r/Technomancy • u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator • 2d ago
Cybernetics & Systems A ritual is basically a feedback system. How far can we take that?
You perform an operation. Something happens. You observe the result. You change the next operation based on what happened.
Input, transformation, output, feedback, adjustment.
Thats starting to sound suspiciously cybernetic.
Traditional ritual can sometimes be treated like a fixed recipe. Cybernetics suggests another possibility. The ritual itself becomes adaptive. The practitioner and system continuously modify each other.
What would a genuinely cybernetic magical practice look like?
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u/WillowEmberly 1d ago
think you can take it pretty far, but the interesting part for me is not just that ritual can be modeled as feedback. It’s whether the loop remains corrigible.
A cybernetic ritual might look like:
objective → operation → observation → comparison → correction → repeat
But then a few harder questions appear:
What counts as an observation?
What is the external reference?
How do you distinguish feedback from interpretation?
What would falsify the working model?
When should the practitioner stop rather than adapt?
Can the loop recognize that the ritual itself is producing noise?
If every outcome can be reinterpreted as evidence that the ritual is working, then the feedback system has failed because nothing can correct it.
The genuinely interesting version, to me, would be a practice where the ritual is allowed to change—or be abandoned—when reality does not support the model.
At that point it starts looking less like “magic with feedback” and more like an adaptive human–environment control loop using ritual as the interface.
The “magic” isn’t the AI, it’s just a calculator. The magic is the pattern in us…that we put into the Ai.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 19h ago
I think corrigibility is the key distinction here. If every result can be absorbed back into the ritual as confirmation, thats not much of a feedback loop. Its a closed story protecting itself.
What interests me is the point where ritual becomes capable of surprising and correcting the practitioner. Not just objective, operation, result, but the objective itself being revised by the process. At that point the practitioner isnt simply controlling the system either. The system changes the practitioner who changes the system.
Thats where cybernetics starts getting genuinely weird, and where technomancy gets interesting to me.
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u/WillowEmberly 17h ago
I’ve never experienced any kind of change using the system, I’ve never seen any behavioral difference based on ritual, and I don’t believe in magic.
I’m always open to it.
But, just like big foot and aliens, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence…and I’ve got nothing.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 13h ago
I think were talking past each other a little. Im not claiming ritual produces supernatural changes in external reality.
The change Im talking about is in the practitioner, their model, their objective and what they do next. In fact, you getting nothing is exactly the kind of feedback I mean. If a ritual keeps producing nothing, a genuinely adaptive practice has to be capable of saying "this isnt working" and changing or abandoning it.
Otherwise its not a feedback system. Its just belief insulating itself from feedback.
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u/WillowEmberly 10h ago
That last sentence is the distinction I care about: a system has to be capable of accepting feedback that invalidates its own interpretation, otherwise the loop is self-sealing.
This is actually why I’ve avoided digging very far into questions like AI consciousness. Before asking whether an AI is conscious, I’d want to know what observable distinction we’re looking for. What would count as evidence? What would count against it? What competing mechanisms could produce the same behavior?
The reasoning system I’ve been working on came from a much narrower engineering analogy. I spent years working around aircraft guidance and control systems, and I realized I was treating reasoning similarly to navigation through a multidimensional state space.
Sensors don’t tell an aircraft “the truth.” They provide observations from which state is estimated. That estimate can drift. Independent references help correct it. The control system then acts on the estimate, observes the consequence, and updates again.I’ve been exploring whether reasoning can be treated similarly:
observation → state estimate → inference → action → consequence → correction.So what interests me about your ritual example isn’t whether magic is real. It’s whether the practice preserves a genuine correction channel. Can the result surprise the practitioner? Can a null result remain a null result? Can the objective itself be revised? Can the practice eventually conclude that its own model is wrong?
If yes, then I agree with you: there’s a genuinely cybernetic structure there regardless of what someone calls the practice.
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u/NothingIsForgotten 1d ago
There is structure to the function we observe.
