by on

In accretive theory the double is the accretion, this means the double is what we actually engage with. The original to awareness is the vector field. The vector field is the pure undifferentiated hyle. The vector field is pneuminous but not accreted. Humans learn what different regions of the vector field are called e.g. mum, cat, wheelbarrow, tree. In doing so they continually attach the accretion of the vector back on to it. The vector is highlighted by the induction into the rules for the application of an accretion and when grasped the vector is doubled by the accretion. The vector must have the ability to appear as the concept (accretion) grasps it, it must in some sense be the same (though the vector contains much more potential than the accretion displays). Hence the accretion doubles the vector but appears as the origin. The double then seeks to bend the vector to its likeness.

This is the natural action of magick that takes place all the time. It is the correlate of the way in which intentional magick seeks to alter vector regions such that they will conform to the will of the operator by the application of an accretion to the vector region that would not normally house it. The double is just the application of an accretion to a situation that would normally take it. The double or accretion which is a kind of ideality of the vector region, in attaching to the vector region alters it in an imperceptible way, making it more like the ideality. The double minutely bends the vector to its likeness, making a perfect fusion. Things actually become the things we think they are by virtue of the double.

This also applies to Narps (people) though here the situation is more complicated. Judgements about others applies accretions to them. When we meet someone we double them and then apply the double onto their vector region to try to make them conform to our doubling. But other Narps are not apples or cigars, other Narps have ideas about who they are. They may perceive the double that we seek to apply to them and resist it by displaying other accretions, by trying to alter the double that we seek to apply to them. They may be successful or they may not. A Narp who cannot control the doubles that is applied to her will become subject to the power of the double that is applied to her.

 

 

 

  1. Manifestationism
  2. Incoherence
  3. Phantasy
  4. Pneuma
  5. Accretive theory itself
  6. Design a god.
  7. Significance/Insignificance
  8. Designation
  9. Vector theory
  10. The Umbratic
  11. The Double
  12. The zone
  13. The numbers/the system
  14. NARP

by on

What are the accretions? The accretions are accretions of pneuma. Pneuma is the conceptual substrate that we postulate as necessarily existing when we choose belief in synchronistic phenomena as metaphysically actual and not harmoniously determined -as discussed under agnostic disjunction. Phenomenologically all beings of awareness must necessarily have pneuminous interactions, but certain kinds of beings (Narps, in this case humans) are capable of binding pneuma into incredible forms of complexity and excess: accretions.

The accretions of pneuma are attached to vectors. Vector here is a carrier for the pneuminous accretion, the conceptual stuff. The vector field is itself pneuminous as it is base of all accretive possibilities. Phenomenologically the vector field is laid over the umbratic. The umbratic is the phantasy of being outside of awareness. It is the appearance of the structural elements underneath the conceptual overlay and vector field (pneuma).

This laying-over is one of minimal interaction. In normal reality, vector regions with accretions attached are part of a feedback system that makes them more into the thing the human takes them to be. Here is  vector, I attach the concept pen to the vector. If the vector is such that we would normally use the concept pen for then the application of the concept performs a minor magickal act upon the vector making it curiously more pen-like. Such actions take place all the time and are largely inconsequential. Actual magickal acts/synchronistic ruptures are caused by accretions attaching themselves to vectors that would not usually take them. This may result in an unusual configuration of conceptuality that is somehow arresting.

Accretions are formed by humans (Narps) but are free floating from them. As such accretions exist in two manners, both of which are related. Accretions may be bound to vectors. All physical things are accretions to some degree or other. Everyday disposable things, rubbish, accretes very little, but some things accrete a great deal. As these things travel through life with us we feel how much of our story is in them. In the theory described here, this story is literally in them, the pneuma is actually attached to the vector. Human made things have conceptual specificity embedded in them at the point of creation. These pieces become e.g. this dishwasher, this dishwasher becomes a certain kind of character in a household. Intensity binds pneuma to vectors, this may happen in the course of life or it may be done intentionally.

