n every Aeon, magicians have borrowed from the paradigms of their native cultures

when they felt the need to explain how magic worked. Thus in shamanic times,

magicians assumed that they somehow interacted with the animistic essences intrinsic

to natural phenomena, plants, animals and people. This idea finds perhaps its fullest

development in the classical Greek doctrine of Platonism where all outward forms which

manifest to our senses, merely reflect, somewhat imperfectly, certain ideals which

reside in some sort of superior realm. Thus all observable cats reflect, to varying

degrees of perfection, some sort of cosmic feline principle. To the modern mind this

looks rather like an excessive fascination with the ability of the human mind to form

abstract concepts. Nevertheless Platonism, and its fuller flowering as Neo-Platonism,

had a profound influence on magical and religious thought for two thousand years. Early

Christianity initially incorporated neo-platonic ideas wholesale, and its traces remain in

the Orthodox ideas of Christ as the Logos and in the sanctity and power of icons. In the

Catholic Church, the doctrine of literal transubstantiation and the veneration of relics

remains an influence. Despite the philosophical and monotheistic gloss, such ideas hark

back to animistic ideas like eating the hearts of brave warriors to acquire their powers.

Alchemy arose as a quest to find the essences of things. It would have seemed quite

reasonable to the medieval mind to try to distill the essential principle of Metal out of

lead or mercury, or the essential principle of Generation out of menstrual blood. Of

course none of this seems to have got very far until some alchemists had the humility to

observe the actual rather than the imagined and abstract- idealized qualities of various

types of base matter.Animistic style thinking still colours the way all humans think, we all

still have to weigh up any phenomenon from the idea of an atom to our ideas of a

particular a person in terms of similes and metaphors and analogies, what powers it

has, and what else it resembles. In other words we want to know what something ‘is’, to

give us some kind of a handle on it. For the purposes of manipulating the world by

physical means, such animistic thinking does not work very well if you restrict your

vocabulary of analogies and archetypes to such abstractions as earth, air, fire and

water. Adding Aether does not help much and adding the sephiroth of the cabbala or the

signs of the zodiac just multiplies the illucidity. To manipulate the material world

indirectly you need something far simpler and more basic than the earth, air, fire, and

water concepts. You need something so simple that you will often find it very difficult to

see it in the seemingly complex real world. You will need an abstraction based on an

idea so mind-numbingly trivial that you can easily Discount it, (pun intended). You will

need mathematics, either intuitively to throw a stone, or formally to hurl a rocket to the

moon.However when it comes to interacting with the world directly (by magic), the

animistic style of thinking may have advantages. If we assume that the mind or the

complex functions of the brain can somehow, and to some extent, mesh directly with the

world to find things out or to influence them, then we have a mapping problem, or what

magicians call the problem of the magical link. How can something inside of our heads

have any kind of one to one correlation with the phenomena outside? This problem has

bothered philosophers since the inception of their profession. We have imperfect

senses, but when we enhance them with careful observations or machines the problem

just gets worse because we then begin to see an awesome complexity in the simplest of

things.Thus we inevitably must resort to some kind of conscious analogical modeling of

the phenomena in our reality because our conscious minds cannot digitize anything but

the simplest of our experiences, although our unconscious minds may have a greater

ability to do this. The unconscious mind plainly stores vastly more information than it

makes available to the conscious mind. When you meet an old friend your

subconscious immediately confirms their identity through matching hundreds of their

features which you could not consciously describe, let alone sketch from conscious

memory.Animistic style thinking can thus offer a useful kind of data compression.

Assuming that one cannot consciously remember enough for a decent magical link then

a classification in terms of say an earthy/aquatic nature with jupiterian influences

moderated by the sign of Sagittarius might serve as a sigilistic type of shorthand for

interacting with the target event by psychic means. However for this kind of thing to

work the operator must maintain a pretty tidy and unequivocal symbol system. Modern

people rarely do this, they think too much.Animistic systems rarely have explicit models

of a purely animistic ‘extra dimension’ or whatever, through which the powers inherent in

physical phenomena act on the world. Where such animistic dimensions exist they tend

to become identified either with alternative states of consciousness that the shaman

induces by various means, or with some sort of spirit realm.The hypothesis of spirits

arises naturally out of the human propensity to form a ‘self image’ and a ‘theory of mind’.

