The universe didn’t force you not to believe in magic. You could have spent your whole life believing magnets are magical stones, that the electromagnetic force is magical energy, and that computer engineers are wizards who conjure spirits from magic. And you could have been 100% factually and scientifically correct.
But you chose to believe that magic is by definition not real, because you didn’t want to live in a world of whimsy and wonder. You defined magic as supernatural, in opposition to the natural world. While every scientist knows that nature is just a word for everything that exists. You chose to define magic in a way that it wouldn’t exist, denying it through tautology and not through science.
Why did you choose that?
Because magic has in common verbiage typically been used to describe phenomena we don’t know the mechanism behind.
And all those other things we do understand the mechanism behind. Along the way to understand how we figured out standards that elevate physical phenomena from imagined ones, and slowly we found that there’s very little room left for the unknowable to affect our reality.
So if the word magic is to have any distinct meaning, there’s only left “that which isn’t real enough to affect us”.
But you’re of course free to redefine words as feels useful to you. I find flying, quantum teleportation, and cognition magical, but that more describes the wonder and awe of the inner workings of my world, rather than if it’s real or not.
I agree with your entire post except this:
we found that there’s very little room left for the unknowable to affect our reality.
Until we know everything there is to know, we will have no idea how much we don’t.
Given the age of our species, I’d assume we know very little.
I do agree. I was trying to match the poetic language of OP and convey that we have no proof of supernatural or imagined claims, and thus the narrow sliver of naturalistic reality is where we must investigate phenomena. But you know, in a way a symbolic minded troll would understand.
Give them a little more grace, maybe?
I feel like more people trying to make sense of the world is a good thing. If someone’s trying to change your mind, they can piss off, but embrace the ones who are asking the questions. Even leading questions can be given thought provoking answers.
This one seems like he wants to know why people reject magic as a… I hope this makes sense, but a texture pack for physics. Same laws, alternate perspective.
If that’s the case, I get it. I think that way too, in a sense. I just don’t think most other people do.
A quick look at their posting history shows that they’re indistinguishably close to a troll. Their response as well.
I have refrained from saying this until this person has posted more but the unfortunate way that I see it is that this person is likely in a state of psychosis.
And I do not say that lightly, as I myself have had a psychosis episode myself, brought on by a combination of immense stress, real threat to my physical well being, and drug abuse.
They are needlessly aggressive.
They slip and slide around different meanings of the same word that has multiple meanings, melding them together at times, and switching to another one if it means that will help them make a point.
But this causes the totality of what they say to be inconsistent, incoherent, and not actually definable.
Persecution complex? Yep.
Could be what you describe. But all those things are also hallmarks of a superstitious mind, especially if under duress or long indoctrination.
Not being allowed to question or reconcile things causes internal stress, not being allowed to express certain emotions and thoughts also adds to it. It doesn’t help that many of them are radicalised into driving an agenda.
I’m not expecting to live long enough for that kind of drama, so I simply blocked them. If they’re abusive, please report them before blocking, they might be dragging all of Lemmy down and not just this thread.
I’m starting to get that vibe as well. =(
It is not so much that we do not know the mechanism, it is that the mechanisms have been demonstrated to have no effect beyond psychological in those predisposed to believe in it having some cause, or the easily swayed.
While some things many now call magic did have grains of truth in them, those grains of truth stuck and developed eventually into say elements of medicine and chemistry.
Divining Rods provably do not work. This has been studied.
Astrology and Zodiac readings have no demonstrable, plausible physical effect on anything on Earth, beyond the Moon anyway. Their effect is only present in the minds of believers, this has been greatly studied.
I have personally worked in a university news room where the Editor would just make up the horoscopes for each week by bullshitting whatever he wanted, and then have to sit through conversations with people reading said bullshit horoscopes and planning and interpreting their lives based around them.
Prayer has no effect on the world beyond the mind of the practitioner, this has also been studied.
Much, though not all of the actual physical and material recipes of Alchemy do not work, or do not work as described. The bits that did work eventually became parts of the foundation of Chemistry.
Tarot, Psychic Readings, Fortune Telling, Prophecy, combine basically creative subjective interpretation or prediction with a primed audience that can often then interpret vague predictions as having been accurate when some mundane random event later occurs.
