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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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  • Weird Studies

    • Weird Studies/Crowley

    24 Feb 2023 - 23 Jul 2025
    Open in Logseq
      • On Aleister Crowley. Who is practically normie these days.
      • Magick as striving for wholeness, not purity (including the bad parts of self)
      • Crowley: Magick is for all, it sounds so funny to hear these democratic sentiments from someone like him.
      • "Every man and woman is a star" – interpreted in Aristotelean(?) sense, individuals are outside nature, autonomous...not actually sure what this means and it seems to slightly contradict other things here, about the continuity of the universe.
      • The discussion of science vs magick is kind of dumb, sorry. "Magick looks at every level of reality as equally real" – kind of Latourish, but it misunderstands science in the usual way. Drives me nuts.
      • I was impressed and surprised by the discussion of causality and synchronicity. JFM didn't believe in it because of mechanism issues, which really surprised me. I feel like they are on the verge of an insight, and I'm on the verge of the same one although coming via a different path – maybe that all semantic relations have this atemporal quality, where causality is not strightforward and mechanistic...not sure that's it, it's a fleeting image of a thought, at best.
      • Principle of Sufficient Reason etc. That stuff leaves me cold
      • Narrative theory of reality
      • Burroughs: Money is the worst thing you can ask for in magic. (56:45)
      • Minsky contra Crowley around 23:00 (???)
      • 39:00 irreduction
      • Any intentional act is a magical act
      • Science deals with quantity, magic deals with appearance and the qualitiative
      • Erik Davis: irreducible weirdness
      • fin