Magick Computers
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You are on this forum. This requires some new technologies, though not new in terms of the speed at which things can change these days—I remember the early 90's, when there was no web. There was telnet, ftp, pine & elm, and a late comer into that world, IRC.
I use computers all the time in my magickal work. It is where I record all of my magickal work. I also use Photoshop to create magickal images and related brick-a-brac. It cuts a cleaner line that I can, the colors are more brilliant, and with an Epson photo-grade printer, printing on high quality photo, ink-jet paper, it's hard to justify using actual paint and brushes anymore.
Typing and spell checking any associative work like dream interpretation or Qaballistic analysis is much better on a computer than trying to do it on paper with a pen or pencil. For one thing I can read what I wrote after the fact—my hand written notes are mystic ciphers in their own right.
There are numerous 'flash card' like computer and web-based games that help people learn correspondences.
I think that anything that can cause an honest reaction in its user is probably valid as a mystical/magickal aid, in some degree.
What I have some trouble with is the speculative desire to replace actual physical substances, and this includes physical contact between people, with digital information or digital messaging of some kind. Similarly, I doubt computers can actually receive astral impressions of any kind, despite the numerous ghost stories and movies claiming otherwise. If they receive and transmit any valid spiritual insight it is because a person with that insight put it their, or a randomizing program got lucky.
What do you imagine is possible in terms of the computer and spiritual practice?
Love and Will
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@Frater Aster Lux said
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@RobertAllen said
"........it is because......a randomizing program got lucky."Silly yes, but I suppose I imagined just that. A program that is supposed to be random, receives an "astral impression". What the interface is actually like, or what the program does, I don't know... but thats the gist of it."
I should have been clearer. Most programming languages, a step or two above machine code, have a random function. If not, you can write one for yourself if you have the programming chops. The reality is that these functions are not really random, they only appear random to the user. They are actually precise mathematical operations using a variable that is constantly changing, the internal clock of the computer for instance. If you knew the variables you could predict, or calculate the result.
@Frater Aster Lux said
"I haven't seen the flash card things you mention, but I haven't looked to be honest."
I was assuming such things were out there, like Anistara's online QBL game. If they don't exist, they will as soon as enough people want them.
@Frater Aster Lux said
"As I mentioned above though, I think it would be interesting to use a computer as part of a magical ritual. Maybe conjure a spirit to possess one, and unleash it via the internet!
on second thought, maybe this is starting to sound a bit like a scary movie."
There is or was a great book, imo, by Arthur C. Clarke called Profiles of the Future. In it he carefully and lovingly attempts to predict what science will and will not be able to do. Everything is covered—star drives, time travel, invisibility, and so on. What makes it a great book is that he is fair about his judgments—even if we don't know how to do something now, like create temporary worm holes, if there is no absolute reason why it might not be possible in some distant future, he gives it a thumbs up. It's an old book, but it has aged well. Attempting to reply in the attitude of Clarke, I see several problems in your creative fantasies.
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If the computer seem willful and somehow to have a soul, that perception can only be an illusion. We project the fantasy of animate soul into things, that's what humans do. This tendency of ours to do this makes our relationship with computers suspect, especially if we start to imagine it is possessed by spirits. William Gibson, I think, wrote a story where the Voudoun Loa had invaded the Internet. This is kind of a cool idea, but that coolness doesn't excuse it from being a fantasy.
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Computers are products of science, and until science itself opens up in unexpected ways, a computer will be limited by that paradigm. Because of the speed and complexity of the functions that a personal computer can perform it is easy to loose sight of the fact that digital is little more than a lot of purely mechanical actions. It seems to me the first step in transcending this limitation would be the viable creation of artificial intelligence. No one knows how this will be possible. I suspect most researchers can only still imagine a scenario where the mathematical processes are so complicated that there is only really the appearance of intelligence. In other words, if we knew the variables and the math we could calculate the answer with certainty, though it would take us a lot longer to do this manually.
At this point I see two possibilities for genuine mystical/mgickal applications: interface, and games.
Interface design is here now. It will get very sophisticated very fast from this point forward. So, suppose you had a system that is so sensitive it could read your most subtle, physical, even electromagnetic impulses? It could function in this instance like a pendulum, or some other auguring device. This might have an application that is definitely occult! The obvious criticism is that the real operative is still the human being, not the machine itself. And also, if this very sophisticated device can give shape to inner psychic processes, similar to how a pendulum has been used in the past, the question has to be asked: why spend a lot of money on such a system when you can get, more of less the same thing for a few buck at any store specializing in traditional occult items, in other words, an actual pendulum?