We would find it almost impossible to live without a self image. Somehow we have to

develop a model of ourselves inside of our heads so that we can separate our

perceptions into those relating to self and to those relating to the outside world. As we

develop, our self image becomes more sophisticated as we incorporate abstract

concepts into it, and we become very dependant upon it to structure our lives, we

cannot imagine its absence and so we may come to believe that it must exist as an

immortal soul. You can turn off the self image with certain mystical practices or large

doses of hallucinogens, and then you seem to become everything that you perceive, the

object placed in your hand becomes part of your body; you become one with the tree in

your field of vision, or with a religious notion in your thoughts. People with a seriously

impaired self image cannot act effectively in the world and we regard them as mad. We

would also find it very difficult to deal with our personal worlds if we did not, at an early

age, develop the hypothesis that other people had intentions and perceptions that their

actual behavior often conceals or only partially reveals. Autistic people seem to lack this

ability to various degrees of severity.Our inbuilt propensity to form a self image and a

theory of mind leads quite naturally to the idea of souls and spirits and gods, or ‘sky

fairies’ as some atheists unkindly call them.We cannot imagine ourselves dead nor what

happens to the self we ascribe to other people when they die, we perceive the natural

world as capricious and perhaps therefore possessed of minds (gods) or perhaps one

big mind, (God).The theory of spirits, or spiritism, crept up quite quickly on pure animism

and held a dominant position in magical theory until scientific analogies began to take

over. The old pagans saw mind everywhere, and personified natural phenomena as

gods. Household gods for small matters and bigger gods for more serious matters like

storms, mountains, oceans, cities, and the afterlife. Having imputed mind everywhere,

the ancients could at least try to enter into negotiation with it. Prayer and sacrifice to the

big gods thus become the staple religious activities whilst magic offered some latitude

for trying to push around and command the smaller ones.Monotheism arose as the

pagan systems collapsed under a cacophony of too many gods and an expanding

sense of self image. Pagans did not attribute their lusts and their warlike impulses, for

example, to their own sense of self, but rather to the gods, so they could only expand

their own sense of agency and identity by adding more gods to their pantheons to

explain themselves to themselves. Replacing all this with a unitary deity had the

advantage of enlarging the self image, but at the expense of condemning a large

amount of socially dubious behavior to the demonic realms. You do not see many

temple prostitutes in monotheist institutions for example. However this in itself brought a

political dividend. Social control gets much easier if you only have one priesthood, one

consensus identity, and one set of rules.Magic within the monotheist spiritism becomes

legally perilous. The priesthood rarely tolerates freelance negotiation with the spirit

realm so folk magic goes underground, but the priests themselves usually develop a

characteristic type of spiritist magic of which we see examples in Kabbala and Goetia

and the Islamic Djinn or Genies. Here the magician commands lesser spirits by invoking

the power of God. As most monotheisms, (at least in their youth), tend to leave a host of

lesser spirits in charge of mundane matters, the priest/magician can conjure for almost

anything by the double proxy of God and lesser spirit.Given the belief that mind suffuses

everything, this all makes perfect sense. In modern terms it still makes a certain amount

of magical sense if we assume that ensigilising phenomena as spirits renders them

easier for the mind to interact with. The spiritist paradigm that sees mind in all things will

probably always influence human thought if only because human thought remains the

tool by which we investigate the world. Not a few scientists have exclaimed that the

universe consists entirely of thoughts or mind stuff, but they had mostly been calculating

too hard or overdoing the nitrous oxide.In terms of its value as a magical theory, the

spiritist paradigm has very little real explanatory or predictive power. We all know what

‘the spirit realm’ means, it means whatever the spiritist wants it to mean. In other words

it has fantastically complicated and more or less arbitrary and variable properties. Thus

it cannot tell us anything about possible or impossible, or probable or improbable forms

of magic.The materialist-scientific paradigm spawned a host of neo-scientific

explanations for various parapsychological, spiritualist, occult, and magical phenomena.

