Or even the similar story on CNN - "The media is learning what happens when you give a mouse a cookie" (as the article says: "Spoiler alert: The mouse has some more demands")
I saw the title of that article a few days ago and didn't read it, but today I noticed the name of the author. Clemens Setz has written some good stuff.
I had this realization a few years ago after experiencing various forms of manifestation to bring things into my life, improve my health, etc. Tech and especially AI seem to be catalysts that amplify the effect that our inner reality has on the outer co-created reality (if we believe in duality), just like with Arthur C. Clarke's third law:
So D&D stats like wisdom and charisma that were easily overlooked in our modern world are starting to surpass, say, intelligence when it comes to self-actualization/ascension.
If we follow this to its logical conclusion, then there are magical laws to consider, if such things could possibly be summarized in words:
I believe that every use of magic comes with a cost, which is unknown if the wielder isn't mindful of it. In the simplest terms: using magic to satisfy one's ego by acquiring something deprives someone of something - often the wielder.
There are a few ways to minimize the consequence of using magic:
1) Sacrifice something of value for the magic to consume
2) Appeal to a higher power through prayer, the law of attraction, etc like a paladin so that the spirit bears the cost
3) Act in alignment with the heart so that creation has a chance to help behind the scenes (loosely related to #2)
4) Avoid the use of magic altogether and stick to objectivity, that free will is a fantasy, that reason supersedes meaning, etc
I'm sure I'm missing some, as I'm relearning childish notions around magical thinking.
I think what we're seeing when our most wealthy and powerful leaders denounce empathy is the outward expression of #4. Because empathy allows one to simulate the subjective experience of others in the mind, which opens the door to meaning, the golden rule, reincarnation, even the multiverse and parallel timelines. On the one hand they say that magic is dead, but on the other they use tools like psychology/economics/politics that blur the line between science and magic in order to gain control.
The ultimate expression of tech as magic might be something like the Emperor in Star Wars. Total impeccability and plausible deniability from accountability, yet no soul.
What I've come to realize in my own life is that feeling the magic passing through us is akin to shifting realities. It can't be studied scientifically, because the observer may see outcomes that differ from those of other observers in the previous reality. Science may be deterministic on one timeline, but stochastic across timelines. Which ties into consciousness, quantum mechanics, synchronicity, pantheism, the many faces of God as every living thing, etc.
Whether we influence the world through our actions of manipulate it through control of our attention, karmic consequences still come. The inward flow of psychic energy for personal gain creates a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Whereas the outward flow in service to others creates a sense of abundance. Life becomes a dance of working with these energies, either low-vibration or high-vibration, fear or love.
Where I'm going with this is that this rediscovered power of love has the potential to shift humanity into a reality where our demons can't follow. We are temporarily on this one which seems to be fraught with danger because maybe some part of our soul felt that our help was needed here most. We can shift to a gentler timeline if we wish, or continue playing the life we paid a quarter for in the astral plane and do some world building here.
From a Zen perspective, I've said too much, yet nothing at all. I hope this helps someone find a little peace and light amidst the separation and darkness of these times.
There are no demons or any other supernatural beings, there is no magic. The world would be a massively different place if this were true, and if you truly take the time to consider the implications of this, you'll come to agree with me.
It's certainly entertaining and fulfilling to believe there is some great, deep truth and that you're finding it through the concept of magic, but your mental energy would better be spent understanding things like politics and technology for what they are, not draped in the context of the supernatural.
Overall your post comes off as detached from reality and this is my attempt to help you see that, I'm not interested in debating any of this stuff because there is plenty of literature and experimental results which already do a great job of this.
There are no demons or any other supernatural beings, there is no magic.
^^^ Any sufficiently advanced tech..
Under the definition I'm using, demons live in our mind, often operating through the subconscious mind. The Ancient Greek notion of a daemon described an entity which existed between the realm of gods and humans, connecting our deterministic material plane to the spiritual plane:
Taken literally it means that gods don't just live on Mount Olympus, but are present in our psyche at all times, vying for our attention.
So for example, someone compelled to drink alcohol might have let their mind become ruled by Dionysus (or the Roman name Bacchus), or a daemon in service of that god or pretending to be that god. Same for gambling (Hermes/Mercury). Or politics (Zeus and Athena/Jupiter and Minerva).
