Philosophy & Magical Thinking

The philosopher R. G Collingwood took magic seriously as something that was inappropriately judged in scientific terms. It was best judged alongside art as a craft with ends in view that involved the arousing of emotion. He was deriving his notion of magic from the anthropology of his day but what he was trying to say in the round was that magical thinking and practice were not 'primitive'. It was just another way of seeing the world and engaging with it that was perfectly functional within its own cultural frame of reference. It is on emotion that he is most interesting:

" ... although magic arouses emotion, it does this in quite another way than amusement [which Collingwood associates with Art]. Emotions aroused by magical acts are not discharged by those acts. It is important for the practical life of the people concerned that this should not happen; and magical practices are magical precisely because they have been so designed that it shall not happen. The contrary is what happens: these emotions are focused and crystallized, consolidated into effective agents in practical life. The process is the exact opposite of a catharsis. There the emotion is discharged so that it shall not interfere with practical life; here it is canalized and directed upon practical life." [R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, Oxford, 1938, p.67]

This is interesting because we see this contrast all the time in observing people in their relations with significant others. We also note what happens when emotion is stunted and people are trapped in an addiction to emotional states (the weekly marital argument, the addiction to the state of love, anger at the same thing every time without moving forward).

High emotions seem best directed as either catharsis (an explosion that rewires the brain or moves a person on from one state to another) or channeled, within a context often ritualised in all but obvious name, in order to let the emotion change the world in which the person lives by permitting the conditions for action or change.

One model changes the person (or forces behavioural change on the target of the emotion which may, of course, be mere bullying) and the other transforms the social and cultural, possibly material (but the jury is out on that one) world in which the person has to survive. Both are evolutionarily honed on organism survival. The explosion of emotion forces change in the world in others or in oneself while the sublimation or channeling of emotions manipulates others or one's sub-conscious into desired outcomes.

From this perspective, magic (the channeling process) is as efficacious in its way as doing art, experiencing art or undertaking psychotherapy or religious practice and more effective than science in some contexts (changing the social and cultural conditions we live in) while less effective than science in others (changing the material conditions in which we live).

Science-based politics always fails because magic-based politics will always beat it in an open struggle for hearts and minds as much as magic-based construction will see buildings fall and planes drop out of the sky. Magic will certainly not allow a man to fly despite the claims of yogis and certainly not with the efficiency of modern technologists but it will allow him to cope with, manage or exploit the social and cultural changes created by a world in which people can fly by other means.

Collingwood is not advocating that magic is real insofar as some claim that it can change material reality - there is still no evidence for this and unlikely to be any evidence at any time soon. Magic is only real insofar as it affects psychological reality which is, in fact, the reality that most accords with the really lived lives of most people in the world. Most people use technology and take it for granted but few understand it. It may as well be magical for all the actual comprehension of the science behind it.

At the outer reaches of physics and cosmology, science goes so far beyond perceived reality that its reality looks a lot more magical (although ultimately based on logic, mathematics and observational experiments) than magic does to the mind who has not simply decided to 'believe' in science (a most reasonable belief but still, for most people, a matter of faith rather than knowledge).

Magical thinking is anti-thinking from the inside outwards, constructing reality from the self, the consciousness that is embedded in material reality and is capable of flying shaman-like at any time it wishes. This is opposed to scientific thinking which is reasoning of the outwards world undertaken inwardly.

Eventually scientific thinking ends up following its own logic into mysteries that bend reality and magical thinking ends up following its own logic into realities that bend if not materiality, then society and its workings on materiality.

Science gives us the tools but magic enables us to use the tools by triggering our emotional commitment to a purpose for which the tools have a use. The magical process is an operation on 'morale' - one's own and that of others as manipulation. It is why propaganda, PR and the totalitarian cultural forms of late capitalism are 'magical'.

It is also why magical operations can construct true selves (despite the post-modern nonsense that there are no selves because rational thinking says there are no selves) that flourish regardless of social norms, far more effectively that psychotherapy's attempt to adapt the individual to society and creating a working norm that is healthy within that framework.

The shaman is often indistinguishable from the modern psychopath but his context makes him different. Our 'normal' magical rituals often have a social context that removes their efficacy because the total system disrespects the mobilising power of emotion except as manipulation from above (which has incidentally 'conceptualised' and commercialised art, its sibling, out of existence).

When the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia can buy Da Vinci's 'Salvator Mundi' for $450m simply to establish his modernising credentials and shock his culture into compliance with a new ideology, then art is effectively dead and magical thinking rules.

Magical operations are all around us, operating every day in our lives. The late Marxist attempt to theorise rationally about these operations in nonsense terms such as 'objectification' and 'commodification' utterly misses the point that rational, political manipulation of emotional content must always result in a logical dark magic to maintain emotional balance. Populism's rise was inherent in the manipulations of late liberal capitalism and predictable.

Earlier Marxists would not have used this language but they would have understood the point better ... the decadence of Marxism as it got captured by the middle classes is one of the tragedies of our time. Early Marxists would have seen each magical operation in society as a thesis calling forth by its very nature its own antithesis. Successful magical operations incorporate their own antithesis into their workings to that synthesis is part of what the operation is intended to effect.

A true magician would have understood Newton's "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction" to be as applicable to his world as that of the physicist - a lesson not understood by the dark master magician Adolf Hitler and certainly not understood by contemporary pseudo-scientific materialists who take no account of a huge swathe of matter that is ignored because it cannot yet be weighed - the magical minds of men and women.

The human mind is essentially magical. Rationalist liberals hate this and want our minds to be scientific but, if they were, we would not then be human. Just as the fact of a rough 15% of the population (like me) being completely irreligious does not remove the fact of the species being, on balance, religious in its spiritual or communitarian senses (horrified as I am by what this means) so only a minority of humans are purely rational actors and there is no earthly reason why they should expect to rule over others who think in different and equally efficacious ways.

Indeed, just as the fanatically religious and the atheist, the asexual and the polyamorous, have more adjustment problems with social reality than the general majority of humanity, so the radical rationalism of futurist technologists and the lifestyle magicians are faced with the same near-outsider status. Fortunately, most people are sufficiently rational to have faith in science and sufficiently magical to run their own lives effectively in the world the scientists have made.

Anyone who wants to understand themselves and the world and to know how to manipulate the reality created by the rationalists has to learn to become a magician. This does not mean dressing up in a dark cloak and leaping naked on the Seal of Solomon shouting the names of 10,000 demons. That's just fun but probably a bit of a waste of time magically speaking.

It simply means isolating the will from the world and applying it to what you want rather than what other people have told you that you must want and then finding the techniques that tap into the enabling (usually emotional) sub-conscious, stripping away layers of social patterning in order to find out what is under there, how it can relate most effectively to 'reality' and then bending self and reality through will to create a new functional reality within oneself or as a re-patterning one's relationship with others.

The supernatural does not need to exist to make magic work but its pretend existence itself can become a tool or weapon in the process of self and social construction. But bear in mind that you are always up against 6 billion or so other natural magicians, all creating their own reality out of the material to hand. Some of those will be your enemy (snowflakes, religious fundamentalists and radical feminists are mine) because their reality must place constraints on yours.

In practice, all magical thinking is struggle for social and personal survival in which the dangers are obvious - you lose or, worse, you win, and don't stop there but try to go beyond survival to domination. And that is where every action having its own reaction comes in. The Wiccans have it right with 'Do What Thou Wilt an Harm No One' since 'bad magic' (as one A. Hitler found it) will come back to bite you because of the eventual opposition it creates. To live long and prosper, there is only ever 'white magic' ...

On the Supernatural

I want to dispute the value of the term 'supernatural' - the perceived non-natural that is not 'at hand', immediately and potentially useful or easily explicable, and not that material universe that is based on what we can reasonably know or trust to be so from those who do claim to know on the basis of science. The term, which seems not to have been used before the 1520s, has shunted a number of categories into one basket - a problem of accounting for aspects of the world if you insist on creating a meaning outside of it, some things that happen to people for which there is no immediate accounting and the various imaginative creations that have been projected onto the world or exist in that liminal zone where imagination creates functionally useful assets in society for profit, pleasure or social control.

The creation of the idea of the 'supernatural' has separated out a whole set of mind events from other mind events but also other events in the world from the world and packaged them as something 'other' yet culturally identifiable. It is part of the process by which we have failed to critique religion, human perceptual frailties and the imaginative economy alike but also failed to appreciate the complexity of humanity and so the value to it of absurd beliefs and sometimes radical imaginative creativity. Worst of all, the concept includes real events for which there is no current explanation and associates them negatively with absurd belief and the products of human imagination without anything other than a reliance on an equally dubious radical rationalism. It then puts all these in one box where everything in it can be safely dismissed as 'non-scientific', constructions of the human mind, of the hysterical or weak-minded in some quarters and so of little interest or value.

