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Published: 06 September 2016

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Two young men both tried to move scraps of paper with their minds, one failed, he became a notable physicist and a bit of a philosopher and he became harshly dismissive of parapsychology, although he did develop a fondness for the utterly bizarre Everett-Wheeler (10⁵⁰⁰⁺) multiple universe hypothesis. The other one felt an unexpected breeze suddenly move his scrap of paper, ‘that will do’ he decided, he became a notable wizard and a bit of a philosopher but he became too sceptical to become an acceptable scientist. Oddly they shared a surname.

Emergent phenomena arise when systems exhibit properties and behaviours that their component parts do not seem to exhibit on their own. ‘Weakly Emergent’ phenomena like the bulk behaviour of many solids do seem in principle reducible to the properties of the atoms which compose them.

However ‘Strongly Emergent’ phenomena like living organisms, the weather, and economic behaviour do not seem similarly reducible, epistemologically or ontologically, to the behaviour of their component parts at lower levels. Something about the complexity of these systems allows them to exhibit properties that do not seem to come from anywhere except from the very complexity of their structures.

Even if we eventually discover a ‘theory of everything’ consisting of a small handful of equations which describe all the fundamental processes of the universe, the existence of grasshoppers or the Mona-Lisa would probably not appear as inevitable consequence of them.

At the time of writing we do have  a Core Theory, see picture above, most of the symbols in it act as shorthand for rather more complicated entire equations. It can tell us precisely what a wave/particle will probably do under certain circumstances. However it offers no clue as to which way time will flow, the reasons for the vales of fundamental constants, or much of a clue as to what forms of complexity could emerge from it, rather like the hypothesis of causality it has far better explanatory power when used backwards. Plus it only works in weak gravity situations and the Higgs part of it looks a bit dodgy. The supreme achievement of the Core Theory lies in its revelation of the enormity of what we didn’t even realise we don’t know, it has massively expanded our awareness of our ignorance.

According to Science, consciousness arises as an emergent phenomenon from matter. As biological complexity and the processing power of nervous systems becomes selected for, then the process of ‘consciousness’ gradually develops. Even if we cannot precisely specify what we mean by ‘consciousness’ we can appreciate some kind of a quantitative and probably a qualitative difference between the behaviour of ourselves and our fellows and say, rocks for example. Dogs and many other animals quite plainly exhibit something of what we recognise as consciousness as well.

A phenomenon such as consciousness plainly resists a complete reduction to the functions of the component parts of the systems which give rise to it, such as the nerve cells, the chemistry of those cells, and the particle physics underlying the chemistry. Rather the incredibly complicated arrangement of matter in a brain supports behaviour which does not seem present in its component parts.

Or does it? The philosophy of Panpsychism attempts to explain the existence of consciousness by describing it as a fundamental attribute of all matter. Thus even individual subatomic particles must have it to some degree. Well individual particles do exhibit indeterminate and thus unpredictable behaviour and they seem capable of simple communication with each other by quantum entanglement, and emergent properties arise all the way up the scale, the properties of water for example do not seem entirely defined by those of its constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms, but they at least have the freedom to exhibit such behaviour.

The tired debate about Free Will versus Determinism usually becomes bogged down by the assumptions that matter can only behave deterministically or randomly, neither of which satisfies any criterion of free will, and so free will must either arise from something immaterial or ‘spiritual’, or prove illusory. However if consciousness arises as an emergent property of matter, then so can free will. Beyond a certain level of complexity an organism (and perhaps even a machine) will start to self-generate behaviour that does not always causally depend on its component parts, or on its inputs, or on pure randomness either.

According to many Religions, matter arises as an emergent phenomenon from consciousness. Thus some immaterial but conscious deity or other simply wishes or imagines the material universe into manifestation. Just how such deities achieved consciousness in the first place they do not say. However the material universe then seems to exhibit emergent properties and to manifest phenomena not apparently intended by deities, creating multiple failures of omnipotence and omniscience, and awkward questions about theodicy (deities permitting bad stuff).

Some religions (like many of those of the classical civilisations) had the fallible gods co-evolve with matter from a more primeval chaotic state and then muck around with it or fight over it for a while before humans appeared or got created.

The superiority of ‘mind’ over matter really seems to have taken metaphysical hold with the advent of Platonism and Neo-Platonism. The late classical thinkers became so obsessed with the very idea of ideas that they came to regard them as more fundamental than the phenomena they related to. From this point on, the interface of late classical thinking and Hebraic monotheism led to the doctrines of Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and Kabala, in which ‘The Prime Consciousness’ or something of that ilk, gives rise to a series of descending thoughts and emanations which eventually result in this miserable flawed material world. Such doctrines have formed a strong thread in religion and mysticism ever since.

Today the old Pagan view appears somewhat more realistic than the top-down Monotheist view. Matter plainly tends to evolve complexity and to manifest emergent properties, and these emergent properties act rather like gods, controlling the very substances from which they emerged, to create waves and turbulence in water, to make forests out of dirt, water, air, and sunlight, and to make animals and self-aware creatures out of bits chewed off plants and/or bits chewed off other animals.