These fall more or less neatly into the categories of occult aethers, occult energies, and

occult information paradigms. Occult aethers or ethers seem to have begun with Eliphas

Levi, a nineteenth century French cleric who dabbled in magic and Kabbala. He

proposed the Astral Light, a sort of medium for the transmission of thought and the

support of spirit. Then came the rather more elaborate doctrines of the etheric and

astral planes and ectoplasm, and so on, in response to the scientific ideas of the

luminiferous ether and the dimensions of space current at the time. Before the

popularization of Einstein’s ideas it appeared that gravity could operate like an

astrological influence at a distance, and that light and electromagnetic radiation in

general would need some kind of a medium to cross space.From such mighty

misconceptions, puny occult explanationisms developed.Science constrains the concept

of energy with a very tight definition of its properties and this makes it useful.

Unfortunately ‘occult energies’ suffer from exactly the same problem as with spirit

realms, they mean anything anyone wants them to.As the so-called information age

dawned, it did seem at last possible to nail down an irrefutable explanation of magic in

terms of a hidden exchange of information between material structures, including

brains, assuming that information had some power to modify the structures involved,

and assuming that quantum physics allows the information to find its way to wherever

the magician wants in space and time.I must confess myself guilty of the above, during

the folly of my extended youth.I fell into the trap of making the paradigm so broad that it

would do anything I wanted, despite the fact that I could not always do what I wanted by

magic.Now, reviewing my casebooks and my theory books, I can see the need to both

limit and to extend my frames of reference.I suspect that time has a richer structure than

we commonly imagine and that a Multiverse or Omnium of realities caused by quantum

entanglement and superposition surrounds us in three dimensional time, and that

particles travel both backward and forward in time. In this scenario we do not need

‘disembodied information’ to account for the functioning of the universe or the

phenomena of magic, the exchange of ordinary particles of matter and energy will do

the trick given the extra degrees of temporal freedom.See the Quantum Irreality Paper

on this site, for the arguments leading to the above.When the magician divines he

interacts primarily with future versions of himself. In divination he basically taps into

what he may know in the future. A curious circularity seems to exist in divination; it only

seems to work if at some point in the future you will end up knowing the result by

ordinary means. This explains why the best results in divination seem to occur for either

very short term divinations about unlikely things that will happen in the next few

seconds, or for events which are heavily deterministic, but not yet obvious, in the further

future.In enchantment the magician basically aims to select a future where his wish has

come true. The entanglements between the magician, his past and future selves, and

his environment can provide many channels for the modification of events towards the

desired objective, so long as it does not remain ridiculously improbable. This explains

the observation that enchantment tends to work best when used over longer periods of

time.And that, ladies and gentlemen, witches and wizards, may I believe, constitute the

beginnings of: - A New Magical Paradigm.It may not greatly alter the way we attempt to

do magic for some time, but it may alter the way we think about why it works, and that

may eventually improve our practice.Perhaps for the first time it offers a potentially

testable model, particularly where it relates to divination, and one that we could

potentially quantify with a view to eventually wrapping some mathematics around it. As

an afterthought I should perhaps mention the traditional ideas of evocation and

invocation once again. Whilst I accept the psychological and sigillistic value of the

animist and spiritist paradigms, to me the proof of the pudding in both evocation and

invocation remains the quality of the divination and enchantment arising from such

activities. General Metadynamics 1.Note, read the Quantum Irreality paper first.

Abstract. General Metadynamics attempts to provide a paradigm of Science and

Sorcery. To do this it shows how the three dimensional transactional time in the HD8

interpretation of quantum and particle physics could allow divination and enchantment

to occur.Metaphysics concerns itself with our ideas about the ultimate nature and reality

of phenomena. Any serious enquiry into such matters should in principle, begin with an

examination of underlying metaphysical assumptions and end with their reconsideration.