Today's billionaires would be ruled by gluttany (Adephagia/Nemesis) although the Romans equivocated on this because concepts like master and slave had different meanings then, because the empire's existence depended on subjugation so it became "just how things are". Much like in the modern era "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understand it" (Upton Sinclair).
So Nemesis may have allowed a human to reach a high station, even emperor, unless that human committed hubris. For example by defying the gods by trying to become a god, like Croesus did by seeing what he wanted to see:
For billionaires, obsessive thoughts revolve around health, mortality and waiting for the other shoe to drop, since they experience Nemesis without knowing its name. Whereas for farmers, concerns are more about putting food on the table, since their thinking is ruled by Demeter/Ceres.
This relates to modern concepts in psychology like "symphony of mind", that the faculties in our brain lead to the emergence of agents which influence our spiritual vibration to dominate our thinking.
So when someone perceives the presence of a demon through sight/sound or feeling, it's more like their intuition is communicating with them through a sense which is not well-defined. For nonbelievers or people who haven't experienced trauma yet which stresses the mind into seeking non-objective explanations for the breakdown of their reality, angels and demons are just as mythical as say, hearing voices or having multiple personality disorder. But for people who have witnessed paranormal activity, the idea that there may be more to our reality than we typically experience is as true as say, the love of a child for its parent.
-
I've seen one or two things that I can't explain, that would amount to ghost stories and close encounters. But I've also seen things that were later explained. For example, I was hiking in the desert at night one time with friends and a star lit up so that for a second or two, it was as bright as day, but it wasn't a shooting star. I later learned about Iridium satellite flares.
So I'm open to the idea that magic doesn't exist. But as long as science can't explain how consciousness works, then none of this can be ruled out. IMHO science will never be able to do that, because I believe that consciousness is the quantum uncertainty portion of nondeterminism. In other words, everything down to the subatomic level has a measure of consciousness, that we observe as an outcome or choice. Without consciousness (uncertainty), the universe would evolve in a purely deterministic fashion.
But when we introduce self-awareness by adding an observer, the act of observation influences the uncertainty to determine which timeline we walk. We control our destiny and may have even had a hand in our past before our consciousness reached a level of organization that would allow us to remember why we chose to come into being. Our awareness isn't a separate aspect of reality, they're two sides of the same coin, which is analogous to pantheism.
It's certainly entertaining and fulfilling to believe there is some great, deep truth and that you're finding it through the concept of magic, but your mental energy would better be spent understanding things like politics and technology for what they are, not draped in the context of the supernatural.
I would urge you to play devil's advocate and consider that the simplest explanation tends to be the right one by Occam's razor. Politics and technology give people an out so that they can rationalize groupthink and amoral behavior. A strong argument could be made that today's political landscape is comprised of tribes that engage in cult-like thinking, similarly to how multilevel marketing schemes (MLMs) attract evangelists due to how their incentives align.
-
So all of this that makes no sense - like why we would want to elect public officials who are free of accountability - becomes transparently obvious when viewed through the lens of metaphysics. It's because the cognitive dissonance people experience living under systems of control like ours (that promote suffering when there is plenty for everyone were it not for wealth inequality) compels them to reach for solutions that allow them to defer their own accountability.
Because they don't want to begin the healing and growth work that would help them ascend past their self-imposed limitations, because they don't want to face their guilt and shame. So they project their frustrations outward as elitism, favoritism, discrimination, othering, division, dogma, prejudice, authoritarianism, etc. Which politicians turn into wedge issues so they can choreograph elections, sort of like gerrymandering but by framing debates instead of district boundaries.
When politicians orate and capture the hearts and minds of their base to gain power, it's no different than church leaders taking their lord's name in vain to further their own wordly goals, or magicians pulling the wool over their audience's eyes to create the illusion of a fantasy reality to make a buck. It's all magic, just like consciousness is magic.
-
You're right that my post comes off as detached from reality, I get it. But I think there's a difference between studying a subject to master it and transcend its rules to add new ones, and practicing willfull ignorance of a subject to pretend that its implications don't exist.
Remember that Carl Sagan warned in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark:
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance"
But also wrote the character Palmer Joss in his book Contact to remind us to question our most deeply held assumptions, so that we don't inadvertently worship reason as a substitute for meaning.
One of my favourites. The Grimms' original is in a Low German dialect but the style is so beautifully simple that if you know the story and have a good knowledge of standard German then you can probably understand almost everything:
This tale of the Grimmsʼ collection was contributed (in a Low German dialect) by Philipp Otto Runge. His main profession was painting, and he designed a color model using a sphere.[1]
His interest in colors certainly left a trace in the elaboration how the sea and the sky are colored and change their colors.
