"How Does Magic Work?"
Aug. 23rd, 2009 01:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wolven7Many types of magic rely on the cultivation of certain mental and emotional states in either the individual or groups to interact with what is seen as the overall conceptual substrate of reality.
The combination of the "correct" (howsoever you want to define that) states of mind and being with certain words and actions (which, in theory, can be said to only act as a focusing tool) produce a crystalization of new ideas, or a radical reconceptualization of what forces go into the operations of this reality.
I am starting at the "assumption" that the universe around us is valueless, formless until concepts are brought to bear on it. Until we build a conceptual framework (mathematics, philosophy, physics, radical biology, etc) and dress it in language, reality has no meaning.
From there, as we manipulate our concepts and understandings of the forces that generate "reality" (through ritual meditation, spell casting, ritual sacrifice or interaction, or simply learning and reinforcing what we "know" to be true), we come to accept and expect certain types and tokens experiences and actions as having an effect on the world around us. But, in the case of magic, these will change with expectation, perception, internal mental configuration, intuition, natural proclivities and preferences, as well as external forces such as gravity, light quality, inertia, and even other mental states.
What I am trying to say is that, even for one magician, effects may not be repeatable, because things like state of mind or "brain-state configuration" can affect the outcome of the work. If your mind changes, enough, then no, it doesn't work. But something else probably does.
How? Take the purely physicalist tack. This is not what I believe is going on, but I think it's one that might work for you. The interactions of the brain are just high-level representations of various physical patterns. Research supports that, if we repeatedly seek to train ourselves to be aware of something, in or through our physical bodies, then we become accustom to it, and expect or "know" it's existence, even when we don't experience it directly (sometimes Because of its absence.) See: the blind boy who developed sonar; man who made himself sensitive to magnetic field fluctuations for the purposes of navigation; people learning to use and understand what they were seeing in a microscope. It would bundifferentiated Stuff, because to be truly objective is to be completely removed from interpretation, personal investment, and conceptualization, all of which are the only states which give form and meaning to what we see and experience.)e strangely simplistic to think that, intentionally or not, our actions and the configurations of our brain-states don't cause fluctuations in the other direction; the only question is what, if any, gross results can be intuited from our actions and "thoughts."
(Parenthetically, it seems to me that the end point of an "Objective View Of Reality" is a return to an
But, so we work to train ourselves to be aware of the correlation between our brain-states, our actions, and certain effects in the world; between how we "feel" about something, what we do while feeling that, and what results we see, either immediately, or "sometime down the line." But the brain-states and the actions don't always match. You don't always feel or think the same way about actions you perform, and, when your feelings and thoughts are a necessary component of the work, at hand, that can cause either a weakening of effect, or a complete failure in performance.
Now, brain-scans are possible. We have had that technology for years and years. But can you scan the brain of someone performing a ritual designed to have gross external effects, without their knowing it? Can you monitor the various areas of brain-activity in a supposed "telekinetic," without them being aware of it, and that awareness being a constant factor in their performance?
I think, fundamentally, we still differ on what counts for input, in a system, and what "lacking in sufficient data to in any way support the claim made" means.
Or, here's this one:
1) Conceptually and theoretically, every action we perform, every set of thoughts we have, every dream and half-formed desire contributes to an overall model of reality from which we operate to continue to build a model of reality.
2) What we use to build that model can and must be pulled from those things which exist within the model.
3) Thoughts, emotions, desires, and "wishes" all affect the "physical world" if only by the way they colour our actions, and what we seek to make the world, through politics, design, creation of art or other physical works.
4) The active manipulation of emotions, thoughts, etc, can affect the "physical world."
Ultimately, my point is that we don't know anywhere near what we think we know about the universe, regardless of what the methods of science teach us. The fact of the matter is, everything we see and experience could only be thus because, for the multiverse, it is Tuesday, and this is the multiverse's Tuesday Tie. The externally observable world may be one tenth of that which is generating itself, and we simply don't know how to see 100% of how reality works, yet, if we ever will.
