Special:Badtitle/NS106:What I know

Due to recent events I've become introspective again. I'm reminded that I have no experiential evidence that the paranormal is anything more than an interesting mystery ultimately caused by known, mundane phenomena. Psychology, sociology, faulty memory, carbon monoxide poisoning, low frequency EMF and sound, tall tales spun out of proportion, and attention seeking are all seductively plausible explanations. Yet always still there's that doubt, that were such "supernatural" (ie undocumented natural) phenomena to exist, occams razor would pick it in a heartbeat to the complicated and coincidental explanations offered.

So this essay is to take stock in what I know, either from first principles or experience.

Provable from first principles:
 * Everything "exists"
 * I exist
 * Ego is defined as a perceived causality between ultimately unrelated timeless frames of reality
 * Any definition of the continuation of an ego will always have a path in probability space which maintains its existence, and frames in which the ego dies cannot be experienced
 * Therefore, "I" cannot cease to exist - I can't experience nonexistence
 * If there is no afterlife in this reality, I can't die either - something will always prevent it, no matter how miraculous
 * Consciousness in the purest sense (experience or "the observer") is indistinguishable between instances, thus it can be said that there is only one (a = b & b = c <=> a = c) spread across the infinitely infinite expanse of possibility space
 * Truth can only be meaningfully defined with respect to a consciousness and its ontology
 * Objective reality may exist, but is fundamentally unknowable
 * Experience informs belief but does not dictate it

At this point I realize a kind of dissonance - reality is defined by the observer, but the observation is informed (though not dictated) by reality. If a schizophrenic sees madness, that is reality, but so too is experiencing evidence they may use to disprove that reality and substitute it for another. Is either the originator? For years now I've operated under the assumption that because objective reality is unknowable, its existence is irrelevant and thus perception defines reality as its source. But that requires a binary notion of truth, where empiricism operates under statistics. Of course, empiricism itself can be considered a metaphysical policy for selecting beliefs which is still subject to perception, further suggesting consciousness as the originator.

The importance of this dissonance can be seen in formulating theories about magic, the willful manipulation of perception to control reality (as above so below, as within so without, as thought so it is). Even if I were to develop a consistent method of manipulating belief and expectation, there's nothing within first principles which require that the responses of reality conform, potentially disproving to the practitioner their beliefs and destroying their source of power. For example, supposing our "Objective reality" doesn't allow for pyrokinesis, no matter how powerfully I convince myself of the legitimacy of casting a fireball, somewhere along the chain of experience I'll be unable to explain the inconsistencies - why isn't my enemy on fire? If I believe they are, why aren't they screaming? Etc, Etc, until the whole of experience requires being substituted with an inner reality. This isn't a bad thing, but it becomes exponentially more difficult the more must be substituted, easily surpassing human limits.

Thus we get to what I know from experience but can't be proven:
 * Paranormal phenomena are the emergent consequences of consciousness defining reality, which is the best "universal theory of weirdness" that I have. However sheer prevalence and explanatory consistency aren't especially compelling.
 * From this it follows that paranormal phenomena can be artificially induced using applied psychology, producing what one might call "magic"
 * Physics as we know it can be thought of as an exceptionally strong and self-sustained thoughtform built over billions of years which defines the reactions of reality seemingly independent of an individual's actions or even surface level expectations, acting as a grounding "anti-magic" force. Some might even call this "the veil", at least insofar as thought doesn't seem to shape reality directly.
 * Despite the raw mental energy behind physics, it's far easier to destroy mental barriers than it is to create them, thus the pursuit of magic needn't be hopeless
 * Quantum physics is the first demonstration that physics is finite - particles not given explicit direction take every valid path to the destination, the so-called path integral. This is where we as the observer defined nothing else for physics to do, so quantum physics is one step away from defining the mathematics of conscious manifestation in the face of uncertainty or "don't care"ity