Runge contributed another tale, “Von dem Machandelboom” ‘Of / about the juniper tree’. Both tales were held in high regard by the Grimms. They saw some traits as typical or classical for the genre, e.g. the repetitions, parallelisms with rising tension.
There's a similar Russian tale in blank verse by Pushkin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Fisherman_and_... - probably either inspired directly by the Low German story or mediated through a version told to him in his childhood by his nurse (who in turn heard it from someone else).
In the Russian version, the fisherman's wife's final and mistaken wish is to be the Queen of the Sea, with the fish as her servant.
In the New Testament, Jesus had a lot to say about wealth and power being bad. This feels like a reference to all that.
In my head, all that Sunday school I had internalized as a kid makes me think, "This is not the kind of church Jesus would preach at" when I see a really nice church where wealthy people attend.
Some Christians talk about "mammonites" or "the cult of mammon":
Old too: But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, “No! but we are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.”
I don't think it's as simple as "wealth and power being bad". More that
- wealth and power are not reliable proxies for favor and righteousness (as many in Jesus's day thought)
- wealth and power come with unique temptations
Jesus also said "make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings" and there's a bunch of proverbs that talk about how the diligent prosper.
The punchline left me wondering why the wife didn't simply ask for something else after being returned to the filthy shack. Had she finally found contentment or enlightenment? Did the flounder finally call time?
Maybe she spent a near-eternity in agony with all that power and responsibility, and wished it all away. "Genie...er, Fish, make me an all-powerful fish!!!"
Some people are greedy and don't know when to stop when they have enough. The fisherman is notably not one of those people.
Older generations might have been most offended by the "becoming like God" part. The enchanted fish was willing to grant any wish that is in principle achievable by a human being, even the most ridiculous wish of becoming Pope.
But the moment the wish transcends that human realm it is turned down and punished.
I guess the theme of "becoming like God" resonates with the story from Adam and Eve's fall.
My interpretation is that the fish didn't actually turn down and punish, but fulfilled the wish. It's just that the fish thought: to be like God means to be humble. She asks to be like God, true godliness is humility. So she did get what she wanted, but not in the way she thought. (BTW I'm not religious in the sense I go to church a lot, and don't even necessarily believe in God, but I do share many of the values of religion.)
But surely humility is only one attribute of God, and not the most relevant one. Omnipotence and omniscience are typically listed as more important aspects of the divine.
It depends on the religion. In Christianity, Islam, and some "the universe is a simulation" theories: yes. In other religions, god is not all that powerful.
I don’t think of it as punishment. She gets her wish granted, she just did not understand that God does not care about the kind of shallow riches the fisherman’s wife is aiming for.
I think the point is that when one believes that having their desires fulfilled will bring them happiness, or an end to desire itsself, that the material circumstances in which that person lives are completely irrelevant. In the case of the wife, the suffering she experiences from not having her desires fulfilled is the same whether she is living in a filthy shack or whether she is god. Her internal state is identical in both situations, so her becoming god and her becoming a poor fisherman's wife are exactly the same from a phenomonological perspective. The same could be said for the man. His satisfaction was the same whether he was living in the shack or the palace. What changed for him was the burden of having these material things and asking for more, knowing it wouldn't ultimately make him or his wife happy.
Or it could mean that due to the transient nature of all material things, anything gained will invariably break down eventually. All desire leads to loss.
I read it as the fish returning her to her God-ordained state, as she was, from her magical-fish-given states of human appointed positions; that is, wealth and status coming from community rather than any kind of divine appointment—which is maybe also a Protestant dig at Papism?
There is a similar episode of Frasier where he and his brother Niles keep trying to get into ever more exclusive tiers of the “Empire Club” in Seattle. One of my faves. https://frasier.fandom.com/wiki/The_Club
Reading this story and the discussion in the thread have been a rare treat; surprises like these are why I love this site. Now I must find more of the Grimms' work!
I like to think of myself as having modest desires, but this story does a good job of making me wonder: am I the fisherman or the wife? I don't want a palace, but I wouldn't want a filthy shack either. Which of my desires, for myself or for others, are truly reasonable? I'd be fine with health and happiness, but none of us is entitled to those by birthright.