Far better, surely, to separate the three categories of the supernatural - faith, psi and creativity - and reintegrate them back into one world view that is fully 'natural' (that is, ultimately part of the same universe) and so part of the human condition. In other words, treat them critically but with some respect as all human-related. It may complicate matters to do so but would it not offer us the chance to be more true to human reality and help us walk away from attempts to manage what has been called supernatural through denial and alienatory strategies. We should adopt a radical naturalism that includes these phenomena. By restoring the 'supernatural' fully to the natural, bringing it back down to earth so to speak, the opportunity is created not only for a more open analysis of the function of religion, experience and creativity but this change also enables a more profound critique of the thinking systems that try to take the supernatural and create a system out of it that then seeks to command nature without cause or justice.

We think here of non-dualist philosophies and pan-psychism in particular, neither of which explain the world better than a naturalist materialism that takes into account the material basis of the human mind's possible abilities, not only to create a world for itself as observer but also to respond (possibly) to forces that, while mysterious in effects, still have a material basis even if we do not yet have the tools to understand how they operate. What for example may a demon be? A real entity created by God and now rejected? A psychological projection of inner turmoil? An imaginative creation functionally useful in controlling an ignorant person? Or a material external effect on vulnerable minds? At least one reputable psychiatrist seems to think there are really existing evil spirits out there and is about to release a book on it, already touted by the Washington Post.

Personally I tend to the second and third in this particular case but things get more complicated when we speak of ESP (extra-sensory perception) and PK (psychokinesis). These are experiences that sometimes have explanations that show fraud or delusion or coincidence effects but sometimes show patterns in some people at some times that are quite simply not so easily explicable. The demonic possession outlined by Gallagher might easily be transferred to this category of events. Shunting all these into the category of the supernatural, exiling them from the natural, is intellectual cowardice. However, equally, simply saying that they do not exist (scepticism) is no more valid than asserting that they definitely do exist (faith). They may exist but, in possibly existing, they should be seen as natural phenomena with no requirement for alien beings or gods or demons outside nature or materiality and every requirement for understanding better the way the human mind works in its relationship with its own material and social environment (which latter is ultimately just an emanation from the material world).

Mind arises from matter and creates (as information and through communication) a world of intangibles that would cease to exist if the material substrate was destroyed and yet this fluid world is different from inert matter. It could be argued that a more effective model than the split betwen the natural and the supernatural would be between inert and manipulative matter (which might include many of us humans most of the time) and consider something we might have called supermatter within the natural if we were lazy. This element within the material universe but 'super' the expression of the material world in terms of an inert substrate is represented by the mind of individual when it constructs the intangible and cross-communicates with other individuals to create social mind-stuff. Social mind-stuff (culture) is used to create not only the conditions for the manipulation of inert matter but also the conditions for the manipulation of itself, a situation complicated by the self-evidently material base for a new category of inert matter that mimics the mind-stuff of humanity, artificial intelligence, and which, in turn, is capable of entering intangibles into human minds and culture and eventually to manipulate matter just as humans can and do.

With artificial intelligence, it is as if inert matter is catching up with us as matter manipulators, thanks to our own mind manipulation of matter in creating matter that can manipulate matter (the binary code that is the basis for machine computation). Yet all of this is fundamentally materially based. Everything 'mind' is lodged in matter and cannot survive without the survival of the substrate of matter, no matter how manipulated by mind. And so, putting the invented God-things and the products of the imagination aside, we can return to 'unexplained phenomena' and reasonably assume that these two aspects of the case are products of matter directly (the mystery of things not explained which may simply mean that we do not yet understand matter fully) or indirectly as the product of mind in its relationship to matter (as in perceptual delusion) or, finally, as mind working on itself within its material substrate (as in the belief in the God-origin of miracles or the Hollywoodisation of the vampire or werewolf).

So, what I propose is that we abandon the separation of the natural and supernatural as an early modern invention (certainly not something the Ojibwa, say, would understand as a correct interpretation of the world) and re-think the world as one material world:-

• which we do not entirely understand (leaving room for scepticism about scepticism when effects are unexplained) but which we know reasonably to have a material (natural) base so that all things are ultimately natural and 
• where the material substrate permits the construction of mind that in turn invents itself, including the conceits of the 'supernatural' (now just a cultural phenomenon whether of God-things or werewolves) based on the frailties of perception and the genius of the imagined.

It is certainly plausible that dream states can create gods and demons. On the other hand, the emergent social mind now also creates tools that mimic the naturally emergent mind (artificial intelligence) and which are apparently immune from individual or social bias (assuming the inputs are logical) and of anything inexplicable. Once we have disposed of god-things and cultural artefacts, we are still left with a residue of the inexplicable whether related to our human minds or to events in the world. There is no mind event that is not emergent from our own minds. The conceptualisation by a mind of a mind event outside itself represents no more that this created mind is a real mind than the mind of an artificial intelligence (as one currently stands) represents a real mind. A material substrate, of which we may not yet know everything and may never know all we need to know to understand it, is still required for all human and silicon and even alien mind events. Even demons are likely to have a material substrate somewhere to justify their existence.

Psi (ESP and PK) and unusual mind events that may or may not exist but they do not need to scare us if they do exist. They are clearly relatively rare and arise from peculiar circumstances. As natural phenomena, they are worthy of study with an open mind even if the final conclusions are either that they are all delusions of emergent human minds or explicable in terms of micro-effects in nature that we had not previously understood - or are simply things in the world that cannot be explained. We have to accept that it is not the lot of humanity (even aided by machine intelligence) to know everything. Absolute knowledge of a system by something within that system is not attainable unless one falls back on the insane belief that Man can become God.

To reverse the formulation of Gyrus in his 'North', it is not 'the preciptation of the gross earthly realm out of the aetheric infinity embracing it' that we are dealing with but 'the precipitation of an aetheric breadth of possibility out of the inert material realm embracing it'. This allows us to position the natural and the supernatural in a different conceptual context - that of immanence and transcendence. The standard model for the supernatural it is to see nature as immanent (which parallels the idea that God is immanent in nature, in all that can be seen and experienced and measured) and the supernatural as transcendent (insofar as the mental model is of God being outside nature, transcending it, as well as immanent).

With God and all forms of prime mover and all forces external to nature removed from the equation, nature can remain immanent but as total materiality - that is, all that is in the universe and all that is in the universe is matter or energy in some form. Transcendence can be re-cast as what emerges out of nature that has to be within nature by the nature of things but which is different in quality - that is, it is self-reflexive consciousness or mind and its associated tools such as reasoning. This raises interesting questions because there is no easy binary here between matter and mind. Self-reflexive consciousness and reasoning as a tool arise not in some sudden spark of creation and binary difference but evolve very slowly over vast tracts of time. The difference between the thing that is self-reflexive and aware and the thing that is not is not 'created' in an instant by some external touch but evolves. Self-reflexiveness and ability to think also varies even within a community of individuals in society in real time and within one individual, often from second to second.

Nor should we fall into the trap of valorising the self-reflexive consciousness so that a mythic narrative emerges that automatically assumes that the more conscious the entity then the higher the value - this is the error of cod-existentialism that valorises untestable claims to 'authenticity'. No attribute is of intrinsic value except situationally - from the stance of the individual or 'society'. No external force ensures a positive valuation, certainly no force outside nature (the world and all that is the case within it). Neither consciousness not authenticity are things-in-themselves but are rather states of being that shift in time in a Heraclitean flux much as 'mind' emerges transcendentally over long periods of time and in fits and starts.

The point here is not to create another binary (always the instinct of the simple analyst of the universe, the raw and the cooked, the hot and the cold, the good and the bad) but to have a concept to hand - the transcendental - that can shift its meaning from something external and unknowable and outside reality (when the supernatural is actually just a sub-set of human imaginative invention) to something that transcends inert matter existentially, that is, that emerges from out of matter (transcends its substrate) to become something that forms and creates itself, not only as the individual mind and personality with its reasoning, conceptualisation, creative imaginings, inventions, discoveries and meanings but as the transcendent creation of cultures of all levels, societies of all types, collaborative artistic creation and scientific discovery, the academic project to increase the bounds of knowledge, the prosecution of projects (not excluding business and war) and so forth.

