Hacker News Reader

Comment by normac2 | Hacker News Reader

> I can't recommend doing any of these things, but if someone wants to, I highly suggest not naively following the directions of a satirical blogpost.

Very interesting stuff. Regarding this part, are you saying that that the supernatural claims behind these rituals are real in some literal sense, or that they have psychological effects that might not be desirable?

View on HN

One does not have to believe "that the supernatural claims behind these rituals are real in some literal sense" to be very wary of this sort of stuff - magick is not something that works along "literal" lines in the first place! Anything that you do in a serious magickal ritual (and if you're intending to "sell your soul", that definitely qualifies!) can have very real and long-lasting effects in the spiritual plane. That's what's especially troubling about this: it's definitely doing something, that something it's doing is going to be very much not-nice (since you're expressly intending to deal with malevolent beings) and we don't even know what exactly is happening! It's just madness unless you happen to be very familiar with this sort of left-hand path stuff, and even then there's plenty of reason to be very careful since you're straying way off from even most acknowledged "left-hand path" stuff (which is ultimately about skillfully leveraging evil and chaotic forces in ways that will accomplish some greater Good).

It sounds like you're referring to "spiritual plane" as something that is a distinct metaphysical entity that exists alongside what would be normally be seen as the natural world. (In this case I mean "metaphysical" in the philosophical sense.)

I realize that "natural world" is a fraught concept in itself, but please take me in a common sense reading; basically what would be seen as natural in everyday conversation or depicted in a movie/book/etc.

Maybe that concept should be expanded or contracted or eliminated to slice up the world in the most accurate ontology that we can, or maybe we should have no ontology at all. All of those are lines of argument that have been advanced by those who believe in religion, magic, etc. But as of right now the term "natural world" does have a current common sense interpretation that most people having good-faith discussions would recognize.

"Metaphysical" is a confused word. You don't have to include spiritual stuff in your model of the world (there's plenty of people who don't, and this doesn't seem to stop them from leading outwardly fulfilling lives!) but if you do, you're going to see it as no less "natural" than anything you'd include in your 'common sense natural world as depicted in everyday conversation or in a movie/book'. It's literally something that's part of the exact same web of cause-effect relations as what we all acknowledge as 'physical'. The metaphysical question is ultimately uninteresting and we don't need it to work with this stuff effectively.

Fair enough. Then would you say the spiritual plane that can be accessed or interacted with via these rituals, couldn't be fully described under the laws of physics as we currently know them?

(Obviously almost any phenomenon can't be fully described by the laws of physics in the sense that it's too complex to account for the location and state of every elementary particle involved. But I mean in the sense of introducing entirely new laws, or instances where the existing ones are overridden.)

Nope, I wouldn't necessarily say that. Just as there's many people who don't acknowledge the spiritual in their model of the world, there's many, many people who do very real magick using nothing more than the commonly acknowledged laws of physics! We generally call them scientists and engineers. And the kind of magick they customarily deal in (known, somewhat conventionally, as "natural magick") is probably the most powerful of all, at least wrt. its effects on the purely physical plane. Other, more spiritual kinds of magick then act in a strictly subsidiary role, to "fill in the gaps" and "augment" this work in ways that aren't generally overt or amenable to be described by some outward "law". I realize that this description will probably seem very frustrating to you if you're inclined to very literal thinking, but that's how this stuff works. It's silly and childish to expect that "spiritual" magick will ever substitute for effective science and engineering.

Yeah, to be honest, parts of this message I'm having trouble even parsing as information. If you've had/seen interactions like this where the other person just seemed too literal-minded, I'd ask you to think about whether your ability to explain it is also contributing. Maybe it's a bit of both. Certainly, I don't pretend this stuff is easy to explain to an outsider. But I think of people like the clearest defenders of Buddhism or Advaita Vedanta--Swami Sarvapriyananda has both Eastern and Western education and is an extraordinarily good popularizer of Advaita Vedanta, for example. I actually understand what they're saying and for the areas that simply can't be described in words, I understand the general bounding box of where the nonverbal insight needs to happen. (E.g., I don't know what it's like to be in a state of pure consciousness without thoughts, if that exists, so I can't understand that specific part of their argument.)

