Why do people still practice Magick?

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One of the things I've found quite interesting for a while is what kinds of 'no go' zones our culture has in terms of thought and discussion. A primary example is in this area as it relates to models of the universe and consciousness.

For example if we take the notion seriously that 'Matter is unconscious' and apply it to everything in the universe then we have to admit to ourselves that our five senses, our memories, every story we tell ourselves, are complete fabrications because we're not really here and we're not really experiencing anything - we just 'think' we are.

Taking that a step further if we admit to ourselves that we are here and we are experiencing something but still adamantly claim that matter is essentially unconscious we're then in a place I like to call the Church of the Magic Neuron. It's a place where all matter is dead, however there's something magical/magickal about neurons. Unfortunately for as neat and complex as neurons might be they're just clusters of DNA, lipids, and various kinds of support structures like microtubules. There's nothing special about neurotransmitters, they're just molecules too.

So some scientists and philosophers who are in close with 'credible' science, like Thomas Nagel or Christof Koch, have decided that they're hanging their hat on some form of panpsychism, ie. the idea that matter is in some degree conscious or consciousness-capable at the atomic level (they'd just add, for credibility's sake) that it's impossible for a single atom to be conscious and that it needs a lot more complexity.

The problem with panpsychism - it's an emerging attempt to answer questions that couldn't be answered by reductive materialism by hanging their hat on atoms instead and unfortunately the more we study atoms the more we realize those are largely vapor as well, and then what - quarks or leptons are conscious?

This is part of why I've increasingly been a fan of neutral monism. It fits the situation better and points at a particular zone of inquiry rather than trying to hang its hat on some type of quantum process. Quantum biology is now of course a thing and people like Jim Al Khalili are constantly getting barraged by embarassing questions like 'Are you into divination?' when he gives lectures largely because the scientific community spent decades roundly beating up the idea that there are any quantum processes in consciousness and then, embarassingly, Jim was that guy who had to say 'No, we were wrong, birds have structures in their nervous systems that give them the capacity to read magnetic lines and follow them for their migration paths - and here's our experiments that prove as much'. Obviously quantum effects in bird brains or human brains don't answer any of the deep questions of what consciousness is, but it does show just how much stupidity, dogmatism, and ossification there is around the topic of what's possible or what could be at the root of consciousness.


And then, if I want to be a real obnoxious prick, I'll take this train of thought further and say - if consciousness is somewhere in the neutral monism vector, or in a Hillary Putnam type of functionalism where consciousness is what it does, does it make way more sense that our self-awareness as human beings not only wouldn't be special but wouldn't be particularly rare? Wouldn't it make way more sense if the universe is brimming with disconnected islands of self-awareness?

And if that model, which makes way more sense than reductive materialism, is correct - are we still saying that people are batshit crazy for believing that they can, through a sort of non-telecom type of setup, reach out to and contact broader forms of consciousness in the universe through invocation or evocation and have some degree of meaningful communication with them?

The popular answer would probably be 'Yes - because only stupid or crazy people believe that sort of thing. We know religion's BS and we know that the only reason anyone believes in that stuff at all is because they were raised by religion to believe it and if there was no religion it would go away'. It has nothing to do with any curiosity over what's actually true or not true but it has to be admitted - brow-beating and egotism are one heck of a social currency and you might as well not care what's true so long as what's not true is way more useful for social climbing and proving to other people with dogmatic opinions just how 'rational and with-it' you are.

Here's the tragic fate of King's Landing in a nutshell as best explained by Plankton from Spongebob Squarepants.



F is for fire that burns down the whole town!
U is for uranium.... bombs.
N is for No Survivors!

Nobody commented on my Spongebob reference to King's Landing being burned to the ground...

At least in developed countries like the US we're not burning "stupid' innocent people alive at the stake for practicing "magic" like in the old days. Although that might change if Mike Pence were to ever replace Donald Trump as president...

I bet he would round up every wannabe witch, homosexual, and non-Christian in this country and have us all burned as heretics if he could.

He surely can't be that bad can he?

Is there any GoT character who bears similarities to Pence?