Scientific/Philosophical Materialism

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The way I see it with this stuff - to really get in at it you have to be willing to look at everything from reductive materialism-adjacent material to some of the seemingly wackiest new age and NDE stuff, then out to occult and esoteric traditions, and yes, at various different models of reductive materialism as well, and look for the gaps in connection where you see that people - for whatever reason - simply aren't asking the questions that they should be. IMHO there's probably far more low-hanging fruit in this area for people who are willing to do the analysis, it's almost embarrassing to feel like I know more than so many people in this area and I consider that a problem - ie. where people don't know a terrain or choose to ignore it - if there's anything like human hopes, needs, or dreams commonly camped out in that area then you're really set up, just by how Darwinian evolution and market pressures work, to have such a jumble of weeds and snake oil after a while that hardly anyone wants to try going over there and cleaning it up.

The good news on that last part - that clean-up does at least seem to be somewhat underway, and I think the internet is helping with that a lot because people who are asking the right questions can run into each other more and compare notes and they are having increasingly powerful meta-conversations. Adrian Nielson (metarRising / Waking Cosmos) has a lot of great guests in the context of academic philosophy surrounding non-materialist and materialism-adjacent worldviews, if it's traditional western esotericism Alex F (Glitch Bottle) has a great series of interviews as does Gordon White (Rune Soup) on chaos magic and postmodern philosophy, and I tend to look at a lot of what these people are doing as explorations of the kind of probability space that John Vervaeke often talks about as being so large that it's practically unmappable.

For almost anyone who practices or works with western or eastern esotericism at any serious level they're first and foremost, just because it's the most proximate thing anyway, working on getting a good map of their own subconscious and unconscious minds, what comes from where, how their own emotions, inner voice, hypnogogic information, etc. seems to work. Similarly if you're actually doing magical workings one of the things you're also trying to figure out is what to make of what happens - clearly you're sending quite powerful suggestions to your subconscious mind, IMHO in a lot of important ways that can be almost as effective as LSD or psilocybin in getting under the usual barriers that prevent healing from trauma and the like but with the tools of esotericism admittedly it's a little more challenging (used together though? unstoppable). From there, when you really feel like you have a great grasp on 'this is my internal content' or 'this is what it looks like to conjure up something that another side of my own mind that I don't see answers back with' vs. 'that's an external entity' or 'wow, that wasn't apophenia, that was such a powerful raft of synchronicities that I can put 60,000 non-coincidenced a day times every day I've lived in the denominator and it's still a stupidly big number' - there as well you have to be careful because you have to be really conservative about what conclusions you can draw. For example if we feel like we validated that 'reincarnation memories' are a real thing and somehow we knew that psi was at least in some way tied to this, it would take a lot to rule out that it isn't someone's forming mind having made contact with some other layer of nature that we don't know (possibility - the 'no-hiding theorem' seems to postulate a huge subspace where information gone from physicality would go and it could be possible for minds in certain states to siphon that back in) then there's some possibility that it's still something quite interesting but not exactly what it looks like at first glance.

I think that's probably the biggest tragedy in this area - ie. people have allergies to pretty much all of it under the assumption that it's BS and it's BS because, as far as they can tell, it's an impenetrable wall of fraud and self-delusion. IMHO it's fair to say that there's been plenty of that, but even to just start out there and try to figure out what it tells us about what we're made of, like for example would our subconsious minds lie to us about absolutely anything at all, as persuasively as possible, ie. anything to keep us alive? Would they perhaps not 'lie' but take certain kinds of information that's there and use it in far more practical and self-interested ways than many people's truth-seeking could handle? Also thinking about the tail end of that last question, is it possible that there are more layers of game theory to reality than just Darwinian evolution and making the cut of getting your genes into the next generation? If so what kinds of things can we learn about those other intersecting layers by looking at how human subconsiousness interacts with the discursively self-aware portions of the mind like that which we're using to communicate, think, and reason right now? And then, obviously the most sexy part of all of this - is there anything to exceptional human experiences that would suggest to us, if nothing else, that even just the root fundamentals of consciousness (putting aside identity for a moment) actually come from a deeper layer of reality than neurons and neurochemicals? For that latter question my opinion would be yes and it has a lot to do with certain kinds of leverage on reality that shouldn't be there if it weren't the case, and I've had a lot of exceptional experiences that I've sorted through quite a bit and there are at least a half dozen that I debate with myself on as to whether they were right brain interacting with left brain (ie. Iain McGilchrist territory) or whether they were something more profound, and while it's still vogue to psychologize all of it (ty Israel Regardie) I've only found so much of it that really answers to suggestion.

