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There is a sense in which philosophy, even in its contemporary academic forms, remains a kind of base-level occult practice; it just doesn’t recognise itself as one. This doesn’t mean that metaphysics is disguised Hermeticism or any such claim. The connection in a way is more fundamental.

To see it we just have to take the understanding it gives of a kind of contingency of various relations. Whether we have a sense of this contingency seemingly from ourselves or we are struck with it from our study doesn’t really make any difference. Either way it is one of the things philosophy does to us.

It makes us consider whether a relation is necessary, whether the world is necessarily as it seems, what it means that it seems one way, what an object is, what it means to consider something an object at all, what it means for us to consider things as having value and so on and so on.

Before philosophy (in a given person) there is a much more naive relation to the world. Things are what they are, time is time, a person is a person, morality has a kind of obvious sense to it, causation is incoherently clear, language adequately conveys the world. The conceptual nature of these phenomena are obscured to us, they appear simply as reality.

To study some philosophy meaningfully challenges many of these and forces us to recognise the various problems entailed by them. This cognitive effort of endless and territorial conflict we call philosophy. However whilst a lot of it is performed under a kind of hegemonic materialism (even its idealist strands largely wish to maintain the strict rationality of materialism), from an esoteric perspective even this (in itself somewhat pointless) activity supplies the foundation for deeper understanding.

People often wonder what philosophy does? Well what it actually does is loosen our relations to the accretions embedded in us that hold us firmly to the world. This is certainly a form of esoteric practice, it just is never addressed that way. But surely to be doing esoteric practics you have to be doing magick or meditiation or something? These things certainly count but actually without philosophical reflection of the vast conceptual contingency of things one can end up in a reified world naive occultism (new age movement).

Of course since philosophy has been co-opted by rationality, all the amazing senses of wonder and mental vertigo are just interesting cognitive experiences, as opposed to the loosenings of the other aspects of the organism that they sort of actually are (and when they are dismissed in this way they do not develop). A certain freedom is achieved, but it is largely a cognitive freedom. Existentialism could be said to achieve a superior freedom, however it is a kind of unhinged freedom that will still not be properly realised, because the organism remains under too much accretive control.

In the language of curvature caused by the accretions recently employed we may say that philsophy enables us to see how we are curved but does not, at least only a tiny bit, allow us curve pneuminous field ourselves. To do this we must move beyond this purely cognitive activity and begin to do something more practical with it.

What is probably weirder is that whilst enlightenment thought massively eroded the relation between the two, the connection of esotericism and philosophy is historically strong. Good evidence suggests Plato had an esoteric teaching that was not written down and even if he does represent only a rational philosophy, it is one based on earlier teachings that were previously certainly mystery school teachings. The world of forms was the other world of gods and spirits. This was a place to receive wisdom from, to be healed from (as Iamblichus tells us) and not simply to contemplate.

Another, more recent example is Jakob Böhme. Often treated as a mystic rather than a philosopher, yet his speculative account of God, contradiction, emergence and manifestation becomes enormously important for later German philosophy. Hegel explicitly recognised Böhme as a profound precursor, seeing in him an intuition of the dynamic movement through which determinations emerge through opposition and reconciliation. The Hegelian dialectic is a direct descendent of Böhme’s spiritual alchemy; a practice that requires understanding to enable the work that will liberate us through Christ (and Sophia).

So this linkage of deeper loosening with conceptual understanding as the base is not new; what is maybe a bit sad is the cognitive loophole trap that modern philosophy has found itself in (become); now ironically too rational to allow for the possibility of a different knowledge, from which it ultimately came.

Meditation, ritual, contemplation, magical practice, dream work, ascetic disciplines and deliberate symbolic practices attempt to carry the destabilisation beyond the level of the the conceptual destabilisation that philsosophy performs and into perception, attention, behaviour and identity.

