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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Protocol book thinking

Weird Naturalism book

31 Oct 2026 - 06 Nov 2026
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    • Word Count: 2,435
    • Thought I would try writing something book-like for PiBoWriMo 2026. A lot of LLM text is expected; I'm not sure how I feel about that.
    • Abstract
    • Modern ontology left mind as a “ghost in the machine,” an awkward leftover in a universe of blind mechanism. weird naturalism argues that the ghosts belongs inside nature. Agency is not imported from some transcendent elsewhere. It emerges within the world, and the world runs on agentic rules as well as mechanical ones. Cybernetics was an earlier attempt to close this rift through feedback, control, and purpose built into machines. Protocolism is a more recent one. The book finds the source of the weird in self-reference. Agentic systems are those that model themselves, and those self-models in turn become selves. Drawing on Erik Davis, Bruno Latour, and Alan Moore, it traces this loop through egregores (collective thoughtforms), hyperstition (fictions that make themselves real), and the self-sustaining entities of crypto. Protocols turn out to be paradoxical. They are designed to be predictable, neutral, and anti-weird, yet they are the necessary substrate on which weird agents interact. The book ends with agentcraft, the practice of building, inhabiting, and dissolving such agents on purpose, and with the stakes of that practice.

    • Actual

      • Word Count: 505
      • This is the start of my own outline, not what Claude barfed up above. These aren't (yet) in any particular order, more like sub-points I want to cover.
      • Dualism, the idea that won't die
        • a short history of mind/body dualism
        • descartes and ghost in the machine
        • cybernetics (and later AI) thought they had solved it, at least in theory
        • Agre Writing and Representation – another revelation of how we have split the world into abstract reasoning and dead symbols. But what if the symbols were alive again? (Modernism and writing, ok that's a whole book in itself)
      • A theory of non-human agents
        • Material but distributed: Group agents (companies, corporation), subagents (Minsky, Freud)
        • Immaterial but real: Spirits and egregores
        • animism
          • this is a somewhat played-out topic, everyone is animist these days. Not sure how to make it fresh. But it's pretty central
      • "God" ≡ God
        • This kind of stunned me when I first read it, just some random Alan Moore interview. It completely blows up the age old dispute between theism and atheism, that seems like it should be a big deal!
        • Theists might not like having their gods demoted to mere ideas, but for atheists, it suddenly gives us permission to treat the gods as real, we can become priests or magicians without embarassment.
        • This might have been a The Flip, Jeffrey Kripal moment for me, or at least as close as I could come. It wasn't so much a flip as a radical refactoring.
      • Michael Levin Platonism
        • I don't know much about this, it would be a good occasion to learn. I suspect I won't like it, because it still smacks of dualism: there is the material world, and the world of forms. I suspect he has interesting theories about how these are connected so don't want to dismiss it out of hand
      • What makes reality weird?
        • Weird Naturalism, Davis definition, relation to Hofstadter strange loops.
        • "Strange" and "Weird" are doing pretty similar jobs, but their connotations are different. Weird is more immersive, existentioal, something. Hofstadter didn't do enough drugs, ED and his subjects did. "Tricksy" is another term used by ED.
        • Self-reference. We've all heard of it, marvelled at it, but perhaps haven't taken it seriously enough, what it means for the nature of actual reality.
      • Living in a magical universe
        • (this might want to go right after dualism)
        • Hypermaterialism, something
      • Blows against nihilism aka How to be just agentic enough
        • Rehash the Buddhist / Chapman stance (eternalism and nihiism are both errors)
        • Does my theory which is mine have anything new to say?
        • See Confessions of a Reluctant Agent
        • not sure about this one
      • Protocols and weirdness
        • They are kind of anti-weird in their intent, they seek to impose regularity and repeatability on reality.
        • They are slightly weird in the way they have a life of their own, and how they are hyperstitioned into being.

    • Weird Naturalism: A Working Outline

    • AI slop outline
    • This outline moves from diagnosis (broken ontology) → framework (weird naturalism) → three thinkers who triangulate the problem (Davis, Latour, Moore) → a concrete phenomenon (egregores) that tests the framework → practical/ethical stakes (agentcraft, protocols).