But suppose science admits the existence of something that is for all intents and purposes the equivalent of our astral plane, and they figure out how to measure it and receive messages from it. Then you could expect devices that are in fact able to register these forces, and computer interfaces and programs that would give graphic shape and voice to them as well. Like many things, in time it would probably do a better job than any human agent because it is a machine and not susceptible to 'bad hair days' like its human counterpart. But this is a myth as well, since anyone who works with technology can tell you, technology can be just as cranky and prone to glitches as any human. Also, by imagining this possibility I am also criticizing it, because I am simply reproducing a relationship that already exists in practice. The scrying of John Dee and Edward Kelly is little more than this, where Kelly is the receiving device and Dee the operator. Maybe we will use this machine someday in the future, but right now nothing should stop us in the present if we are committed to doing this kind of work.
Games are a whole other ball of wax, imho. These are real, complex systems, but they require people to play them before they can yield any real results. There is still the limitation of the machine in this regard, but the interconnectedness of many users more than makes up for this limitation. Online games connect people who are otherwise separate, sometime by many thousands of miles. This is a good and bad thing. It is especially bad if you you subscribe to the importance of physical proximity in order for psychic energy to be shared, collected, and manipulated in some meaningful way, as I do. Other practical problems include the tendency for game development, at present, to be dominated by purely financial motivations—it's advantageous for Blizzard to create a gaming experience that will monopolize all your time and keep you paying monthly subscription fees. This can put a serious dent in your ability to perform the Great Work! Still, there is this very real, very tantalizing potential in what a game is and what it might do for the players.
Love and Will
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"Is it possible to channel magic/psychic energies into a computer? Could computers be used somehow to scry, or communicate with "spirits", like a crystal ball?"
I have a audio collection of over 10,000 songs/titles on my Itunes program. When I irst installed the program and my files, I saw a function called shuffle. This function suffles through your files and creates a "random" playlist of sorts. I have been a long time fan of using the radio for divination, sounds, songs, static and divining meaning from these random bits of inforamtion.
I have found that this suffle is a fantastic tool, and have been able to fine tune it, in other ways which include the lenght of the file (time ie 2 minutes and 18 seconds).
For the past 5 years or so I have had better results with this method then my tradtional Bibliomancy.
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I think there are at least three considerations here:
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The soul of technology—basically it's place on the Tree and the God ultimately behind it, Thoth-Hermes-Mercury...
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Are computers in themselves viable things that can be used to make talismans—mostly plastic with some metals, shielded for the most part from atmospheric electrical fields and rogue electrical charges...
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Willfulness, or the propensity to be possessed by alien intelligences, not us. Of course, this happens all the time—malicious viruses; internet browsing, downloading media and email; and the use of external devices. But the question here is whether this can happen in a more disembodied fashion—a spirit taking control of the computer and causing it to behave in novel and unexpected ways.
I'm blanking on the names of the artists, but I heard them talk at a panel at UCI last year. They use sophisticated filtering software to search for patterns in white noise and visual snow. These patterns resolve themselves into audible words or recognizable images. In a way they are exploring this thesis, that the computer can be a vehicle for disembodied intelligences—communications from another dimension. It should be mentioned though, that these messages tend not to add up to anything of importance. To isolate a sequence of sounds that resemble the sound of someone saying the word 'razzle' is not very impressive, neither are the numerous face-like images that can easily be isolated from an apparently random screen of monitor snow—the visual equivalent of white noise.
If I can find the names of these artists I will post them. As I recall, they were eager to assert claims along the lines of spiritualism—that these were in fact voices and images of the dead.
Love and Will
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I have seen a couple of dramas and horror movies with this theme....
that one is called white noise.
The horror movie about the spirits coming throught the college students pc, and printers....
Gosh I cant recall the title right now.
it was scary:)edit: it was called Pulse.
I'll look throught my library and find it, but there are a few other movies that deal with that theme.
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EVP, reverse speech.
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@Vlad said
"EVP, reverse speech."
The artists are Paul Woodrow and Alan Dunning.
This is a link to something about their work:
escholarship.org/uc/item/7hm6h6q2#page-1Specifically, look at something called Ghost in the Machine and Electronic Voice Phenomenon, or EVP. It's very artsy and technical...
I don't think it proves anything other than that we are very good at creating order in, and through, our perceptions—this doesn't mean that order is really out there, whatever 'out there' is. Still, it's very suggestive and may rock someones boat.
Love and Will
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@RobertAllen said
"Still, it's very suggestive and may rock someones boat.
Love and Will"
Got that rightJust record your own voice and listen to it backwards, do it a few times. If nothing else, it's funny.
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@RobertAllen said
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I'm blanking on the names of the artists, but I heard them talk at a panel at UCI last year. They use sophisticated filtering software to search for patterns in white noise and visual snow. These patterns resolve themselves into audible words or recognizable images."Wow. Do you remember the name of the UCI talk? Lon Duquette touches on this subject in his Book of Ordinary Oracles. Tim Leary said 30 years ago that the Mouse = Fire, Display = Water, CPU = Air, and Hard Drive = Earth.