It's easy to read this story and think "Hah! Look at that greedy wife, I would not keep asking for more." But... would you ask for anything at all, then? And if you did and got it, would you be satisfied forever? All of history suggests that it is human to keep ratcheting it up.
And on the other hand, is it really "better" to be the fisherman? He may be satisfied with living in a filthy shack, but hey, he's out fishing every day. She's living in it. Is he really in a position to judge his wife for wanting something better?
I suppose the moral of the story is that one shouldn't fuck around with talking flounders? Or for that matter kneel before every capricious whimsy of a sociopathic control freak of a wife?
Possibly following from this article?
To understand how AI will reconfigure humanity, try this German fairytale
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/sep/16/ai-artificial-...
Or even the similar story on CNN - "The media is learning what happens when you give a mouse a cookie" (as the article says: "Spoiler alert: The mouse has some more demands")
* https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/19/business/media-business-t...
I'd never heard of that story before I heard the Decoder Ring episode. America sounds _wild._
https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2024/09/how-if-you-g...
I saw the title of that article a few days ago and didn't read it, but today I noticed the name of the author. Clemens Setz has written some good stuff.
I had this realization a few years ago after experiencing various forms of manifestation to bring things into my life, improve my health, etc. Tech and especially AI seem to be catalysts that amplify the effect that our inner reality has on the outer co-created reality (if we believe in duality), just like with Arthur C. Clarke's third law:
https://www.thoughtco.com/what-are-clarkes-laws-2699067
So D&D stats like wisdom and charisma that were easily overlooked in our modern world are starting to surpass, say, intelligence when it comes to self-actualization/ascension.
If we follow this to its logical conclusion, then there are magical laws to consider, if such things could possibly be summarized in words:
https://www.themystica.com/the-laws-of-magic/
http://www.neopagan.net/AT_Laws.html
I believe that every use of magic comes with a cost, which is unknown if the wielder isn't mindful of it. In the simplest terms: using magic to satisfy one's ego by acquiring something deprives someone of something - often the wielder.
There are a few ways to minimize the consequence of using magic:
1) Sacrifice something of value for the magic to consume
2) Appeal to a higher power through prayer, the law of attraction, etc like a paladin so that the spirit bears the cost
3) Act in alignment with the heart so that creation has a chance to help behind the scenes (loosely related to #2)
4) Avoid the use of magic altogether and stick to objectivity, that free will is a fantasy, that reason supersedes meaning, etc
I'm sure I'm missing some, as I'm relearning childish notions around magical thinking.
I think what we're seeing when our most wealthy and powerful leaders denounce empathy is the outward expression of #4. Because empathy allows one to simulate the subjective experience of others in the mind, which opens the door to meaning, the golden rule, reincarnation, even the multiverse and parallel timelines. On the one hand they say that magic is dead, but on the other they use tools like psychology/economics/politics that blur the line between science and magic in order to gain control.
The ultimate expression of tech as magic might be something like the Emperor in Star Wars. Total impeccability and plausible deniability from accountability, yet no soul.
What I've come to realize in my own life is that feeling the magic passing through us is akin to shifting realities. It can't be studied scientifically, because the observer may see outcomes that differ from those of other observers in the previous reality. Science may be deterministic on one timeline, but stochastic across timelines. Which ties into consciousness, quantum mechanics, synchronicity, pantheism, the many faces of God as every living thing, etc.
Whether we influence the world through our actions of manipulate it through control of our attention, karmic consequences still come. The inward flow of psychic energy for personal gain creates a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Whereas the outward flow in service to others creates a sense of abundance. Life becomes a dance of working with these energies, either low-vibration or high-vibration, fear or love.
Where I'm going with this is that this rediscovered power of love has the potential to shift humanity into a reality where our demons can't follow. We are temporarily on this one which seems to be fraught with danger because maybe some part of our soul felt that our help was needed here most. We can shift to a gentler timeline if we wish, or continue playing the life we paid a quarter for in the astral plane and do some world building here.
From a Zen perspective, I've said too much, yet nothing at all. I hope this helps someone find a little peace and light amidst the separation and darkness of these times.
There are no demons or any other supernatural beings, there is no magic. The world would be a massively different place if this were true, and if you truly take the time to consider the implications of this, you'll come to agree with me.
It's certainly entertaining and fulfilling to believe there is some great, deep truth and that you're finding it through the concept of magic, but your mental energy would better be spent understanding things like politics and technology for what they are, not draped in the context of the supernatural.
