offering 3 - new normal

I hope everyone’s settled into their new lives as apartment dwellers. Personally, my lifestyle hasn’t suffered great changes. I’m enjoying getting flashbacks from highschool times of frolicking aimlessly in the tide pools of the early 2010’s web. Now I’m back to present you with the finest pearls I found. (also check out my past weekly offerings)

Chaos Magic

• I haven’t delved very deep into the topic, but I’ve seen some good indicators that I’ll want to. It just seems connected to so many things I’ve been interested in: information systems, complex networks, psychonauts like Terrence McKenna and Alan Moore, works like The Sandman and The Invisibles, lovecraftian egregores, Jung and the collective unconscious, comparative religion, memetics, etc. Two more reasons why I’m drawn to this:
• First, the word chaos points to the intractable and the yet-unmapped, which coincide with where I think the usually referred as “supernatural” lies.
• Second, its meta-belief that “belief is a tool for achieving effects”. It seems like symbols and practices from many mystical traditions are seen as manifestations of the same archetypes and used interchangeably. However, it feels quite postmodern (in the hurr nothing means anything sense) and I question from the outside how benign that bit is.
• This focus on instrumental beliefs brings to mind something I read in The Elephant in the brain on how having disparate conscious and unconscious beliefs can be adaptive because your body language will convey a set of beliefs, while your underlying evolutionary aims (held unconsciously) are something else.
• I like how it’s agnostic towards supernatural models of the world, which I reject outright. Practitioners explain the mechanics of chaos magic with different models. A rough way in which I see it (again, as an outsider) is something like: You use your energy or attention and symbols to condition your unconscious - which can be thought of as a mass of autonomous spirit helpers (in shamanic language) - to work towards your conscious goals.
• Recently, (according to almighty wikipedia) it seems practitioners have found that it is not strictly indifferent which symbols and traditions one uses and have started delving into old lineage traditions, which pushes back some of the postmodern notions initially associated with the discipline and makes sense because the oldest traditions are lindy and their symbolism has been honed by time.
• Finally, I want to bookmark some potential connections with metarationality and Kegan level 5 in the sense of holding different models of the world at different times.

Ithalqua, the wind walker ,

• Last week I shared this blog Exploring Egregores that wrote about ideas as eldritch lovecraftian gods - which I hadn’t fully read - but now that I have, this is the one that stuck with me the most.
• Ithalqua is visually associated with the Wendigo, it is also called the kidnapper, and wanders the icy polar wastes. Like Elsa in Frozen, it is self-reliant, and stands for one’s turning away from society to delve into one’s projects or self.
• The faustian bargain here is that you become incomprehensible to others and detached from human ties. To me, the icy wastes it dwells in are the effort others must go through to reach you in your castle of jargon and introspection after doing your own thing for a while.
• I feel I’ve been somewhat frost-bound, headed to this state of mind and it’s one of the reasons I’m trying so hard to work with my garage door open. That way I’m leaving a trail of breadcrumbs as I leave civilization for concept space and introspection.

Information Geometry  - thinking spatially about the fuzzy

• A friend brought this field of math to my attention while co-introspecting a bit. I consider this as much part of my AI research as of my arcane studies - I haven’t seriously studied it though, so it’s just a bookmark.
• The link shared is from Cosma Shalizi’s blog Bactra (ancient hellenic Tajikistan/Uzbekistan) and he describes the field as the application of differential geometry to probability distributions, and so to statistical models.
• From what I gather, Information Geometry studies manifolds where points are distributions. Put in a very libertine way: It’s differential geometry where KL-divergence (or relative entropy) works as a metric (but not really because it’s asymmetric) and Fisher information (2nd derivative of the likelihood function, and the inverse of the covariance matrix) works as curvature. (If I’m not egregiously mistaken) This allows people to prove theorems about statistical models by conceptualizing them as well-behaved geometrical objects and then using geometrical tools on them. John Baez has a  nice series of posts  for anyone seeking more technical insight.
• This is relevant to me because of the way I visualize the information flows of research, discovery, and creativity in my head.

Memoirs of Babur by Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur

• SPEAKING OF BACTRIA (best segway I could ask for) This the 500 year-old journal of Babur, the founder of the Mughal empire and descendant of Timmur and Genghis Khan. He was born in the Fergana valley in modern Uzbekistan. A rags-to-riches true story told candidly in the first person. I have a total crush for Silk Road/Central Asian aesthetics because of the eclectic mix of people, cultures, and faiths. Plus this ties in well with chaos magic’s arc of different ontologies coexisting.
• Caspian Report is also just an awesome geopolitics channel that I watch all the time.

真っ黒 - tricot

• WHAT A RIP jagged math rock with a varnish layer of pop production. Anime-opening verses, intricate weavings of rhythms and voice as a first-class citizen. That album intro is particularly delicious.

Thanks for reading!