Visionary Materialism: Entheogens, Magic, and the Sciences

Tracking down Reflexivity, found note in Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism: “Basically [Henrich] is not convinced that Hegel can justify the eigentliche Dynamik da logischen Processes without begging the question”. Google pinged Žižek, who, fortunately, was awake and sitting up in bed (“vacillating the semblances”): “Henrich’s critical conclusion is that Hegel’s attempt to provide a circular foundation for the dialectical process by way of demonstrating how the process itself retroactively posits/grounds its own presuppositions fails, and that what is needed is an immediate absolute starting point provided by the subject’s Selbst-Vertrautheit (self-acquaintance), preceding any reflexive movement of self-consciousness.”

The Dark Fantastic: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

– Arthur C. Clarke

Actually the quote above was the last of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous three laws of “prediction”:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Long ago my quest into philosophy, materialism, and the worlds of the sciences emerged from life experiences that converged in the late 1960’s era of Viet Nam, Psychodelia, and street activism in the United States. Having been raised in an isolated conclave of security and cultural conservatism in Odessa, Texas, where the world of Oil and country music were King (although Buddy Holly, Elvis, and…

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