Of course magic only has an effect on the mind. The mind is the only thing of whose existence we are assured. Descartes said Cognito Ergo Sum, and in this he was correct, but his argument that Deus Ergo Veritas is nonsense. There is no perfectly good god, and therefore Descartes’ argument that there is reality is wrong. Experiential reality is a product of the mind, assembled according to processes we do not understand. We cannot yet account for the sudden appearance of sensation as a result of neural impulses. And cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that we never will, because neurons are an invention of the mind, not the other way around.
I think, therefore I am.
You don’t think, therefore you aren’t.
You just believe whatever nonsense confirms your biases.
Okay Christian.
All As are B
Everything that is not A, is therefore not B.
Fallacious logic.
Humor understood, functioning human.
Humor not understood, functioning plant. Aka u.
That’s a very postchristian view of magic. For most of human history, magic wasn’t unknowable. It factored into the daily lives of billions of people who felt they understood it to varying degrees, that it could fundamentally be understood, and that some people understood it better than others. If magic can’t be understood, then what on earth were witches, shamans, druids, wise women, sages, gurus, priests, and medicine men supposed to be doing? Nah, humans have always believed magic was knowable. It was only christians who hated magic which didn’t come from their god, and who persecuted practitioners of traditional magic from other cultures.
Personally, I hate the effect christians have had on our culture, and I refuse to let them redefine terms that have existed for thousands of years. I reject their definitions of magic. Magic is knowable. It always has been. Magic is subject to the scientific method, like everything in this world. I’m sure you know this and agree with me, that everything is knowable and everything is governed by science. So by choosing to define magic as unknowable, you chose to define it as unreal. Why did you choose that?
And how do you know that? Through magic?
If you have issue with me using only 12 - 18 centuries old definitions, I welcome you to have this talk in pre-christian times, although I might be busy then.
See, this is why I often say that white atheists are culturally Christian. You guys are so unwilling to step outside the set of definitions and the worldview of Christianity. You believe in everything except the god. And I assure you, there’s a lot more to Christianity than just the god. There’s a whole philosophy to how the world works that white atheists entirely accept without question. And you, right here, are openly unwilling to reject a Christian definition of magic as ineffable. You know that the reason Christians decided magic was ineffable was cause they say their god is, right? The entire reason you’re taking your current stance in this argument is that you’re parroting a Christian theological assertion.
This community might as well be called Christian Memes based on the average user demographic.
How are you seeing skin color though?
Magic has existed throughout and within Judaism and Christianity.
Sure, different forms of it have been suppressed and accepted to varying degrees based on time, place, your social status, etc, but magic has played an important role throughout the entirety of those religion’s histories.
And it certainly was not only Christians who hated magic that did not come from their God.
Just in the Abrahamic faiths alone, there are Christian Occultists that were criticized and persecuted by other Christians, Jewish Occultists that were criticized and persecuted by other Jews, and Muslim Occultists who were criticized and persecuted by other Muslims.
And that is to say nothing of pre Christian Rome’s persecution of the many varied druids and shamans of Europe north of the Alps.
Hell, we even have decent documentation of religious upheaval in ancient Egypt based around opposing cults with opposing gods and opposing magic.
You seem to be critical of post-christian worldviews, as you say, but your ideology seems to be akin to fascism:
Make up an ahistorical, vague, idealized past, with mythical ‘good times’ that were disrupted by the advent of the desecrators, in your case, christians.
Yeah, yeah, christian views are varied. But you see, when I use the word postchristian, I’m describing the sum total effects of 2000 years of christian actions. In particular the middle ages drive towards seeing magic as the work of the devil and the canon ban on Artes Prohibitae in the 1450s, which eventually culminated in the witch hunts famously including Salem. The magic-accepting christians failed to effect the cultural changes necessary to prevent KidnappedByKitties and others from thinking magic is ineffable.
I did not define the word magic. Society did that. My choice is to communicate effectively, which means largely respecting the established consensus on which words mean what. If you’d rather render yourself ineffectual by using your own personal alternate definitions for established words, that is your choice, but it’s not a choice that aligns with my or most other people’s priorities.
Besides, “magic” only has whimsy associated with it because we restrict it to fake things. If we’d been calling electricity “magic” all along, “magic” would be mundane and you’d be over here complaining that we don’t use a more whimsical term like “etherics” or “thaumaturgy” or “electricity.”
As for wonder… what the flippity floppity fuck are you even talking about? The scientific world is full of wonder. Wonder is what drives science in the first place, and it has nothing at all to do with terminology. If you look up at the night sky and are too distracted by vocabulary to feel wonder at the pretty lights shining across unfathomable temporal and spatial distances, well, that seems more like a deficiency in you than any sort of flaw in which arbitrary sounds and squiggles we’ve picked out to describe things with.