Few people actually bother with this exercise because metaphysics embodies a fatal

flaw derived from the structure of language that has a tendency to render the exercise

pointless.Metaphysics traditionally includes Ontology, our ideas about the existence or

being of things. Ontology studies our ideas of what things really ‘are’. We could perhaps

call this Metastatics instead, to differentiate it from Metadynamics, the study of our

fundamental ideas about what phenomena actually ‘do’.No phenomena actually exhibit

being. You can never catch anything in a state of just ‘being’. Everything has internal

movement, at least on the atomic scale, and everything exchanges energy with its

environment to maintain its existence.Thus Ontology or Metastatics remains an illusory

and pointless exercise except where it generates useful similes that we can use as a

sort of shorthand for descriptive purposes. When we ask what something ‘is’ we really

want to know what it does, or what properties it has, or what history it has.

Metadynamics, the study of our fundamental ideas about what phenomena actually do,

has become perhaps humanity’s most powerful and least recognised tool for

understanding the universe. The great concepts of causality, chance, probability,

symmetry, and the conservation laws, all fall within the remit of what I would call

Metadynamics, and they all dominate the way we perceive the world and act in it, to

such an extent that we rarely stop to question these concepts.Now people exhibit a

range of differing metadynamics. Scientists have a fairly formal consensus

metadynamic, although quantum physicists often have eccentric versions of it. Ordinary

westernised people usually have diluted and informal versions of the scientific

metadynamic. Religious people often have metadynamics which lack self-consistency

(gods act mysteriously). Magicians and occultists often have metadynamic concepts

that conflict radically with scientific ones.Religious belief systems usually disguise their

inconsistencies with metastatic concepts. Gods and dead people can apparently get

away with just ‘being’ instead of doing. Occultists usually fall into a similar mire and fill

up their paradigms with all sorts of planes of being and disembodied forces and

energies that conveniently explain everything and nothing, depending on what actually

happens.Can we develop a General Metadynamic which reconciles what we know

about the fundamental activities of the phenomena of the universe from our knowledge

of both science and magic? We need not include most of the phenomena of religion

within such a metadynamic because mere psychology explains them. Only ‘miracles’

offer any justification for the inclusion of religious data, and magic offers a better

explanation for miracles than does religion. We do not need to erect a false

metastatic/ontological distinction between mind and matter either. We know enough

about the behaviour of the brain to understand that it acts as an information processing

machine, albeit a very complicated one, and that it creates the necessary subjective

illusions of self and consciousness for perfectly good evolutionary reasons.Do we have

enough data for such a General Metadynamic? Well science may have got pretty close

to describing the behaviour of matter at its apparently most fundamental quantum level,

however the ideas we get from the description can lead to a variety of interpretations,

few of which make much sense. The HD8 interpretation does make a kind of sense

although at the price of adding extra degrees of temporal freedom with three

dimensions of transactional time.I find some justification for what I have attempted in

HD8 in a quote from Professor Sir Roger Penrose, and they don’t come much more

brilliant and illustrious than him.‘It is my opinion that our present picture of physical

reality, particularly in relation to the nature of time, is due for a shake up – even greater,

perhaps, than that which has already been provided by present –day relativity and

quantum mechanics.’Stephen Hawking brilliantly observed that entropy increases with

time because we measure time in the direction in which entropy increases. We simply

adopt the entropy increasing direction as our temporal reference direction, and so we do

not usually notice the orthogonal components of time. Entropy (or increasing disorder)

defines our forward direction I time so order propagates backward through time, thus we

can see why the theory of causality works so well in reverse but not so well forwards.

We can always find a reason for something that has happened but we can rarely predict

precisely what will happen. Things often happen for insufficient causes in forward mode,

but afterwards both we often construct sufficient causes and reasons.I suspect that the

orthogonal components of time correspond to net entropy changes no larger than those

that could slip through at the quantum level. We could write an equation with entropy

and orthogonal time as another pair of complementary terms in an Heisenberg style

uncertainty/indeterminacy relationship thusly:-

DST Dti ~ h

Where D(delta) ST means entropy change (at a particular absolute temperature),

D(delta) ti means imaginary (orthogonal) time,h means Planck’s constant (an

exceedingly small number).

