Knowledge Overcomes the Psychic Censor

Current knowledge of intelligence and mind from philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and computer science---collectively, cognitive science---provide good support to overcoming the psychic censor. Scientific understanding shows us that simply setting our intentions is critical to utilising our innate intelligence, as I will discuss below.

...although, it seems to me, that maturity is also a key ingredient in overcoming the psychic censor. I suspect that young people simply have a harder time getting past their social conditioning and internal censor than older people. Nonetheless, I hope that some mainstream (scientifc/scholarly) authority can help overcome the psychic censor!

Intentionality

In the philosophy of mind there is a concept called 'intentionality'. Intentionality is the capacity of the mind to direct itself to 'be about' things. That's it, just the idea that the mind can 'be about' things.

One of the key features of intentionality is that it can be about imaginary things. Due to my intentionality, I can think about mythical creatures like big-foot. Creatures that I have never experienced. Nonetheless, due to my intentionality, can I think and reason about what big-foot is like (what it may look like, what it may eat, what it's behaviours may be, etc.).

Intentionality may seem unremarkable---'it's just the imagination'---but it is a special characteristic of mind that is believed to enable sentience, consciousness, and other properties of intelligence. The fact that we can make our minds 'about things' that are not simply our senses, make us more than sensori-motor automatons.

Intentionality is also a critical component in the understanding of magick. It is because magick at it's essence is about utilising our intentionality, not simply for how things are now, but for how things could be.

The Psychic Censor

The psychic censor is a core concept in chaos magick, although it often seems a bit under-defined. One way to understand the psychic censor is that it is kind of like our social-conditioning (or superego). Growing up we are socialised into a culture. The culture's ideas, values, morals and so forth are impressed into us. This creates a 'rational complex' of beliefs and values in our minds.

Our socialisation tends to tell us what is right, what is wrong, what is real, what is possible, and so on. This socialisation acts something like a censor on our intentionality. That psychic censor dissents when we move our minds to be about things that are not coherent or consistent with the culture's rationality. That dissent, that censorship, gives rise to doubt and disbelief in our willful intentions. 'How can that happen?', 'Has it happened yet?', 'As if that is true'...these kinds of thoughts run interference to undermine faith in our willed intent.

Getting around the psychic censor is the main aim for the new chaote. This is usually done by employing various tricks. Sigils and altered states of mind are employed stragetically to get past the psychic censor in order to implant our subconcious with our intentionality. Once past the censor, our mind can 'be all about that'.

Emergence

Organisations and cultures are typically about 'rule-based' orders. Education is also often about learning rules. Scientific reductionism has also largely been about determining the 'laws of nature' (i.e. the rules). However, rule-based systems have been increasingly giving away to complexity in scholarly and scientific thought over the past 50 years or more.

Break throughs in Artificial Intelligence have occurred precisely because engineers gave up trying to figure out the 'rules of intelligence' or other tasks. Instead they shifted towards working with black-boxes that store complexes of data, from which 'intelligent' task performace emerges on its own.

It seems almost certain that black-boxed (i.e. unconscious) information processing is the primary, innate, foundation of all intelligence. Long before people learned systems of rules and logic, we relied on innate, intuitive forms of intelligence within ourselves. Such intelligence works not by beliefs, logic, or rules, but instead by impressing information into it.

Animals are quite intelligent, but they probably do not think and reason with rules. Instead, they focus on a desired state (a goal) and pay attention to constraints and affordances in their environment. Their brains take this information as a set of relationships and cyclically process it (like a loss-function in a deep learning system). The information updates itself in terms of the constraints and affordances seeking an equilibrium (an attractor) that balances all the impressed factors. The equilibrium simply emerges out of brain network's tendency to balance themselves. Since that network is also the basis of perception through which the animal understands the world, the solution to the problem also just emerges into their view. Actions to take simply become obvious and there is an impulse to take those actions.

Innate, primary intelligence simply emerges in mind by unconscious processes. You set the goal, you attend to constraints and affordances, and then simply follow your impulses. This is no less than the same process sought in magick.

Rules are a Double-Edged Sword

Rules and deliberate planning are a kind of secondary intelligence, but they can be a double edged sword.

A person overly conditioned into rules can find themselves unable to use their primary intelligence well. The psychic censor, the superego, becomes a tyrant (a demiurge) that won't allow the setting of intentionality in any way other than the status quo.

A person who is overly intuitive, on the otherhand, can often find themselves stuck in a rut. Rule based thinking (especially problem-solving) is especially good at breaking out of ruts that we can fall into when using our innate (unconscious) intelligence. Rules can push us to do things that seem unnatural, but by doing so, it gives our mind's new information and experiences to work with, which often results in our innate intelligence finding a new solution it couldn't previously find.

Humans have been so successful precisely because we mix rules with innate intelligence.

Chaotes similarly have two primary techniques. The first is encoding intentionality into the subconscious to engage innate intelligence. The second is to disrupt the current circumstances in order to find new pathways for those intentions.

An Illustration

I drew a sigil to go with this post. It has the Ingwaz rune, which represents a seed and gestation. The seed is inside an eye, which is often a symbol of mind. Out of it is growing a tree, trees often representing wisdom or knowledge. Thus the sigil represents knowledge of seeding the mind for emergent manifestation, which is what this post is about.