I have seen and experienced emotions influence reality. I have seen "magical" work, done on behalf of an individual, have precisely the intended outcome. I have created beneficial situations from nothing, and been at the centre of bizarre "coincidences." Everyone has.
I've also seen magic do nothing in the face of what Is. I've seen people in intractable and intolerable situations stay there, no matter what they or anyone else do. I've seen things that, on the surface, had some kind of coherent systematic point or purpose turn to be completely meaningless. We all have.
Magic, and here I am speaking for me, and not my "circle" is everything I've talked about, here. It's none of these things. It's bits and pieces of all of them, recombined and broken down, and reintegrated. But that's the universe, that's Views of concepts which we find Useful in a certain type situation, but not others, and not always. That's Theory and Method, for making sense of and operating within the world in which we live, and the results are not always reproducable, verifiable, or even singularly quantifiable, over a long period of time. Their value and meaning are different things, at different times, from different perspectives, and How they mean what they mean is something determined by the individual doing the asking, if at all.
And that's why I said "Maybe Magic Doesn't Do It For You." Maybe it is not one of the many, Many lenses through which you gain any useful information about the world, but that's okay. It is a lens through which many others operate and through which they come to new modes of thought and conception about the world, and seek to make it "better." It's also a mode into which people lock themselves and dogmatize, and only succeed in making things "worse."
But my point is, while scientific rationalism seeks to be a catholic system, I don't think it has to be, or can be. I think there are necessarily things in this reality which defy a rational scientific mindset; combinations of emotions, experiences, and actions which leave a far more primal impression on people than can be done justice by appeal to scientific methodology. The language and mindset of science aren't as useful for gleaning meaning and use from them, as other terminologies.
So the question of "how does magic work" is a question that will, necessarily, have different answers depending on what kind of magic you mean, who you're asking, what they know, what they believe, when you ask them, and if they even have, in their minds, an externally explicable framework for communicating that to other people.
I'm talking about meta-magical/systems theory, and that's completely okay, because even the differences in "truths" can teach us something about the nature of the reality that allows for this. But scientific rationalism only allows for one over-arching Way The World Behaves, and I just don't see it as being the only thing that's true.
Though, paradoxically, in itself, it has to be. Kind of like how YHVH is the One True God, and you shouldn't have any others Before Him. After Him, however, is a-okay.
Starting to ramble. Time to roam.
The combination of the "correct" (howsoever you want to define that) states of mind and being with certain words and actions (which, in theory, can be said to only act as a focusing tool) produce a crystalization of new ideas, or a radical reconceptualization of what forces go into the operations of this reality.
I am starting at the "assumption" that the universe around us is valueless, formless until concepts are brought to bear on it. Until we build a conceptual framework (mathematics, philosophy, physics, radical biology, etc) and dress it in language, reality has no meaning.
From there, as we manipulate our concepts and understandings of the forces that generate "reality" (through ritual meditation, spell casting, ritual sacrifice or interaction, or simply learning and reinforcing what we "know" to be true), we come to accept and expect certain types and tokens experiences and actions as having an effect on the world around us. But, in the case of magic, these will change with expectation, perception, internal mental configuration, intuition, natural proclivities and preferences, as well as external forces such as gravity, light quality, inertia, and even other mental states.
What I am trying to say is that, even for one magician, effects may not be repeatable, because things like state of mind or "brain-state configuration" can affect the outcome of the work. If your mind changes, enough, then no, it doesn't work. But something else probably does.
How? Take the purely physicalist tack. This is not what I believe is going on, but I think it's one that might work for you. The interactions of the brain are just high-level representations of various physical patterns. Research supports that, if we repeatedly seek to train ourselves to be aware of something, in or through our physical bodies, then we become accustom to it, and expect or "know" it's existence, even when we don't experience it directly (sometimes Because of its absence.) See: the blind boy who developed sonar; man who made himself sensitive to magnetic field fluctuations for the purposes of navigation; people learning to use and understand what they were seeing in a microscope. It would bundifferentiated Stuff, because to be truly objective is to be completely removed from interpretation, personal investment, and conceptualization, all of which are the only states which give form and meaning to what we see and experience.)e strangely simplistic to think that, intentionally or not, our actions and the configurations of our brain-states don't cause fluctuations in the other direction; the only question is what, if any, gross results can be intuited from our actions and "thoughts."