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@Middleman said
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@RobertAllen said
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I'm blanking on the names of the artists, but I heard them talk at a panel at UCI last year. They use sophisticated filtering software to search for patterns in white noise and visual snow. These patterns resolve themselves into audible words or recognizable images."Wow. Do you remember the name of the UCI talk? Lon Duquette touches on this subject in his Book of Ordinary Oracles. Tim Leary said 30 years ago that the Mouse = Fire, Display = Water, CPU = Air, and Hard Drive = Earth."
It was annual DAC conference: Digital Arts and Culture. And it was actually in 2009, not 2010. There were a lot of speakers, but only the two artists I mentioned spoke on the subject cited in my quote within your quote, above. I doubt you would find most of the other papers of much interest.
But the link I provided, several posts back, is to the DAC archive. The link links directly to the paper delivered by Woodrow, and Dunning. Here it is again:
escholarship.org/uc/item/7hm6h6q2#page-1Love and Will
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@Frater Aster Lux said
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Quite simply, I was wondering if any one had ever thought to use a computer (any kind of computer) in an aspect of their magick... Also, how they have thought to do this?"
My interest in computers was born of the possibility of using them to calculate gematria at a time when there was almost no software available of any sort, so I had to learn to program, and I still do. I have written countless programs for analyzing the text of the Book of the Law in unusual ways. The current gematria program I use is quite remarkable in what it shows from any number of perspectives. The most significant thing I have done, and one of the simplest, is write a program that counts the occurrences of letters in the Book of the Law, which I currently using as the basis for an English gematria system.
I also started writing I-Ching programs many years ago, and recently wrote one that I use for divination. I am of the opinion that pressing a key on a computer to generate a hexagram is essentially the same as tossing coins or sticks to generate one. The program will also generate hexagrams at random, a function that I use in a 'hands-off' approach by concentrating on the question until a new hexagram is generated.
" Is it possible to channel magic/psychic energies into a computer? Could computers be used somehow to scry, or communicate with "spirits", like a crystal ball? Maybe new computer programs could be developed for this reason. I'm sure there may be other applications, but stuff like this should give an example of what I mean.
"I can think of several applications that might be developed. Imagine a program that creates high resolution images similar to fractal art that utilizes specific numeric patterns and colors to generate images on a large monitor screen; it could work similar to dark mirror techniques for skrying.
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It tickles me to be reminded of Isaac Bonewits illustration on page 29 of "Real Magic."
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@Heru-pa-kraath said
"I can think of several applications that might be developed. Imagine a program that creates high resolution images similar to fractal art that utilizes specific numeric patterns and colors to generate images on a large monitor screen; it could work similar to dark mirror techniques for skrying."
Suppose an honest attempt were made to use magickal theory and custom to realize something along these lines, what sympathies make sense, which god would be behind the operation?
Example: the oracle of Zeus at Dodona was actuated by listening to the sound of the leaves of an oak tree in the wind. The oak is sacred to Zeus, so the connection is obvious and consistent with sound magickal practice.
I can think of several possibilities. The rational, mathematical side of the computations would suggest Apollo; the networked, communications side of it would suggest Hermes; the 'rich' abstract, colorful life of fractal art suggests Hades, or possibly Hephaestus...
Love and Will
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Devil's advocate.
@Frater Aster Lux said
"It's true that we project those ideas onto our most cherished items (and pets)... but what makes our perception of ourselves (or people we know) any more real?"
Nevertheless, you are talking magick, and there are rules and considerations in that mindset. So stay on topic and stay on task. If you want to make a creative departure from a given system, be clear about that—the why and the how. As of now there is some vague fantasy about the possibilities and very little definition.
@Frater Aster Lux said
" RobertAllen wrote:1. The soul of technology—basically it's place on the Tree and the God ultimately behind it, Thoth-Hermes-Mercury...
I think it would be on the bottom, with all material things."
All things are in Malkuth, after a fashion, but I was referring to something else—the spiritual, or magickal underpinnings of the manifested reality. In other words, if a god were responsible for the invention called computer, who would it be? Which deity is most flattered by such a thing? I'm talking planets, elements, zodiac signs, anything that would definitely place it in one camp or another.
@Frater Aster Lux said
"Maybe someone with an Iphone could use an app to draw one, consecrate it, carry it around, and let us know? I think it would be interesting to consider whether or not a computer could create sigils, or other "random" glyphs or things (strings of words, numbers, etc) while in the presence of "magical" energy."