This provides a key to understanding three-dimensional time and the association of

quantum weirdness with exceedingly small energy differences. It means that you can

have as much orthogonal for a process as you like, so long as entropy changes remain

minimal, but I digress.Most magical descriptions of reality still require some nebulous

extra component to the universe beyond the matter and energy that science can

measure. Spirit, spirits, astral planes, occult energies, morphic fields, and disembodied

thoughts or information have, at various times, all filled this role.If the HD8 interpretation

of physical phenomena remains un-falsified then it remains as a valid, if highly

eccentric, description of fundamental physical behaviour which could form part of the

metadynamic. The problem then reduces to one of describing the phenomena of magic

using only the extra degrees of temporal freedom afforded by three dimensional

transactional time, and avoiding the traditional spooky immaterial explanationisms.A

General Metadynamic including magic would have to offer an explanation of only

divination and enchantment, for these lie at the root of all magical phenomena.

Divination presents the simplest case. If at some point in the future the diviner can know

the answer to a question, then that answer can feed back from the future to the present.

However because the universe behaves with a degree of randomness and chaos,

several different futures can feed back to the diviner’s present to give mixed results. In

some cases the diviner’s choice of one particular item of feedback could even act to

increase the likelihood of that future becoming more probable. Thus divination can work

as enchantment by self-fulfilling prophecy.Pure divination works best in pursuit of a fixed

but concealed future. As a simple example consider the case of a well shaken dice. If

you slam the dice cup upside down over it without looking and then try to guess the

number showing, the number remains a fixed element of your future (except to an

extreme quantum solipsist). If however you try to guess the number that will appear

before even shaking the dice, then all six futures exist at the time of divination and only

enchantment offers any hope of obtaining a non chance result. In practise the former

type of divination works far better than the latter.Dowsing provides a classic example of

how divination actually works. The dowser basically divines what effect digging a hole in

a certain place will have on his future perceptions. It plainly does not depend on

mysterious geomantic energies emanating from water or minerals because experts can

dowse from mere maps of the terrain.Note that in this metadynamic of divination we do

not require anything immaterial to pass between the diviner and the target. The diviner

functions as a collection of superposed states entangled with the superposed states of

his past and future. As the ‘particles’ of the diviner move forward through time they

simultaneously move backward through time as well,(because they actually consist of

particle/reversed-particle pairs), however we do not normally notice this.The

metadynamic of enchantment (making things happen by magic) has symmetries with

that of divination but it also demands something else.The collapse of quantum

superpositions and entanglements remains officially indeterminate and random, but

macroscopic phenomena often behave with deterministic chaos according to general

scientific consensus. ‘ Deterministic chaos’ means that the behaviour of a complicated

system like the weather exhibits extreme sensitivity to its initial conditions. Change the

airflow or the temperature just a tiny bit and you may change tomorrow’s weather quite

a lot, this in turn could change next weeks weather totally. This gives rise to the rather

poetically named ‘Butterfly Effect’, in which a butterfly changing course over Belgium

could result in a hurricane devastating Cuba, or not devastating Cuba, sometime later.

In another age we recognised this as the horseshoe nail effect, for want of a horseshoe

nail, the horseshoe was lost, and hence the horse, the messenger, the message, the

battle, and the whole empire became lost, for the want of that horseshoe nail.Most

theorists of chaos mathematics maintain that the behaviour of complicated macroscopic

systems remains causal and deterministic, although difficult if not impossible to predict.

However they fail to reiterate their equations far enough to realise that the sensitivity to

initial conditions for many systems must eventually extend down into the quantum

domain. Random events at the quantum level must therefore lead to random events in

the macroscopic world. However because of the exchange action in transactional time,

something even stranger must also occur, chosen actions on the macroscopic level can

cause non-random changes at the quantum level. Of course we accept part of this

already, we can polarise light or make atomic nuclei disintegrate by doing clever things

with lumps of matter, but temporal reversibility in transactional time entangles

macroscopic action with the quantum past as well as the future.The enchanter functions

as a collection of superposed states entangled with the superposed states of his past

and future universes. In theory, by changing his perception of the universe he can bring