The other way in which accretions exist is unbound. Pneuminous accretions that are unbound  are easy to experience, one only has to remember anything or imagine anything and the accretion is detectable in some sense, either as non visual structure or visual. Since accretions are often built around a word-seed, the word seed will summon the accretion easily. Pneuma is sticky. We may take two ideas and with will force them together thus making an accretion.  Magick is largely based around humans abilities to manipulate unbound pneuma and to beseech the unbound pneuminous accretion to alter the regular solidity of things. Memory houses, kabbalah etc all use unbound pneuma. Active magick of intent seeks to apply new conceptual structures (an unbound pneuminous accretion) onto a vector which does not currently take it but might do so -this extensive contingency is important.

The regular solidity of existence as ruled by the structural umbratic can sometimes be breached by the accretion. Intensity can be responsible for this though in the case of synchronicity the action is down to the accretions themselves. No doubt factors which might be called unconscious are related to the manner in which the accretion behaves, ultimately though this is pure speculation. All that can be said is that some idea has inserted itself into someone’s world in an uncanny way and when paranormality is chosen (as a belief), the accretion must be responsible.

A human then is attached to accretions and is formed of them. The word-seed for most humans is their name. Around this word-seed the neurotic-accretion or self is formed. This accretion is embedded in the body-vector. In normal human functioning the neurotic accretion controls the conscious aspects of the vector and regulates the ability of other accretions to control the vector. The neurotic accretion though is in perpetual struggle with accretive powers which seek to dominate it, to control the territory. In the case of severe insanity the neurotic accretion fails to regulate the other accretions and they wander freely through the body-vector.

We can analyses accretions vector relations into 4 principle types.

  1. Accretions bound to vectors that fit the description of the accretion or even if they have escaped the original vector the attachment is still sensible from the Narp’s perspective. Hammer as use term, becomes hammer accretion embedded into vectors capable of taking this accretion.
  2. Accretions unbound from vectors that still represent the vector  in some way. The vector as the source of such an accretion determines the appearance, even if now the appearance has taken on a platonic type hue of perfection -ideality. These are what we call representations in the mind.
  3. Accretions unbound to any vector and having the appearance of never deriving from a physical vector. Imaginary images or magickal constructs/manifestations fall into this category.
  4. Accretions bound to vectors that they not suited to in ordinary life. These occur in magick, humour, surrealism/dadaism/pataphysics. This is the instance in which we take a vector and say ‘this vector will take the concept x’ even if the vector is nothing to do with x. We take a spoon and we pretend it is an owl. In doing so we infect the vector that readily takes the spoon concept and stick onto it the owl concept.
  1. Manifestationism
  2. Incoherence
  3. Phantasy
  4. Pneuma
  5. Accretive theory itself
  6. Design a god.
  7. Significance/Insignificance
  8. Designation
  9. Vector theory
  10. The Umbratic
  11. The Double
  12. The zone
  13. The numbers/the system
  14. NARP

by on

How does process philosophy fit with the accretive theory? Is the obvious necessity of ‘meaning as use’ equivalent in force to the notion that existence is necessarily process? Are these two in some sense the same? The notion of ‘meaning as use’ means that we can understand the meaning of a word by looking at the social situation in which it is used. That is, we should not look for an object that the word points towards, rather to the general rules in which it is possible for the word to be cogent. In this way objects which do not conform to ideal images of objects can easily be capable of having the names of such objects applied to them. The ashtray that is the empty beer can in the context of ‘pass the ashtray’ not be ‘really’ an empty beer can, it just is the ashtray. This does not mean there is always such flexibility, some words may have fairly strict rules the transgression of which means the application is simply ‘wrong’ -though wrong of course is also a use term. As noted elsewhere, the issue of the perpetuation of metaphysics is not something Wittgenstein can actually stop since it is often not possible to tell when a word has been deterritorialized to the point where it definitively lacks meaning. The phantom of meaning is indistinguishable from an originary meaning.