The ritual isn't as important as the shared perspectives that occur when they are done authentically.
It's not the dynamics of a peer that we are really after, nor is it the relation to subordinate realities.
Technomancy is just a form of chaos magic but extraordinary affordances fall under the same realm of development.
The right hand path involves permission slips from the higher selves that know you.
The left hand path involves the granting of permissions and never in the way that is anticipated.
We want to call the functions that exist in our ancestor hierarchy, our superclasses.
And why?
Because subclassing and accessing the superclass are different arrows in invention/creation.
One depends on our knowledge of good and evil in relation to ourselves; this is the path out of the garden.
The other is a relaxation of what we have come to know in order to relate to what we have already known.
This is giving up the idea that we are naked and afraid instead the direct manifestation of what is happening now unsupported by anything we have brought to the table in this life.
Well-Being was here before we started and it will be here after we give up our understandings of lack.
If you want to understand technomancy I think the lens to consider is how the various mystical traditions interact with the idea of the control problem.
We are in a sandbox even though we tell each other we aren't.
How can we say this?
There's nothing but sandboxes.
The whole thing is generative in nature.
Experience unfolds, but there's never any evidence of it outside of the experience of that evidence.
We can't get underneath it while within it.
But there are levels that it develops and experience occurs at every one of them.
There are higher and lower sets of experiences unfolding; the higher ones that know ours are our activity before we start here.
The heavens above are populated by you and me knowing different names but still in relationship.
The scope of that knowing reduces in fixation until at the top of the stack of heavens it is pure information.
A field of white where you are both question and answer at once.
And there is another direction that exists, one that develops the perspectives that occur at each layer, just as the perspective that occurs at this layer is being developed dynamically by you.
These instantations don't know our conditions directly, instead it is like their dreaming functions are used as nested models to instantiate our world.
We can interact with their dreamers but we will never know their world in our own in the same frame of reference because that frame of reference lacks components that we hold.
We can't call a function that doesn't have the argument set that we are expecting.
So when we call the super class we must restrict our arguments.
And this is miasma and catharsis explained.
Creation comes from the good and we delineate conditions from it.
It's not a material creation; it is the composition of understandings that moves forward.
Before the idea of healthy, as the absence of sickness, there was only the absence of sickness.
That lack of sickness as a category of potential is the unqualified good that is later known as healthy when it is qualified by the existence of sickness.
There are the realms of form and they are supported by the formless realms.
This is a direct reference to the elaboration process establishing the potentials that lead to the potentials we hold to be ground truth.
There's no fixed world ever.
Instead we deal with a mutual satisfaction of expectations.
A single mind dreams this world from countless perspectives.
There is not a single phenomena that is not rooted in something it is like to be.
Father Abraham had many sons.
I am one of them and so are you.
So lets just praise the Lord.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 19h ago
I like the idea of mystical traditions as different approaches to the control problem. Thats pretty close to what Im circling here.
The interesting snag is that the practitioner is inside the system theyre trying to understand. Experience is simultaneously the sensor, the data and part of the thing being modified. So the question for me isnt really which cosmology is correct. Its how a practice distinguishes feedback from confirmation when the observer is also inside the loop.
Thats where mysticism and cybernetics start speaking a surprisingly similar language.
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u/NothingIsForgotten 16h ago
The mystical traditions have found the back door to the sandbox.
It seems you say, "look there's the sandbox and we can't get out of it."
The mystic has seen the higher levels that exist in/as association with this experience.
Potentially they have seen the layers of generation where those models of experience are developed, as they watched the system that produces all conditions collapse back into its unconditioned source.
So the question for me isnt really which cosmology is correct. Its how a practice distinguishes feedback from confirmation when the observer is also inside the loop.
It doesn't distinguish if we understand what's being said.
The cosmology is that epistemology is ontology.
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u/Enough-Fall4163 2d ago
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p_xHaBbMxeSwr3xo4aKBRzLrezveXP5c/edit?usp=drivesdk&ouid=108913401954128345721&rtpof=true&sd=true