about changes in reality, with two provisos.Suitable entanglements and suitable

superpositions must exist. The magician will need a magical link; he cannot conjure

successfully in complete isolation from the target, and the desired result must have

some natural probability of occurrence, preferably not an excessively remote one.In

practise the magician will need to rely on some kind of butterfly effect to create

substantial changes in the universe and he will usually have to rely on his subconscious

to intuit where these possibilities exist. Conversely in divination the magician will usually

have to rely on his subconscious to pick up the feedback from his personal futures. We

currently understand only the tip of the iceberg of neuroscience, but I suspect that many

of the functions of the brain depend on superposition and entanglement. Magicians

have distilled from historical traditions a few pragmatic ‘sleight of mind’ techniques for

enhancing divination and enchantment, but they remain unreliable if occasionally

remarkable phenomena. This paper merely attempts to explain the mechanisms that

can allow what we call ‘magical’ effects to propagate across time and space without

invoking some sort of nebulous ether or whatever. This metadynamic of enchantment

does not require any kind of mysterious occult influence to pass between the enchanter

and his target; it requires only that the known effect of entanglement and the dynamics

of chaotic systems can extend into three-dimensional transactional time.The General

Metadynamics paradigm does suggest some modifications to our approach to practical

magic.In Divination it would suggest that the magician seeks to visualise the future

situation in which he will know the answer. It may also help if the magician resolves to

visualise sending the answer back to the time of divination when he has found the

answer or confirmed his divination. This may seem a very bizarre and pointless thing to

do, but in a number of my best divinatory successes I decided that I just had to

‘complete the circle’ as it were. So when I finally received confirmation that I had divined

correctly, I made a point of acting out the peculiar scenarios in which I had divined

myself getting the answer. In practical terms you can adapt techniques like this:- 0) Do

not attempt to divine for future events that remain indeterminate at the time of divination.

(This usually applies to roulette wheels and lottery devices).1) Resolve that whenever

you receive the answer (by normal means) to a specific divinatory question, that you will

do something highly specific like write the answer on a big sheet of paper, whirl on the

spot and scream a specific codeword whilst staring at the writing. Basically resolve to do

anything that will turn your attention forcefully to the answer. Plenty of anecdotal

evidence exists to support the view that extreme forms of gnosis often generate the best

results. 2) During the Divination visualise yourself performing the above actions.3) Do

not even think about not carrying out your original resolution afterwards!In

Enchantment, General Metadynamics suggests that the magician should give much

consideration beforehand as to how the desired effect could come to pass, and to the

availability of magical links.I do not advise conjuring against a static situation. In

enchantment the magician tries to exploit changes by encouraging changes to manifest

as desired. The magician thus needs to look for fluid situations or to provoke them

deliberately. The rather delicate power of magic works best when deployed in situations

balanced on a knife-edge, not on those set in stone.For a magical link, nothing seems to

beat physical contact or at least visual or vocal contact. Recorded images seem to work

only to the extent that they provoke remembered images, the same usually applies to

physical objects; they rarely remain significantly entangled with their origins or owners

for long.In summary, General Metadynamics attempts to provide a paradigm of Science

and Sorcery. To do this it shows how the three dimensional transactional time in the

HD8 interpretation of quantum and particle physics could allow divination and

enchantment to occur.General Metadynamics has the virtue that it does not depend on

nebulous metaphysical influences that remain, in principle, impervious to confirmation or

falsification by rigorous means. Thus it constitutes a proper hypothesis or theory, rather

than just a mere assemblage of beliefs.Three dimensional transactional time explains

the apparent ‘spooky action at a distance’ of entanglement which so annoyed Einstein,

and the apparent ‘multiple states of being’ of superposition which together have

bedevilled scientific understanding of quantum phenomena. It also has the virtue that it

explains why Science usually works reliably whereas Magic often works erratically if at

all. Science deals mainly with large entropy change events of high probability. Magic

relies mainly on the low entropy changes associated with orthogonal time that often

have low probabilities of occurrence.On a practical level, conjuring within the General