Some theorists suspect that once an emergent behaviour has developed it may set some sort of a pattern for similar behaviour to emerge in similar systems. Here we enter controversial and occult but potentially testable territory populated with ideas about Morphic Fields and the possible weak quantum entanglement of all similar phenomena and/or the ontological rather than the epistemological reality of wave-functions as in the PBR theorem.

In an odd way such ideas about Morphic Fields and the non-local effects of information begin to resemble the old Neo-Platonic ideas about discarnate Ideals or ‘Forms’, but with a crucial difference: - In the modern information theory, matter and information co-evolve, information requires embodiment, it requires matter to process it, to emit it, to receive it, and to decode it.

This implies both limitations and extensions to our ideas about the esoteric possibilities of information. Completely discarnate sentient ‘Spirits’ of deities, or of the deceased, or of events which have ceased to exist seem unlikely within the new paradigm. On the other hand, information about such things can persist in living minds (and evolve there) and possibly have effects beyond them if information can have the sort of non-local effects suggested by quantum and morphic field theories.

Non-locality in space either effectively means ‘instantaneously’ regardless of distance and lightspeed, or it means the effective cancellation of distance by the exchange of information backwards in time.

Non-locality in time does seem to occur in some quantum experiments; the present can seemingly modify the past and seemingly modify the future without actually ‘touching’ it in the classical sense. Of course the annals of the magical and the occult lie littered with such claims, most of them dubious and/or explained in terms of an antique ‘spirit’ hypothesis.

Nevertheless temporal non-locality leads to the opening of a very large can of worms which could include retroactive enchantment and divination of the future on a probabilistic basis, and maybe ‘talking’ not with the dead but maybe with the previously alive. Plus the correction to the gravity part of the Core Theory for high gravity as suggested by Hypersphere Cosmology leads to the intriguing speculation that a positively curved vorticitating universe finite and unbounded in both space and time ‘always’ has consciousness in it.

If something like a Core Theory Equation does govern the basic mechanics of the universe then the magic lies in the Emergence of improbable events yet it will always give the appearance of having happened naturally, if somewhat improbably. That will do.

Yes, I have just read this https://www.amazon.com/Big-Picture-Origins-Meaning-Universe/dp/0525954821

It contains much to stimulate and to argue with.

Finally, let us hope that Comrade Jeremy Corbyn wins the UK Labour party leadership resoundingly. He would make a splendid leader of the opposition, a proper democratic government needs a lunatic opposition from which it can borrow the very occasional sensible idea.

And, post-finally, Grammar Schools, I had the good fortune to go to one from an upper working class home, later I taught in one and in quite a number of secondary modern schools during 5 years at the chalkface. If you want a comprehensive school to have mixed sexes and mixed ability and a wide range of academic and vocational subjects then it has to become pretty large. The  largeness usually screws it up, the staff don't know each other personally, the staff don't know the pupils personally, instead of an educational community you get a dysfunctional educational factory. Inevitably the kids get heavily streamed anyway within the school. Because large schools don't work very well we should concentrate on making them smaller, to allow this they would need to become more selective. To allow for social mobility we should have much more mobility between schools that have specialisms but a smaller size. I never worked in a school with more than 4-form entry that didn't seem like a mediocre shambles blighted by disruptive behaviour.

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Published: 26 July 2016

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Lughnasadh

 In this season of Harvest Festival a number of items seem to have come to fruition.

Tarot. I recently received a copy of the Chaos Magic Tarot direct from the printers but with no indication of who authorised its dispatch to me (but thanks anyway).

http://www.chaosmagickgroup.com/

If a camel consists of a horse designed by a committee then what do you call a tarot designed by 47 artists? Well it looks CHAOTIC. Some may find it creatively chaotic; others may find it a rather random entropic mess. I remain doubtful about it. The coordinators of the project have stuck to the traditional 4 suites and court cards and 22 trumps and the continuing influence of antique and discredited ideas of the classical elements, astrology, and kabala remains vaguely apparent. Well I suppose occultists can continue to use it for the same old attempts at tarot reading without seriously challenging any paradigms. Overall it looks rather like someone bought 78 different tarot packs and selected one card from each, a lot of bother for no real improvement in principle, plus it doesn’t seem to have the usual accompanying booklet to broaden the users’ appreciation of the images with written exegeses, and some of them seem to have arisen from minimal thought and effort.

I feel a little disappointed that a bunch of self-professed modern Chaoists has fallen back on the old formulaic structure rather than boldly creating something new and imaginative.

Just how much of a hand the Ineffectualists Of Transgression XI⁰ had in this remains unclear, nobody seems to have claimed responsibility.

Graphic images on moveable cards can certainly prove useful for a lot of esoteric purposes beyond sortilege for divination, they can additionally function particularly well as an aid to visualising forms for invocation and evocation, and for this reason Matt Kaybryn and I decided to break with the old tarot structure and do something completely different with EPOCH.

http://www.esotericon.org/

Brexit. The sky has not fallen in since we voted for Brexit, cocked a snook at the Synarchy of big-business and the political class, and demanded back the right to address the challenges of globalisation on our own terms. The export side of my little enterprise has achieved a magnificent harvest over the last weeks as a result of the currency correction.

