The Magic/Science Boundary - Or Lack Thereof

So this is something that comes up repeatedly in my ramblings so again, for regular readers, sorry about beating the dead horse but this is important enough to have it's own blog where I can really let loose, without having to make brief mention of it to support another point. It's something that's come up a lot lately in different places, I think Joe Rogan mentioned recently with Kevin Smith the old quote about advanced enough technology seeming like magic, and Styxhexenhammer also covered the topic recently in a video that I shared. As a result it's been swimming around my consciousness and I've been wanting to collect my thoughts on it into something coherent, so you fine people are going to be subject to that attempt - successful or not. There's obviously a hell of a lot of quantum woo-woo and bullshit out there that puts people off even broaching the subject, mostly because of the absolute surety that people with absolutely no scientific background speak on these things - so from the off, let me clarify, I'm absoluuutely not a goddamn scientist. I'm a very tired, quite broke witch working full time in a minimum wage job and studying in the rest of my full time. Work that one out. Anyway disclaimer aside, I'm just going to propose some theories and let you sort out what you think of it and maybe get back to me with some counter arguments.

I've said it plenty of times that magic is just science we don't understand yet, and I stand by it, but not necessarily from the point of view that anything we could see as being magic is just advanced tech of some kind - like Styx, I do believe in literal magic in the ethereal sense, and in gods, spirits, spells and rituals and all the rest of it. Instead of it being advanced tech, it's more like advanced understanding - which can be discovered or reached by heavy-duty trance work, psychadelic use, natural talent, or by circumstances such as being contacted or harassed by a powerful person or entity, i.e. a curse or haunting. I always like to couch my security in this belief comfortably in the knowledge of how absolutely little we actually know about things like time, space, gravity, dreams, energy, emotions, hallucinations, personality, death, the placebo effect. For a lot of skeptics the world seems to be a hell of a lot more quantifiable and measured than it actually is - given the nature of fractal mathematics, even the size of your garden is more or less a best guess really. 

It's absolutely imperative in my opinion that people give up on this egocentric idea that they have absolutely any idea of what is going on at any moment, because we absolutely don't. We don't know what the superstructure of the universe is, we're not even sure of the microstructure yet - hence the gigantic fucking machine under Switzerland that's smashing stuff together fairly regularly. We're getting closer, but just because we know what some stuff IS, doesn't mean we know what it MEANS - plus then you have to deal with the entire can of worms opened up by the fact that stuff can both exist and not exist at the same time, and that measuring stuff changes that stuff. Now here's where I'm about to step right outside of my area of expertise and swerve hell-for-leather right out of my lane to link up some shit that may or may not make sense, so bear with me. 

I always feel like Giorgio Tsoukalos when it comes to this part, but instead of "aliens" it's "multiverse". The multiverse theory is absolutely the only one that feels intuitively correct to me. I've seen a bit of string theory, and what's the one about the filaments that hit off each other sometimes? Can't remember, but given the fractal nature of the observable part of the universe we currently inhabit, wouldn't it just make sense that that fractal keeps going out and out, and that other, concurrent universes are doing the exact same thing, right next to us, just separated by a dimension we don't really grasp? Anyway I don't have to convince anyone of the multiverse here, that's the job of the scientists - my job is to wade out into that unknown science and bring you back some magic. I'm not the first one to do so by any stretch of the imagination - besides psychonauts and the like, there's always been the theory of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and while that familiar internet critter may seem ridiculous, by the very implications of an infinite multiverse, yeah, he's out there, in Gods know what form. I actually see him somewhat as the unofficial God of the Internet, seeing as how the internet sort of flies and probably resembles spaghetti if you could visualise it, but however, I'm getting off topic.

If you can imagine the FSM, then it's not really that much of a stretch to bring it back home to the gods, goddesses and other entities that have been conceptually floating around earth for literally thousands of years. Thor, Freya, Zeus, Athena, Aine, Brigid, Isis, Seth - these names were spoken by one or another of most of our ancestors at one point, not to mention the deeper, darker, more obscure entities. Wouldn't it somewhat make sense that in an infinite multiverse, one or another of these universes would spawn God-beings, with all of their omniscience and omnipresence? And would it not be relatively easy for those beings to interact with our planet and the people on it, for various reasons? Sometimes it could be fascination with the tiny meat beings, a scientist's approach. Sometimes it could be a bit like a cock fight. Probably depends on the gods, but I don't think that it's really all that outlandish of a proposition.

Take it out a bit further. In all of the infinite possible realities, there are infinitely possible ones where the laws of physics would absolutely not support meat-beings, much less conscious, thinking ones capable of really abstract thought and reasoning. Then we get to a thing where it's like, why did we end up in this one? What are we? What the hell is abstract thought and reasoning? Maybe there are some philosophy majors out there that can help me out with some of this, but I doubt it. Were we created on purpose or spawned as an inevitable result of an infinite system? These are things we probably won't ever be able to explore using any kind of conventional science that is capable of reducing something down into a definite "is" and a definite "isn't", because once you go out that far the definition starts to fade, and the multitude of possibilities overlap so much that at any one time it's none of them and all of them, and it's all a bit like the very edges of a dream. Once you get out into that conceptual soup, that's where the really woo-woo stuff begins to kick in. It's the ether, the formless mass of spirit, the mind of god, whatever. It's the place where the gods live, and work, and wage their endless wars - or don't. It's bloody everything, man. 

So hard not to sound like an absolute fruitcake when I talk about this shit but I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only person to be able to grip onto the concept - I'm not the only person who says it, and I reached these conclusions entirely on intuition alone, I have never read a single proper occult book from cover to cover or listened to any Terrence McKenna (I hate his voice), and yet when I meet many other people who believe in this stuff and don't seem to be completely full of shit we have startlingly similar results. All those old phrases like "we're all just consciousness experiencing itself" - that comes up very, very consistently across cultures, espoused by some very bloody intelligent people - usually after consuming copious amounts of psychedelics but absolutely not always. That angle often discredits the whole argument for people who haven't tried them. "You're just high", or whatever - but when thousands of high people all reach the same conclusions you've got to start going, wait a goddamn minute here, there might be something to this, or in my opinion you're just literally being intellectually dishonest.

Anyway, bring it on - I want all your best arguments. For any God-botherers out there, I respect you, but leaving snarky comments and never replying to the replies is pretty cowardly, just saying. I have massive respect for Christ-like people, but not for God-botherers, so you know. You can still comment, like, it only benefits me, but really you're a chicken if you start something you can't finish and then run away. 

For anyone interested in wrestling further with these and other concepts, my own independent forum/discord combination known by the lofty title of "Court of the Ibis" is a reasonably amicable space for practitioners of all paths, nationalities and politics to get together, compare notes, show off our work, work on projects, have deep meaningful conversations and also generally shoot the shit - possibly over a text-based game of DnD. We recently added a murderbunny to our party, my elf character is pretty conflicted about this. We genuinely have a great, but tiny, community going on over there, we've got normies, lefties, libertarians, trump supporters and Irish people, it's fairly worth a gander if this kind of thing is in any way up your alley, so do come and check us out - even if it's to argue, although we do have a "shun the nonbelievers" policy, it's very loosely enforced.

https://courtoftheibis.com