Overall your post comes off as detached from reality and this is my attempt to help you see that, I'm not interested in debating any of this stuff because there is plenty of literature and experimental results which already do a great job of this.
There are no demons or any other supernatural beings, there is no magic.
^^^ Any sufficiently advanced tech..
Under the definition I'm using, demons live in our mind, often operating through the subconscious mind. The Ancient Greek notion of a daemon described an entity which existed between the realm of gods and humans, connecting our deterministic material plane to the spiritual plane:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(classical_Greek_mythol...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimonion_(Socrates)
Taken literally it means that gods don't just live on Mount Olympus, but are present in our psyche at all times, vying for our attention.
So for example, someone compelled to drink alcohol might have let their mind become ruled by Dionysus (or the Roman name Bacchus), or a daemon in service of that god or pretending to be that god. Same for gambling (Hermes/Mercury). Or politics (Zeus and Athena/Jupiter and Minerva).
Today's billionaires would be ruled by gluttany (Adephagia/Nemesis) although the Romans equivocated on this because concepts like master and slave had different meanings then, because the empire's existence depended on subjugation so it became "just how things are". Much like in the modern era "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understand it" (Upton Sinclair).
So Nemesis may have allowed a human to reach a high station, even emperor, unless that human committed hubris. For example by defying the gods by trying to become a god, like Croesus did by seeing what he wanted to see:
https://www.parikiaki.com/2021/12/croesus-of-lydia/
For billionaires, obsessive thoughts revolve around health, mortality and waiting for the other shoe to drop, since they experience Nemesis without knowing its name. Whereas for farmers, concerns are more about putting food on the table, since their thinking is ruled by Demeter/Ceres.
This relates to modern concepts in psychology like "symphony of mind", that the faculties in our brain lead to the emergence of agents which influence our spiritual vibration to dominate our thinking.
So when someone perceives the presence of a demon through sight/sound or feeling, it's more like their intuition is communicating with them through a sense which is not well-defined. For nonbelievers or people who haven't experienced trauma yet which stresses the mind into seeking non-objective explanations for the breakdown of their reality, angels and demons are just as mythical as say, hearing voices or having multiple personality disorder. But for people who have witnessed paranormal activity, the idea that there may be more to our reality than we typically experience is as true as say, the love of a child for its parent.
-
I've seen one or two things that I can't explain, that would amount to ghost stories and close encounters. But I've also seen things that were later explained. For example, I was hiking in the desert at night one time with friends and a star lit up so that for a second or two, it was as bright as day, but it wasn't a shooting star. I later learned about Iridium satellite flares.
So I'm open to the idea that magic doesn't exist. But as long as science can't explain how consciousness works, then none of this can be ruled out. IMHO science will never be able to do that, because I believe that consciousness is the quantum uncertainty portion of nondeterminism. In other words, everything down to the subatomic level has a measure of consciousness, that we observe as an outcome or choice. Without consciousness (uncertainty), the universe would evolve in a purely deterministic fashion.
But when we introduce self-awareness by adding an observer, the act of observation influences the uncertainty to determine which timeline we walk. We control our destiny and may have even had a hand in our past before our consciousness reached a level of organization that would allow us to remember why we chose to come into being. Our awareness isn't a separate aspect of reality, they're two sides of the same coin, which is analogous to pantheism.
It's certainly entertaining and fulfilling to believe there is some great, deep truth and that you're finding it through the concept of magic, but your mental energy would better be spent understanding things like politics and technology for what they are, not draped in the context of the supernatural.
I would urge you to play devil's advocate and consider that the simplest explanation tends to be the right one by Occam's razor. Politics and technology give people an out so that they can rationalize groupthink and amoral behavior. A strong argument could be made that today's political landscape is comprised of tribes that engage in cult-like thinking, similarly to how multilevel marketing schemes (MLMs) attract evangelists due to how their incentives align.
-
So all of this that makes no sense - like why we would want to elect public officials who are free of accountability - becomes transparently obvious when viewed through the lens of metaphysics. It's because the cognitive dissonance people experience living under systems of control like ours (that promote suffering when there is plenty for everyone were it not for wealth inequality) compels them to reach for solutions that allow them to defer their own accountability.