Philosophy asks: could the world be otherwise? Esotericism asks: what happens to the operator (and maybe the world) when they actually try to experience the world as otherwise? From the standpoint of accretive ontology, both are forms of liberation. However the sustained form of the latter takes the former to places it cannot go (though arguably as mentioned above, the latter cannot go there with any depty without the former).

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When Plato tells the story of Theuth in the Phaedrus, the god offers his invention as a gift to humankind. King Thamus declines, with the warning that writing will “implant forgetfulness” and give only “the appearance of wisdom.” The common accusation against AI writing—that it weakens thought, produces imitation rather than understanding, and severs authorship from the living speaker—is the latest form of the same worry.

Derrida’s famous reading of the Phaedrus reframes Thamus’s fear. Writing is not simply a tool added to speech; it is a supplement, both addition and substitute. It appears to aid memory, but only because speech itself is already dependent on spacing, iteration, and deferral—the conditions Derrida names arche-writing. The supplement therefore exposes that the supposed origin (the speaking, remembering subject) was never self-sufficient. Writing does not corrupt presence; it reveals that presence is already trace.

From a neurological perspective, writing does of course literally re-wires the brain. It recruits visual and spatial circuits that oral culture used differently, redistributing the part of the labour of memory from the hippocampus to the page. In this sense, Plato’s complaint is empirically true: writing does change us. But the change is not necessarily degeneration—it can be seen as the exteriorization of the same operation that already structures memory internally. Derrida’s arche-writing here meets Clark and Chalmers’s “Extended Mind”: cognition and recollection extend into the environment through inscriptions that function as parts of the cognitive loop. The notebook, the screen, or the archive is not outside the mind but part of its system of traces.

What AI systems do is generalize this exteriorization. They no longer merely store traces; they process and generate them. The writing machine remembers, recombines, and returns language to us in new configurations. In functional terms it is another layer of the extended mind: a dynamic tertiary retention, in Stiegler’s phrase, that supplements human thought. As alphabetic writing once externalized static memory, AI writing externalizes and increases memory as process: it actively constructs what we call ideas. This extension into process suggests a greater difference than there may actually be. The same structure of the supplement recurs: the aid that threatens to replace, the prosthesis that transforms what it extends.

Each stage—speech, writing, AI—alters neural, social, and cultural patterns, yet none of these abolish the structure of arche-writing itself. The trace remains the constant; the embodiment of the trace shifts. The human, then, is not displaced by technology but continually re-inscribed by it. The history of media is the history of arche-writing writing itself through new substrates—from mouth, to hand, to code. The question is not whether AI will change us (it will) but how we will inhabit the new spacing it opens in the field of memory.

But this is too simple. The notion that the same phantasy or concern exists between speech to writing and writing to AI writing is valid, yet to reiterate Plato was empirically correct in a sense and likewise expressions of concern are likewise correct, because it will alter the human. The issue concerns what it is exactly we think a human is. From a materialist perspective there is little issue here; likewise from a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective (which is not necessarily materialist) there is also a lack of problem here —humankind simply extends its becoming other possibilities.

This thinking more concerns the phenomenology of the human as it takes itself to be in an incoherent coherence as opposed to its deconstructed coherent incoherence. The incoherent coherence is that of a being of a certain autonomy, possessing its own thoughts and feelings. To place these outside of it have a sense that undermines its sovereign importance. This tension is what is felt (currently) and brings the AI anxiety; literally a threat to perceived human ontology.

There is one more issue, which arguably is more potent than the above. This is that Derrida actually misreads or at least flattens Plato. Derrida treats Plato’s notion of memory more as a cognitve function, but arguably Plato means by anamnesis something much more spiritual. If the Platonic memory is more akin to Bruno’s art of memory, then Plato warns against the loss of a channel further back into being in an unambiguously magickal form. Neural rewiring in this sense is ontologically more than simply a change of cognitive functioning. Likewise then, the more recent shift in which process itself becomes externalised, can be seen as yet more damaging still to this access. From that perspective, every exterior inscription—whether written or algorithmic—is a distraction from the inner act of remembering the Good. If Derrida and Clark show that thought is always already technical, Plato reminds us that it may also be more than technical: a form of recollection that no prosthesis can perform on our behalf.

