Miscellaneous Laws and Philosophies
This is another grimoire extract featuring a compiled list of philosophies, paradoxes, laws of life and physics.
Some of these might be particularly helpful to your practice if you wish to apply them, for example the philosophy of similarity or Newton's laws of motion. Or perhaps you’re like me and just find them interesting to list -some of these, I will admit, I chose to include for a bit of a giggle.
-Absurdism: The philosophical theory that life is absurd with no meaning or higher purpose and can not be understood by reason.
-Acton’s Dictum: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.
-Backwards Law: The harder you try the less likely you are to succeed. In psychology, this is also called the ironic process theory.
-Brandolini's Law: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than the amount it took to produce it.
-Buttered Cat Paradox: Cats always land on their feet. Buttered toast always lands butter side down. If you tape a slice of buttered toast to a cat what will happen when you drop them?
-Catch-22: A situation in which someone is in need of something that can only be had by not being in need of it.
-Clarke's Laws:
The Old Scientist: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right. When they say that something is impossible they are very probably wrong.
Possibility: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little ways past them into the impossible.
Magic: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-Finagle's Law: An addition to Murphy’s law “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” will at the worst possible moment.
-Gibson's Law: For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD.
-Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Or, do not invoke conspiracy as explanation when ignorance and incompetence will suffice, as conspiracy implies intelligence.
-Hedonism: A group of philosophical theories centred around pursuing and defining pleasure, referring to both large activities like sex or recreational drugs and small activities like reading a good book or watching a sunset.
-Humphrey’s Law: Conscious attention to a task normally performed automatically can hinder its performance.
-Ironic Process Theory: The psychological process whereby an individual’s deliberate attempts to suppress certain thoughts makes those thoughts more persistent.
-Lem’s Law: No one reads; if someone does read, they do not understand, if they do understand, they immediately forget.
-Muphry’s Law: If you write anything criticising, editing, or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written (the name is a purposeful misspelling of Murphy's law).
-Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
-Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword: What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.
-Newton’s Laws of Motion:
Law of Inertia: Objects will stay in rest or in motion unless an outside force causes a change.
F = ma: Force = mass x acceleration meaning the acceleration of an object depends on the object's mass and the force acting upon it.
Action and Reaction: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction meaning when two objects meet each other they apply force to one another that are equal in magnitude but in the opposite direction.
-Nihilism: Based on the rejection of religious and moral principles and the belief that life is meaningless. Many people see nihilism as depressing and nihilistic people as miserable and annoying, that may be true for some but nihilism also provides the freedom to create and express yourself without social boundaries. There are two types of nihilists: those who say “life is meaningless so why bother?” and those who say “life is meaningless so why not?”.
-Occam's Razor: The philosophical principle that the simplest explanation is usually the best one. When presented with two competing hypotheses that have the same prediction, one should choose the hypothesis with the least variables and assumptions.
-Papert’s Principle: Some of the most crucial steps in mental growth are based not simply on acquiring news skills, but on acquiring new administrative ways to use what one already knows.
-Paradox of Hedonism: When one pursues happiness itself, one is miserable; but, when one pursues something else, one achieves happiness.
-Philosophy of Similarity: Based on the degree of resemblance objects have to one another using their shared properties. This is built on recognising certain patterns like colour or taste and then comparing them to others.
-Rothbard’s Law: Everyone specialises in their own area of weakness.
-Sagan Standard: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
-Solipsism: The philosophical view that the self or the mind is the only thing that is known to exist and anything outside of that is unsure and undefined.
-Stein's Law: If something can not go on forever, it will stop. If a trend can not go on forever, there is no need to make it stop, much less make it stop immediately; it will stop of its own accord.
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