Because I use logic and rationality to observe and define the world around me as opposed to unfounded delusional thought. I didn’t “choose” to define magic as unreal, it simply is.
It’s not that I “don’t want to live in a world of whimsy and wonder”, I just don’t believe in the supernatural, and am not going to waste my time convincing myself of something that doesn’t exist. Same reason I don’t believe in a god.
Suppose we lived in the world of Dungeons and Dragons. Suppose our neighbour is an elf, my girlfriend is a halfling, there’s a dragon living in yonder mountain, and in the castle tower there is a wizard who ponders a magical orb and creates magic potions. Clear, undeniable magic, as you and I currently define it. Would your arguments not be equally applicable in such a world?
If dragons, wizards, and elves were part of the natural world, then they would not be supernatural. And thus, because you choose to define magic as supernatural, they would not be magic. So even in such a world, you would continue to say magic isn’t real.
If you and I cannot even imagine a world that has magic, then your claim is unfalsifiable. It cannot be empirically tested; any possible result will be used as further evidence of your tautological theory. Therefore, your theory is scientifically meaningless. It may be true, but it doesn’t scientifically matter, because it doesn’t tell us anything new about the world. It’s just a pointless linguistic game.
But we don’t live in a world of dragons, elves, etc. There are no wizards or potions or magic. There are no spells or incantations any more than there are midichlorians or the force. If those were real, then yes, you could say magic is real. But there are no supernatural forces, only natural phenomena which can be explained by science.
it isn’t necessarily meaningless, as the nonexistence of magic or the supernatural further reinforces the fact that everything can be explained by the very real laws of physics, whether or not we have the current ability to do so.
Our ancestors would’ve thought electricity is magic, but it’s not. They would’ve thought machines are magic, but they’re not.
Your statement about this being a pointless linguistic game is true. You are trying to argue that things which are not magic can be called magic, but you are wrong. By its very definition, magic is a supernatural force. You can’t call something supernatural when it isn’t, that’s just blatantly false.
You’re free to use the word however you please, but don’t act surprised when people call you out for being objectively wrong.
You just like didn’t pay attention at all, did you? Did you get bored and think about football when I was talking about the scientific principle of falsifiability?
Sure. I can go with this. I actually once met a woman who jokingly referred to herself as a half elf.
She had a rare genetic condition that caused the uh… not the outer lobe of her ear, but the little inner thingy that you can push on to close your ear canal…
… that thingy kept developing something sort of like a non malignant cyst… not quite that, but basically, it made that part of her ear keep growing.
Sort of the inverse of an elf ear. Not the outer lobe growing to a point, but the opposite part.
How can that be explained? Magic? Did she slip through from the DND realm?
Nope. Long medical history, lots of study.
But… would you call that clear, undeniable magic?
If you’ve got a tummy ache, and I know enough about the ingredients and creation process of pepto bismol to create a weird, pink, strange tasting concoction that you slurp and then wow poof 5 minutes later, no tummy ache…
…is that magic?
I am not being facetious. I have literally no idea what your definition of magic is as you refuse to define it, only attack others by asserting that they tautalogically believe magic is not real.
Can you actually define magic?
Sure. Observable phenomena caused by things that aren’t real. For example, money isn’t real, and therefore the economy is magic. Gender isn’t real, so gender roles are magic. Alchemy isn’t real, so turning lead into gold is magic. Astrology isn’t real, so horoscopes are magic. The state isn’t real, so laws are magic. Hyperspace isn’t real, so the Millenium Falcon is magic. A medieval man suddenly transported into the modern day would have no concept of electrical current being real, so from his point of view computers are magic, but from our point of view they aren’t. Placebos aren’t real, so the placebo effect is magic. This definition accounts for every single example of magic by virtue of the fact that it uses the concept of reality, which means different things to different people. Thus, magic is able to mean different things to different people. The more reality someone believes in, the less magic they see in the world. But an antirealist or a solipsist would see everything as magic, which indeed I do.
This is not how anyone actually uses the word, though.
Ok, so your definition of magic is anything with complexity and alterability that is not well understood by the perceiver or subject.
So basically, ignorance.
I mean I guess I agree with you that the ignorant will label things that function in ways they do not understand, or take issue with, as magic.
So then! Your original posted meme does not work that well then.