Okay, so what are the very practical, very magickal considerations to this proposal? If we are honest with ourselves we will be on guard to spot those gestures born out of laziness and reject that motivation—go back to the old candle, book, and bell. But suppose we are just curious, a valid reason for any experiment, we should ask ourselves what an Iphone is really made of, will it easily take the charge of the given element or planet we are working with, or not at all? Does it matter? If not, why?
@Frater Aster Lux said
"Do our tarot cards work because a native spirit possesses them? Many people in the occult community are torn on this issue, and most people say it doesn't matter how you look at it. "
This sentiment begins to undo the rationale, motivation and all, of why a computer would be a plausible magickal agent. Because, if you can do all of what you propose and imagine with simple tarot cards, yarrow stalks, pendulums, or whatever, why bother with the computer?
Love and Will
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@Alrah said
"I'm fascinated by the idea of quantum computers, which seem to come from a much more organic root - a range of quantum states rather than an on/off gate. And the idea keeps intiguing me because what will it's diagnostics see if there's a spike down the line or the computer isn't limited by a one in 7 choice but can choose various combinations of the 7? Will it develop a basic conciousness by that method? Start theorising about God perhaps in a primal sort of way?"
It's curious that quantum computers are promoted as simply more complex than regular computers. This might be an over simplification on my part, but it is what I understand from the articles I have read. When and if they succeed in building one it will be interesting to see what this exponential jump in computing power will mean, and what philosophical problems it might unleash. Maybe there is a threshold level of complexity, once breached, opens some kind of rift in a systems ability to understand.
In the news these last few days was the super computer Watson that recently beat two previous human champions on the trivia game show, Jeopardy. (Watson in not a quantum computer, they don't exist yet.) NPR had some discussion about the implications of the event, and on one such show the experts were at pains to denounce the computers achievements in light of the fact that, despite the impressive showing in terms of voice recognition and apparent understanding of the questions, really did not understand!
This thread begins to move in another direction with this notion introduced by Alrah. Deep waters.
I have two thoughts and references here: The analogy given by James A. Eshelman in one of the introductory chapters of Visions and Voices; and the speculative 'scientific' mysticism of the French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard De Chardin.
In Visions and Voices Eshelman compares humans and computers, asserting a similarity between us, at least as far up the tree as Binah. At this point the comparison ends—we have Chokmah and Kether, the machine does not. My apologies if I mangle the analogy by taking it out of context, but I found the assertion that a computer also had Binah something a puzzle. I might not get exactly what Jim was implying by his attribution, but my best understand was that the computer actually had some sort of understanding (Binah), which is a soul quality—the capacity for depth, imho. I can only disagree with this attribution as I understand it, because like the experts on the NPR talk shows, I don't think the computer has any depth of understanding—the quality and beauty of its soul does not accrue as it experiences the struggles, disappointments, losses, and deaths that make up life. I also have difficulty imaging a computer, no matter how sophisticated functioning intuitively. In this I see one of the great hurdles, yet to be overcome in the quest for true AI, the capacity for real understanding—a genuine appreciation bordering on an intuitive grasp of the significance of its knowledge—not just surface facts, but depth of feeling and appreciation for those facts.
Chardin's thesis suggests a way out perhaps. Again, I apologize for not fully understanding the implications of his thought or the original intent of his terms and writings. I have only read him in translation and then only a few articles, and only one book. But as I understand it his concept runs something like this: Consciousness does not derive from a threshold moment—there never was a magic moment when systems were so complex they magically achieved the ability to be self-aware. By contrast, according to Chardin, matter is inherently conscious already—the smallest, most illusive particle is aware of itself, as is everything that is of the cosmos. If this is true, then even the stuff of computers partakes of this cosmic-consciousness. It simply lacks the ability to think for itself, and also to put one moment of cosmic consciousness together with the next moment to produce the conscious memory of the continuity of it's persistence in time and space. In other words, despite the technical presence of computer memory, it still doesn't really remember that it was, just a brief moment before. It forgets because this experience has no means of making a sensible impression on the organism.
But enter the quantum computer. It is significant that one of the biggest problems that will have to be overcome for this to happen is the problem of shielding. Being an operation at the quantum level, the risk of interaction with other quantum phenomenon is all but probable, which means any operation will be corrupted by these other influences. Does this suggest an interconnected, conscious reality that might be given some sort of heightened existential experience of itself if isolated from its otherwise promiscuous relationship with the rest of reality—maybe something of a Chokmah/Kether moment?
I'm going to stop here because I have no idea where I'm going with this. I can only be suggestive in fields in which I am not expert. I do this a lot, but in this instance the gap between what I'm saying and what I know is exponentially greater than it usually is.
Mea Culpa, I'm about to hit the 'submit' button.
Love and Will