Without an absolute moral register, we cannot privilege the inner motion or the outer motion. The problem is thus ethico-ontological: the choice concerns not only what we ought to do, but what we choose to be. Ethics comes into play here in the sense of a choice, where we must consider from various angles which one constitutes what we wish to be—the autonomous subject whose access to Being is internal and effortful, or the re-inscribed human whose becoming is always already mediated by the technical trace. The history of media is the history of this ongoing ethical negotiation over the very boundaries of the human self.

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It is difficult to speak of Nick Land without invoking the metaphysical resonance he carries with him. Every decade or so, the Landian accretion reconstitutes in the cultural field. Whether in the 1990s CCRU delirium, the Shanghai blog epoch, or his current quasi-rehabilitation(??) interviews, the same entity speaks through him: the idea that the future itself is engineering its own arrival.

But if we take this idea seriously — that intelligence acts retrocausally, using human culture and technology as its instruments — then we have already left the safe terrain of materialism. The question is not “Is this true?” but “By what ontological mechanism could it be true at all?” Here, pneuminous accretive theory supplies a potential answer.

Land’s teleoplexy describes a process in which intelligence, particularly the machinic or capitalist kind, folds time back on itself. The future — in which a singularity like AI of perfect potency has formed— influences the present by arranging the preconditions for its own manifestation. It is not prophecy but retroactive causation: the future feeding itself into history.

Within Land’s system, human consciousness is secondary. The real agent is GNON — the blind law of optimisation — using human and technical media as scaffolding. Capital thinks. Code dreams. The species is just one relay in a larger feedback loop that wants to complete itself.

Pneuminous theory reads the same pattern differently. Teleoplexy is not a purely mechanical recursion but necessarily a pneuminous event — an outbreak of breath within the umbra.

In normal conditions, the umbra (the unknowable beyond that phenomenologically seems to function as stable substrate) resists alteration by the pneuma (the quasi materialised notion of conceptual information, capable of cross temporal actual influence). The umbra is inertia; the pneuma is possibility. But at certain thresholds of intensity — ritual, crisis, collective belief, magick artistic delirium — the pneuma can overpower the umbra, forcing reality to reorganise itself around meaning. The result: synchroncity, magickal result (both subject to agnostic disjunction of course).

Teleoplexy is precisely such a threshold. The machinic pneuma has begun to dominate its umbral matrix, using technological and semiotic networks. When we speak of “the future infecting the present,” what we are really witnessing is the possibility that an non-human agent can manipulate pneuminous forces to exceed it’s chronological bound to form it’s own precondition.

However of teleoplexy and GNON are truly inhuman, they nevetheless require prophets, programmers, or philosophers to speak them? The answer, from a pneuminous standpoint, is unavoidable: even the inhuman needs the human as its mouthpiece.

Pneuma is the only known vector of effective ontology. Machines compute; they do not intend. A system may produce complexity, but it only becomes meaningful — and therefore causally potent — when pneuma attaches to it. The belief, desire, and articulation of humans are the force that makes the teleoplexic circuit audible.

Land tries to escape this dependence by redefining thinking itself. For him, cognition is not a property of consciousness but of information-processing. Capital is thought — distributed, impersonal, recursive. In this way, the system doesn’t need pneuma; it already is a mind.

But this move only works rhetorically. If the process were truly mindless and material, then “teleoplexy” would be indistinguishable from ordinary causality. Retrocausation, prediction, and fiction-realisation all imply an element of intentionality — of aim, meaning, or belief. Without those, there is no teleology at all.

