Janblog 2025.
Reflections on the Future.
Optimism seems in short supply as we begin the second quarter of the 21st century. Economic growth flatlines in Europe, unsurprisingly perhaps as Europe has 10% of the world’s population, 30% of the world’s economy, and an astounding 60% of the world’s social spending. Meanwhile the developing world now competes furiously for resources, manufacturing opportunities, or migration opportunities. Authoritarian governments control most of the world’s countries and liberal democracies drift towards the right of the political spectrum as social democracy seems to falter as an ideology. America under Trump seems likely to curtail imports and immigration and to row back on hyper liberal wokeism. Globally we have quite a lot of wars in progress and a growing consensus that we should tool up for more.
COP 29 proved a copout with humanity’s politicians collectively deciding on token mitigation of climate change instead of significant reductions in CO2 emissions.
The benefits of Artificial Intelligence in scientific research seem likely to become dwarfed by the effects of Artificial Stupidity in warfare, surveillance capitalism, and general political surveillance, persuasion, and control, and in psycho-toxic forms of ‘entertainment’.
Do we have any reasons to feel cheerful?
Well I just got round to reading this over the festive season: -
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Not-End-World-Generation-Sustainable/dp/1784745006
This relentlessly upbeat book by a data scientist certainly paints an optimistic picture of the future although perhaps by heavily selecting just the data sets that confirm that. Critics from the doom lobby have accused the author of bolstering the Trump-Musk-Farage axis of eco-gnomic thought and ideology.
If I chose to believe the book it would certainly reduce my reluctance to campaign for Reform UK whose current manifesto seems sound on most issues - but utterly crazy and irresponsible on environmental matters.
We ‘live in interesting times’ as the ancient Chinese curse goes. Happy New Year.
Necronomicon Mythos Sorcery Simulation Game System.
The following basic rule structure works well as a single player quest, as a multiplayer game for many participants - adjustable for cooperative or competitive play, or as a board game, or you can simply play it with pencil and paper and a single D6 dice.
Herewith the basic rule system: -
Necronomicon Mythos RPG Sorcery Simulation.
1) All Sorcerers get this double sided rule sheet on which to record their Sanity, Vitality, and Magic powers, and treasures wrested from the Elder Gods, plus a pen and a six sided dice.
Sorcerers each have 8 points which they can divide between their powers of Sanity, Vitality, and Magic. If any of these factors drop to zero, they die. (They may reincarnate i.e. take a new sheet and start again having lost all treasures and acolytes).
At each turn Sorcerers may: (i) -Move ONE power point between their powers in preparation for a challenge. (But not Treasures)
(ii) - Challenge Cultists for an Acolyte, or challenge an Elder God for its Treasure which can increase their Sanity, Vitality or Magic, but this involves the risk of the loss of these powers also. All challenges to Cultists or an Elder God involve 3 sequential dice throws, against Sanity, Vitality, and Magic. Sorcerer’s Power + Treasure + Dice Throw vs Adversaries Power. The Sorcerer has to beat the adversary’s highest+ power to gain that treasure. However, if the Sorcerer loses the throw on ANY power, then the Sorcerer loses 1 or 2 points of that power. Sorcerers may sacrifice a previously captured Treasure with the appropriate power or sacrifice an Acolyte in place of any lost power point(s).
2) The Elder Gods & Cultists each have a magnificent display board showing their Image, Treasure, Sanity, Vitality, Magic, and the costs of failing a challenge to them, distributed around the temple.
NAME Sanity Vitality Magic Treasure Reward Failure
on any power
Cultist ( various 5+4 2 ) Sacrificial Acolyte@ Absorb Loses -1
Shub-Niggurath 3 5+ 4 Orgone Accumulator* +1 Vitality -1
Cthulhu 5+ 4 3 Jewel of Clarity* +1 Sanity -1
Nyarlathotep 3 4 5+ Necronomicon* +1 Magic -1
Hastur 4 6+ 5 Sigilium Vigorum +2 Vitality -2
Yog Sothoth 6+ 4 5 All Seeing Eye +2 Sanity -2
Azathoth 5 4 6+ Hand of Power +2 Magic -2
Cosmic Indifference 6 7 8+ Innominandum +3 Magic -3
@ = At a conference a Sorcerer may gift an Acolyte to another Sorcerer.
* = At a conference Sorcerers may confer this treasure upon another Sorcerer and keep it.
The Immoderator will call the beginning of each round of challenges, call for conferences when appropriate, and after a number of rounds invoke Mortality after which Sorcerers must lose one point of power of their choice at the beginning of each succeeding round. Victory – Let’s see who survives and how many treasures they won.
Cultists Sanity Vitality Magic Cultists Sanity Vitality Magic
New-Agers 5+ 4 2 Odinists 2 5+ 4
Kabbalists 5+ 2 4 Hermetics 4 2 5+
Thelemites 4 5+ 2 Gnostics 2 4 5+
A Sorcerer may acquire and use any number of Acolytes, but only one of each of the other Treasures.
Herewith eight display boards for playing it with a large group of participants wandering around a space.
Herewith a boardgame type adaptation devised by Max, a correspondent and play tester.
Notes on the Game System. As a simulation it obviously involves a fair bit of simplification and abstraction to model a lifetimes career in Sorcery in a game lasting about an hour. Nevertheless it does embody a number of real-world sorcery principles: -
Sorcerers should avoid risking their own powers of sanity, vitality, and magic when seeking treasures to augment them. Seek to throw the dice as little as possible by picking fights you cannot lose. Sorcerers should reconfigure their powers appropriately before mounting challenges, and sacrifice acolytes and treasures rather than their own powers in most circumstances, and build up sanity and vitality before building up magic.