(Parenthetically, it seems to me that the end point of an "Objective View Of Reality" is a return to an
But, so we work to train ourselves to be aware of the correlation between our brain-states, our actions, and certain effects in the world; between how we "feel" about something, what we do while feeling that, and what results we see, either immediately, or "sometime down the line." But the brain-states and the actions don't always match. You don't always feel or think the same way about actions you perform, and, when your feelings and thoughts are a necessary component of the work, at hand, that can cause either a weakening of effect, or a complete failure in performance.
Now, brain-scans are possible. We have had that technology for years and years. But can you scan the brain of someone performing a ritual designed to have gross external effects, without their knowing it? Can you monitor the various areas of brain-activity in a supposed "telekinetic," without them being aware of it, and that awareness being a constant factor in their performance?
I think, fundamentally, we still differ on what counts for input, in a system, and what "lacking in sufficient data to in any way support the claim made" means.
Or, here's this one:
1) Conceptually and theoretically, every action we perform, every set of thoughts we have, every dream and half-formed desire contributes to an overall model of reality from which we operate to continue to build a model of reality.
2) What we use to build that model can and must be pulled from those things which exist within the model.
3) Thoughts, emotions, desires, and "wishes" all affect the "physical world" if only by the way they colour our actions, and what we seek to make the world, through politics, design, creation of art or other physical works.
4) The active manipulation of emotions, thoughts, etc, can affect the "physical world."
Ultimately, my point is that we don't know anywhere near what we think we know about the universe, regardless of what the methods of science teach us. The fact of the matter is, everything we see and experience could only be thus because, for the multiverse, it is Tuesday, and this is the multiverse's Tuesday Tie. The externally observable world may be one tenth of that which is generating itself, and we simply don't know how to see 100% of how reality works, yet, if we ever will.
I have seen and experienced emotions influence reality. I have seen "magical" work, done on behalf of an individual, have precisely the intended outcome. I have created beneficial situations from nothing, and been at the centre of bizarre "coincidences." Everyone has.
I've also seen magic do nothing in the face of what Is. I've seen people in intractable and intolerable situations stay there, no matter what they or anyone else do. I've seen things that, on the surface, had some kind of coherent systematic point or purpose turn to be completely meaningless. We all have.
Magic, and here I am speaking for me, and not my "circle" is everything I've talked about, here. It's none of these things. It's bits and pieces of all of them, recombined and broken down, and reintegrated. But that's the universe, that's Views of concepts which we find Useful in a certain type situation, but not others, and not always. That's Theory and Method, for making sense of and operating within the world in which we live, and the results are not always reproducable, verifiable, or even singularly quantifiable, over a long period of time. Their value and meaning are different things, at different times, from different perspectives, and How they mean what they mean is something determined by the individual doing the asking, if at all.
And that's why I said "Maybe Magic Doesn't Do It For You." Maybe it is not one of the many, Many lenses through which you gain any useful information about the world, but that's okay. It is a lens through which many others operate and through which they come to new modes of thought and conception about the world, and seek to make it "better." It's also a mode into which people lock themselves and dogmatize, and only succeed in making things "worse."
But my point is, while scientific rationalism seeks to be a catholic system, I don't think it has to be, or can be. I think there are necessarily things in this reality which defy a rational scientific mindset; combinations of emotions, experiences, and actions which leave a far more primal impression on people than can be done justice by appeal to scientific methodology. The language and mindset of science aren't as useful for gleaning meaning and use from them, as other terminologies.
So the question of "how does magic work" is a question that will, necessarily, have different answers depending on what kind of magic you mean, who you're asking, what they know, what they believe, when you ask them, and if they even have, in their minds, an externally explicable framework for communicating that to other people.
