As a magick practitioner the whole “magic is science we don’t understand” thing frustrates me.

It’s not totally wrong: magick is full of proto-science. But you can also practice magick without acknowledging any forces not accepted in scientific consensus or proposing any mechanisms that would be a tough sell to a scientist.

This often makes talking to “skeptics” hard! Some magick practitioners are really attached to dubious models (many of them scientistic though not scientific — ex., quantum anything), but a lot of the time a skeptic will say “that’s not magic, that’s just availability bias” and the Magus will try to explain “no, you’re missing the point — it’s availability bias, but when you *use* availability bias, that’s magick”.

So on the one hand, you can have magick that completely overlaps with science in its content, but differs in form & intent. Magick is like engineering, in that it applies science toward a goal, but it also does things that are anathema to science & engineering because it specifically involves fucking with your experimental apparatus (the practitioner engaging in temporary tactical self-deception), which is sort of like self-modifying code in that it can be super useful but is also dangerous in its unpredictability.

But at the same time, magick deals specifically with fractalline paradoxes a lot (what GEB calls strange loops). Really, self-deception falls into this category. These structures can’t be flattened into a non-paradoxical form so they lie outside the frameworks that would render then internally inconsistent. “Nonsense…