Because they don't want to begin the healing and growth work that would help them ascend past their self-imposed limitations, because they don't want to face their guilt and shame. So they project their frustrations outward as elitism, favoritism, discrimination, othering, division, dogma, prejudice, authoritarianism, etc. Which politicians turn into wedge issues so they can choreograph elections, sort of like gerrymandering but by framing debates instead of district boundaries.
When politicians orate and capture the hearts and minds of their base to gain power, it's no different than church leaders taking their lord's name in vain to further their own wordly goals, or magicians pulling the wool over their audience's eyes to create the illusion of a fantasy reality to make a buck. It's all magic, just like consciousness is magic.
-
You're right that my post comes off as detached from reality, I get it. But I think there's a difference between studying a subject to master it and transcend its rules to add new ones, and practicing willfull ignorance of a subject to pretend that its implications don't exist.
Remember that Carl Sagan warned in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark:
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance"
But also wrote the character Palmer Joss in his book Contact to remind us to question our most deeply held assumptions, so that we don't inadvertently worship reason as a substitute for meaning.
Regarding your link:
http://www.neopagan.net/AT_Laws.html
If magick were real, the person behind that MySpace-worthy website background would have been cursed into oblivion by now.
Ergo, magick isn't real.
Pascals wager suggest it is in your interest to believe in the supernatural
Pascal’s Wager assumes an afterlife isn’t it?
There is only evidence that this is our only life; no reincarnation or some spiritual realm that persists our identity/ego/soul/consciousness/memory.
Pascal was describing belief in god but I was mainly getting at the logical framework.
Absence of evidence is not evidence for absence.
> Absence of evidence is not evidence for absence.
which do you believe is the right default position to have:
a) nothing, unless something is proven, OR
b) something, unless nothing is proven
it seems to me that (a) is the more prudent stance and hence much more likely to be correct.
People believe life is out there in the universe based on no evidence and this is a commonly held stance.
Pascals wager involves God and the consequence of an eternity spent in either heaven or hell, not magick.
Belief in god(s) is belief in magic(k) is belief in the supernatural. It's all the same set.
It can be applied to magic too. He used it for god but it is a logical framework.
One of my favourites. The Grimms' original is in a Low German dialect but the style is so beautifully simple that if you know the story and have a good knowledge of standard German then you can probably understand almost everything:
https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Von_dem_Fischer_un_syner_Fru_...
It's crazy how this is almost perfectly readable as a Dutch person.
Without being very familiar with any of them, I suspect Low German and Dutch are pretty closely related?
They blend into each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhenish_fan -- https://duckduckgo.com/?q=german+dutch+isoglosses&iar=images
Very close, and I can confirm that as someone who knows "standard Dutch" it is fairly easy to read.
It wouldn't surprise me if it is even easier for someone from the german-dutch border region who is fluent in a local dialect.
Stay away from the german dutch portuguese creole https://pfl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riograndenser_Hunsr%C3%BCckis...
Right? I'm fluent in Dutch but I can't read German. This is more readable than Afrikaans.
This tale of the Grimmsʼ collection was contributed (in a Low German dialect) by Philipp Otto Runge. His main profession was painting, and he designed a color model using a sphere.[1]
His interest in colors certainly left a trace in the elaboration how the sea and the sky are colored and change their colors.
Runge contributed another tale, “Von dem Machandelboom” ‘Of / about the juniper tree’. Both tales were held in high regard by the Grimms. They saw some traits as typical or classical for the genre, e.g. the repetitions, parallelisms with rising tension.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_Otto_Runge#Runge_and_c... –
There's a similar Russian tale in blank verse by Pushkin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Fisherman_and_... - probably either inspired directly by the Low German story or mediated through a version told to him in his childhood by his nurse (who in turn heard it from someone else).
In the Russian version, the fisherman's wife's final and mistaken wish is to be the Queen of the Sea, with the fish as her servant.
What moral do you take away from this story?
Right up until the end I'd say it's a good illustration of the hedonic treadmill.
But I'm really not sure what to make of the ending.
> "Oh," he said, "she wants to become like God."
> "Go home. She is sitting in her filthy shack again."
This is ambiguous. The flounder simply acknowledges a change in state without saying whether he actually fulfilled the request or not.
If he rejected the request, then it's a tale about checking ambition, trying to be like God, etc.
But if he accepted the request? Then it's advancing a very different idea of what God is like.
I wonder if the original German is equally ambiguous...
EDIT: I suppose she's not making the sun and moon rise, so maybe I'm overcomplicating it.