I'm talking about meta-magical/systems theory, and that's completely okay, because even the differences in "truths" can teach us something about the nature of the reality that allows for this. But scientific rationalism only allows for one over-arching Way The World Behaves, and I just don't see it as being the only thing that's true.
Though, paradoxically, in itself, it has to be. Kind of like how YHVH is the One True God, and you shouldn't have any others Before Him. After Him, however, is a-okay.
Starting to ramble. Time to roam.
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no subject
Date: 2009-08-23 06:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-24 02:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-23 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-24 02:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-24 12:51 pm (UTC)Most likely Choice A, but I kind of hope it's C cos that would be more entertaining.
Thoughts I'd had this morning:
Date: 2009-08-24 04:28 am (UTC)To know a thing is, in some way and for a limited time, to become it.
Words, names, are a method of knowing a thing. Sex or the flavor of a still-warm heart are tested methods of knowing a person.
If you know the problem, you can be the problem. If you are the problem, you control the problem. Become the problem, then unravel yourself.
Sorry if I'm a little freeform with this; It's been a while since I've written an essay.
Re: Thoughts I'd had this morning:
Date: 2009-08-24 09:47 am (UTC)Re: Thoughts I'd had this morning:
Date: 2009-08-24 03:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-24 03:22 pm (UTC)Trite responses:
I) "Be the change you want to see in the world."
II) "The more you learn, the less you know."
... this development has me both the most frustrated and most excited I've ever been. Well, maybe when I first printed my own run of MSU and had the clusterfrak on the way to Origins.
I still need to remember to use 285 as a focusing tool. And send out MSU blimps.
Mostly agree. Excellent point about things after YHVH being acceptable, even though the Zealots will probably never accept it.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-28 02:28 pm (UTC)And no. That's almost never how they interpret that passage, even though they don't speak Hebrew (neither do I), let alone Deity (debatable).
no subject
Date: 2009-08-26 12:02 am (UTC)And posting it here will allow a different group of people to provide input, which is generally helpful to me in understanding things, mostly due to semantics.
Anyway... I've read it, and re-read it, and I'm going to re-read it again tonight and reply where necessary. Thanks for putting forth the effort to help me understand these things.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-28 02:26 pm (UTC)And no worries, I like watching where your head goes with these things, as it's not always where one might expect, and that's cool.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-07 07:53 pm (UTC)There's too much info to cover in a single comment, or a single post, so I guess think of this as a sort of preface to a series. I'll keep those posts public so you or anyone else can comment on them.
But to begin with...
"So the question of "how does magic work" is a question that will, necessarily, have different answers depending on what kind of magic you mean, who you're asking, what they know, what they believe, when you ask them, and if they even have, in their minds, an externally explicable framework for communicating that to other people."
This is probably the biggest stumbling block in any attempt I have to address anything in magic as you describe it, the fact that there is so much that goes under the heading of "Magic". It would be like arguing about scientific notions without ever labeling one "geology" and another "biology". It's simply a massive amount of information, with different areas being specific to different things.
But breaking things down in even the slightest way seems to illicit the complaint that it is reductionist, or an attempt to put magic into a box of scientific rationalism, or something less true to the essence of what magic is.
To a certain extent I can buy that. In the grand scheme of the universe, one can't very well talk about gravity without mentioning electromagnetism. Mention of the Andromeda galaxy, or description of it, or description of its mechanics, can't very well ignore the existence and affect of the gravity of things around it.
To get a true picture of the astronomical-level universe, you'd have to be simultaneously aware of all the matter, fields, energy, and forces of the universe all at the same time, and yes, even in the past and future as we've discovered that at the planck level, time itself can be a fuzzy concept.
But this is not only a point in favor of the way in which you describe magic, but also a point against using the term at all.
In some capacity, as you have told me, everything is magic, even when there is no force or action outside of scientific rationalist thinking to describe the event.