Thus, it is mind, culture and society that are at least potentially 'supernatural' (on a trajectory that seems to be increasingly disconnected from its material substrate over time) in this different interpretation of the terms although I would dispute that anything can ever be disconnected from materiality. What we traditionally think of as supernatural in two of its key categories (the invention of meaning and imaginative creation) is simply a sub-set of something that is not so much 'above nature' as the highest part of nature (summa autem natura?), at least as seen from the point of view of those who have the ability (the self-reflexive conscious mind) to observe 'nature'. 'Nature' itself does not observe itself but is a thing in which we are embedded and which we have reconstructed from our observations into an abstract.

Matter in itself is inert but there is a distinctly different quality in that which can observe itself and its own substrate and environment. Either there is nothing supernatural here or we might deal with the problem by recasting 'nature' to mean not all that there is in the universe but all that there is that is not self-consciously reflexive and aware of itself, I think this is intellectually lazy - an essentialism after instead of before the fact designed to over-privilege the human (and indeed the thinking machine, alien and demon by pushing them into the place where once we positioned God and a conscious Nature. It might be better here to speak of a radicalisation of a part of nature itself and so stay 'grounded' (literally). This conceit also forces us to consider at what point artificial intelligence elides from being part of the inert material substrate and joins us humans as 'summa autem natura'. It also begs the question of the possibility of independent self-reflexive entities emerging out of the material in the past, existent now or in the future from the material substrate - which opens the door to evidence-based acceptance of aliens, emergent god-things, spirits, angels and demons (to speak in human terms).

The actual evidence for these latter is flaky to say the least but it would be intellectually dangerous to assume that, if the material substrate had permitted 'summa autem natura' in relation to ourselves as human beings, that it might not permit the emergence of similar minds and entities or other minds and entities elsewhere in the universe and/or in time and that they might have a character and experience very different from ours. After all, we are on the path ourselves to creating potentially transcendent artificial intelligences that might well fit the bill for a form of independent self-reflexive and creative consciousness.

This leaves us with the last category of popular ideas of the supernatural, outside religion and popular and folk culture, the paranormal. Psi (ESP and PK and other events) are claimed to happen to people by people themselves (though not easily observable by third parties as true and reliable) and may or may not be entirely delusory events whether as a not understood coincidence or as misperception or as fraud by third parties (and so forth). The immanence-transcendence model here inverts itself because a deluded mind might be seen as a warped transcendence but, if there is anything in these events (and we have an open mind here), then they are still events within nature and not supernatural. They are part of the material substrate and so part of the natural. They are simply natural events that we either cannot or do not understand.

Psychological effects that are interpreted as 'paranormal' (a better term than cloaking these events with the term supernatural) and physical events involving a warping of our understanding of causation, time and space may not be automatically considered to be absolutely impossible so much as probably impossible with the information and reasoning at our disposal as transcendent minds at this time and in this space.

If the concept of the supernatural is something we have inherited from our own earlier stages of development, it works functionally as part of our cultural tool kit insofar as we value religion or create imaginatively for our own psychological needs. It is equally a rather sloppy way of moving forward as self-reflexive consciousnesses in our own right. It would be better to make a functional assumption of absolute materialism and then enclose all current definitions of the supernatural as properties of 'summa autem natura' (the highest form of nature from our own perspective), excepting the 'paranormal'. This latter should be separated out as either a delusion or, on further investigation, an unknown element of the totality of materiality.

The 'paranormal' becomes a potentiality for knowing rather than something known, mirroring our creation of artificial intelligence as a potentiality for consciousness rather than as something conscious in itself now. The first offers the potential for changing our perception of material reality without any necessity for 'spiritual' inventions while the latter offers the potential for changing our assumptions about the uniqueness of our own transcendence (whether later to be challenged further by the discovery of aliens or demons is probably something not within the capability of current science). Our working assumption can be that we do not have to worry over much about aliens and demons (except as cultural artefacts) but that we should be concerned about understanding artificial intelligence and we should continue to be sceptically interested in the paranormal without throwing too much resource at it.

Beyond this, we continue to transcend as much as we can because that is what we do subject to our all-too-obvious dependence on immanent matter (after all, we die!). We continue, driven by our own 'nature' at least amongst those so inclined, to employ our transcending minds in the manipulation and exploitation of the material universe, of 'nature', in order to assist our continuing process of transcendence - regardless of conservative attempts to try to give immanence/matter priority over our own transcendence. We think here of those retrograde elements in the green movement that go beyond sustainability in our own interest as transcendent-within-immanence beings into a preference for the invented rights of 'nature' over humanity or those 'spiritual' elements who insist on inverting the situation and trying to give an untenable transcendent quality to nature itself whether overtly as God or as some form of pantheism or pan-psychism.

The supernatural thus can quietly disappear from view except as cultural artefact (meeting psychological needs) or as an incorrect descriptive term for that which is not known or cannot be known. It is a term we no longer need philosophically if we have the concept of emergent consciousness as 'summa autem natura' (this is the best term I have to hand and welcome others' thoughts) from its own perspective as observer of its own condition when even Psi (ESP and PK), aliens, gods, angels and demons can only either be inventions of ourselves or a knowable (but not necessarily by us) part of nature.

Modern Mythologies and the Social

Joseph Campbell in his Occidental Mythology wrote that

"In the long view of the history of mankind, four essential functions of mythology can be discerned. The first and most distinctive – vitalizing all – is that of eliciting and supporting a sense of awe before the mystery of being. ... The second function of mythology is to render a cosmology, an image of the universe that will support and be supported by this sense of awe before the mystery of the presence and the presence of a mystery. ... A third function of mythology is to support the current social order, to integrate the individual organically with his group ... The fourth function of mythology is to initiate the individual into the order of realities of his own psyche, guiding him toward his own spiritual enrichment and realization."

The unknowability of Being, the invention of meaning around this core of unknowability, the maintenance of social order and personal individuation are 'mythologised' in integral societies. Conservatives pine for this. They think we were both better and happier when these functions were integrated despite the probability that each whole system was inevitably built on invention. There was a disconnect between the actual nature of material reality, society and the individual in their relation to Reality (or Being) as soon as anyone began to think about what was going on. Deep thought does not work well for serious traditionalists. Mythical societies were static societies, not necessarily, despite the claims of the ideologies making use of myths, very ordered or mentally healthy. Trying to construct a myth to restore total order - to the material world, society and the person in an integrated way - may be the dream state of the conservative and it may be true that our species clings to irrational pseudo-order out of fear and anxiety but it is not necessarily true that the species needs to cling to anything that extensive at all.

In our contemporary world, the, four functions have separated out and then fragmented within themselves. It may be that the fragmentation within the functions is the problem rather than the disconnect between the functions. It may be that the disconnection of function is, in fact, a healthy state of affairs and that it is the fragmentation within each function that makes us 'unhealthy'. The attempt, by conservatives and the religious, to integrate forcibly the four functions misses this essential point - that we can live well enough by seeing each function as having a separate purpose but still yearn to have each function function well which it cannot do if it is not coherent in itself.

The contemporary world has an opportunity to accept this situation instead of fighting it. Our mythology of awe is now either simple existentialism or the choice by individuals from a smorgasbord of 'faith-based' choices that can be insulated from the other functions if we wish - New Age beliefs if we insist, Our cosmology can be that of science - the most coherent mythology now on offer even if some may choose incoherent ones existentially - even as, in our heart of hearts, we know that this, at its furthest reaches when it leaves the world of technology and demonstration, has its faith-based aspects. Our current mythology of social order is most in disarray because atomised individuals now know that they cannot easily trust to the competence let alone benignity of their priestly and warrior castes (if ever they could) while the mythology of the person, the narrative that helps construct our individuality, might be talked up by psychotherapists but is, in fact, simply the story we tell ourselves to navigate a society that is fluid and unnerving. 

It is possible to create a myth of non-meaning, trust blindly in science and construct a personal mythology that permits the first two and live well. The problem child in Campbell's short litany is the lack of a viable myth of the social since it is not easy to live well if society is unstable or works against individuation (as most conservative spiritual, religious and social mythologies work against it for many people). In a world that permits the possibility of existentialism (alongside faith-based essentialism), science and psychotherapy and free choice, it is the social that has become problematic. It is the failure of the social to reconstruct itself without God, with Science and yet respectful of 'human rights' that is the crisis of our time. The social does not need the mythologies in the other three areas to be in accord with its own necessary mythology any more than any of those other mythologies require any of the others to function effectively. The revolutions provided by the Enlightenment, Nietzsche and Freud (discredited though he is in detail) provided, eventually, a new coherence but the opportunities provided by Marx were squandered by the Marxists, leaving little behind.

