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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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  • Weird Studies

    • Weird Studies/Batcheldor

    11 Mar 2026 - 18 Mar 2026
    Open in Logseq
      • The elusiveness of the paranormal.
      • Science assuemes a stable/lawful reality, but the paranormal is rearrangements...
      • The Universal Creative Principle (aka hyperchaos).
      • I like that they are distinguishing 2 forms of paranormal theorizing: that it's just some physcial/causal thing that we just don't understand, but could with more scientific research (Rhine approach), vs this and WS which holds that it is somehow acausal, creative, and free in a way that is beyond mere causality. A creator can't be necessary, or its just production.
      • So the UCP is this seething source of creativity. It's not paranormal since it creates both normality and violations.
      • Map to medival categories: natural, preternatural, and the supernatural (god)
      • JFM says this is radically strange, its not because of some special power or force, its literally just a coincidence, but as a result of a creative principle that somehow wills weird shit. Doesn't seem strange to me, it's just standard theism with a new label?
      • UCP can do anything but- tends towards regularity (canalization). But why? I mean, OK, "regularities emerge" is about as LCD a principle as you could want. UCP sounds like the Tao under a different name, and we all know that we don't know it's real name so why not.
      • Irregular things kind of evaporate, go away. Pockets of indeterminacy. Normally those just don't get observed. Analog with cancer cells, which emerge but usually don't get macroscopic. A gravity well (JFM spin on canalization).
      • Recalled Blake's Newton, the rational mind looking at this little corner of light and ignoring the vast dark chaos around it. They need more Blake on the show.
      • At any rate, since the paranormal by its nature eludes the methods of science, then studying it is not pseudoscience, its something else. To me, it seems to have the quality of religion, especially since people get so emotional about it.
      • [ins 2 pages from Maker notebook]