I don't think of myself as very literal-minded. I've spent hundreds of hours doing things like meditation and lucid dreaming and have experienced a range of states of consciousness. I'm even interested in very wild (but naturalist and law-bound) accounts of why subjective experience exists, like mind/body dualism and Russellian monism.

In this sense I appreciate people like psi researchers who at least overtly say "yes there are supernatural phenomena that go against the current laws of physics, we understand them very little if at all, but we're trying to get some initial data." I don't think they've ever succeeded, but at least I know how to have a conversation with them. But in other cases the answers just get bogged down in elliptical wording that I can't even understand, and I think that's what happened here.

The POV of psi researchers these days is more like "psi phenomena might or might not exist, but if they do exist they're mischievous enough that there's no way they're going to show up unambiguously in a rigorous controlled experiment!" In this sense the physical effects of higher or "spiritual" magick are indistinguishable from psi, and for the same reason they're most likely not going to impact our understanding of "the laws of physics".

Interesting take. It's analogous to religious arguments defending the idea of miracles. I don't say that in principle the world must be causally closed and bound by natural laws; only that it seems very likely, as it enough to explain an insanely huge ratio of what we already witness, and the quality of the evidence for other stuff is very low.

I just finished with a quick edit to my post to be more specific, but I suspect your answer would be similar either way.

I might agree, except I view it more productively as an argument defending the idea that the physical world can be inherently lawful ("bound by natural laws", in a very real sense) despite the common belief in miracles or magick! You don't have to renounce belief in the reality of physical laws just because you might also practice some ceremonial magick (or religious prayer, for that matter) - indeed, one can make very rigorous claims about just how much physical laws explain already.

Well, I can agree with all that, probably more so than 80%+ of other naturalists. Although naturalists tend to actually be pretty open to the powerful psychological effects that can happen via natural means, as you need that to explain things like alien abduction experiences, near-death experiences, etc. in natural terms, unless those people are literally all lying.

I'm going to punt on the first half, the second is emphatically true. Or the psychological effects could be desirable.

No one should recommend ceremonial magic and occult study, in my opinion. Anyone who 'should' be going down the rabbit hole can't be dissuaded.

But if you must, start with something like Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. Don't just pull out the Goetia and start summoning demons. Reality may or may not be mutable, but our perception of it certainly is. Would you really pick that as a first experiment?

> But if you must, start with something like Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. Don't just pull out the Goetia and start summoning demons. Reality may or may not be mutable, but our perception of it certainly is. Would you really pick that as a first experiment?

Maybe so, because my mind is so bull-headedly resistant to being modified (at least in the ways associated with occult stuff, like visions, extreme emotion, etc.) that maybe I need a dose of the hard stuff to even notice it ;)

As a naturalist I don't think I can sign on to the first half, even as a realistic possibility. But for psychological effects, sure, I could buy it. The ability of the mind to do get into pretty extreme psychological states, via ritual and otherwise, is easily underestimated.

In fact I would say many naturalists hold onto that argument harder than just about anyone, because it's critical to help explain the weird stuff people experience (e.g. alien abductions are often hypnagogic hallucinations or sleep paralysis, near-death experiences are due to various impaired brain states, etc.)

I’d put the case a little differently. If you say those who stumble down that path were “destined”, to such an extent that no human intervention is possible, then that very assertion will attract to that path those who already feel helpless and disempowered. Those are the very ones least able to manage that sort of path.

How about this? Do not invoke what you cannot dismiss. You cannot be certain that you can dismiss anything you invoke. Don’t be an idiot.

Or perhaps this. You are playing a first-person shooter. You can be seen by your adversaries, but the adversaries are invisible to you and you have no idea of their powers or weaponry. Sounds like a stupid game for which there are only stupid prizes.

There are many paths up the mountain. Don’t be an idiot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com