Metadynamics paradigm means looking at your own future(s) in divination, and seeking

good magical links to fluid events in enchantment.General Metadynamics does not of

course constitute a complete theory of either science or magic for each has a huge

repertoire of disciplines, techniques, and data. Rather it offers a way of looking at our

core ideas about what kinds of events can occur in this universe.Most previous attempts

(including some of mine) to model magic and parapsychology using quantum physics

have proved inadequate because they assumed the reality of quantum ‘spooky action at

a distance’ and then used it too freely to assert a general case for any kind of occult

phenomena without limit. Chaos Magic has accumulated a cornucopia of ritual and

sleight of mind tricks over the years and a wealth of mixed results and metaphysical

hypotheses. Most of the experimental data used to create General Metadynamics have

come from results generated by working with Chaos Magic techniques. I thus offer

General Metadynamics as a paradigm that can supply the theory of how the

parapsychological effects of Chaos Magic actually occur, in a way that does not

contradict what we can know from science.

General Metadynamics 2.

General Metadynamics and Strong Emergence.

Abstract. A rather metaphysical debate rages about how the universe works between

the proponents of Reductionism and the proponents of Emergence, particularly in the

field of Complexity research. Can we derive all the complex behaviour that we observe

in the universe from a few simple laws, or do other laws somehow emerge at higher

levels of complexity?General Metadynamics throws a fresh perspective on the principle

of strong emergence that may interest both scientists and sorcerers.

General Metadynamics 2, the case for Strong Emergence.

The Reductionist paradigm states that we can in principle derive all the complex

behaviour that we observe in the universe from a few simple basic laws. At the time of

writing the candidates for these basic laws officially come down to quantum mechanics

and gravitation. Thus life reduces to biology, biology reduces to chemistry, and

chemistry reduces to quantum mechanics. As cosmology reduces to astrophysics and

astrophysics also reduces to quantum mechanics, plus gravitation, (in a way not yet

fully understood), we can in principle derive the existence of snowdrops and their

blossoming in spring, this paper, your reading of it, and the Great Wall of China, from

just a few basic quantum and gravitational laws. The calculations and derivations might

prove fiendishly difficult but reductionists maintain that a sufficiently detailed picture of

the initial conditions and sufficient computational power would reveal the entire past and

the entire future of the universe and all its contents, to any desired degree of detail.

Thus to a hardcore reductionist we inhabit a rigidly deterministic clockwork universe,

and we advance towards a perfectly predictable future, if only we could measure and

calculate with sufficient precision.Two particular problems exist with the Reductionist

paradigm. Firstly quantum physics seems to show that we could not in principle

measure the initial conditions of any system to an arbitrarily high degree of precision

because down at the quantum level, events simply do not exist in a sharply defined

manner. Secondly we cannot have arbitrarily large computational power because either

the universe has a finite size (if it does not expand) or because we can only have

access to a finite amount of it (the part of it restricted to us by a finite lightspeed in an

expanding universe). We could never in principle achieve a computational power better

than the Landauer-Lloyd limit of 10^120 bit flops even if we commandeered every

particle in the universe for computational purposes. Despite the enormous size of this

number it does not exceed 2^400, so the theoretically available computing power of the

entire universe could not in principle tell us what a group of just 400 elementary

particles, each in one of two possible states, might do.The idea of Weak Emergence

gives something of a boost to the reductionist paradigm. Weak emergence occurs when

complex behaviour arises directly from simple rules and laws. The Mandelbrot Set for

example, emerges in all its complex beauty from the reiteration of a very simple

mathematical formula. Similarly, cellular automata in the so-called Game of Life can

produce very complicated images and even patterns that reproduce and evolve, from a

few simple rules.Nevertheless in both these famous examples of emergent behaviour,

all experimenters who start with the same initial conditions and the same rules will get

exactly the same result, because in these two examples we can specify the initial

conditions and the rules precisely. The results may seem unexpected and richly

fascinating, but they remain rigidly deterministic.The proponents of Strong Emergence

however, insist that many of the complex behaviours that the universe exhibits do not

arise as directly deterministic consequences of the basic laws governing the behaviour

of matter and energy acting upon certain initial conditions. Thus given the laws of