Example:
"Thoughts, emotions, desires, and "wishes" all affect the "physical world" if only by the way they colour our actions, and what we seek to make the world, through politics, design, creation of art or other physical works."
There's no super-natural effect in this description, or telekinetic effect in it, as you've plainly stated. Our emotions affect our actions, which then affect the physical world.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-08 03:25 pm (UTC)I think that Existence implies Naturalness. I think that what we think "natural" means is a limited scope borne of the (not completely faulty) idea that processing a thing changes its relation to "Nature." I think that the change in relation, in question, is more to the other components of existence than to "nature."
I think that magic is a way of using the things that the natural world gives us in a way not that is necessarily normal nor rationally seen or understood. What it allows is a view that takes many other systems' component concerns and finds the place at which they interact. It's a lens of lenses, made out of the places where they overlap. It is a way of seeing and interacting with the world which provides a very particular kind of information.
It, like everything else, is wholly "natural."
I just think we are disagreeing on what actually exists.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-07 07:53 pm (UTC)So often you have stated that science and magic describe or explain different things in the world/universe/reality, but by attributing a magical element to the above-mentioned event you have put magic in the position of explaining an event which is explainable by science.
It also shows a very dualistic approach to various matters, which may or may not be simply semantic differences in the expression of the concepts.
For instance:
Take emotions as an example of something which could be said to be both "magical" and "scientific". You can study the actions and causes of the brain chemistry of emotions. Event A happens, witnessed by the sensory organs of Witness B, which triggers chemical reaction C, which we call an emotion.
But a more dualistic approach would be to say that that doesn't tell the whole story of the emotion, invoking a word such as "Qualia", saying the "experience" of "feeling" the emotion can't be explained by the simple recording of the intricacies of the event by science.
I think this is a fundamental disagreement, perhaps between you and I, but certainly between me and most modern philosophers. For one, I think this shows a lack of understanding of the science, of the information gained from the study of neurology and chemistry. I think it also shows a lack of understanding of the philosophy involved.
This guy puts it better than I can, how consciousness and awareness are somehow different, about dualism. I imagine you've already heard the exact same sort of things a million times, but for clarity I include it in case I didn't explain the position that I'm opposing very well.
But ultimately I think this takes something that has been explained and then super-imposes over it an unnecessary element. I think it is because of 10,000 years of philosophy NOT having the tools of neurology that mankind has put itself in the philosophical box of thinking that consciousness is somehow separate from the physical processes that give rise to it.
You can liken it to the OS being different than the Motherboard, and say that one is "separate" from the other, and study the two separately, but at the end of the day our brains and our consciousness are even less separate than an OS and a computer. Our knowledge and emotions are linked to very specific physical structures in the brain, even to individual neurons, and they spark at each other in associated patterns to develop a larger "image".
no subject
Date: 2009-09-08 02:59 pm (UTC)Is vision an illusion? Does the fact of its having been created by many intricate and interconnected actions and reactions of photons, receptor plates, muscles, and nerves, make the end effect-- That We See Something-- any less Real? If the answer to that is no, then why would the interaction of brain states giving rise to a thing, to a pattern we call "consciousness" be an illusion? It is, in that case, an effect. I think this is what gets people so emotionally riled up, in these debates, is that, to proponents of consciousness, the others are saying "You're Not Really There," rather than saying "You're there, but WHAT you are is different from what you think you are."
At base, they may say the same thing, but it's the difference between saying, "You just broke your arm, because you're a fucking idiot," and "You probably shouldn't hang upside down out of second-story window ledges over concrete, anymore..."
Anyway, you're not calling it an illusion, so we'll move on.
I'm not a dualist, I'm not a monist, I'm a Stuff-Ist. There are different things that make the universe, and those things can be seen and interacted with in different ways, as well as recombining to make yet other and different things. In this view, I'd have to say that the brains we possess have a direct impact on the kind of consciousness we have, but they are not fully responsible for the whole of our conscious structures. If we had different kinds of brains, we'd have different kinds of consciousness.