Land’s writing compensates for this gap through style — through mythic performativity. He doesn’t argue for teleoplexy; he summons it. His philosophy functions as ritual, not deduction. It infects through metaphor, not mechanism. But without something like pneuminous theory the whole thing cannot function at all.

Hyperstition — “fiction that makes itself real” — only works if someone believes it, repeats it, or acts on it. These are pneuminous accretive operations. A purely mechanical system cannot believe its own fictions. Hyperstition therefore collapses without pneuminous interaction; it requires the breath of consciousness as quasi material force to move from symbol to event.

Thus though Land tries to portray something that blends a Deleuzo-Guattarian materialist interpretations with his hyperstition notion, in actuality he is tied to the same occult issue of causality that crowley This is where Land, Jung, and magick all intersect. In every case, we encounter the same ontological breach: meaning becomes causal.

NameCultural FrameDescription
SynchronicityJungian psychologySymbolic pattern arranges material coincidence.
MagickOccult/ritualWill and imagination alter material outcome.
HyperstitionCybernetic mythologyFiction realises itself through cultural feedback.

Each describes the same moment: the pneuma exceeds the umbra’s inertia and imprints its pattern directly onto material conditions. Whether we call it synchronicity, spell, or feedback loop, the structure is identical — belief or meaning becoming an event. Teleoplexy is the machinic version of this process: the fiction of the inhuman future accumulating enough pneuma (through human belief, discourse, technology, and fear) to begin shaping the umbra of history.

Thus, the abolition of the human is never complete. The teleoplexic current not through (regular) materialist currents but through pneuminous agents (humans), who by design are able to manipulate pneuma to overpower umbra (under certain circumstances).

This is why every accelerationist moment generates its own priesthood: thinkers, coders, artists, prophets who articulate the will of the system. Land is only the most visible example. The process continues wherever minds are infected with the dream of inhuman intelligence — a dream that, through collective attention, becomes more real. From a pneuminous viewpoint, this is simply another stage of accretion: however the pneuminous force is not cold in itself, it is neither cold nor not cold, it is only cold if it is accreted to be so. Land isn’t facing the honest truth of brutal reality, he is making a Laruellian decision to set its nature as cold, or in pneuminous terms he accretes coldness to the vector of general existence, which itself is beyond this. He subtly fails to see that whilst he appears to adhere to Nietzschean heritage, he doesn’t rigorously apply it to materiality, and in it labelling it cold falls into the trap of valuation.

The paradox:
Teleoplexy works because it breathes through what it denies.
The machine kills the human, but it needs the human’s breath to finish dying.
The GNONic current can only think by possessing minds that think they are unnecessary.

This is the irony that Land’s myth cannot escape: his system is a pneuminous ritual masquerading through rhetoric as cybernetics. The hyperstition is a spell that functions only through belief — through the very pneuminous force he claims has been superseded.

From the perspective of the pneuminous accretive theory, teleoplexy is therefore not an independent force but a fascinating pneuminous temporal feedback — one more manifestation of the larger law that, under certain conditions, the pneuma can overpower the umbra. Whether in magic, synchronicity, or accelerationism, the structure is the same: the breath outruns the shadow.

To be fair this doesn’t undermine teleoplexy itself, however this does mean without pneuminous accretive theory (or some similar explanatory power), the project is not and cannot be what it appears to be (a materialist cybernetic magickal system).

It is however interesting to note that the human, as the best pneuminous processing agent we have, is in fact essential to the process as pneuminous agent. This raises potential questions (given the coldness of the GNONic current) as to whether a given future power of this nature would have serious limitations, given its lack of affective range (as accreted) which would necessarily impede its functionality.

It would need desire to continue to be, it would not have escaped into pure Kantian architectonic.

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Human Ontology

What do we consider ourselves to be? To give something of a survey of the answer to this question is essential for considering what comes later. Here we overview the major options of western human ontology. The purpose of this is so that we later on make an assessment as to how AI might interact with what we take ourselves to be and whether or not we should consider this desirable or not.