So, this is the next stage - having established that there are things we cannot know and which must be faced with pagan equanimity, that there is no God but only Science as our Faith and that we are captains of our own souls until we die, we now need to establish some kind of social order that requires no deities, can make use of science and technology and respects autonomous individuals but yet has its own independent mythology that can hold it together for the next stage in human development. A mythological 'faith' in the good society is the last of the four corner stones to be put in place before we can move forward as a species. After the current time of troubles, our species will probably construct this new myth once ideological liberalism has gone the way of communism and fascism ... but not before.

Robotics, AI, Sexuality & Power - A Brave New World

In a somewhat breathless report in the Financial Times on February 14th, Moshe Vardi, computer science professor at Rice University in Texas, is quoted as saying that “We are approaching the time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task. Society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?"

There may be a dash of panic emerging about the emergence of robotics and AI - after all, scientists and engineers have form when it comes to doing the 'chicken licken' thing as they move into the public sphere. It is as if these professions have a deep psychological problem in understanding social and system complexity, adaptability and unpredictability. We have certainly seen this with climate change much as we once saw it with scientific panic about racial degradation!

Nevertheless, AI and robotics are set to make an impact similar to that of the introduction of machinery in the early agricultural phase of the industrial revolution. This pushed masses of peasants out of traditional jobs into the cities as cheap labour. This lead to the next round of applications of machinery to industrial processes as urban labour started to become more expensive. Administrative, clerical and skilled labour are now expensive enough to drive the next set of applications of machine intelligence.

Robotics probably will eliminate many skilled manufacturing jobs. AI will certainly eliminate many clerical and even professional jobs. Robotics plus AI will eliminate many unskilled jobs. On past form, new jobs of a different nature to meet new needs eventually get created. Human existence and experience, after a painful disruption, then improves significantly yet the disruption could be politically and socially dangerous.

In the earlier cycles, there was no democracy so we had riots, then revolutions and then the formation of new political parties constructing the democracy and other radical forms of governance that allowed society to engage in the internal Darwinian struggle that led to the triumph of a rather weak form of welfarist liberal democracy.  This may have frustrated Nietzsche who saw the 'weak' collectivising to become strong and it is true that this collectivisation could de-humanise as much as the machines did but the outcomes were, on balance, more beneficial than not in terms of creating the conditions for at least the possibility of personal empowerment and individuation.

The next cycle looks as if it will be expressed through populist upsurges. We are now into new territory, so we may as well enjoy the ride ... but the one thing we can be sure of is that this new system like the old will be managed by self-reinforcing elites periodically replaced by more suitable self-reinforcing elites.

This is the nature of power - it cannot be held by everyone at the same time although the powerful are just as controlled by those over whom they exercise formal power, in subtle and devious ways, as they control those who have no formal power. Foucault was good on the complexity of all this, If so, the first 'new' elite will only be the cleverer elements of the old elite seeking to manage the new populism. It is when that fails that the fun and games begin ...

But before we get over-excited here is an example of hype that needs treating with care, The FT again: "Prof Vardi said it would be hard to think of any jobs that would not be vulnerable to robotics and AI — even sex workers. “Are you going to bet against sex robots?” he asked. “I’m not.”" As usual in our rather sexually anxious culture, the Professor uses sexuality to heighten the air of tension. We really do need to grow up about sex but that is not why I raise it.

If you think about Vardi's comment, it begs the question of what sort of sex worker - we are speaking of the oldest profession, one that deserves being taken seriously and respected in our otherwise sex-negative society. There is the aspect of 'relief' and of 'fetish' whose demands might be relieved by autonomous robots with no personality (the problem of robots with personality and consciousness is one for science fiction and very far into the future but still one eventually to be taken seriously).

But there is the very separate aspect of human need for contact with other humans, as opposed to the autistic but perfectly reasonable human need to have no contact with other human beings, where the elimination of the exhaustion of work and our daily scrabbling for 'time-resource' (an overhang from the industrial era) might actually create a positive need for a huge range of erotic services for all sorts for very different people in safe and psychologically healthy ways.

Perhaps the female interest in the performance art of burlesque or the turning of pole-dancing into a form of athletic prowess are just the beginning of this vast range of human-to-human interactions which will involve 'trade' and extend to all other forms of experience - ambience, performance, fashion, play, aesthetics, humour, dance and movement, fragrance, seduction, ritualised safe violence (which is what much sport is at heart), magical belief and the invention of cults, psychotherapies and philosophies, new ways of constructing family and community, new politics (against the reactionary politics of Iron Age religiosity and industrial age bureaucracy), safe altered states and new forms of economic organisation.

All that will then be needed is a limited framework for protecting the person (and the animal and eventually the conscious robot) from unwarranted unequal exploitation and physical and (within reason because all conscious creatures create themselves out of risk and struggle) mental harm. The State should, ideally, as Marx expected, 'wither away' except that there will long be a need for something to construct and set the limits for the massive infrastructural investments that will help create that limited framework's potentialities.

Professor Vardi chooses sex workers as a trope because our culture is still hung up on sexuality. A socially conservative puritanism is re-emerging in this context as the last reactionaries hope to use the coming crisis to reintroduce their worn out values - hence the explosion of Islamism, Papal energy, Super-Federalism, Neo-Cold War idiocies, counter-terrorism strategies, surveillance, prohibitionisms and engineered anxieties and panics.

The choice of sexuality as the primary point of excitement itself suggests the problem - a deep cultural issue with the normality of sexual response and the ancient fear of it in a context of limited resources, the need by elites to control humans as property (which still carries on in those states that conscript their young) and the danger to order of emotions in closed spaces.

The new technology opens up spaces, no longer permits humans to be treated as property (which is very scary to people who find security in being slaves) and increases resources - suddenly, there is no excuse at the educated and intelligent end of society for savage authoritarian mores other than the existence of the disturbed personality type of the authoritarian.

We have often noted that the struggle between freedom and authority or power, often generational, is far more central to the human condition even than class or gender or ethnic conflict. The problem then becomes one of the fear of ancient ways dissolving and releasing the mob into chaos (which is the current terror that permits social conservatism to be tolerated).

The AI/robotics revolution may be scary for the disruption in employment and community (but what positive change in society is not) but it is also scary for another reason - it will terrify Authority faced with the loss of their elite control over the distribution of resources, over cultural space and over the disposition of labour value.

The most frightened will be the 'educated' (education not being the same as usefulness or intelligence) who have believed that they rule by divine right because they have ruled, at least culturally, for over half a millennium in some form or another, whether liberal-bureaucratic, pseudo-socialist, progressive, corporatist or fascist.

So, for the rest of us who embrace the future while thinking it reasonable for new elites to arise who will mitigate bad effects on humans and who will prepare for the day when the descendants of the AI/robots will be our conscious equals (and one hopes our friends), it is a case of watchfulness against the claw-back of power by the losing classes, the exploitation of fear and anxiety to impose restrictions on our freedom and the crass over-claims of excitable scientists and engineers. Avanti!

Omniscience and Big Data as New Religion

One of the persistent delusions of humanity (taken as the default, though not the inevitable, position of most people who think that they are thinking) is that the universe is not only knowable but that knowability is a necessary good. It might be better for us to draw a distinction between knowing all that we can know and all that there is in our world. The drive to know all that we can reasonably know is the progressive mentality that expands our horizons through science and philosophy but the illusion that that we can know all that is in the world is the basis of religion and absurdity. Where reasonable knowledge intersects with the belief that all can be known or that what is known actually accords with reality is the point that divides the useful from the useless, even counter-productive.

The ancient method of dealing with the problem of total knowledge - the necessity for omniscience - was to displace this knowledge on to an invention - God. God knew everything. We could partake of this knowing indirectly by knowing Him. We, of course, did not and could not know everything but we 'knew' that He knew everything for us and so we felt comforted. The comfort came from believing that Something knew everything and if Something knew everything, then we were relieved of the pressure of absolute knowing but could yet believe that absolute knowing was possible. Belief in an omniscient God would bind the world into a coherent and safe whole no matter what happened to us as individuals. Our priests would know enough to interpret - to stand between Omniscience and our limited knowledge of the world. We could remain relatively ignorant knowing that we only had to strive to know ourselves, know our neighbours or know God through our priests or direct revelation.

