there’s a take i think of internally as the “minimal but respectful take” on astrology, tarot, magic, etc. which is that nothing is happening that violates known physics, but that the human mind is capable of discerning real signal from more info than the west assumes
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i see the human mind as an exquisitely delicate and powerful learning machine, sifting through vast reams of sensory data constantly looking to make sense of the world and guide action through it. most of this data is filtered out of consciousness but it’s still there. storytime:
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at burning man a friend of mine took an unfortunate mix of psychedelics and prescription drugs, and for the rest of the day he lost much of his ability to sensory gate. he became extremely sensitive to light and sound, asked us to speak softly without hard consonants
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he asked us all to do this, even though some people were maybe 20 feet away and quiet already. he requested that someone hold his hand while staying grounded and when that person’s posture was ungrounded he could feel it through the hand and he asked them to shift it
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through the hand, he could tell how grounded someone’s posture was in their *hips*
this isn’t the only story i have of someone exhibiting high levels of sensitivity but it’s one of the most extreme. gave me a visceral sense of how much raw sense data is being filtered
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another story: another friend of mine told me that once when he was a teenager he had a very unusual day (i forget if it was triggered by drugs again) where he felt like he knew what people were going to say a few seconds before they said it. never happened again
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he’s not a woo or hippie guy, if you met him you might think he was a trucker or an ex-football player, iirc military background. i have no reason to believe he was lying or even exaggerating this story for effect. at the very least i believe this is how he remembers it
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but actually i’m pretty inclined to just take him at his word, that for a day he could, in a limited way, see a few seconds into the future. i believe the raw sensory data is there to permit this level of inference, under conditions, in a totally physics-compatible way
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not to say that i think this sort of thing is always going to be 100% accurate, perceptions and inferences never are, but probably more so than most anti-woo people are willing to acknowledge as a real possibility. in any case it’s not as if ordinary perceptions are that accurate
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there’s an entire universe of experiences like this that people have been having for millennia, that a kind of “i fucking love science” devotion to scientific materialism dismisses out of hand because it is the *wrong genre*. this is, frankly, deeply unscientific
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among other things this is part of why i’m very critical of cultural constructs related to “insanity.” sometimes an “insane” person is someone who genuinely senses something that the people around them don’t. it’s a terrifying and lonely position to be in
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the meta-gaslighting that enables other forms of gaslighting is the undermining of direct perception, the idea that you are not allowed to perceive something unless it is on the list of Socially Approved Perceptions
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this is important shit and i'm gonna keep being mad about it. the undermining of direct perception is one of the biggest tools of social control. it is the meta-gaslighting that enables other forms of gaslighting. it's one of the worst parts of the "i fucking love science" meme
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at the most basic level the "minimal but respectful take" for me is just about respecting people i know and the experiences and perceptions i know they've had. i see no reason to believe that they're any less reliable than my own experiences and perceptions
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the next level up from the minimal but respectful take involves just not caring particularly one way or the other whether known physics can explain anything. i am not all the way there yet but i occasionally try to meme myself in that direction
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magic has nothing to do with violating the laws of physics. it has much to do with violating *expectations*, and we can reflect on what in our society causes us to conflate the two
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ah no this was a better QT from that thread
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"the laws of physics" *should* refer to your experience of pushing and pulling and bending and breaking and grasping and stretching but it *actually* refers to a specific kind of propaganda that was shoved down your throat in grade school
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okay, fine, i will own up to it because i get annoyed when other people don't do that: this is a subtweet, but i have tried to mostly focus on what i want to see more of and hopefully i mostly succeeded
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Ppl who are real into astrology/conspiracies/woo beliefs *really* trigger me, but it's not because of the beliefs themselves, it's what it indicates about the person.
To me, it implies a profound lack of curiosity in checking to see if their beliefs are true. 1/
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as you can see my pov is almost the exact opposite of the above: "aren't you *curious* what's going on with all this woo stuff, which has been happening uninterrupted to our species this whole-ass time we've been around, several times longer than science has?"
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i really like this question because it seems genuinely curious. i replied with five possibilities: wind currents, electrical / magnetic currents, smells, facial expression, body language. there’s a lot of information potentially available if you learn how to sift it
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wind currents is maybe surprising but go into a building (say a gym) where there are people moving around but no windows open or AC so the air is still by default. close your eyes and see if you can notice changes in the air currents produced by other people’s movements
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this is relevant to understanding experiences like knowing somebody is behind you even if they haven’t made any obvious sounds. we are probably sensitive to movements of the air below the level of conscious auditory perception. very sensible thing for an animal to be capable of
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followup thread
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right, so i did not talk about this at all, lemme lay out some stories that seem plausible to me. in more detail, the “minimal but respectful take” here seems to me psychological: that tarot and astrology are two different scaffolds on which to hang intuitive psych reads twitter.com/laughinghan/st…
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also some super interesting historical context
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Since the idea of astrology being “irrational” is rearing its head again, let's explore how such criticisms are in fact nothing new, but reflect ancient debates. In fact, any sharp “rational” vs. “irrational” dichotomy is ahistorical, unempirical, & fallacious. 1/thread
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