About this Book XI
1
Introduction 1
1
All or Nothing? 1
2
Kindness 2
aside: The Two-Million-Dollar Comma 2
aside: Sufficiently Magical Technologies 3
aside: Our Gods 4
3
Cruelty 6
aside: Ghostly Causality 7
aside: Durable Cruelties 8
4
Beginning, Again 14
aside: Chaos Invoked 14
5
The Freedom Not to Choose 15
aside: No Atheists in Foxholes 16
aside: Blake on Firm Perswasion 17
aside: Metafictional Magic: The Writer’s Will 19
aside: Shapely Sentences 21
aside: Beckett Meets Twilight Zone, Glass-Half-Full Version 23
2
Complex Systems in a Nutshell 25
1
Horror Movie Reboot 25
2
Interpositivity 25
aside: Interpositivity 27
3
Becoming a System 27
4
Creatures of Light 29
aside: Transformative for Whom? 30
aside: Plant Sorcery 31
5
aside: iii 33
aside: Co-evolution 34
6
Leveled 35
aside: On being born too early and dying too late 36
aside: Up Around the Bend 37
7
A Personifying Universe of Stretchy Things 38
8
Dynamism 40
aside: One Plus One Equals Infinity 41
9
Magic, but No Black Boxes 41
aside: The T-Shirt Version 43
10
Wildness 43
aside: Pet Resemblance via Social Theory 44
3
Magic by Example 46
1
Failed Magic: Modernist Heaven (and Hell) 46
2
Placebo Magic 50
aside: Pregnancy via Magic 52
aside: Following the Scent 53
3
Mirror Magic 54
4
Biting Game 59
5
Dog Whisperer 61
6
Conclusion 62
4
Future Perfect 63
1
The Gettysburg Address as a Magical Speech Act 63
aside: Dr. Livingston’s Magical Bank-Shot Visualizer 65
3
Meteors, Messiahs, and Migraines 69
aside: On This Rock I Build My Church 69
aside: Falling Off a Log 71
4
Magical Militarism 72
5
Four Asides 74
aside: Dr. Livingston’s Time Travel 101 74
aside: A Somewhat Rationalizing Account of Mystical Nonviolence 76
aside: A Somewhat Mysticizing Account of Rationalist Nonviolence 77
aside: Four Scholars 78
5
What is Religion? 82
1
A Fuzzy Set 82
2
Magic, Science, and Religion Coevolve 83
3
Restoring the Chaos 84
aside: From Flow 89
5
Providence, via Vico 91
aside: Systematizers Systematized 93
6
God 3.5B (A Nearsighted Evolutionary Panorama) 97
1
Salience to Sentience 97
2
Primordial Systemhood Membership Narratives 100
aside: Law and Order 101
3
The Myth of the Acquisition-of-Consciousness Moment 103
4
Use of the Terms I and We 104
5
Cis-Systems → Trans-Systems 105
6
First Caveat: Characters 106
7
Plant and Animal Intelligence 107
8
Learning and Evolution from a Systems Perspective 108
9
Second Caveat: Plot 111
10
Especially Informative Postinfundibular Amphioxus Hypothalamus Neuropile 114
11
The Holy Grail 120
aside: Neuro-X 121
12
Teamlikeness 124
aside: Play and Teamlikeness 125
aside: Three-Ring Circuits 126
7
Blake Magic 138
1
Famous in Heaven 138
aside: No Success Like Failure 139
2
Blake Magic 140
3
Auguries 143
aside: Prophecies 145
4
Angel Kings 146
5
Magic in the Current Conjuncture 149
6
Five Asides 154
aside: An Elegant Pose 157
aside: Ritual Retraction 158
aside: Obscurity 160
aside: Butterfly Tornado 161
Acknowledgments 165
References 166
Index 173