If God is dead (though this proposition presumes that there was something there in the first place 'to die'), the inherent human demand that Absolute Knowing be present does not easily die with God. So how does it survive? It survives in sets of belief that have the cover of secular rationalism but which are no less absurd than the belief in a Knowing Subject outside of ourselves of which we can become a part directly or indirectly. Today's grand absurdity is the belief that the totality of information in the world (with all of materiality being presented conceptually and imaginatively as information) might be computed and understood ultimately in mathematical terms. Instead of us individual humans entering into a relationship with the Omniscient God, we are to be able to access this new evolving omniscience through our relationship with the potential total knowledge of 'cyberia', not just the internet and the accumulated knowledge of our current priestly class (the scientific community) but perhaps the evolved mind that will emerge out of the internet and quantum computers. In fact, few scientists would make these claims easily but that will not stop those who are ideologically committed to science and technology.

There has emerged an hysterical tendency in contemporary culture for God not to have been removed but merely to have been displaced into speculative science and fiction. These neo-religious believers, with their own texts, are often highly intelligent but only in the sense that Augustine and Aquinas were intelligent - formally capable of manipulating ideas and facts to come up with creative models of reality that suit their needs not advanced intellectually very far from the medieval scholastic. Just as the medieval scholastic could not critique the base belief whose proven inadequacy would undermine all the rest of his system - the belief in God - so the modern neo-scholastic of technologism cannot critique his belief in the relevance and 'reality' (for really existing humans) of the technological potential for total information. The theoretical constructs of God and Total Information, not being provable, stand together alongside many other absurd human beliefs, telling us that our species (in the mass) finds it difficult not to believe in something even when it purports to rationality.

This is closely related to magical thinking about numbers. That numbers are in themselves containers of meaning beyond quantity and inherently logical calculation is another ancient inheritance, the world of gematria, correspondences and Bible codes. Of course, the use of numbers in association with logic and reason has created an immensely valuable tool for the investigation of reality but that is very different from saying that it is reality or that the radical extension of calculation to its limits necessarily has any relation to any reality meaningful to humanity. If it works and it makes things of use to the human, it has value and may contribute to the manipulation of material reality and the construction of social reality. But meanings constructed out of numbers that are not usable are of no greater status than meanings constructed out of belief. Belief in God may not have had much effect on material reality but they certainly did on social reality - does that alone make God existent? That people believe in Him. For some, then, Thor and the Jedi are real if that is so.

A number that builds a spacecraft or calculates radiation levels in star systems has at least some potential use but a number that postulates an untestable belief about the death of the universe that relies solely on the logic of mathematics does not. Reality elides from Newton's dropping apple to the world of speculative science, the partner of speculative fiction. Exactly where the buck stops and the useful becomes the poetic or magical is always a matter for debate but it is important to know that the elision is taking place. Just because facts at one end of the scale are 'true' (useful and testable), this does not mean that the 'facts' (useless and untestable) at the other end should ever be accorded the same status. There are thus things ('facts') that are actually not formally knowable not only by us but by any total thinking machine since the very idea of a total thinking machine falls into the category of radical speculative science and the totality of all things is not knowable by a part of the whole unless it becomes the whole (the totality of knowledge).  Religion enters by the back door because this final postulated omniscient thing is ... God. God has become (as Tipler suggests) a thing of total information encompassing all things in all time.

But let us come down to earth since the social sciences are also chasing the ghost of total information, albeit not within the universe but within society. We have to ask now whether this particular Emperor has been naked for a very long time. The beginnings of social science are to be found in relatively simpler industrial societies working on data within fairly closed conservative societies that were also within bounded nation states. They told us things we did not before - or rather they revealed ourselves to ourselves in terms of simple narratives that might not tell us all but told us something more than no information would have given us. Today the social sciences continue to tell us something about ourselves but less and less with time because we have become more self-reflexive as subjects of research, societies have lost their conservative character and boundaries have collapsed. The volume of data required to make even simple statements has increased, is highly complex and its components will become redundant quite quickly in time. Yet the number of social scientists and their implicit claims on public policy have grown in proportion to the degree that they can no longer tell us anything decisive about ourselves.

What does the research into British working class life in the 1950s tell us now that is useful for public policy? What actually did it tell us then that was useful to society in the long run? Is working class life better today than it was in the 1950s because of social science research or are working people living in an entirely different world unpredicted by the academics and with unintended negative as well as intended positive consequences of their influence on public policy? Economics is notoriously slippery in telling us anything useful about reality as Paul Ormerod has repeatedly shown us. This is not to say that it is not useful only that it is contingently useful in a restricted way.

Policy that relies on the findings of social science is likely to be intrinsically flawed because it cannot aspire to total information (unless Big Data really does work), is quickly outdated by events, cannot take account of the many things that are going on outside the research and because the research itself is a factor affecting the actions of people themselves as well as those acting on people. Perhaps we can know some big things (more from observing history than from scientific method) and lots of little things (like the sub culture of Goths in Milwaukee over three years). Perhaps we can surmise something useful from meta-analysing lots of little things or contextualising our lives within the big things but the idea that we can know (rather than model inadequately) our actually existing social reality along any lines that are not closer to the traditional humanities rather than 'science' is becoming increasingly threadbare.

The massive interest in 'Big Data' as driver for social policy decisions strikes me as based on a belief system (that internet-based knowledge can provide a good and useful approximation of reality) that is no more reliable than any other belief system (that is, it sort of works when everyone believes nonsense but collapses when even a relatively few question the belief). And there is the self interest of those who propose it and of the social scientists, basically the interest in the system of those who expect to profit from it or, more negatively, fear that they will lose livelihoods and resources if they do not believe in the prevailing wisdom. In this, they will be true heirs to the Churchmen of the Late Middle Ages.

One suspects that we are about to go into another cycle where a plausible belief system has an apparent coherence because no one will critique the core assumptions (like a belief in God or the inevitable withering away other State or the inevitability of a struggle for survival between races). It will create the sea in which the fish of society can swim but which does not accord with reality and which must eventually collapse on its own internal contradictions. Above all, it must collapse eventually on the fact that the claims derived from the ostensible central fact (the core assumption) must collapse because the core assumptions are wrong, in this case that the accumulation of big data can be a true reflection of social reality and that the big data can be successfully analysed to provide meaning that is useful and not part of the problem that it is trying to resolve. This is not to say that Big Data may not have some use but we have to be careful to be critical of it and how it is used and especially how it is used by the new priests of technology - the political class, the academy, the security and policy bureaucracies and the marketeers and accountants - to dictate reality to us. Just because the numbers say the world is thus will not mean it is thus - we alone decide our own reality as self-reflexive humans. If we want to be sheep, we just have to sit back and allow ourselves to be defined as sheep. 

On 'Original Sin'

There are four 'scientific' claims that original sin exists and they are worth noting [1]:-

* The Selfish Gene hypothesis states that "a predominant quality" in a successful surviving gene is "ruthless selfishness." ... "this gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior."

* Psychologists who find a "selfish" trait in children from birth, a trait that expresses itself in actions that are "blatantly selfish." [Horreur!]

* Sociologists who claim that "fraud, corruption, ignorance, selfishness, and all the other vices of human nature." One such, Sumner, enumerates "the vices and passions of human nature" as "cupidity, lust, vindictiveness, ambition, and vanity." He finds such human nature to be universal: in all people, in all places and in all stations in society.

* Then there is the psychiatrist Thomas Anthony Harris who observes that "sin, or badness, or evil, or 'human nature', whatever we call the flaw in our species, is apparent in every person." Harris calls this condition "intrinsic badness" or "original sin."

Well, think about the assumption at the root of this. It is that 'being selfish' is a bad thing and 'being self-sacrificing to the community' is a good thing but this does not stand up once you abstract yourself from the pre-set valuations of the Judaeo-Christian West.

On the contrary, a righteous self-centredness is the basis not of 'sin' but of 'virtue' (an older pagan idea). An intelligent self-centredness, however, understands that the self is served better by a well ordered society and by co-operation than it is either by solipsism (which simply results in isolation) or by submitting to the power relations of other selfish individuals who just happen to have seized the commanding heights of culture and society.

The Christian obsession with sin simply cuts the ground from under those who would challenge the order of things by asserting their own rights and being against the claims of those who are in control of the definitions of good and evil. Let us look at the absurd language of these scientists, psychologists, sociologists and psychiatrists - all representatives of the commanding order.