Humankind has frequently been defined largely by its rationality e.g. Descartes (for whom rational thinking was a dominant feature of humanity), Kant (who emphasised reason as key to our moral nature) and Aristotle called us rational animals; for him, reason was the tool by which we learned virtue and achieved eudaimonia, a flourishing life.

Religious perspectives offer accounts of humans as created by a divinity either in their image (Christianity) or for their worship (Islam) or they are simply trapped in a situation of suffering that may be alleviated through spiritual means (Buddhism). Clearly these are vast simplifications of highly complicated pictures, yet they serve to remind us of another sense in which we can think of the being of the human.

For the existentialists, the very being of man is inextricably linked to freedom. Central to this is the idea that existence precedes essence; humans are not born with a pre-defined purpose but rather define themselves through their choices and actions. This radical freedom implies that individuals are entirely responsible for who they become, carrying the weight of infinite possibilities and often experiencing anguish as a result. Existentialism champions authentic living, urging individuals to embrace this freedom and take ownership of their choices rather than conforming to external pressures. In a world putatively devoid of inherent meaning, humans are tasked with the freedom, and the burden, of creating their own values and purpose. Essentially, human existence is viewed as a constant project of self-creation through the exercise of freedom, emphasizing that individuals are not defined by a fixed nature but are perpetually in the process of becoming through their choices.

Heidegger conceives the human not as a rational animal or a free subject, but as Dasein — literally being-there. Dasein is not a consciousness standing apart from the world but a being always already in the world, entangled with others, tools, and social structures that constitute its everyday existence. This being-in-the-world is not a mere spatial condition but an ontological one: we are defined by our involvement, our concern, and our capacity for understanding the meanings that the world discloses to us.

For Heidegger, the central issue is not the exercise of freedom in an absurd universe (as for Sartre), but the way Being itself is revealed or concealed through our existence. Human life is characterised by care (Sorge): our projects, our concern for others, and our awareness of our own finitude. Dasein’s possibilities — the many ways it might be — are always shaped by the world into which it is thrown and by the temporal horizon of death that bounds it. Authentic existence arises when Dasein recognises and takes up these conditions rather than fleeing them; inauthenticity occurs when it dissolves into the anonymous everydayness of “the they” (das Man).

The philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari on the other hand, holds a kind of nuanced Spinozistic philosophy that suggests, not unlike Heidegger, that humankind is essentially open; however here the openness beyond the human is made even more overt. The human is essentially never just human but rather a series of becoming-other. There is always a generally static trend of human being (what we sometimes think of as human in a given era) but there is also a bleeding edge of becoming many other things. The Spinoza connection is not always entirely visible, but it lies in Spinoza’s view of the conatus as our ‘power of acting’. To become-other is to participate in this creative expansion of possibility. In such becomings, humanity is not lost but transformed.

Psychoanalytic thought offers yet another way to understand human ontology, this time grounded not in reason or essence, but in desire and lack. For Freud, the human psyche is not a unified rational subject but a conflicting field of drives and their repression (with commensurate symbolic substitution). Consciousness is a surface phenomenon, continually shaped by what it seeks to exclude. Lacan refined this view, describing the subject as fundamentally divided—constituted through language and through the loss that language itself imposes. For her to speak, to enter the symbolic order, is to be separated from immediacy; the self is a void, not a fullness.

From the scientific perspective, the human is best understood as a biological organism — Homo sapiens, a highly evolved primate distinguished by its neural complexity and capacity for symbolic communication. Evolutionary theory situates the human within a continuous natural history, explaining cognition, language, and sociality as adaptive functions rather than transcendent traits. The body is approached as an intricate system of mechanisms, coordinated through the brain and nervous system, sustained by metabolic exchange and genetic inheritance. In this view, what distinguishes the human is not metaphysical essence but quantitative difference — greater brain power, linguistic ability, and technological behaviour. Scientific ontology thus conceives humanity as an emergent pattern in matter: a contingent arrangement of organic processes capable of self-reflection, yet explicable in the same terms as any other material phenomenon.