quantum mechanics and gravitation and a vast amount of elementary particles,

Snowdrops and the Great Wall of China do not have to happen at some precise point

several billion years later.Proponents of the Hard School of Strong Emergence often

seem to imply that the laws of the universe actually evolve with time.Thus instead of the

universe running exclusively on bottom up principles, where simple initial rules and

conditions fix the entire future, we have a scenario in which a certain amount of top

down rule making also occurs.Theorists disagree about what, if anything, causes the

seemingly random collapse of quantum wave functions when particles drop out of

entanglement and superposition at interaction or measurement. Some suspect that

minute gravitational influences might tip the balance; some suspect that consciousness

or at least deliberate choice of measurement can affect the issue. Some Emergentists

have intriguingly suggested that some sort of top down effects occur in complex

systems. A complex system thus modifies the quantum behaviour of its components!

Personally I doubt that quantum physics can entirely specify chemistry or that chemistry

can entirely specify biology. I would defy anyone to derive the exact melting point of

aluminium oxide from basic quantum mechanics.The Strong Emergent idea of Top

Down causation augmenting lower level laws smells strongly of Magic, or at least the of

the General Metadynanics paradigm which seeks to provide a metaphysic for both

science and magic.In General Metadynamics, causality can work retroactively, or top

down, backwards in time, because all changes consist of a probabilistic exchange of

particles/reversed particles across time. Thus if a complex system evolves some form of

higher order behaviour, perhaps just by chance, then that behaviour can feedback to

modify the behaviour of the starting materials to establish that new behaviour as a

physical law, or at least as a convention that could grow stronger with time.General

Metadynamics can thus explain the phenomenon of Morphic Ressonance and also

point out some limitations to the accompanying theory. Morphic Ressonance

undoubtedly occurs, the manifestation of any novel phenomenon does seem to facilitate

the subsequent occurrence of that phenomenon, but it does not require the agency of

some sort of spiritual nebulous Morphic Field that so horrifies scientists. The top down

causation implied by Strong Emergence and explained by General Metadynamics will

do nicely.Some Emergentists claim that consciousness provides a prime or even the

sole example of Strong Emergence.I have to say that I do not understand the meaning

of the term consciousness, although I understand that both I and other people can have

awareness of all sorts of things. I receive sensory imputs from within my body and from

outside of it, I do thinking and emoting, I can do thinking about thinking, emoting about

thinking and vice versa, and emoting about emoting, I take decisions, I perform actions,

during dreamless sleep I do nothing except metabolise and snore, apparently. I do not

seem to have something that I can identify as separate from all of these activities as

consciousness. Instead I seem to have a brain in which a surprising capacity for

information processing has emerged.I suspect that nobody has consciousness and that

the word does not really mean anything at all, although people can have awareness of

all sorts of things including their internal states, as can any sophisticated information-

processing machine.Evolutionary biology suggests that the decision-making capacity of

brains has evolved by weak emergence from the large information processing facility

that they provide. Simple animals thus display complicated but ultimately predictable

behaviour. However at some uncertain point, something else seems to happen, the

brain acquires the capacity to modify itself and the realisation that it can do so. At this

point, Strong Emergence comes into play. We recognise this as free will, (although it

rarely acts completely without reference to previous experience). It does not of course

mean that we suddenly have some sort of indefinable consciousness or an immortal

soul.Watch a baby develop into a child and then through adolescence into adulthood,

and you can see the Strong Emergence gradually kicking in.Not all adults behave like

babies in big meat overcoats, although this does provide a useful rule of thumb.

Sometimes more means qualitatively different.General Metadynamics offers a

mechanism by which Strong Emergence can occur.Basically, once a complex system

has evolved a novel behaviour by stochastic means (random trial and error) or by

deliberate means (in the case of thinking organisms), then retroactive causality can, to

some extent, modify the subsequent behaviour of the system or the universe as a

whole, to establish that novel behaviour as a convention or even as a hard physical law.

Subsequent papers will examine the implications of this idea for magical theory.

Last Updated on Saturday, 21 February 2009 12:43