies do—that is to say, it manipulates matter and energy directly, which again is what magic does not do. I’d like to propose, in fact, an alternative rule, which I’ve modestly titled Greer’s Law: “Anyone who is unable to distinguish between magic and any technology, however advanced, doesn’t know much about magic.”

There.  My obligatory occultist’s rant on being accosted by hardline atheists.  I’m allowed to rant on my own blog, after all.  If you want to talk to me about the possibility of magic in a spiritual setting, that’s a whole ‘nother ballgame, and I’d be up for that.  But let’s keep stuff within the same discipline and language, alright?  Thanks.