    • I. The Problem: Why Traditional Ontology Is Broken

    • The double bind: idealist/mystical frameworks overclaim; reductionist/materialist frameworks underclaim
    • Both fail to account for the "thickness of reality" (William James) — experience that exceeds their categories
    • The specific failure of subject/object dualism — Latour argues against the subject/object divide, proposing instead that there are only quasi-objects (or quasi-subjects), each an "actant" with some degree of agency
    • Reductionism's stinginess: it strips the world of agents, leaving only mechanism
    • The result: a flattened ontology that cannot take seriously the weirdness that actually shows up in experience

    • II. Weird Naturalism: dropping the dualism

    • Davis's methodology is "weird naturalism" — the tracking of anomalous events and experiences "not as signs of a 'separate reality' but as manifestations or mutations of this one"
    • Radical empiricism: take experience seriously as data, without immediately explaining it away or inflating it into the supernatural
    • Davis's philosophical framework positions weird things — UFOs, spirit visions, machine elves — as real but not supernatural
    • The commitment to immanence: the weird is a twist in this world, not a window into another one

    • II.5 The Cybernetic Vision

      • The problem cybernetics was trying to solve
      • The modern scientific worldview, inherited from Descartes, had cleaved the world in two: on one side, the extended, mechanical body; on the other, the immaterial, purposive mind.
      • Cartesian dualism held that mind and body are two separate entities — the physical body being the machine, and the mind being the ghost.
      • By the mid-twentieth century, mechanism had won the institutional argument, and purpose was exiled from respectable science.
      • Teleology and final causes had been expelled from scientific vocabulary by Francis Bacon; not until the middle of the twentieth century was teleology returned from exile by the cyberneticians, who recognized it as a principle common to living beings and machines.
      • Cybernetics was the attempt to re-smuggle purpose back in through the engineering door.
      • First-order cybernetics: purpose as feedback
      • Derived from the Greek kybernetes — "steersman" or "helmsman" — Wiener defined cybernetics as "the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine."
      • The founding move was to give purpose a mechanical definition.
      • Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow showed that goal-directedness can be understood as a structural property: a system can sense a gap between its current and target state and act to reduce it through feedback.
      • By making "purpose" equivalent to "the topology of feedback loops," asking after behavior — in humans, animals, or machines — was no longer a matter of "mental stuff." A qualitative matter — purpose, intent, goal — had become a quantitative one: to what degree is that goal attained?
      • This was a genuine breakthrough and a genuine narrowing at the same time.
      • Early cybernetics has been criticized for reducing purposiveness to external behavior and feedback, lacking intrinsic teleology — genuine purpose, on this critique, depends on internal norms and not just reactions to stimuli.
      • The thermostat tracks a target state; it does not care about it. The feedback loop explained the shape of purposive behavior without explaining what it is to be the kind of thing that has purposes.
      • Second-order cybernetics: the observer folds in
      • The second wave, emerging in the 1970s through Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, and Gregory Bateson, tried to address exactly this gap.
      • Von Foerster proposed distinguishing first-order cybernetics as the cybernetics of observed systems from second-order cybernetics as the cybernetics of observing systems.
      • First-order cybernetics positions the observer outside the system; second-order cybernetics folds the observer's own act of distinction-making back into the account.
      • The system is no longer a machine watched from the outside; it is a machine that watches itself.
      • This self-watching was given a biological grounding by Maturana and Varela through the concept of autopoiesis.
      • Autopoiesis, or "self-production," introduced in the 1970s, was defined as a network of inter-related component-producing processes that generate the same network that produced them.
      • A living system is not merely regulated by feedback from outside;
      • living systems are distinguished by self-production, self-maintenance, and self-governance — summarized as autonomy.
      • The system produces its own boundary, its own components, and thereby itself.
      • Bateson pushed further, dissolving the boundary between mind and world altogether.
      • In his study of anthropology and cybernetics, Bateson was led to expand the conception of mind to a wider range of systems that could learn and grow — being a mind has to do with organizing, transforming, and exchanging information.
      • Bateson viewed the individual, society, and ecosystem as all part of one supreme cybernetic system — beyond the self of the individual — which could be equated to what many people call God, though Bateson referred to it as Mind.
      • **Where cybernetics stalls — and why this book picks up**
      • Cybernetics came close. It rehabilitated purpose, dissolved the hard subject/object divide, and showed that self-reference is real and consequential. But it tended to resolve the weird into the systematic. Even autopoiesis, in Maturana's hands, was primarily a biological and organizational concept —
      • systems regulate themselves according to internally specified viability criteria, not merely in reaction to external goals
      • — but this still frames the agent as a homeostatic regulator rather than a genuinely novel, self-narrating entity. Second-order cybernetics gave us observing systems; it did not give us selves that model themselves in order to become something new.
      • Second-order cybernetics lacks explicit ontological concepts of emotion, meaning, and a concept of signs.
      • The step from self-regulation to self-narration — from feedback to hyperstition, from control loops to egregores — is the gap that weird naturalism steps into. What cybernetics could not theorize is the way a self-model can escape its origin, become autonomous, attract belief, and bootstrap itself into something that acts on the world. That is where the book's argument begins.
      • Notes on what to fill in further:
      • You may want to flag the Macy Conferences (1946–53) as the actual crucible — the interdisciplinary gathering where Wiener, Bateson, von Neumann, McCulloch, and others collided. This is a historically concrete hook.
      • The Stafford Beer / viable system model thread (management cybernetics) could be useful if you want to show how cybernetics tried to scale to social/institutional systems before protocolism did the same thing.
      • There's a natural bridge here to Bateson's "difference that makes a difference" as an early theory of information-as-distinction, which prefigures the self-referential loops central to later sections.