But let's say that we Create different structures into which we can put out patterns. We give ourselves new pathways and areas to play with, by thought and decision making and learning. The shape and substance of the new pathways will inform-- not determine-- the shape and substance our consciousness.
I am of the view that consciousness is an effect of the complexity of interaction between internal brain-states, actions, reactions, and the external world. Again, this doesn't make it illusory, but it makes it only partially reducible. Eventually you have to address the consciousnesses in question on the level of interacting patterns of patterns, if you want to get anything useful From those patterns or the people they represent.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-07 07:53 pm (UTC)But to say politics and biology are separate is sort of equivalent here. You can study the actions and system and call it politics, but it can also be explained by studying the individual people that form it all.
What I'm getting at is that to call something like my acting on an emotion "magic" is to simply add unnecessary terms to the equation, an equation that is already explained by reductionism and science and rationalism, wholly and fully. Putting layers on top of it isn't getting closer to the truth, it's getting further away from the truth.
I think it's much more a symptom of philosophy being trapped in a box that it is unwilling to get out of, much more so than science. The box of conscious dualism, or using the language of "the soul" to describe human interactions, emotions, and motivations, is in a sense tainting the entire discussion by adding unnecessary qualifiers to something.
And while it can be branded about all day who's got the "simplistic" view or who is "stuck in their box" or whatever, which in the end is mostly rhetorical statements with little weight, I think it's very well suited to this portion of the discussion, because there IS a 10,000 year history (well longer than that) of people describing the soul as the seat of consciousness, attributing to it the cause of our emotions, our hopes, and our dreams, and our motivations. If you look at modern psychology (or especially psychology from 100 years ago) you see the way people like Jung attribute significance to dreams in that sort of way, where everything has some sort of almost "mystical" significance, where it's all somehow outside the physical, interacting with it, despite there being no reason, rational, philosophical, or otherwise, to believe this. No observation to assume, or to infer this.
So this is one area where magic IS trying to explain the SAME thing as science, and where it ultimately does not explain anything at all.
And even with something simple it's easy to see how it touches so many different disciplines that it's hard to ever compartmentalize anything enough to say "it explains THIS but not THIS" because something simple like an emotion requires analysis of so many different things, from chemistry to neurology to studying a "system" of social interactions, etc...
But with all of that I'm simply trying to make the point that there are some areas, such as physical actions taken by emotional motivations, which are explained by "physicalist" rationality, with no extra layers, and to try and use extra layers does you a disservice, and is ultimately the product of 10,000 years of superstitious terminology being used to explain day-to-day physical events.
Let's remember that at the so-called "dawn of man" that the gods, demons, souls, and spirits were all used as a way of explaining the physical world, which you say is science's domain, while magic supposedly explains something ELSE, but SOME of the things you describe as being explained by magic ARE already explained by science.
So either magic explains the same things differently, or it explains something else, and if it does both, then that needs explaining.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-08 02:38 pm (UTC)What I'm getting at is that to call something like my acting on an emotion "magic" is to simply add unnecessary terms to the equation,
I meant not that YOUR actions upon YOUR emotions should be seen as magic (unless there is a clear understanding in your mind as to the nature of your reactions and actions), but that the external manipulation of such by an agent or "Magician" to effect a desired result is. If I understand your emotional reactions and cause certain information and experiences to come to you, in a particular order, specifically to cause you to act a certain way in the world at a certain time that is, in part, something I would call magic.
Magic isn't going to be wholly separate, honestly, from anything else. All of the conceptual systems in the world overlap and inform all the others. But those areas of overlap are areas where we look at the same phenomena with different purpose. Their use and meaning are different depending upon the system we're using.
As for Jung and the psychologists, Jung's principle of synchronicity is, in part, responsible for the theories of the collective unconscious, which isn't, at base, a dualist mode. It's more along the lines of incidental, epiphenomenal cloud computing, for the human mind; a result of frequency and emission overlap, and termed "zeitgeist" or "collective."