Not sure why you posted a meme where atheists are dumb for defining magic as not real, thus precluding it from being real, when you yourself are an actual antirealist solipsist who does not believe in reality.
Pretty much a perfect example of the classic right wing authoritarian strategy of painting your opponents as bad because they believe in bad thing, when they themselves actually believe in the bad thing.
The ‘No U’ rhetoric.
No, I understand all the magics I listed except for alchemy very well. You’re full of shit.
So you’re basically saying that anything you don’t understand is magic… That’s the same irrational thinking as people who explain things by simply saying “god did it”.
Money is very much real, either as gold/silver/etc, fiat, or ones and zeroes on a bank account or crypto wallet. Gender is not “real”, but it is a very real social construct. The state is a very real entity and its laws are very real rules set in place and enforced.
You’re correct in saying that alchemy, transmutation of lead to gold, astrology and horoscopes are not real. Yes, they are magic. The one thing they all have in common is that they do not exist in any form other than fiction, and neither does magic.
No, I didn’t say anything I don’t understand is magic. You’re just making bullshit up. I have a deep understanding of all of the magics I described above except for alchemy, which I’m barely a novice in. And they’re still magic, even though I understand them well.
Okay. It’s pretty obvious you’re just arguing in bad faith and using mindless semantics to debate the non existence of a fake thing. I’m done engaging with nonsense.
Enjoy your wishful thinking.
For something to be real to science, it needs to be measurable.
If magic was measurable, we wouldn’t call it magic.
Magic, by definition, is not real.
You could call quantum mechanics “magic”, but we just call it quantum mechanics
Magic, by definition, is not real.
Why did you choose to define magic as not real?
You are being willfully obtuse. Atheists didn’t choose the definition of the word. Magic is a catch all for things that are not explained by a scientific process. Computing is not one of those things. You don’t understand computers because they are a black box. Therefore it is tempting to call the result magic. But you had better sure as hell hope that the effect of computers are reproducible, every single time, because if they are not, the world as we know it ceases to function.
Pretty sure my degree in computer science means you’re full of shit
Fucking act like it then!
It’s cool you have a unique worldview about what constitutes magic and that brings you joy, but stop asking people to apologize for not sharing it!
It’s not a unique worldview. It’s a normal worldview anywhere that Christians haven’t colonised the local people’s brains.
Magic can be anything as long as we are willing to twist the definition so much it describes fucking nothing
As Terry Pratched put it, magic is the knowlege of obscure things, knowing stuff the others don’t know. That’s why you call computer-savvy people “wizards”
Because reality is way too complex and we need to have clear, well documented, error-proof ways to understand it. Wonder and amazement can follow after the understanding of what is true. Is alway better to have “boring” but clear terminologies and a well documented way to expain phenomenon, instead of mixing “Facts” with “Romance” just because we like the sound of certain words. Also, the term “magic” is just a filler, a " deux ex machina", it didn’t explain nothing.
Try paying attention, please.
Wh… why are you telling me what I believe and think?
Also, no, you would not be scientifically accurate in describing computer wizards as summoning spirits from magic rocks, because spirits are not a scientific concept.
Spirit means many different things to many people, such that few will 100% agree on its qualities on properties. It is basically a religious concept with an extreme amount of variance depending on who you talk to, generally it could be said to be a sort of ‘essence’ of a person or thing, but some would even disagree with that.
What does or does not have a spirit? People? Animals? Rocks? Only magic rocks? Water? Concepts (Zeitgeists)?
What does a spirit do? How does it do what it does? How can you know whether it is present? Is it limited by time and space, temporarily and spatially localized? Or is it in many places at once, or does it persist through time? Do spirits have personalities? Do they have forms, or bodies?
What you mean by spirit?
I don’t know, but I also won’t presume to know someone else’s thoughts.
Anyway, I did not define magic as anything, though I love studying the esoteric and the occult and learning what different peoples in different times have believed.
There are many forms of magic. Some of them relatively simple in both exercise and effect, others vastly complex and purporting astounding powers and abilities. Alchemy (Spiritual Purification / Inner Alchemy / Gnosis Englightenment and Proto Chemistry), Divining, Scrivining, Tarot, Evocation, Wards, Spells, Charms, Hexe/Curses, Secret Languages… theres so much more.
What typically differentiates magic from non magic for most people is probably the idea of a well understood, provably reliable causal mechanism.
In the past, when little was understood, concepts from religion, folklore, philosophy, mathematics, medicine, chemistry… much of this was jumbled together such that dividing those listed ideas into their modern constituent concepts would be anachronistic for to varying degrees for different places and time periods.