Frequency. Hypersphere Cosmology on this site has clocked up nearly 1/3 of a million reads with some sign of argumentation or agreement but no sign of a refutation in sight.   For this month’s Ouranian meditations on Arcanorium College I took a fresh look at Cosmological Redshift from the ‘other side’, and it provided an interesting clarification. Redshift of course refers to the increases of wavelength that we can readily observe with spectroscopes and the simplicity of that observation has led to the fundamental misconception underlying standard cosmological models; that the expansion of the underlying spacetime has led to the observed increases. If we had chosen to focus on the accompanying decrease of cosmological frequency shift instead we might have ended up with a very different explanation. Frequency decreases in proportion to cosmological distance, implying a deceleration and this appears quite clearly if we rearrange the Redshift equation to show the Frequency Shift instead, we get the more intuitively obvious: -    

f_o/f_e = c – (dA)^1/2/c

Where f_o = Observed frequency, f_e = Expected frequency, d = Astronomical distance, A = Acceleration due to the small positive curvature of the universe, as appears in the residual Anderson deceleration.

Sculpture. As I have already fashioned a ‘bronze’ of Lugh, this year’s summer sculpture consists of a figurine of The Morrigan. (I need the long hours of natural daylight to work on small fiddly constructions in dark materials).

The Morrigan represents the Celtic Ishtar, goddess of love and war, sex and death, so in the absence of authentic historical Celtic iconography I’ve borrowed a bit from Babylonian and Greek imagery and given her a Raven’s headdress and mask, an instrument of war, and a suggestive fruit in the form of a peach (debate rages over whether the ‘golden apple’ of Eris actually implied an orange or an apple, or another fruit). Inside her milliput form she has skeletal reinforcements of steel and copper wire for war and love, and some sheet aluminium (the Ouranian metal of magic, flight, and extreme amphoteric chemical reactivity) in her headdress. I might arrange a limited edition in bronze if anyone has an interest, they will come out at around a couple of grand each, admittedly rather more than the JV tea towel, but they will last for millennia. 

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Published: 28 June 2016

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On what we will remember as Independence Day I voted very early, cast my final spells, and later adjourned to my cabin in cyberpurdah in Wales for a long weekend, hence my lack of early response to the amazing result.

So much of what I heard on the radio sounded like hysteria, sour grapes, denial, or triumphalism, none of it helpful. Politicians and financial markets all stand guilty of over-reaction, but this will pass.

Enough of the British People came forward and simply put Democracy itself before their short term economic interests.

And this despite the frenzied predictions of Project Fear and hollow threats from the EU.

Britain taught the world Democracy, Britain had the first revolution, it put a king’s ‘divine right’ to the axe and invested sovereignty not in a sovereign but in a Parliamentary Democracy, and as a result it has never fallen under Dictatorship.

Thus it seems fitting that Britain should have struck the first serious blow against Synarchy, the continental European delusion that we should hand over government to a largely unelected self-selected clique of people who think they know best.

To the younger people of Britain the Remain campaign made a strong pitch to conflate European culture with European politics. This seemed basically dishonest, whilst European cultures contain much to delight us all, European politics has become disfigured with a Synarchist agenda that plainly doesn’t work and has The Totalitarianism of the Centre as its final federal objective.

Hopefully the EU will now start to disintegrate and become replaced by a limited number of sensible agreements between sovereign democratic nations, each pursuing their own unique contribution to European culture(s), rather than striving for some ghastly vision of Synarchist Monoculture.

To the Scots the SNP made the basically dishonest pitch of ‘The Auld Alliance’ once again, siding with continental European power against the English & Welsh merely to increase its regional bargaining power. This didn’t work in the Scottish referendum, most Scots realised that divorcing from the UK and getting fully into bed with the EU and adopting the euro didn’t actually look like a very attractive proposition at all.

Britain now needs to show Europe what a free democratic nation can do.

So Keep Calm and Carry On.

The only thing worse than Democracy is every other system ever tried – Winston Churchill.  

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Published: 15 June 2016

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EU Referendum, 1 week to Independence Day!

A vote to ‘remain’ means giving up most of the power of our hard-won democratic votes forever, for after that, voting would become basically pointless.

Britain sends just one appointed representative out of 28 to the almighty European Commission which already decides about half of our laws and will soon decide on most of the rest. Voting for the sham ‘European Parliament’ has no effect whatsoever, as it has no actual power.

So a vote to remain means permanently devaluing all our votes to just one twenty-eighth of their current value.

If we remain in we basically surrender our country to Brussels and Germany and we will not succeed if we press for reform, they have already made that abundantly clear.

The economic arguments cut both ways, nobody really knows, but plainly Britain can survive and prosper independently.

The EU has anyway proved a terrible economic screw up for most of its members, with low growth and high unemployment driving hundreds of thousands to our shores. Britain thankfully never joined the euro.

Vote for Independence on June 23^rd.

Vote Leave.