> But I'm really not sure what to make of the ending.
>> "Oh," he said, "she wants to become like God."
>> "Go home. She is sitting in her filthy shack again."
Jesus was poor and humble and God. Like, remember which cup the Holy Grail was in the test at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade?
She exactly got her wish, it just wasn't what she expected because she was a greedy fool.
Edit: and this take is interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45303908. It might even be a happy ending for her.
In the New Testament, Jesus had a lot to say about wealth and power being bad. This feels like a reference to all that.
In my head, all that Sunday school I had internalized as a kid makes me think, "This is not the kind of church Jesus would preach at" when I see a really nice church where wealthy people attend.
Some Christians talk about "mammonites" or "the cult of mammon":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammon
Old too: But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, “No! but we are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.”
I don't think it's as simple as "wealth and power being bad". More that
- wealth and power are not reliable proxies for favor and righteousness (as many in Jesus's day thought)
- wealth and power come with unique temptations
Jesus also said "make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings" and there's a bunch of proverbs that talk about how the diligent prosper.
A lot of wealthy people are really generous.
I think Jesus is really, really, really unequivocal about wealth being bad.
And Luke 16:9, which you quoted, is taken out of context.
> A lot of wealthy people are really generous.
Not so much that they give away all that they have, as Jesus commanded. So, more like "kinda really generous, but not enough that it hurts".
[I am an atheist, but I will not stand for antithetical repurposing of religious texts.]
>And Luke 16:9, which you quoted, is taken out of context.
What context am I missing?
>Not so much that they give away all that they have, as Jesus commanded
Matthew 19:16-30, which you're quoting, is taken out of context.
https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/does-jesus-teach-us-t...
Pretty much every society ever has the same things to say about how wealth/power enables people to behave poorly.
The punchline left me wondering why the wife didn't simply ask for something else after being returned to the filthy shack. Had she finally found contentment or enlightenment? Did the flounder finally call time?
We don't know exactly. Maybe the fish silently punished the wife. Maybe god would simply live a simple life.
Only God knows.
Ooh, I like that possibility.
Maybe she spent a near-eternity in agony with all that power and responsibility, and wished it all away. "Genie...er, Fish, make me an all-powerful fish!!!"
Maybe the ambiguity is part of what makes it a good story?
Some people are greedy and don't know when to stop when they have enough. The fisherman is notably not one of those people.
Older generations might have been most offended by the "becoming like God" part. The enchanted fish was willing to grant any wish that is in principle achievable by a human being, even the most ridiculous wish of becoming Pope.
But the moment the wish transcends that human realm it is turned down and punished.
I guess the theme of "becoming like God" resonates with the story from Adam and Eve's fall.
My interpretation is that the fish didn't actually turn down and punish, but fulfilled the wish. It's just that the fish thought: to be like God means to be humble. She asks to be like God, true godliness is humility. So she did get what she wanted, but not in the way she thought. (BTW I'm not religious in the sense I go to church a lot, and don't even necessarily believe in God, but I do share many of the values of religion.)
> It's just that the fish thought: to be like God means to be humble.
In which religion is the God humble? It wont be Christianity for sure.
Being born to a human, growing up and living as one of them, and letting himself be tortured and killed by his own creation isn't humble?
You don't have to believe it, of course, but God humbling himself is pretty much the defining aspect of Christianity.
> Being born to a human, growing up and living as one of them, and letting himself be tortured and killed by his own creation isn't humble?
That is self sacrifice.
But surely humility is only one attribute of God, and not the most relevant one. Omnipotence and omniscience are typically listed as more important aspects of the divine.
It depends on the religion. In Christianity, Islam, and some "the universe is a simulation" theories: yes. In other religions, god is not all that powerful.
Interesting, you read it as if the fish said "You want to be like God? No, that's too far. Game over!"
But another reading is: God would have chosen the shack (grace to the humble, etc.) So she got her wish.
I was hoping for a "go home, she is as God", then he goes home and sees that she doesn't exist
Yes, I think...
> And they are sitting there even today.
... hints strongly that once that wish was granted, she stopped wanting something different.
I don’t think of it as punishment. She gets her wish granted, she just did not understand that God does not care about the kind of shallow riches the fisherman’s wife is aiming for.
That no matter how good your current dwelling is, your wife will always want upgrades.
Unbounded greed will prevent you from enjoying the benefits of your life.