That last part of course is what makes the things Donald Hoffman is up to so interesting - ie. why not use the 'hard problem' as a hatchet for another Einsteinian revolution and see if we can even get further under the math? We already have top brass in physics saying that space-time isn't fundamental, I don't know if it's all of the physics community agreeing on that yet but I ever hear the hardened skeptics agreeing (often from the standpoint that if you can't examine below Plank distance without creating black holes then all of this has to be resting on something else). I try to imagine the stagnation we'd be in if people pejoratize perfectly good data for too long because they don't like the social implications or social associations of who'd like the way the data looks - ie. it's a really strange way to look at things and it's a great way to stop scientific progress and growing our understanding of the universe for the sake of winning certain kinds of political and tribal battles in a pre-defined way that was based on knowledge that we didn't have yet.

I'm heartened as well to think, and again it's one of the benefits of smart people networking online or getting to know that it's acceptable to examine edgy or controversial data, that you're allowed to do it so long as you're willing to remain conservative enough with your estimates of what that data means that you keep your editorials and hypotheses just that, keep the facts moving forward by way of experiment, and then be a student of the facts whose willing to let those facts as they progress amend their worldview rather than perpetually attempt to shoehorn that data into a pre-defined worldview when constant addition of epicycles is needed to make that work (unfortunately the temptation isn't just there for cranks, there are institutional issues as well which tend toward group think that can even close out or demote other reductive materialist hypotheses without the merit for that motion being what it should be). That said I do think there will be a revolution in our lifetimes in how we view consciousness, possibly as well how we view matter and universe, but I'd also add that it'll remain hard-nosed and scientific in the way it needs to be - something I think Hoffman explained very well in that interview I shared - ie. that if your story contradicts itself then you already know it's not cohesive and you constantly have to check your story for contradictions, and constantly try to break the parts that you feel most comfortable with to see if there are places where observable reality fails to close on that given assumption.

Branding advice: if you don't want to be viewed as new age esotericism, don't call your field 'chaos magic'.

On a side note - I think if you were interested in looking at it - you'd probably want to start off with the academic works on western esotericism. One good place to start might be Access to Western Esotericism by Antione Faivre but there are others out there. I mentioned reading Eros and Magic in the Renaissance by Ioan Couliano, he was a professor at University of Chicago back in the 80's and early 90's, unfortunately he got assassinated over something to do with Romanian politics.

Something else worth adding perhaps, and I'm thinking of it because I'm in conversation with some people right now about this stuff, there's a few different levels I like to think of it from.

In the 'world as we typically think of it' I think of esotericism as sort of a Linux/Ubuntu open-sourcing of your own meme-plexes, and I think the most concise way to phrase that - which I believe I've heard both Robert Kegan and Jordan Peterson use for it (ie. psychology parlance) is 'self-authoring', and I'd add building your own immunity or resistance to psychological malware. IMHO that's probably the most immediately powerful way to use it.

The other side of it, and anymore I really like to think of it from the starting point of Donald Hoffman's network of conscious agents, what do the laws of physics rest on, what do they integrate with, and what kinds of rare state, evolutionarily invisible, layers are there that we don't know about which could help clarify or improve our relationships with ourselves, others, and the physical world we inhabit? On one hand we have consciousness, on the other we have a physical world that we're not used to being responsive to it, and yet a lot of people - I'd almost say most - notice glitches in what happens that don't fit expected behavior of the world - at least if we had the complete story of what it is and how it's built. Some cases, like someone saying they put their keys down and they fell through a table onto the floor, do fit into rare case of quantum Darwinism (ie. put your keys down so many times and it's not impossible for it to at least happen once). There's also what David Chalmers has been talking about with his particular breed of dualism - ie. that emergences yields observers that can turn around and cause emergence, and strangely when I think about that that runs right back to Eric Weinstein's take on the hand that draws itself (invoking MC Escher) as his model of how both the playing field and the stands (in his 14-dimensional model). I don't know for sure if there's a direct link between Eric and David are thinking about this, my guess is that conversation at least wouldn't happen because Eric as far as I can tell tends to avoid conversing about consciousness and perhaps, I'm guessing, because he has some type of very novel view that he doesn't feel comfortable expressing.