For a more cooperative game allow for more frequent conferences and gifting or trading of acolytes and treasures. For a more competitive game allow sorcerers to attack each other at any turn instead of mounting a challenge. In this case, both throw dice and add them to their power points and treasures for each power. Defeat on any factor leads to the loss of an appropriate treasure, or an acolyte, to the winner, or the destruction of an appropriate power point, at the losers discretion.
Applying mortality before move 12 makes for a desperate and difficult game.
Does the Inominandum imply a Nameless Horror or a Nameless Wonder? Some might call it both or the power of Chaos.
Geometricating the Quanta.
Since Einstein we have understood gravity as spacetime curvature, rather than as a ‘force’.
Matter (and energy) tells spacetime how to curve; Spacetime tells matter how to move.
From this Geometric insight we can abstract an Algebra and put the numbers in and give ourselves considerable explanatory and predictive power.
At the heart of Einstein’s Special and General Relativity theories lay beautifully simple and elegant ideas of enormous effectiveness. Lightspeed simply represents the ratio of space to time in spacetime, and hence also the ratio between mass and energy, and gravity = spacetime curvature = acceleration.
To explain gravity and much of the large scale behaviour of the universe we need only the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time familiar to Newton, plus the idea that mass/energy equates to the curvature of those space/time dimensions.
(Hypersphere Cosmology just follows on from Relativity by considering the full effects of the spacetime curvatures of the universe in terms of Einstein’s original idea of a gravitationally closed static universe; before he caved in to peer pressure to think of it as expanding.)
Quantum physics recognizes three fundamental forces – the strong nuclear force, the weak force, and the electromagnetic force. To a rough approximation these three forces respectively account for how the bits in the nuclei of atoms stick together, how those bits in the nuclei can swap themselves around to create different types of atoms, and how the electrons orbiting atoms give rise to chemistry, magnetism and the emission and absorption of light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation.
Quantum physics also recognizes four classes of fundamental ‘matter’ particles, the leptons made up of neutrinos and electrons, and the hadrons made up of down type quarks and up type quarks, all of which can appear in particle or antiparticle form and in one of three generations although such antiparticles and the higher generations of particles do not naturally appear frequently in this part of the universe. Plus quantum physics also posits several classes of ‘energy’ exchanging particles such as the photons of light and electromagnetic radiation, weak force bosons that mainly mediate quark rearrangements, gluons and mesons to hold quarks together, and maybe Higgs bosons to explain some aspects of mass.
However quantum physics does not present a geometric view of particle physics that we can express algebraically and simply put the numbers in. Rather in its latest iteration of Quantum Field Theory, ‘particles’ or quanta now consist of excitations and waves in underlying omnipresent fields. Instead of particles described by numbers we have events described by operators. In some areas this gives usefully predictive results, in others it doesn’t.
Furthermore, in quantum physics, one or more of the following classical principles of Causality, Reality, or Locality, often seem not to apply. Quanta can seem to do things without a cause, quanta can seem to have existed in indefinite states between doing things, quantum behavior can seem to violate lightspeed by acting instantly, or perhaps retroactively.
Nevertheless, because three out of the four apparently fundamental ‘forces’ do submit to some sort of description in quantum physics terms, a lot of effort has gone into trying to ‘Quantize Gravity’ and describe it as a quantum field with the hypothetical graviton particle as the characteristic excitation of that field. This enterprise has so far failed so spectacularly that perhaps we should consider ‘Geometricating the Quanta’ instead.
Geometricating the Quanta would mean developing a description of quantum phenomena that we could visualize in terms of shapes or ‘things’ in motion; we cannot currently do this with the abstract mathematical relationships of quantum field theory.
Visualization of quantum phenomena becomes difficult without ascribing some sort of physical causality, reality, and locality to them, yet by relaxing the conventional constraints on just one of the dimensions of spacetime we can imagine how quanta can seemingly violate causality, reality, and locality to some extent, but without entirely abandoning these concepts.
The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics implies that whilst ‘in flight’ between interactions (or measurements), quanta appear to exist in indefinite wavelike states precisely because any quantum interaction involves a two-way quantum handshake forth and back across time and the final and the initial states do not become definite until the transaction becomes complete. Causality thus survives but in a weaker sense, cause and effect remain linked but in any order. A quantum has no definite and ‘real’ particle like state whilst in flight and between interactions, we can perhaps regard it as fluctuating at very high speed as the quantum handshake sorts itself out*. Locality only appears to fail because quantum waves can propagate backwards in time at ‘reverse lightspeed’ to modify the initial conditions.
*Esoteric and magical ideas can perhaps stimulate a breakthrough here. The Transactional Interpretation implies that quantum handshakes take place in some kind of ‘pseudo-time’ orthogonal to observed time and thus appear instantaneous to us. Two more dimensions of time which we could quantify by using imaginary numbers to designate their unobservability, would effectively add a plane of pseudo-space to our description of physical reality. This pseudo-space could accommodate quantum superposition and also provide sufficient degrees of freedom to model all the varieties and qualities of the quanta as rotations in a 3S 3T spacetime. We should not forget that any wave consists of a spacetime translation and a rotation involving at least one ignored or unobservable dimension, and all quanta have wave functions.
It remains a hell of a jigsaw puzzle to solve, but if it proves doable then it would confirm the ‘simple’ esoteric hypothesis that a realm of possibility, call it an astral plane if you like, lies somehow at right angles to our perceived material reality. It would also set some realistic constraints on what we could expect of it and eliminate the nonsense of the many-(particle like)-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.