Yourfaith Setyoufree

This article was published in New Dawn 165 (Nov-Dec 2017) Science fiction is always more important than science. – Timothy Leary The sacred, the sublime, has always walked amongst the profane. The signs are everywhere, blended into the sidewalks, pulp fictions, and the kitsch trappings of the art world. For iconic sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick, most of the sublime things of his world were disguised as trash that seamlessly slipped into the background of a dysfunctional world reality. The seeming trash of the everyday mundane clashed with incoming cosmic mutterings that have found their way into much of our popular culture. In the US especially, a blend of anarchic cultural subversions manifested that played upon known semi-mystical memes. Enochian magic, Golden Dawn rituals, meta-computing of the mind, and a weird kind of chaos were springing up within treatises of popular culture. One of these was the text of the Principia Discordia that emerged in the 1960s as a ‘sacred te...

This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 12 No 5 (Oct 2018) The word “real” in the title distinguishes the type of magic we’re discussing. This is not about the fictional magic of Harry Potter or the fake magic of Harry Houdini. This is about real magic, which falls into three main categories: divination, or perception of events distant in space or time; force of will, or mental influence of the physical world; and theurgy, or interactions with nonphysical entities. In my book Real Magic (Harmony, 2018), I describe how these traditional, esoteric forms of magic (occultists use the term “magick”) have been scientifically studied for over a century, and why the accumulated evidence in favour of real magic is now overwhelmingly positive. This assertion might be surprising given that college textbooks teach us that magic is merely an ancient superstitious belief. But textbooks are regularly revised and updated as science marches on, and at the leading edge of sc...

This article was published in New Dawn 170 (Sept-Oct 2018) We hear a lot about Artificial Intelligence today. It is a phrase that refers to a kind of intelligence that machines can function with, and over the last few decades this functionality has developed extremely rapidly. But how did this machine intelligence originate, and what exactly does it means to call a machine “intelligent”? Intelligence is a word that since time immemorial has been applied to human beings and other living creatures, but only very recently to machines, so how does this new machine intelligence relate to, and differ from, our human intelligence?                    Nature as a Machine To answer these questions, we must first understand what originally motivated people to instil intelligence into machines. If we go back to the Middle Ages, the first astronomical clocks that began to appear in public places during the early decades of the fourteenth ...