Nevertheless no matter how convoluted the pathways become, meaning continually emits from its usage. It is a secondary effect of language that produces the accretion, or ideality. In the strong sense of accretion as chaos magickal entity, the designated object as actually real. Magickal practices are often predicated on the ability of a word or symbol to uniquely pick out an individual or event. Designation in the strongest metaphysical sense is necessary for this to be the case. Wittgenstein would be totally correct if it were not for the appearance of magick. The use term though, generates the accretion. The current ideal version of a given kind of object sticks to the word. Thus we have two essences, the false essence of the accretion as word/object and the real essence of the primordial use relation. Not all words generate this duality but many -especially visually possible- words do.

What of the notion of process? Does this have the same status as usage? It seems there is a relation insofar as both offer a kind of ground of necessity. To deny process is to deny time. However the two issues cannot be conflated as identical, they are not. Meaning as process would still lapse into a naivety of things existing without conceptuality. Process means that being exists in flux. Usage as meaning recognizes this by allowing open the horizon for the extension of the remit of a given concept.

In this sense accretion is the enemy of process. This is basically true and yet it points to importance of a phenomenology of magick that cannot be denied. Designation and magick go together; this is the phantasy of the words reach out to touch the object -which in magick is literally true. Accretion means that there is a time resistant dimension (the pneuminous), where the accretions of pneuma (conceptuality) dwell. The accretive flickering image is not of a thing in time, it is of an ideal abstraction. Process largely happens too slow for us to perceive it directly. We necessarily see fixed accretions and can only understand flow as a necessity. This kind of claim is disputable. Goethe for instance claimed to have been able to retrain his mind to perceive process directly in certain ways (e.g. plants) and even claimed this possibility was available to all. Even so his method was predicated on being able to perceive the phenomena from start to finish in order that one might replay the segments to the mind to reveal the a temporal ideal unity (or entelechy as he called it). This though does nothing to undermine accretive theory, indeed it is largely grist to its mill. Goethe successful accreted the extracted plant image into the atemporal perception he achieved. His phenomena certainly would be attached to the vectors (the object we attach the concept plant to -see vector theory elsewhere on the site) but they are still just another form of pneuminous accretion. The Goethean entelechy recreates time and escapes it simultaneously. Goethe extracts time only make a small passage of time (the plant entelechy) abstract. His accretion is a temporal enemy in disguise.

The possibility of magick though means the picture is much more complicated. For if the use relation generate  accretions which exist of necessity (and let us say they do exist) then there exist feedback loops from the accretive structures to the vector field (and beyond). That is, the accretions will be feeding back into reality, not just under ritual conditions but under any conditions. That is, as the accretions are not outside of all that is but simply a part of it, process cannot be considered a pure truth that we should strive towards as process itself will be necessarly shot through a temporal accretive structures that persistently attempt staunch the flow.

by on

As far as I can see the later Wittgenstein fulfilled the vision of the earlier one and successfully stopped philosophy in some ways. The simple doctrine ‘meaning is use’ when properly grasped unfurls into an attitude that permanently alters your philosophical perspective. The problem is that it doesn’t quite achieve what it looks like it might do. The issue is roughly this: even if we can see that a language game has escaped its home, how can we be sure it does not continue to make grammatical sense in its new territory? So Wittgenstein is right, how can he not be? Words occur in social situations in relation to the various regions of the vector field (the world) that we interact with. Any region of the field that is capable of taking the rules of a given language game can take it. Essences do not evaporate so much as become grammatical. Just because there may be a greater variety of vectors capable of taking a concept doesn’t mean that any vector can take any concept.

On a strange linguistic axis it seems to recreate a desire for the view from nowhere. We need some external power to able to tell us when we have erred in applying a language game to a certain situation and when we have not. The notion of criteria is there to try to do this, however in reality it fails to act as a sufficient curb, as criteria for all manner of beliefs can be generated in all manner of ways. Psychoanalytic type structures clearly are capable of enabling what might look like (to some) strange criteria e.g. many people might consider founding certain beliefs on the contents of a ‘special’ book, not good reasons for beliefs and yet many people think this kind of thing is perfectly reasonable.

