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.

Magic is related to fictionalism. Technic is about capturing everything in language, magic is about the ineffable. Magic has a better relationship to reality

He sounds like a narrativist or fictionalism dude, so OK. The hosts are, "ok, so what" and I get that.

If all we have are illusions, then we also have the freedom to choose which illusions we count as real. If a mechanist, representationist, multiple-draft theater theory of mind is correct — as Dennett holds and I mostly do too — then voilà: not only do we get a postmodernist world-as-text, we also get full justification for religion. It's all spells all the way down. This is Dennett's fictionalism in spite of himself — naturalism plus fictionalism, a combination he'd resist but can't quite escape. The two things I've always held as incompatible, materialist cognitive science and something like weirdism, turn out to share a foundation.

fictionalism

11 May 2024 - 18 Aug 2026

But I find it so exciting, this idea that all knowledge is fictional, a construct, loosely based on something underlying that we can never actually grasp or talk about. It's liberating – ideas no longer imprison us. It's scary – ideas no longer protect us.

It elevates the human mind – we are all creators of our own stories, like it or not. We might not be terribly bold or original, but we have to spin fictions for ourselves that we then inhabit. Sometimes collectively, sometimes individually (although nobody really does it on their own).