Is not gene 'selfishness' the evolutionary order of things that scientifically cannot be valued as good or bad in itself but simply as a fact on the ground. Evolution has contructed a being that can undertake compassionate and altruistic acts, define itself and do 'good' things because it chooses to do 'good things'. In other words, far from being 'original sin', the 'selfish gene' is the basis for all that is termed 'good' in the world as well as 'bad'. Its existence requires no attempt to derive the good from outside materiality and the evolutionary process.

And that children are 'blatantly selfish'?! Excellent! So they should be. They have to struggle for their existence as the future. They cannot rely on the competence or concentration of 'nice' parents or other kids. They learn by doing and usually learn co-operation and 'goodness' in doing so. We should worry if they were not starting out as selfish little beasts. An unselfish small child is an evolutionary dead-end.

As for our sociologist, he speaks only of the variation in our evolutionary state that includes examples of all these things that are apparently 'bad' but also examples of everything that is apparently 'good'. There is no flaw in our species that is not a flaw in materiality itself. That materiality is flawed is the most absurd of essentialist propositions once you have eliminated the magical thinking of absolute idealism. The whole language of flaws is sloppy thinking, an external imaginative imposition on the complexity of material reality.

What we see is not original sin against which we must struggle to create some idealistic perfection but a complex and fluid evolutionary reality with maximum variation in which we all have to struggle and live. It contains neither good nor evil in itself or better, given our human perspective, contains all forms of good and evil now and in the future.

This is not 'sin' unless all reality is 'sin. While it is perfectly permissible to take that Gnostic line, any analysis that sees reality and materiality as merely 'sin-based' and our magical thinking as somehow redemption from 'sin' is sending us way up the garden path of anxiety-driven and cowardly evasion.

We are not intrinsically bad or intrinsically good. The desperation in certain personality types to define our species in these terms speaks more to personal neuroses and fears than it does to our reality. The point is that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people not because of original sin but because we are disordered and have not ordered ourselves internally and externally.We have not progressed rather than that we have 'fallen'.

Instead of understanding our nature and creating systems of order that are based on diminishing harms from a close observation of 'what works' (a technology of living in the world), we think that the exhortations of the propertied and powerful on the frightened will somehow change reality itself into something better. When it does not do this, we whine and moan that it is all 'not fair' instead of doing something about it or recognising an occasional truth - that we cannot do anything about it. It is not good or evil but just life. We alone are responsible for our own failures in managing the technology of power to protect ourselves and those we care about. And protecting ourselves and those we love is not 'original sin' but who and what we are.

So, away with this talk of 'original sin' and the attempt to find 'scientific proofs' for our intrinsic 'badness' or 'goodness'. We are neither. We are what we are. In general, it is best for us to do what we will as a balanced self-centredness and harm no one because we have no need to do so. The bulk of us can then organise ourselves to deal with those whose nature is to do harm and perhaps, equally usefully, restrain those who are under the illusion that it is their task, because of their nature, to go around doing unwanted 'good'. 

[1] The original citations for these views are at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nature

The Flaw in Thinking Artificial Intelligence Can Solve Our Problems

I recently knocked out a review of Frank Tipler's 'The Physics of Immortality: Moderm Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead' (1994) on GoodReads. One passing claim struck me as particularly interesting in the light of my blog postings that cast doubt on speculative science as useful - not that it is not worthwhile but that it seems to be fuelling a cultural hysteria about scientific possibility that is distracting us from what is achievable. I have a similar critique of the social sciences and I covered my concerns about excessive claims in that area in another GoodReads review - of Lawrence Freedman's 'Strategy: A  History' (2013).

Tipler's passage gave me yet another useful bullet for my gun of scepticism about claims not only about what we can know about the world but what any machine created by us may know about the world although Tipler's main task is to postulate (amongst other things) omniscient total information at the Omega Point of history.

On page 297 of my Edition but also elsewhere, Tipler explores the amount of information required to be or do or understand certain things in the world. He points out that if something is more complex than 10 to the power of 15 bits of information, then it cannot be understood by any human being whatsoever. This is the level of complexity of the human brain itself. He points out that human society is 10 to the power of 15 bits of information times the number of humans in the world.

We have to invent higher level theories to attempt to explain such complexity but these higher level theories over-simplify and so may (I think, will) give incorrect answers. The problems of human society, in particular, are far too complex to be understood even with such theories to hand which, in my view, are not scientifically valid but merely probabilistic guidelines.

Often human instinct, honed on millions of years of evolutionary development which screens out more information than it actually uses, is going to be more effective (assuming the human being is 'intelligent', that is, evolved to maximise that evolutionary advantage) in dealing with the world than theory, no matter how apparently well based on research. Tipler's omniscient Omega Point is, of course, classed as something completely different but no one in their right minds would consider any probable AGI coming close to this level of omniscience within the foreseeable future. Tipler does not make this mistake.

Therefore, in my view, an AGI is just as likely to be more wrong (precisely because its reasoning is highly rational) than a human in those many situations where the evolution of the human brain has made it into a very fine tool for dealing with environmental complexity. Since human society is far more complex than the natural environment or environments based on classical physics (it is interesting that humans still have 'accidents' at his lower level of information, especially when distracted by human considerations), then the human being is going to be more advantaged in its competition with any creation that is still fundamentally embedded in a particular location without the environmentally attuned systems of the human.

This is not to say that AGIs might one day be more advanced in all respects than humans but the talk of the singularity has evaded and avoided this truth - that this brilliant AGI who will emerge in the wet dreams of scientists may be a reflection of their rational personality type but is no more fitted to survival and development than a scientist dumped with no funds and no friends into a refugee camp short of food and water.

In other words, species or creature survival is highly conditional on environment. The social environment in which humans are embedded may be tough but it also ensures that the human species will be operating as dominant species for quite some time after the alleged singularity. Pure intellect may not only not be able to comprend the world sufficiently to be functional (once it moves out of the realm of the physical and into the social) but, because it theorises on the basis of logic and pure reason, is likely to come up with incorrect theories by its very nature.

Worse, those human policy-makers who trust to such AGIs in the way that they currently trust to social scientists may be guilty of compounding the sorts of policy mistakes that have driven us to the brink in international relations, social collapse, economic failure in the last two or three decades. Take this as a warning!

Frontiers 6 - Precognition

Can we see the future? Is there any way that we can rely on our perception to predict certainly rather than our reason to extrapolate uncertainly what will happen in the future? Since reasoning has a very poor track record on prediction in practice (observe The Economist on the 2008 Crash) and often the best personal predictions are those made on instinct, it is not axiomatic that analysing the future should follow the same patterns of thought as analysing the past, especially as the data that we require is simply not there. The past has things and events in it which we might possibly know and any failures of analysis come down to our imperfect knowledge of those things and events. The future, of course, has no events or things about which we can reason except as extrapolations from the past and the present - and, as any fool investor knows, past performance is no predictor of certain future success.

The problem is that, notwithstanding the research and ideas of J.W Dunne in the 1930s and others since, we have no hard scientific evidence of our being able to know future events and things although that only means that we have no evidence of precognition and not that precognition does not and cannot exist.The most obvious challenge to precognition is that our experience of the world says that no effect can exist before its cause. Cognitive biases are also well attested that give cause to be suspicious of many claims of precognition. Yet what is puzzling perhaps - given the widespread fascination with the alleged phenomenon - is why no independent and open-minded scientist without a prejudice in either direction has yet conducted a series of experiments that can fully stand up to peer scrutiny in order to decide the matter one way or the other - either finally to quash this last bastion of irrationality or, alternatively, show some interesting effect that needs material explanation. Those experiments that come nearest to the necessary scientific criteria tend to show that there is no such phenomenon but not decisively.

Perhaps the only suggestive finding that one would think would be explored further, if only to eliminate it from the enquiry, is the possibility that precognitive effects exist for some persons in a heightened state of erotic or other arousal. This is intuitively interesting because, inconveniently for scientific minds, if shown to be true, it offers the hint of proof for the practice of sex magick and the claims of Alastair Crowley, altered states and magick and Austin Osman Spare. Of course, it has not been shown to be true, merely a possibility to be investigated further.

The argument that no effect can exist before its cause is not an absolute truth that can be demonstrated philosophically. It is true enough about the world in which we live and in which we experiment but it is not necessarily true. The best that can be said is that it is pragmatically true for a species whose existence arises from a series of causes and effects, whose relationship to the world is one of cause and effect and whose observations have always been made under conditions where time always flows in one direction and where no effect can exist before its cause.

