On 5/1/08 4:01 PM, in article
604ff28f-6659-4358-9d39-9ab392633967@n1g2000prb.googlegroups.com, "mika"
gmail.com> wrote:

I did address this before, but I'll do so more thoroughly here, and will
subsequently not address it again in the other post of yours I plan to
respond to today.

To begin with, in the natural setting where the effects play out in real
life, we can't know. That's the very nature of it, and it's why these
processes and the effects they facilitate qualify as "occult" in the
terminology that I'm using these days: they are hidden/unseen. In this
sense, "occult" doesn't indicate secrets that we get to learn once initiated
or after making personal discoveries, etc., but rather indicates information
flow and influence that are by their nature not generally accessible to the
thought processes of which we are normally aware.

Keep in mind, all such influences do impinge on the processes of which we
are aware. That is, overt behavior, the final common pathway, must by its
nature involve what we tend to call "conscious" processes. The point is,
there are sources of information that bias those processes in ways that are
specific to sensory input of which we are not directly aware, and I'm on
about specifying how that works, and ultimately how certain magick practices
may provide a means of having a willful influence on them.

So, as I said, under real-life circumstances, we cannot know what we cannot
know. If we are unaware of cues that have a biasing influence, we remain
unaware of them during and after that influence has its effects. This is
true for people who do and do not practice magick. I've said this already,
and I also suggested at that time that the best a magician can do is to
apply a sound journaling strategy that has the potential for capturing
consistent patterns over long periods of time. Like this one perhaps:
http://neuromagick.com/index.php/library/34-development/55-developmental-jou
rnaling

So now you want to know what basis I have for the claims I'm making, and the
answer is a substantial body of scientific literature that demonstrates
effects that are consistent with what I've described. I can provide you with
actual studies to review if you're interested, but without a strong
background in research methods, theory assessment, the history and
development of cognitive science, etc., a good deal of it is probably rather
difficult to digest. I will provide citations if asked, but in the meantime
I'll try to provide a reasonable idea of how the data I'm relying on has
accumulated.

In a lab setting, the researchers control and purposefully manipulate the
pertinent variables. So in a generalized way, for a study to demonstrate
that environmental cues can be processed implicitly and then subsequently
influence judgments, decision making, or other behavioral actions in a way
that participants are not aware of, researchers have to control the sensory
input the participant experiences, manipulate the cues so that researchers
know the content of the implicit information, measure post-exposure
responses in ways that capture the influence the cues have on target
(judgment, action, etc.), then interrogate the participant to assess what
they were and were not explicitly aware of.

There are several research paradigms that meet those generalized criteria.
For example, to control the cues, researchers might present a sequence of
visual stimuli, say a series of words, simple line drawings, complex
landscapes, etc., and instruct participants to attend to specific features
of the presentation. The cues of interest will be present but will not be
what the participant was instructed to attend to. Participants will later be
tested (often after a distracter task, like a 10 minute math quiz or some
such thing) to assess whether or not the unattended cues had an effect, then
queried to assess how consciously aware of the target cues.

Studies of that nature form the basic research that identifies fundamental
cognitive processes and effects. Lab settings and manipulations, however,
tend to be rather artificial, but once basic effects have been identified in
those ways, and as the topic area of research matures, research paradigms
develop to capture more and more of the components of more naturalistic
settings, and on it goes. The literature I'm talking about goes back about
30 years in practical terms, but much farther in spirit. William James, for
example, characterized comparable processes and effects some 100+ years ago.

The entire body of literature that feeds into the ideas I'm presenting is
excessively vast, but no single study captures everything I'm advancing.
What I've been talking about is reasonably inferred from the collective body
of research.

There are a few online resources/demos that people can play with that are
part of this overall literature. None of these capture what I've been
talking about precisely, but all are relevant in some way or other. If you
play with any of these and you want to talk about how I think they relate to
magick as I've been discussing it, I'll be happy to oblige, because I know
it may not be obvious. Anyway, check them out if you're interested.

http://nonverbal.ucsc.edu/ipt.html
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/
http://coglab.wadsworth.com/experiments/ImplicitLearning.shtml
http://psiexp.ss.uci.edu/
http://psychexps.olemiss.edu/Exps/Covert_Attention/startd.htm
http://psychexps.olemiss.edu/Exps/Dichotic_Listening/startd.htm
http://psychexps.olemiss.edu/Exps/Perception_of_Gender/startgr.htm

And here's a fairly straight-forward page dissecting/specifying
non-declarative learning, which may aid understanding some of what I've been
talking about:

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~psy114/week2_lecture.htm

Okay, on to your next question:

The cues we process implicitly are almost always ambiguous to some degree.
So how predictive a given cue is will always be less than 100%%. That's true
of cues we process explicitly too. That's just the way it is. The world is a
complex place and some degree of uncertainty inherent in just about
everything. I think ~70%% accuracy is probably pretty good for most of the
kinds of information we process.

The question isn't whether it's a good idea or not to condition automatic
responses to less than perfect predictors. That is the natural state of
affairs. Whatever cues we process, we respond to them in the manner in which
I've described. These are natural processes that go on with or without
magical training. But keep in mind, the influence is a tendency, a bias in a
given direction, etc., not an absolute. So the cue has a < 100%%
probability, and so does any given response. Maybe a better way to think of
it might be that processing the implicit cues tends to narrow the field of
potential choices that will ultimately be made in that final common pathway.

In the bus stop example, instead of leaving, there would be other generally
protective choices, like Shelly Taylor's feminized version of fight or
flight behavior, which she dubbed, "tend and befriend." So if the
uncomfortable feelings were not powerful enough to get you to up and leave,
you might strike up friendly conversations with the non-creepy people
waiting with you, the idea being that you're less alone so less vulnerable
to potential attack.

Now the point of magick training, if its worth anything at all, would be to
provide specific advantageous over and above what we develop naturally from
experience alone. The general idea is that the training should enhance
perceptual acuity for cues of that nature, and allow us to guide the
development of the response tendencies in a willful manner. If those things
are not possible, then the diligent effort required for rigorous magical
training is simply a waste of time.

The fundamental ideas about how "occult" information is processed and the
general effects information of that nature has on judgments, decisions, and
behavior, are well established in the scientific literature already, as I've
just described. What remains to be demonstrated is whether or not there are
ways to willfully manipulate those processes in an advantageous way. There
is currently existing empirical evidence to support the idea, but it's thin
at this point, it's a complicated case to make, and the question won't be
answered definitively until direct tests of specific magical techniques are
carried out.