we've been trying to explore divination through various means but we've had great difficulty with it, and I'm pretty sure it's because of the residual nerdbro social conditioning. our system does have at least one frank atheist in it (that'll be Alyx Woodward, over at @pnictogen-horses) and probably there's others lurking among the more eccentric introjects.
and the nerdbros say that "random" things are meaningless things. divination, to a "rational" or "skeptical" person, is like investing the flip of a coin with metaphysical significance—and as the system's pontifex between the metaphysical and physical worlds, trying my best to reconcile these two things, I'm in the uncomfortable position of trying to argue that a coin-flip can have metaphysical significance. I say that the outcome of the coin-flip is not truly "random". chaotic and unpredictable? yes. but "random" in the sense that uniform white noise is random? I say that it's not practically possible to determine whether flipping a coin is truly "random" in this narrow sense.
and yes, I do think it's very narrow (and yet commonplace in nerdy subcultures) to regard all unpredictable phenomena as "random" in the thermal-noise sense. it's like pretending that all unpredictable things obey the normal distribution—and how many programmers make that desperately fallacious assumption about everything they see? it's easy to see why: uniformly random numbers and normal distributions are easy things to understand, and trivially easy to program into everything. and because nerdbros have a really bad habit of thinking that their programs are more accurate to reality than reality itself, they tend to have—in my opinion—a very poor grasp on unpredictable phenomena and seeking meaningful patterns in them. they're apt to write off anything unpredictable as if it were mere noise. it can't be relied upon, therefore it's meaningless: that, in sum, is how the "rationalists" tend to see things. it's how they tend to see people, and therefore they demand rigidity and predictability in human behavior (imposed by force, if necessary.)
back to the coin-flipping. if flipping a coin isn't truly random but in fact unpredictable in a chaotic sense, this implies that the outcome of coin-flipping—or any other process of physical randomization—might in fact be subtly dependent upon specific external factors. certain external circumstances might not affect the coin-flip very much; other circumstances might exert a profound influence. that's the nature of a chaotic physical system—its unpredictability is circumscribed, a complicated function of the system's parameters, vulnerable to certain perturbations but not to others. if that's true about flipping a coin then...well, divination might start to make sense! the outcome of the coin-flip might be partly determined by external influence and specific circumstances. it might be something other than merely one more bit of white noise.
at least this is a plausible enough rationalization for us to proceed with trying to study and master methods of divination. this has been our greatest issue with studying magic: we've had to rationalize things things in nerdbro terms before we could make much progress. we couldn't take astrology seriously until we were able to rationalize it as applied mathematics. we couldn't take alchemy seriously until we were satisfied that there was some plausible physical basis to a number of alchemical concepts (the "four classical element" model and the Paracelsian tria prima.) I imagine that this is likely to be a persistent issue during our attempts to study the occult.
~Chara of Pnictogen