Don't go above INT_MAX or you'll overflow back to -2147483648
Actually it's undefined behaviour. Undefined behaviour may legally include your castle growing wings and flying away to space.
I think the point is that when one believes that having their desires fulfilled will bring them happiness, or an end to desire itsself, that the material circumstances in which that person lives are completely irrelevant. In the case of the wife, the suffering she experiences from not having her desires fulfilled is the same whether she is living in a filthy shack or whether she is god. Her internal state is identical in both situations, so her becoming god and her becoming a poor fisherman's wife are exactly the same from a phenomonological perspective. The same could be said for the man. His satisfaction was the same whether he was living in the shack or the palace. What changed for him was the burden of having these material things and asking for more, knowing it wouldn't ultimately make him or his wife happy.
Or it could mean that due to the transient nature of all material things, anything gained will invariably break down eventually. All desire leads to loss.
Maybe it's both. I think it's both.
If you give in to an unreasonable person's demands, that person will demand more and more until it all comes crashing down.
So when product comes to you with stupid requirements, push back!
I read it as the fish returning her to her God-ordained state, as she was, from her magical-fish-given states of human appointed positions; that is, wealth and status coming from community rather than any kind of divine appointment—which is maybe also a Protestant dig at Papism?
There's a few potential pretty reasonable morals to draw from it that apply at the individual and various group levels.
The more jaded you are the less of them you'll reject but also the less of them you needed to be told.
If you get into options trading, make sure to have a hard stopping point.
I think the "straussian" reading is it's the husbands fault. He knows he's doing the wrong thing but he can't say no.
1) Listen to your conscience & speak up unambiguously
2) Something like "Victim blaming is correct in moderation"?
I don't know if I agree with that but it seems like an interpertation
Don't get married.
Don't get married... to a greedy psychopath.
being a deity is a crap job, aim for Pope.
Am I the only one to read it as the fact that God is supposed to be humble, so that's why when she asks to be like God she's back to the shackle?
Smart fish, got her on a technicality ;)
Classic genie move
There is a similar episode of Frasier where he and his brother Niles keep trying to get into ever more exclusive tiers of the “Empire Club” in Seattle. One of my faves. https://frasier.fandom.com/wiki/The_Club
Reading this story and the discussion in the thread have been a rare treat; surprises like these are why I love this site. Now I must find more of the Grimms' work!
I've always liked the slightly different ending: "I just want my wife to be happy." And she ends up in the shack. This one is a little different!
There is a similar Dr. Seuss story that had been published in a magazine but more or less lost until being republished in a collection of shorter works in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bippolo_Seed_and_Other_Los...
A famous fairytale from Germany.
There is a german movie of the same title based on the story: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0430097
I like to think of myself as having modest desires, but this story does a good job of making me wonder: am I the fisherman or the wife? I don't want a palace, but I wouldn't want a filthy shack either. Which of my desires, for myself or for others, are truly reasonable? I'd be fine with health and happiness, but none of us is entitled to those by birthright.
It's easy to read this story and think "Hah! Look at that greedy wife, I would not keep asking for more." But... would you ask for anything at all, then? And if you did and got it, would you be satisfied forever? All of history suggests that it is human to keep ratcheting it up.
And on the other hand, is it really "better" to be the fisherman? He may be satisfied with living in a filthy shack, but hey, he's out fishing every day. She's living in it. Is he really in a position to judge his wife for wanting something better?
Not to be confused with the Hokusai woodcut print titled "The dream of the fisherman's wife" (1814) (NSFW I guess?)
Thank you! I had no idea this existed, but it has now blown my mind. I didn't realize this kind of art existed back then and was so explicit.
The filth you see about you today, is the same or cleaner than was imagined in the past.
There's nothing new about dirty minds; male monkeys will "pay" (give treats back) to see porn of female monkeys in heat.
yeah, i think that's pretty clearly nsfw
hmm, a sort of fractured fairy tales version https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-shark-and-the-surfer-fa...
ha. weird.
aka the fisherman and Gordon Gecko ;)
Another interesting one: Rumpelstiltskin
https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm055.html
I suppose the moral of the story is that one shouldn't fuck around with talking flounders? Or for that matter kneel before every capricious whimsy of a sociopathic control freak of a wife?
I don't see the AI connection in any case.
Was there supposed to be a connection to AI?
From the post itself, no, but the top comment made the connection through a guardian article, though it's a bit of a stretch for this fairy tale.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45300111
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