Unfortunately, this also means that, though philosophically it might be possible to conceive of an effect existing before its cause (that time can flow backwards), scientifically and pragmatically we are 'stuck' in a world of forward moving time. Those physicists, psychologists and neuroscientists who poo-poo the possibility of parapsychology are probably to all intents and purposes correct - within their observable world. However, the assumptions of selective bias, unconscious perception, self-fulfilling prophecy, the 'law of large numbers' and memory biases may equally be presumptions since no psychologist can possibly know what is happening in another person's mind at any one time. That cognitive biases are possible or even probable is a reasonable working assumption but that they are certain is not something that any scientist can or, if they are honest, would claim.

Perhaps we should simply accept that 'to all intents and purposes' precognition is not possible from the perspective of not only rational science but also usefulness and probability but also that it is not proven that it does not exist simply because such a claim is impossible to prove. Just one precognition that is true by one person amongst the human billions taking place at just one moment in the long history of the species would mean that ... precognition is possible. And there are philosophical reasons for not entirely closing the door on the possibility because of a healthy scepticism about any scientist who makes absolute claims to knowledge (which no good scientist will do). But the 'to all intents and purposes' is sufficient to make precognition a non-issue for social and cultural investment. As we suggest below, the lack of interest in research may owe more to psychological barriers in dealing with the implications of a definitive answer far more than it does to rational engagement with the utility of such research. After all, the horrible discovery that sex magick might work might seriously frighten the horses.

In an excellent overview of the state of play in research as at May 2014, Schwarzkopf tell us what is at stake:

Such findings of “psi” effects fuel the imagination and most people probably agree that there are things that current scientific knowledge cannot explain. However, the seismic nature of these claims cannot be overstated: future events influencing the past breaks the second law of thermodynamics. If one accepts these claims to be true, one should also be prepared to accept the existence of perpetual motion and time travel. It also completely undermines over a century of experimental research based on the assumption that causes precede effects. Differences in pre-stimulus activity would invalidate baseline correction procedures fundamental to many different types of data analysis.

Which is precisely why precognition is recognised in our series as a Frontier. It is not only the implications for science and religion if a scientifically validated discovery of precognition is presented to the public that matter here but equally the implications for human culture of a major unquestionable test of the claim that appears to prove or disprove beyond any reasonable doubt (and in a replicable form) that precognition exists. At the moment, the fact that psi has not been discovered to be true is not taken (by any reasonable scientist who has not turned his appropriate scepticism into a rationalist cult) to mean that it is not existent but only that it cannot be demonstrated to exist and so only 'to all intents and purposes' does not exist. The door is open at all times to a genuinely fool-proof replicable experiment by open-minded scientists that demonstrates its probability. This must then raise questions of the sort raised by Schwarzkopf.

This is where it gets interesting because the recurring problem in parapsychological research is poor methodology and blatant distrust between the scientists involved. It should not, however, be impossible - though one suspects rationalist and believing partisans are both reluctant subconsciously to put the matter to the test, given what is at stake culturally, lest the experiment comes up with the 'wrong answer' - to construct a devastatingly simple large-scale controlled psi investigative experiment using artificial intelligence within a few years as the objective assessor of the statistics involved, including such variables as sexual or erotic or other emotional excitation. This is the Frontier to be broken - a decisive experiment that sends our culture in one clear direction or the other.

There are probably no better clues to the problems presented by psychical phenomena than those provided by Professor Broad, a serious mid-twentieth century Cambridge analytical philosopher but also twice President of the Society for Psychical Research. Psychic phenomena, in his view, would challenge five basic limiting principles of philosophy (he proposed nine basic limiting factors in philosophy but it is these five that 'stick' in this case). He is not saying that these limiting principles actually are limits but that they are only unquestioned principles that underpin our view of the world and are hard to refute in terms of experience, habit and experiment. Here, I update the five limiting principles to take account of some beliefs and theories about quantum mechanical processes that have emerged as classical physics has not so much been superceded as added to. Part of the problem of 'psi' is that it does not fit into a materialist view of the world based on classical physics but that quantum physics has introduced concepts that seem to permit the theoretical possibility of something materialist permitting, in turn, something approximating psi effects. It is quite possible that one, some or all of the limiting principles could be shown to be philosophically unsound or not quite as sound as they appear at first sight though, as humans living in a human-centred material world, the struggle to do so and be credible is immense. However, accepting that the limiting principles as not necessarily absolutely true philosophically gives us an argument similar to that which notes how 'common sense' is frequently overturned by science: in short, current science may be being faced with subversion by the possibility that it is the common sense now to be overturned by itself.

• Backward causation - that effects can precede causes is the most evident limiting principle although at the quantum level, it is clear that there is plausible theory that posits something like this actually occurring though not in ways that affect the world which we experience. Quantum backward causation is the straw which those determined to see psychic phenomena as really existing will clutch at without any proven basis for any link between quantum physics and psychic experience other than belief. However, if a 'psi' phenomenon is proven, the scientists have nowhere else to go but here to describe what is happening without having to abandon a materialist conception of the universe. Cause and effect will not be abandoned, just redefined in the context of new thinking about time and matter.
• An argument is that, if minds are non-physical and the world is physical, there is no means by which non-physical things can act on the world without actually being physical. Psychokinesis would seem to demonstrate that dualism is wrong (a major event in philosophy) and that monist materialism is correct, raising only the issue of the physical process by which minds can move matter - which brings us back to the current fantasies but theoretical realities of quantum level events in the mind having physical effects.
• If minds can actually communicate with each other (as in 'mind-reading') then the notion of minds being of a separate substance from the physical might start to fall apart (although, of course, it is possible, that insubstantial entities might be able to communicate on equal terms even if that stil begs the question of how insubstantiality communicates with substantiality in order to crerate effects). Skepticism about the non-interaction of apparently non-physical things becomes dubious. The cat is set amongst the pigeons because scientists, again, either have to accept some mystical spiritual explanation or seek a material mechanism by which information can flow over distances between minds. This, again, might be resolved by minds being material and being connected at another level of materiality - which brings us back again to quantum physical effects as the only current road to go down (or to postulate some materiality undiscovered).
• The ability to perceive events in other places than those available to the senses in one body located in one particular place not only offends human reason but offends our assumptions about perception, that perception is limited to five senses plus prioperception (our groundedness in the world), in order to add a sixth sense or set of senses. This is the key claim of those who champion a strong view of parapsychology and the subject of the experimentation by these scientists (for scientists at their best, they are) though not yet proven. If they do prove the existence of a sixth sense, then the offense to reason begins to place reason itself in doubt insofar as reasoning in the human being is calculated on the evaluation of sensory inputs combined with logic. Mental reasoning finds itself having to take account of intuitions that may be pulling data private to the individual from other sources that cannot be evaluated by an outsider ... such 'romanticism' becomes 'true' if science finds that the mind's perception of things outside immediate sense-data observable by others is true. Psychology and the social sciences become far more problematic as alleged sciences on the uncovering of such a 'sixth sense'. Power shifts a little from the expert to the 'volk'.
• A final limiting principle is that persons cannot live without their bodies. The denial of this belief represents the very heart of the transition from folk culture to modern rational and scientific culture. It offends or puzzles many folk with strong beliefs in spiritual matters but educated and rational man can see no means by which persons can live without their bodies. Elaborate schema have been proposed by such religiously-minded scientists as Tipler to give persons their bodies back at the resurrection of the dead but few are persuaded according to the dictates of reason. The idea that persons can live without their bodies is a matter of mere belief while speculative transhumanist science still presupposes that persons as information can only survive if embodied elsewhere - in machines as emulations. Although the least likely of all parapsychological phenomena to be true (because of the complexity of the claim compared to simple experiences of sensory psi), if ghosts (for example) were shown to be 'true', then the idea of insubstantial immateriality as capable of existence in the world as (say) pure thought or experience shatters the rational materiality of the age or at least forces the scientific community to reconsider the material underpinning of reality, It might lead to a sceptical belief that we cannot know our own deep materiality: the uncertainty in itself will shift power a little back from the expert to the volk.