As an experiment, and to further illustrate the connection to emergent intelligence, I asked the AI to restyle the sigil in a fantasy art style with a star field background. The AI uses the same kinds of dynamical constraints based processes I have described for innate intelligence to generate images. The AI took my crude impression, and created a more realistic manifestation of my intentionality. Much like our unconscious minds do with our intentionality.

Note: I know that there is far more to magick than just innate intelligence, nonetheless, I find this perspective and knowledge very useful in opening my mind to a more intuitive mode. I simply replace 'innate intelligence' with 'innate divinity' and the more far-reaching horizons open up as well.

Chaos theory is evident in the works of Chaos Magick writers like Peter Carroll and Phil Hines. So, I thought some people may appreciate an overview.

Chaos Theory

To understand Chaos Theory it is worth understanding a little something about dynamical systems. Dynamical systems are deterministic systems (i.e. follow strict rules) that have multiple interacting components that update each other's states. A simple dynamical system is a pendulum. You pull a pendulum to one side and it will swing back and forth periodically around it's pivot.

Dynamical systems can sometimes produce chaos, such as in the case of the double pendulum. A double pendulum's behaviour is erratic and unpredictable. Even the slightest difference in it's initial conditions can lead to wildly different behaviours which grow with time.

Not all dynamical systems produce chaos. A lot of systems will settle into an stable equilibrium called an attractor. If a system does produces chaos, it will have what is known as a chaos attractor. That is a set of conditions that will produce chaotic, non-repeating behaviour.

Some theorists suggest that reality itself is fundamentally a chaotic system. It is a complex dynamic system with a chaos attractor that produces endlessly non-repeating patterns (much like a fractal). But if reality is chaotic, why do we see so much order in it? Order in a chaotic system is explained ideas such as the 'edge of chaos' and 'chaos control'.

Since chaotic systems are so sensitive to changes in conditions, it also means that a small change can lead to significant change in it's behaviour. While we might expect that this means more unpredictability, it can actually mean that order can emerge quite easily as well. A chaotic system, can be pushed into a state of order with relatively little effort. Applying just the right amount of force at the right time can change the behaviour of a much larger system. An idea that is much like that of Wu Wei, and is called Chaos Control. An AI can make a double pendulum stand upright and hold that position by making very small adjustments changing a chaotic system into a stable order. That is Chaos Control.

Consider for a moment some primordial state of chaos. Small changes make huge differences and everything is unpredictable. Then just one little change, in just the right place and time, pushes everything into a state of order. The order may be fleeting, since another small change could lead the system back into chaos. This is called the Edge of Chaos. An ecosystem could persist for millions of years, and then a perturbation in the climate causes it to collapse into an entirely different state. The Earth's climate was pole to pole tropics for a very long time, then it switched into the current order of interglacial periods of freezing and thawing, and now will likely shift into a new state due to our actions. This is the Edge of Chaos.

Chaos Magick

The phenomon of magick fits pretty well with the idea of chaos control. Casting a spell, for example with a sigil, is a relatively low-effort action that can lead to a pretty profound effect.

When considering this idea, I personally like the psychological model of magick. Each of our intelligences or minds could be considered like a complex dynamic system, much of which is subconscious or unconscious. While we may put in all kinds of efforts to problem-solve to try and reach some goal we may find that we get nowhere. But then we just sit quietly, clear our minds, then simply assert the intention willfully, and forget about it. This simple action seems to trigger a cascade of changes through our subconscious and unconscious mind, leading us to put ourselves into just the right circumstances for the intention to manifest itself. All through processes that we have no awareness about.

Of course, because we are not aware of the 'mechanisms' of magick, it may not be our intelligence or mind at all that cause it to occur, but some other unknown quantity. Eitherway, the fact that we are unaware of the mechanism is what makes it appear as magick to us. We cannot explain how or why it happens, so it is magick. That doesn't make it any less real, it just means that we only know it empirically (not logically). Chaos theory presents as a potential logic of why magick happens. It is quite a neat idea.

Personally, I have found the idea of emergence from complex systems very liberating. While in the past I tried to apply rules to everything, after learning about dynamical systems and constraints based reasoning from studying complex systems and artificial intelligence, now I simply set the goal, set some constraints, and allow the answer to emerge on it's own. I've seen how this works on computer models that use artificial neural networks, and now I see it happen all the time with my own mind. These days, I only engage active, conscious, systematic problem-solving in cases where I am stuck in a rut (and that is only to put me closer to a good attractor for my mind's emergence to work its magick on).

Setting a goal, constraints, and then waiting for emergence also fits perfectly with my experience of magick. As does the need to do things to get me out of my rut. More often than not, the most supernatural and paranormal things occur when I take some radical action that goes against my usual way of being. Crossing some boundary, breaking some taboo, doing something crazy or new, all of these seem to release energies that result in cool things happening. This also fits with dynamic systems, it is perturbing the current attractor state sufficiently to move the system (me) into a new state of being (i.e. attractor). Such 'disturb the order' actions have a long history in the occult, and are also defnitely notable in the works like Libre Null. They are also Chaos Control at the Edge of Chaos.