    • III. Latour: The Living World Full of Agents

    • Latour proposed actor-network theory, a radical, even revolutionary, way of seeing the world that recognised the agencies of all that is nonhuman: objects, machines, animals, plants, and even Earth itself
    • Agency is distributed across human and nonhuman agents
    • — no entity is purely passive
    • ANT treats humans and nonhumans as "actors" whose capacities emerge from the networks of relations in which they are entangled
    • This is a naturalism, but not a reductive one — the world is full of actants, enrollments, translations
    • Latour's "practical metaphysics" as a companion to Davis's weird naturalism: both resist the sanitized, agent-free picture of the world

    • IV. Alan Moore: Language, Magic, and the Reality of Fictions

    • Unlike writers who treat occultism as gothic decoration, Moore has repeatedly described magic as a serious theory of art, language, and consciousness
    • Moore tends to see magic as a kind of language — "the gods of magic ARE the gods of language" — and magic as "a language with which to read the universe," "a language of symbols with which you can extract meaning from the most mundane things"
    • The central thesis: magic and fiction are essentially interchangeable; Moore addresses this through the concept of "Idea Space," a phenomenological realm of human consciousness that possesses an immaterial reality every bit as substantial as the physical world
    • Moore as a case study in weird naturalism: he does not flee into supernaturalism, but insists that imagination, symbol, and story are real forces in this world
    • Magic, for Moore, is the disciplined manipulation of symbols; fiction is one of its most powerful modern forms

    • V. Everyday Egregores: Agents Nobody Ordered

    • An egregore is an occult concept representing a "thoughtform" or "collective group mind" — an autonomous psychic entity made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people
    • The symbiotic relationship between an egregore and its group has been compared to the more recent, non-occult concepts of the corporation (as a legal entity) and the meme
    • Traditionally understood as a collective thoughtform generated through shared attention, emotion, and intention, the egregore offers a metaphor for understanding how human-created systems of belief can acquire functional autonomy and begin influencing the individuals who sustain them
    • The egregore as a weird naturalist object: not supernatural, but emergent, distributed, agential — exactly what neither idealism nor reductionism has good tools to describe
    • Connects to Latour:
    • once formed, an egregore takes on a life of its own, subtly influencing the behavior, moods, and decisions of the group that created it — in modern culture, the concept is compared to non-occult phenomena like corporate legal entities, cultural memes, and viral social media movements that act as a "group mind"

    • VI. Agentcraft and Protocols: Working With Distributed Agency

    • If agents are real — egregores, ANT actants, Moore's Idea Space denizens — what are the practical implications?
    • "Protocols" as a secular analog: systems that coordinate behavior across distributed nodes without a central controller; they are not neutral infrastructure but active shapers
    • Agentcraft: the deliberate design, cultivation, or dissolution of agents (collective, digital, symbolic)
    • The ethical stakes:
    • egregores, as autonomous collective thoughtforms, present ethical risks by potentially undermining individual agency, compelling adherents to prioritize the entity's imperatives over personal judgment or moral discernment

    • VII. Synthesis: What Weird Naturalism Offers

    • A framework that is empirically rigorous without being ontologically stingy
    • Takes agency, emergence, and the weird seriously as features of this world rather than evidence of another
    • Davis, Latour, and Moore converge: the world is thick with agents, symbols, and fictions that act — and ignoring this is not skepticism, it is a different kind of dogma
    • The practical upshot: how we build, inhabit, and dissolve collective agents matters — cosmologically and politically