None of this means Wittgenstein isn’t correct in his assessment of the situation. If we want to use a word philosophically, we must be capable of explaining it to someone else. This must be possible or the meaninglessness charge comes into force. This kind of accusation is often levelled at some of the notoriously abstruse French philosophy of the last century. Though this seems to me an error. These systems are not incomprehensible, intelligible grammar between two people on them is not impossible, even if there may be some areas of disagreement. However they do require that both persons enter the labyrinthine structure of the language games involved and attempt to understand the criteria that have been used to justify the newly coined terms. The possibility for error is enormous, the likelihood of perfect intelligibility small. Yet still there is some cogent communications there, and maybe this is more akin to ordinary conversation than we would sometimes like to believe.

The correctness of Wittgenstein though has another limiting possibility. As stated, regardless of the various factors that impede our ability to understand the appropriateness or not of a given language game’s expansion, Wittgenstein is basically right. The words can only be social constructs. Designation is just use in certain circumstance. Words feel like they point, but they don’t really.

This would be perfectly correct were it not for the thorny issue of magick. But why is this a problem? Surely this is just outmoded belief. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. This is scarcely the point. The point is that paranormal phenomena give us a clue as the nature of the general failure to be able to trace the viability or not of a language games territorialization of a new region. Here we must illustrate with the same much trodden synchronicity argument that has appeared many times in these various writings.

So if we want to say some event was synchronicitous and mean by this that something exceptional had actually happened -that it was somehow a message, an engagement, from being itself, or some other numinous nature- then we would have to deny all explanations that would render it simply a product of chance. For if it is only chance then the meaning is ultimately projected onto an unreactive sea of materiality. The strong sense of meaning entails some kind of agency on the part of the external. It doesn’t have to be meaningful in a teleological sense, but it does have to be somehow reactive to the subject experiencing the phenomenon. The issue is that if we deny the phenomenon and state that it must be the projection onto materiality then we are saying that we must know the nature of reality. This means in order to deny the phenomenon we must beg the question -we presuppose the nature of reality in order to say how reality is. This would not be outrageous as of course we have criteria to say this -statistics, evidence of confirmation bias, pareidolia, the apparent continual solidity of the world. What though the experience believer has is that the phenomenon looks exactly what it would look like for existence to have that kind of agency. The appearance of agency and the appearance of solidity are just a duck/rabbit situation (or the agnostic disjunction as I have elsewhere labelled it).

Whilst we largely live our culture in the rationalised side of the disjunction, we should remember how close the other side is and in doing so consider the following. If we accept the agency aspect of the phenomenon then designation in a manner much sought after by analytic philosophy becomes perfectly possible, courtesy of the accretion. The grammar of the accretion is legitimised by the agency aspect perception. Indeed the accretion becomes the agent. Because accretions as particulars can be attached to specific vector regions, the linkage between these is one of identity. When I think of Wittgenstein, under the accretive theory I do not encounter the accidental possibility of thinking of someone else called Wittgenstein for the Wittgenstein accretion I am reaching for is based in a historical vector region that took into it the concept ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein’. It is similar to bundle theories of designation insofar as there is only the endless descriptions of the accretive layers, yet the difference is that because the agency (paranormal) version is accepted, the connection between thought and object (vector with inhabiting accretion) is literal and as such guaranteed. That is, the thought ‘Wittgenstein’ is the same accretion as was attached to the vector. This identity assures the connection of designation.

by on

An accretion is stuck together concepts. As time passes more and more stick together. They do not fade, they just become deeper in the accretion. This occurs in the relation between a kind of organism capable of ascribing conceptuality to a region of what we encounter (on any horizon). This is the notion of the vector field. Any region that we encounter that we are capable of ascribing a concept to is necessarily part of the vector field. The vector field is a transcendental field that we must presuppose insofar as there is some x, some region of this field that we have isolated as an organism and now call a specific name. It takes its name vector from its ability to play host to concepts which latch onto it. When we, the accreting organism, start to use a region of it (a stone, a stick) we begin to double the region in our minds. The doubling happens strongly in visual aspects but can happen in others. The double is the pure conceptual (pneuminous) form of the accretion. Concepts are in us and in the vector region. There is a literal connection between them. This is the linkage by which synchronicitous phenomena may occur.