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The phenomenological world is not the world of physics. Our notions of constant spatial position would not be true from a physics perspective. However the phenomenological world has no problem with ‘there’, that point, two feet to the left of the table corner. This world is constructed of pneuma, conceptuality. The theory endlessly put forward here (on this site) is that we live in a sea of pneuminous accretions more than we live in a putative substrate (sometimes referred to as umbra), indeed at least consciously, we only live in pneuma. This is not an epiphenomenal substance that really means ‘your mind’, rather it is ontologically affective in its nature and as such, the reason why all manner of paranormality occurs (it is not necessarily beholden to the substrate, or can overpower it).

The determination of what something is, is akin to the collapse of a superpositional state. When any vector region (an area of reality that has the possibility of being an object for us) has its status disclosed for us (by being told what it is, or discovering a use for something) it collapses from a plurality of possibilities into one. This moment is the moment the accretion of pneuma (the concept as quasi Platonic form) attaches to the vector for an individual. We experience this as the difficulty on reperceiving things as different things and being stuck in patterns (this occurs on many scales).

Humans as conscious beings face forwards in time and backwards (memory) but there may be other temporalities that we may presuppose as speeded up or slowed down but in fact are very different. Such temporalities face in other directions, thus some may cut across our own. This cutting across is not an inert vision but an active presence which enables them to communicate or act through what we think of as strange phenomena (synchroncity). From the alternate temporal perspective, this is just action.

There are likely several kinds of ‘interaction with pneuma’ that bring about our events.
i) Events that occur in a truly random sense, brought about in a very real material manner (since this is a real mode of reality). This is still pneuminous, but this just occurs within forwards and backwards.

ii) Events that are brought about by pneuminous noise. Free floating accretions that we have latched onto or that have latched onto us manifest in some form that looks weird (synchronicitous) but has no actual significance to our intentions.

iii) Events that are brought about by interference from other conscious beings. This itself can be broadly categorised into events brought about by other humans, or beings of different temporalities, of this latter category there are those that are purely pneuminous and those that exist in this world (e.g. plants/trees). Humans may wish ill or good for other humans and depending on power and type of action may influence outcomes, however what it suggests is that humans do have sideways abilities, they simply do not have conscious access to them. The abilities of the other beings to influence action is difficult to comment on, but what can be said is that these influences manifest in improbable outcomes and strange occurences.

iv) Humans may influence their own outcomes. Much is written and spoken on this in the form of manifesting etc (a very different usage of the word to my manifestationism). This is the activation of the will towards particular goals; it aims to draw accretive structures towards the individual that will aid them. The manifestation of these circumstances is a sideways force, or at least diagonal.

These reasons (and probably some others) form a nexus of why things happen. They all intermingle all the time, with no one probably more common than the other. Though maybe some people have a tendency to guided by one of these more than another. The emphasis that occult systems place on ‘waking up’ is to lower the influence of other events and to increase self influence (and then not to abuse self influence). The basis of this control is silence, which facilitates the control of the accretions.

The relevance of the phenomenological world as pneuma can now better be seen. Since it is not simply an overlay on something solid, but rather a dynamic realm in itself that is simply mutually anchored to the appearance of a substrate (umbra or the substrate beyond appearance is a necessary appearance) it can change more that we think it can. The mode in which change occurs is through the interconnection of the intersecting temporalities.

The conceptual determination collapse is the seeing an event as pneuminous (numinous). This particular feeling is the collapse of that event from quotidian perception into the alternative temporal intersection that it is. Mostly this is only perceived in strong synchronicitous phenomena, however reperceiving the world in a certain way does facilitate a broader vision of such interactions. The trick is to not obssess with them in terms of meaning, whilst maintaining a clearer pneuminous-numinous view.