offering 6 - cohering

Greetings brothers and sisters! I hope you’re all coping well enough with our present collective predicament. I’ve been reasonably productive myself, eating well, exercising, etc. I’d like to be meditating more often, listening to the body… been overly plugged to “the stream™” online. Another thing is that I’m, noticing a compulsion to contribute or organize locally, and still haven’t found a way to do so with my skill set/network.

This is the first offering with only 3 items, but they’re good ones. We’re doing 3 instead of 5 to gradually move to longer form writing. Writing short paragraphs about many things was useful to establish an aesthetic, but I’m now based enough to embark on producing full blogposts. I hope you’ll appreciate all the same. This week features a secular materialist framing for chaos magic, island Southeast Asia in Portuguese epic poetry, and a proposition to kill maths, enjoy! (check out past weekly offerings at the altar)

The Value of Subtle Communication: Toward a Secular Materialist Model of Chaos Magick

“Major practices associated with chaos magick do not require appeals to ideas outside the scientific mainstream”

I’ve talked about chaos magic back in offering 3 and offering 4, in the context of The Psychonaut Field Guide (which is a nice introduction if you’re uncertain of what exactly I’m referring to as “magic” here.)

This article expresses my argument exactly for why I think magic AS A PRACTICE is compatible with materialism and a scientific world-view. Specifically, the practices of ritual (especially sacrifices) and the crafting of  sigils .

Central to the argument is the idea of “subtle communication as a means of influence”. Subtle communication here is understood as “communication that bypasses the conscious”. I would rather speak of information flow and the way the unconscious processes information in general. I tend to use the (admittedly more cryptic) language of information theory and complex systems. But subtle communication does the job beautifully.

A psychonaut

“A sigil is a reminder of intent, but one that is oblique enough that it avoids triggering self-defeating behaviors…” I’ve never systematically experimented with sigils. My interest in magic so far has been purely theoretical and existential. However, the way I’ve conceptualized them to work is by producing patterns in the unconscious that eventually result in macroscopic changes that manifest in one’s worldview and approach to decision making, which later produce material results. I suspect this works by seizing the mechanism of  predictive processing , but more on that later.

“…rituals are costly signals to the self about the importance of achieving some goal. “The time and effort turned over to a ritual is itself a sacrifice.

Group rituals bind the group together to a common goal: they all made the same sacrifice and would like to avoid the cognitive dissonance of having wasted it, so they must achieve their goal to justify their sacrifice” You show your commitment to yourself, such that your unconscious will start taking the thing you’re committing to, seriously. If  The Elephant in the Brain  is right and the unconscious is running the show while the conscious copes and rationalizes over whatever happens, this is a way for the conscious loop to exert some influence in the opposite way.

Grant Morrison  coined the term hypersigil to refer to an extended work of art with magical meaning and willpower, created analogously to sigils. His  comic book  series  The Invisibles  was intended as such a hypersigil.

“With hypersigils, the mechanism of action is even easier. People model their worldview mostly on art. A hypersigil takes a naturalistic view of the world and adds elements to it that encourage emotional investment, and then slowly modifies it in ways that correspond to some intent. When the audience has adjusted expectations, it becomes more likely that they will manipulate the world to fit those expectations.” As with sigils, I see these working by changing how people are predisposed to act. Again, I think this has something to do with predictive processing. I also conceive that distributed processing happens where inconsequential local changes in individuals result in larger, emergent effects on the collective  egregore . I’m aware that my writing on these esoteric topics is usually, and maybe only fully comprehensible to people who have already gone through the motions themselves. As I progress I connect more dots and can better relate these insights to everyday life. Meanwhile, I’ll be glad to answer any comments and questions if you feel so inclined.

Indonesia in The Lusiads - Medieval Indonesia

Map of the Indies, from Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1570

Medieval Indonesia is the moniker of a History Ph.D. student that blogs about Indonesia around the 15th and 16th centuries. I know very little about the history of Indonesia, so it’s always a delight when I see MI’s posts and  tweets .

His latest post is about the place as described by one of my countrymen. Luís Vaz de Camões is the Portuguese king of poets. He authored the national epic: Os Lusíadas, about the people of Portugal and the age of Discoveries. The book, written over globe-spanning sea voyages, was amusingly held on to through a ship-wreck by its one-eyed author.

A portrait of Camões by the painter Fernão Gomes. c.1577

Descriptions of the islands of Southeast Asia are to be found in the last canto of the poem, and some of which are meant to tell us about these islands before European contact. “…the majority of our planet at this time was occupied by people with no decipherable written tradition, and few earlier documents survive from much of the rest for reasons of climate and geography — and also because such texts were often destroyed by European administrators and missionaries for  religious  and political reasons.”

Although Camões actually visited the region, his views were riddled with imperialist bias: “…even in the heights of epic poetry he can’t get far from the real preoccupation of the conquistadores: The luxurious produce of each place and implicitly the profits that could be turned from it…”

I thought I’d seize this chance to showcase where my heritage crosses the land of infinite tropical islands, sea, and spice. Bonus fascination points for the rich mix of Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim influences in a land native to none of them. See also Extra Credit’s awesome series on the Indonesian  kingdom of Majapahit .

Kill Math !

gif from Wikipedia’s page for the  sine function

“The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.”

This is a web page dedicated to better math by a user interface designer called Bret Victor. Specifically, a better interface with math. It contains a few interactive projects and essays about the topic. It’s by no means a definitive source, but it’s one of the more developed hubs I’ve seen talking about improving math as a thing. Many people hate math. They usually hate it because they don’t understand most of it. Usually, because the way they learned it was dry and cryptic, which is a reflection of how math is done overall.

I love math, I think it’s elegant, divine. However, I hate reading math notation.

“This mechanism of math evolved for a reason: it was the most efficient means of modeling quantitative systems given the constraints of pencil and paper. We are no longer constrained by pencil and paper. The symbolic shuffle should no longer be taken for granted as the fundamental mechanism for understanding quantity and change. Math needs a new interface.”

Math is intuitive. The way it’s written is needlessly obscure and takes me 10x as much time to understand concepts that would otherwise be natural.  Simulation  and play with parameters is a great alternative to understand formal concepts through experimentation.

Jeremy Howard from fast.ai shows code equivalents for any math notation in his book as pictured below. It’s not the best possible solution, but it’s much clearer already. Just the act of explicitly naming variables goes a long way.

Although this isn’t about math education explicitly, if math is used in a visual, more intuitive way, learning math will certainly be easier as a result.

Finally, a special shoutout to  Insights into Mathematics , a great mathematics youtube channel. It features and awesome series re-deriving math from intuitive principles. Also, trigonometry and calculus without recourse to limits and infinity.

Thanks for reading!