So where we are left is in a state where any form of proven psi (not only precognition) might unravel the materialist assumptions of our time (and so the ultimate reliability of science) if science cannot reasonably quickly and certainly come up with an alternative material theory that can be tested through experiment. It is one things to prove that 'psi' exists. It is entirely another to demonstrate how it works if it exists. The 'mystery' left by scientific inability to prove rather than surmise the processes involved leaves sufficient gap for folkish spirituality to slip through the gaps. There is no philosophical reason why any of these unravellings of accepted reality could not be theoretically possible even if they cannot currently be reasonably argued for. All it takes is one piece of super-verified, fully tested, replicable proof that backward causation exists beyond the quantum level, that quantum effects have material effects on higher levels of matter, that psychokinesis happens, that the 'sixth sense' exists or that a ghost exists (the least likely of all) and a lot of rethinking has to be done about the nature of matter (though not necessarily about materialism) and of reality. Perhaps Cramer's ideas on testing retrocausality based on the quantum entanglement of photons (which might have important communications benefits) will get the funding and interest it requires. If it does and it proves retrocausality at the quantum level, then the first tiny crack may have appeared in our current cultural paradigm. A lot is at stake and scientists and funders seem to be steering clear of the psi area not only because of the unlikelihood of results given current understanding but also because the implications might be beyond what they can cope with in terms of career or mental models. It might be left to a major trading house or the Mars Programme to follow through on retrocausality but that still won't tell us anything about human precognition.

On the one hand, a decisive probability for precognition (even if highly specialised and rare), to take our main example, will raise questions about the second law of thermodynamics and so about the inherent nature of the cosmos that will overnight thrust our cosmology and physics from near-certainty into the more pragmatic realms of 'to all intents and purposes' true for nearly all available situations but yet not all. The gap created may encourage all sorts of spiritual nuts and loons to project their fantasies on to the results but that particular effect does not necessarily follow on from that cause. More likely, the discovery would have a lot of immensely clever mathematical minds considering how, why and when such things might be - assuming every aspect of the experiment had been passed as viable and replicable. It would be a revolutionary event if only because of its effects on the presumption of man in his claims to knowledge if no mathematician or physicist can come up with a viable explanation or an explanations that are not demonstrable except as dodgy but entertaining thought experiments ('speculative science').

On the other hand, a decisive and relicable proof that there really is no replicable scientific basis for precognition (and the psychologists have a slew of alternative explanations for most claimed phenomena) and the matter can be passed finally to the realm of private folk belief and left for its expansion into public life to the fraudster and aforesaid spiritual nuts and loons. Outside these areas, the elimination of precognition as last hope (for many) of the mystery of existence that underpins much private spiritual belief will be an important final cultural nail in the anti-materialist vision of our condition. Not enough to destroy it for all the reasons that make precognition still a viable subject for research today (no proof to date does not equate to non-existence of a phenomenon) but enough to make it an even stronger signifier of difference between the educated (and so culturally 'intelligent') and the uneducated (or culturally 'stupid').

So much is at stake and yet the lack of interest in this field - given the extent of folk belief in it - is curious from this perspective. It is as if no one actually wants to have to deal with the answer to the question. The risks of being proven wrong are far too great for the world-views of the competing radical spiritualist and radical materialist camps. Perhaps that final decisive set of experiments is held back because it is a weapon in the cultural equivalent of a nuclear exchange and some instinct - some sixth sense - stops the species from taking any decisive move that would force humanity to choose one or other fork in the road towards either absolute materialism or renewed uncertainty.

Further Ruminations on East and West, Science and Religion ...

There is a difficulty for anyone seeking to engage with the 'Wisdom of the East'. If you think you are just a creature, ultimately, of matter subject to physical and biological laws, out of which your awareness of your self and the world has emerged, then you are going to be dismissed as wrong-headed by most (though not all) of those who look to the East as fount of 'wisdom'. Yet there is no necessary non-materialistic cause that would make the various transformative experiences that Eastern (and, for that matter, shamanic) techniques can offer anything other than experiences based on some (if not fully understood) physical or biological process.

The problem on the other side is that, whenever a scientist uncovers a bit of the alleged 'God gene' or works out what self-generated DMT actually does to the brain, he tends to crow that this means that all 'spiritual' thought can be reduced to his terms as a number-crunching rule maker. This sets up an interesting problem for modern man. One tradition is dismissive of the ability to 'become' through guided and learned technique: indeed, is a little frightened by its apparent irrationality. The other tradition insists on putting spirit or magic where none may be. Although we may smile at Dion Fortune today, there may have been merit in her insistence that occult matters were thoroughly scientific even if we demur when she suggests that it is a a science lost when an imagined continent disappeared.

Liberal intellectuals often spend inordinate amounts of time castigating irrational belief without investigating its social and personal functionality - to the extent that one suspects that they are behaving no less like gay-bashing closet homosexuals in the Southern Baptist pastorhood in their prejudice. Do they really so fear their own unconscious? They certainly do not have a fully formed and adequate answer to the claims of the 'spiritual'. What are they so obviously scared of?

You usually get some reference to the rise of the Nazi Party at some stage in the discussion of irrationalism which only goes to show that the average liberal intellectual has a highly superficial command of history, neuroscience and religion all at the same time - no mean achievement! Yet, and we return to Dion Fortune again, in her 'The Winged Bull' she provides a dynamic view of the berserker nature of the 'racial consciousness' in a hero who is by no means a bad man, rather a sturdy, decent and protective, an older type who worked for a society at a certain point of time (and helped defeat Kaiser and Fuhrer alike). Simply to throw this type out of the door of history means that we turn the undoubted evil that stalked Europe in the 1930s and 1940s into an over-simplified travesty of what it felt to be a man or a woman in a particular time or place.

Meanwhile, the 'spiritual' types rarely help their case (with some noble liberal exceptions) when they pontificate as gurus, looking with disdain on the poor saps who have not seen what they think they have seen themselves.  A third way might be to accept the reality of monism and materialism without throwing the baby out with the bath water. The laws of the universe exist alright. They are just science that is not yet understood when they appear to be spiritual or magical and actually 'do something' in the world. The problem for positivists is that some things not understood are actually there and may be the basis of techniques (a technology were we to be so clever) with positive benefits for many people.

We can throw away both the simplistic materialism that refuses to see future possibility and the determination of adepts to make their experiences a little bit more meaningful than they really are. The scientific approach to the spiritual (which is really the way we perceive the world in order to create meaning) and a 'spiritualisation' of science (which means humanising existence into forms that can mean something to people) seem to be the way ahead for a healthy humanity. A personal existentialism and a scientific humanism can leave space for the 'mysterium' without recourse to God, spirit or universalities that are not possible.

The third side of the triangle underpinning the modern mentality, set between scientific observation and the subjective experience required to create meaning, is probably the the existential capability to create fresh meanings out of what is 'given out' as the world over time. Both science and 'spirit' appear to like to fix things as immutable (this is not strictly true of good scientists and good mystics but is certainly true of those who claim to follow them). Both have laws or commandments called 'models' or dogma, urgent statements of how things are. The scientific models seem to do better under scrutiny than the religious ones. But the world in general and society in particular, let alone each and every individual, are in a constant process of Heraclitean transformation which either we command or we are commanded by. There are points where even science can tell us only what is impossible and not what might be possible within the constraints of the impossible.

So what might block a creative process of adaptive responsiveness to change? What might limit us as a species at the very moment in our history when we are sensing that we might be displaced by our own creation in artificial intelligence and have once again a hunger for the stars that will not easily be sated if we rely on biological entities, fish out of watery planets. Probably the block will lie in the extremities that stand just outside each side of the triangle: excessive positivism ('rigidity'), excessive essentialism ('gloom') and a propensity to change and shift for the sake of the matter rather than in accordance with one's own true will or unconscious ('the mind of the butterfly') .

Respect the nature of the given world, accept that it is partially but not entirely malleable to will and know your own will - those seem to be three reasonable responses to existence. All three are difficult but not impossible to handle. All three are subject to our having a critical stance to the sum of available knowledge. Dawkins, Biblical Fundamentalists and Robert Anton Wilson may all be necessary exemplars of unnecessary extremism in thought in this context - useful cases that show us where not to go.

The life well lived probably has more to do with a moderate respect for science and received 'normality' (which always emerged for a reason with its own history), with a selfhood that is fully aware that things change constantly and with the idea that we must control our own adaptation than it does with taking stands that merely show that we have no idea who we really are.

Do we really need to have our identities dictated from outside? In this context, the techniques of the East and the knowledge of the West are just tools for self-calibration and for social calibration under conditions of permanent flux. Eastern technique as an end in itself results in a sterile withdrawal from social existence. Western technique as an end in itself results in personal sterility. The flow of one to the other and back again, finely calibrated within oneself and between oneself and others, is both an art and a science.

There is no necessity for the concept of the divine nor of reincarnation nor of the 'eternal return' - these metaphors may be useful to kick-start thought but they become dessicating when they are believed to be true. Liberation starts with the elimination of the divine and placing science in our hands as a tool for our own purposes. Experts and priests are good on means (assuming they are tried and tested). They are very bad on ends. Only we can know our own ends.