To us it seems that we stick concepts together or we can observe how this happened. There might be a region of the vector field called a plate. ‘Plate’ is literally in these regions. One plate may be the last surviving piece of an old family set of crockery. Its presence is tinged with melancholy, evoking all manner of childhood images. These sensations are not simply my memories, they are in the vector region. The totality of the plate as we speak about it is the vector field region that fulfils the criteria for being that plate and the inhabiting concept ‘that childhood plate’.  I did not intentionally stick these complicated memories onto the plate, they just stuck there by the ways of the mind. These ways are not just a mystery, psychology understands much about how memories form. Emotions e.g. are strong binders of concepts to vector regions -events, things, places. I can however use the sheer force of my will to attach a concept to a region. I might get a stick and say, ‘this is a stick of water’ whatever I might mean by that. Then I could just from a forced habit stick together various images and ideas of water to this stick. After a while I will not forget and the stick will be ‘the water stick’.

Again, why do we insist on placing the concepts in the objects? We do not necessarily say this is the case. What we do say is that, if someone believes in synchronicity and/or many other similar phenomena, indeed every time anyone gives a small amount of pondering credence to such possibilities, then they must accept that concepts reside in vectors in something like the way described. This pondering is the flickering of the agnostic disjunction which we engage in all the time. Solid world or fluid world, concept discrete in mind or concept in vector. If we seriously believe in the strangeness of a synchronicitous phenomenon -and do not secretly just think of it as a coincidence. If we think this thought through then we find that conceptuality must be the culprit, a conceptuality that can act upon the seemingly solid and insert itself in way that seems radically at odds with our everyday experience.

But the accretive notion needs some clarification here. It does not seem clear as to whether the accretion refers to the fact that the concept sticks to the vector or that the concepts stick to one another. In a sense it is both, but really the way in which the concept sticks to the vector is less about the accretion process and more about the metaphysics of how the relation between accretion and vector region must be.

It is more sensible to say that once a concept is attached to a vector region, then such regions will inevitably begin to accrete. Accretion as described here occurs on the particular level of the thing. Clearly most experiences we have are unremarkable, most things that pass through our hands not worthy of particular note. All these unremarkable happenings leave a trace, but the trace is minute. But some things endure, have significance. These things or places or even times are personal accretions. This is not to say that simply because they are personal, the connections are purely in the subject. No, in this instance still, conceptuality can be said to dwell in the vector region. But now the failure seems to be in the word conceptual which conveys something too narrow. What we try to intimate is a broad sense of ideas that can be conveyed. Hence emotions too are a form of concept in this sense. If we stay with the solitary plate, that last survivor of a family set of crockery from years ago, we would say here that the vector contains not only the plateness but all that history of its usages. Much of this historical pneuma will be nothing, but some of it will be highly charged, imprinted into the vector, accreted to the plate concept all of which goes to make it ‘that plate’. As an interesting aside, this kind of metaphysic deals neatly with designation problems. The idea of that plate uniquely refers to ‘that plate’ for the idea and the plate are in a sense one and the same thing. Remember we do not see the vector, we only see the plate (the concept). The idea of the plate and the plate are the same entity -which is the accretion of pneuma.

Accretions though necessarily occur beyond a personal level. There is also the general plate concept. This is a non-personal accretion that exists unbound to any particular plate and simultaneously bound to all of them. The general plate accretion exists out there in the pneuma. It is literally a massive accretion of all plate related conceptuality. It is formed by humans but not reliant on them for its continuing existence. This character of being accreted by humans and yet autonomous from them is a key feature of the accretion. It is this autonomy, coupled with their ability to alter the real, that brings about the peculiar effects known as synchronicity.