This is a story about the nature of stories. It’s a description of the framework I use for understanding other frameworks and the world at large. Like all frameworks it’s fake, but it’s been immensely useful to me for a long time, and so I thought it was about time I codified the information therein. I refer to this framework as Metamancy.
We begin, like all ontologies, with a description of reality, which we’ll be referring to as the Seed Code. The Seed Code is the most fundamental part of a given framework, it gives rise to more specific and detailed descriptions of a particular reality, and acts as a ground layer for all understanding. It’s not quite axiomatic because you can always add yet another layer of recursion, but there’s only so much you can do with more recursion and eventually, somewhere, you have to decide on a seed.
The Seed Code to the Metamancy framework cleaves reality into two worlds.
The first world is the world of Matter, the physical material structure of the universe. The things that things are made of. What you actually get when you take the universe and grind it into the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve. Energy, particles, fields, quantum wave functions, subatomic forces of immense power bound and contained bouncing mindlessly and endlessly against one another for no reason in a constantly evolving deterministic universe. A universe of mathematics and physics and logic, the hard cold neutral world where nothing has meaning and all value is an illusion we have created to blind ourselves to the boiling atomic truth that is our nature. It is impossible to truly know with 100% certainty, the nature of the world of matter. You might be able to be 99.9999999999% certain, but you might always be a brain in a very well constructed vat. This is okay. Science lets us approach certainty as our knowledge of the world of matter goes to infinity, but we are forced to experience the world of matter through our faulty senses, so it’s always possible that we’re being deceived, presented with an incomplete picture of reality, or are just plain wrong about what the world of matter actually looks like on a fundamental level. Indeed the description I gave of the world of matter glazes lightly over the surface of a massive amount of complicated math and science that is trying to describe phenomenon increasingly disconnected from our day to day experience of reality. The world of Matter is what casts the shadow on the wall of Plato’s Cave.
The second world is the world of Stories, the descriptions and interpretations we create of our experiences of the world of matter. The world of Stories is where we get language, fiction, narrative, identity, meaning, purpose, and imagination, the world of stories is the world Information, of data and memes and tropes. The ecosystem of interacting ideas in the constantly growing pool that is the sum of all information humanity has created. The world of Stories is our description and interpretation of the shadows on the wall of Plato’s Cave. Any description of the world of matter is going to by necessity itself be a product of the world of stories. The story of how the earth was created by God, the story of how the Earth formed out of an accretion of matter in the early solar system, and causal description of A -> B -> C that is not a logical necessity is a part of the world of stories.
Metamancy by and large concerns itself with the world of Stories, but the place where the two worlds intersect is also a very important place to study and understand. A structure like a suspension bridge, for example, began its existence in the world of Stories, and then was passed back and forth between the world of stories and the world of matter in order to refine the construction methods and ensure the vision from the world of stories would actually hold up in the world of matter, before finally being dropped out of the world of stories and downloaded into the world of matter, becoming a part of the physical structure of the world.
As humans, we are beings of matter, and yet everything about us is actually made of stories. Identities are made of stories and narratives, and we interpret the world by telling ourselves stories about our natures and the nature of the world. The particular set of stories we live in is our Framework. One of the frameworks we might use to describe reality is through Metamancy, which says the world is split into matter and stories, thus our framework describes itself inside of itself at the highest levels of recursion, and the loop returns to its starting point.
The way a given person’s framework interacts with reality and allows them to modify their worlds is their Magic. Under this framework, Elon Musk is a powerful mage, one of such strength and skill that he could even throw his car into space by downloading a massive launch vehicle into the world of matter.
We’ll be breaking down these individual pieces later, but this is the basic construction of metamancy, it is the Seed code on which the rest of our metamancy framework will be built.
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