From: dart@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Dartanyan the Witchling)
Newsgroups: alt.magick
Subject: Re: "do[ing] stuff" (was Re: Is Magick worth the effort??)
Date: 18 Aug 92 20:30:58 GMT
Organization: Purdue University Computing Center

In article <1992Aug11.052702.2675@u.washington.edu> rjb@milton.u.washington.edu (LeGrand Cinq-Mars) writes:
>First, there's the undeveloped argument that (roughly) a tight line of
>ordinary causal connections leaves no room for any magical causality.  I
>didn't develop this because it would have made a lengthy post lengthier
> -- but it applies to mental as well as magical causality.

	I think there is a misunderstainding as to the definition of "magic"
	I will develoop this further as I deal with responding.
>
>Second, in the card example, the causal"problem" is not in how it came to
>happen that the cartomancer was crushed by the car, but how it came to
>be that the cards "predicted" it.  There are two lines of efficient
>causes (the line that led to the card coming up where wnd when it did,
>and the line that led to the crunch); what caused the [meaningful]
>coincidence was the set of meanings that defined the event as a
>"prediction."  Those meanings are a formal cause, rather than an effcient
>cause.  The "event" caused is neither the crushing nor the card,  but the
>"prediction" of the crushing by the card.

	The terms coincidence and synchronicity are synonymous, first, by
definition (just so I can use my preferred one)  coincidence means things
coincide, or occur simultaneously.  Synchronicity means same-time-ness, meaning
things occur at the same time, or simultaneously.
	There are a few different possibilities as to how ther car scene occur-
ed.  1) you can decide that the cards _caused_ the wreck, 2) you can define 
that the reader caused the occurence, subconcoiusly, in response to the reading,
3) you can decide that some "other intelligence" (be it a god, an ufo, or the 
illuminati, or whatnot) watched the whole thing and made it happen in order to
make one of the other possible assumptions be assumed. 4) the future is fixed,
regardless of appearanced to the contrary, as much as the past, and thus the
car going to have hit her caused the cards to say something. 5) both things
just happened at the same time.
	There are probably several other possibilities, but i think that in 
this a point is made.  Occams razor would insist that 5) is most probably true.
In a deck of tarot cards,  one has a 1 in 78 chance of getting the right one,
in a case like that.  IN more comlex cases, multiple cards are used, increasing
the possible combinations, but the detail of interpretation tends to go down
while the generality of the meanings given the cards tends ot go up.  I am not
saying that thgey work, but rather that they are a map used to coincide with
reality, and as the area gets bigger, they lose consistency.  I have never heard
of a reader worth her cards who attempted to read cards for even an entire town.	The thing that makes it seem like "prediction" is the fact that what
she saw on the card seemed to her to say "You will die".
	Interestingly enough, had the card been, say, the indicator card of the
person she bumped into, the reading would have been just as "accurate", but
would have lost all that implicit meaning it had predicting her death.
	Consider the following: If New York lost the statue of liberty, would
it lose liberty?

>
>I wasn't so much interested in trying to generate a really tight
>formalization as to point out the structure of the argument and suggest that
>the question of what kind of thing magical causation might be is very much
>like the question of what kind of thing conscious (or mental) causation
>might be.
	I think the point is being missed.  Magic is acausal.  The fact that
acusality exists sometimes has been all but proven, and it cannot be proven,
as proof indicates causality and acausality is not causality.
	Magic is synchronicity.  Several reports have shown that at times,
synchronicity seems to bunch up, meaning and occurence all coming in clumps of 
time and space, indicating, thus, further synchronicity.
	Magic is thee act of providing one half of that syncronicity, and 
waiting for the opther half to catch up, in essence.
	Magic would be deliberately pulling out the death card, and waiting for 
death to occur.

>
>  
		D