I believe in some things some might call "pseudoscientific bullshit", yet I'd like to think I'm thoughtful about it.
@Ulfra_Wolfe same, although I feel that the word "believe" is somewhat stretched here. Merely because I find value in a concept doesn't mean I "believe" in it, in the conventionally understood way.
@codeawayhaley @Ulfra_Wolfe I just don't think that strict atheism is really tenable. You're basically telling everyone in the world who's ever had a spiritual or religious experience, "You were just hallucinating or fucked in the head, it doesn't mean a thing." Sure, that can be shaped into an intellectually consistent philosophy but, holy heck, it's not one I want to get anywhere near, not any more
@kara_dreamer @Ulfra_Wolfe yeah it is pretty repulsive and bleek as a philosphy, and really the reason I moved away from atheism was it was totally inconsistant with what I had experienced.
@codeawayhaley @kara_dreamer They said to believe in myself, and I did, to an extreme. XD It turned into something entirely new.
@Ulfra_Wolfe Take, for example, my growing curiosity about devising a personal alchemy. One person's "pseudoscience" is another person's deeply felt mythology--at long as it's acknowledged AS mythology, and not as a statement about the nature of physical reality.
@kara_dreamer @Ulfra_Wolfe Alchemy is made up of two fields one being modification of ones soul, the other is what likely evolved into early chemistry.
@codeawayhaley @Ulfra_Wolfe I want to learn more about the second aspect, truthfully, especially the work of the Muslim alchemists. They seem to have been a lot more systematic than the Western practitioners, and gave us a lot of our chemical terminology
@kara_dreamer @codeawayhaley First steps might be the cited works here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy_and_chemistry_in_medieval_Islam#Alchemists_and_works
@kara_dreamer @Ulfra_Wolfe The first aspect of Alchemy is actually one of the aspects that turning a human to vampyre involves as the process is merging their tutelary angel and demon into themselves (often with the assistance of a vampyre, most often a prima or a vampyre created from an angel in physical form)
@kara_dreamer @codeawayhaley @Ulfra_Wolfe
I will say you'd be remiss to overlook the Daoist alchemists as well :) especially if you are more interested in internal alchemy.
Sufi alchemy is very interesting, i rather like like pouring over Avicenna in general though :3
@Irick @codeawayhaley @Ulfra_Wolfe you're better informed than I am then! can you recommend any sourcebooks
@kara_dreamer @codeawayhaley @Ulfra_Wolfe
I'd recommend getting a translation of the Hui-Ming Ching (it's less crazy symbolic) and Understanding Reality by Chang Po-tuan (crazy symbolic, but foundational and beautiful)
@kara_dreamer
Actually, it wasn't too hard to find them, here: Hui-Ming Ching is the second work on this page: http://www.rexresearch.com/goldflwr/goldflwr.htm and here is a translation of Understanding Reality: https://terebess.hu/english/Cleary-Thomas-Understanding-Reality-by-Chang-Po-tuan.pdf
@Irick @kara_dreamer OMG KARA, thank you for channeling lrick's message. Daoist mysticism is interesting to me since I have been getting into yijing! Thank you for the content, lrick, I am anxious to get reading!
@Filene @kara_dreamer
:D
I'm glad I could aid your Craft!
@Filene @Irick ah, glad to be a conduit :] I try to keep my eye open to what my familiar @kel likes to call xer magickal "shinies", although for xem a powerful magickal "shiny" might be, for example, a piece of costume jewelry found by chance lying in the street. but texts and authorities also count
@kara_dreamer @kel @Irick Collectors of useful arcana!!!<3
@kara_dreamer @Filene @kel
Found objects are some of the most powerful ones! At least as far as Oberon Zell-Ravenheart seems concerned. :3
*Has the power of making everything about books*
@kara_dreamer @Ulfra_Wolfe this is even true of textbook physics
@kara_dreamer @Ulfra_Wolfe
Yeah, I've been building an entire personal woo system that on the surface resembles psuedoscience. So much of my research involved other "theories" that were often direct refutations of current science in favor of dictating a different physics.
Only difference with mine is that I'm not trying to do that. :-)
I'd rather build a fiction that includes my alternate universe physics (and metaphysics), and practice that as my own truth.
@emanate @Ulfra_Wolfe I was trying to think of a hypothetical example of a "pseudoscience" or old, refuted scientific model that could nevertheless be reimagined as a source of metaphysical meaning...I can just about glimpse, for example, using the long-discredited phlogiston model as a way to assign magickal meaning to substances.
@kara_dreamer @Ulfra_Wolfe Mine's aether. In the original sense, from early models of electricity, it was the proposed medium that light and electric particles traveled through.
Basis in science history, spun off into broader stroke: aether is the 4th dimension (spatially, not counting time), explains magnetism, electrons leave traces in it. Thoughts are electronic, so thoughts and idea leave more complex traces...etc.
@kara_dreamer @Ulfra_Wolfe "All models are wrong, but some of them are useful?" Fair enough. :P
@Angle @Ulfra_Wolfe concisely put ^^
@Angle @Ulfra_Wolfe @kara_dreamer
This is something that pops up in Robert Anton Wilson's philosophies: the concept of "model agnostic".
The idea being that any model of the universe and how the universe works is both incomplete and also contains useful truths. The challenge is to not mistake any model for the universe as a whole.
I'm sorta that? Except for, like, crafting my own model out of raw aether.
@emanate @Angle @Ulfra_Wolfe right! a scientist is compelled to reject models according to how closely they conform to observable, material reality, but there _are_ other lenses for viewing reality other than strict materialism and positivism. I can assign meaning to (say) a rainbow even though the strict materialist will say, "that's just light coming from a certain direction".
@Ulfra_Wolfe @emanate @kara_dreamer Define meaning? Even materialists are allowed to think rainbows are pretty. :P
@Angle @Ulfra_Wolfe @kara_dreamer I think in the context of this chat "meaning" is more something ascribed past just rainbows being pretty.
I mean...why /are/ there so many songs about rainbows?
@kara_dreamer @Ulfra_Wolfe @Angle @emanate
"Rainbows are pretty because the rain god loves us" is a more specific example.
@Angle @emanate @Ulfra_Wolfe well, for example, the image of the rainbow as a sign of hope after a catastrophe is a powerful one. One thinks of Noah, of course, and of the rainbow at the end of Wagner's _Das Rheingold_.
@kara_dreamer @Angle @Ulfra_Wolfe Yeah, exactly! I've built a Machine, and it's made out of...all this assigned meaning, and runs on attention. Which are integral parts of my imagined cosmology. So it's self-supporting, and I can look back to the historic point where electricity was /mystical/, and take that forward.
@kara_dreamer @Ulfra_Wolfe
I use to be a super athiest but honestly that was exhausting and I was constantly fighting with my desire to believe in something but nowadays I find comfort in my beliefs...