Over time, more and more ideas were tested via experimentation, experimentation itself became more rigorous, and our understanding of those causal mechanisms, and technological use of them, increased dramatically.
I would say that ‘Magic’ can be said to be the ideas, that were not found to reliably have a reproducible effect, that were found to not be functionally useful beyond creating an experience of profundity to the practitioners.
As an example I can attempt to speak Enochian to evoke Metatron to aid in sealing some particular demon by using the Lesser Key of Solomon, but this will not actually do anything unless I convince myself that it has in fact done something, that there was a demon to be sealed, etc.
It would be extremely helpful if you could describe precisely your conception of magic so that an actual discussion could be had, as that seems to be what you are looking for.
In my experience with magic believers/practitioners, all of them will tell you that their specific conception of magic is correct and nearly all others are wrong, so it is quite difficult to avoid accidentally strawmanning them.
But uh, you later switch to a different meaning of the word magic when you describe it as a wondrous and whimsical way to experience the world.
Personally, I find wonder and whimsy through understanding the vast intricacies of nature as science describes it.
How wondrous it is that we live in a world where the laws of optics allow a crepuscular ray from a burning star, following the laws of nuclear physics, to illuminate a lonely grove of plants, whose biology is wonderfully complex.
In closing, I do not know what you mean by magic.
Could you perhaps describe magic as a concept, or some specific instance of it or magical procedure?
Have you read much chaos magic?
So magic is a book?
By definition, it is merely manipulating reality through supernatural forces. If magic was real, we would still call it magic. We just would not say “magic isn’t real.” Because remember: At some point in time, people believed magic was real.
No, that’s nonsense. Supernatural means not real. The natural world is a scientific term for all that exists, and supernatural means nonexistent. If fire breathing dragons were natural, they wouldn’t be supernatural, would they, you silly? You’d still be denying the existence of magic.
Supernatural just means beyond science or understanding.
Magic could exist and people could still not understand why. Just like many concepts and natural forces in the real world, such as consciousness that we don’t understand at all, and yet we still understand it is real.
So much your thoughts here depend on definitions of words that you might want to crack open a dictionary and actually see what the definition of them is.
Nothing is beyond science.
Because I like knowing exactly how and why something works, and by extension knowing that if I wanted to, I could make another one just like it, or one that uses the same principle to do something slightly different, or that if I take the one in front of me and modify it just here I can make it do something completely new. I like science because I love knowing. I love taking things and making them do things they couldn’t before. That’s why I became a programmer – because I could do that to computers – and what got me so excited about open source. The idea that if I find something that doesn’t work exactly the way I like, all I need are the right skills, and I can change it so that it does. If I hear someone say they wish something that doesn’t exist existed, all I need are the right skills and I can make that happen. I am a scientist. I am unstoppable. I can change the world on a whim, and naught but my own ignorance stands in the way.
I will never understand the mindset that sees something it does not understand and decides it would rather think of it as something beautiful and unknowable than try to understand it. Why do you accept the world as it is? Why do you accept that there are things we cannot know when you think of all the good we could do if we knew them?
The artist looks at something that exists and sees that it is good. The engineer looks at something that exists and knows that it could be better, and a piece of their soul cries out to make it so.
I didn’t say magic is unknowable. You did. I said the opposite. Why did you choose to ignore me and define magic as unknowable?
Because if you’re just going to come up with your own definitions for words that already have meanings, why have a language at all?
Magic has been considered knowable for thousands of years across hundreds of distinct cultures. It’s only Christians who think magic is ineffable, and that’s because their god is ineffable and they have weird hangups about magic in relation to their god. I wanted to talk to some normal people, but all I can find here are Christians like you.
EXCUSE ME!?
I’ve been called a lot or hurtful, untrue names before, but Christian tops the list!
I just gave you a two page paper on how much I loved science and how I thought the idea that we should simply accept the natural order was insulting. What about that, apart from the fact that I defined the word “magic” the same way that just about everyone in the Anglosphere defines it, said bible-thumping who-are-we-to-question-God’s-plan lunatic to you?
Face it. The people in this comment section are normal people. If everyone you meet is an asshole…
If you’re not a Christian then stop pushing Christian ideas about magic. Simple as.
Here are the 8 definitions DuckDuckGo provides for the word "magic".
magic /măj′ĭk/ noun
- The art or practice of using charms, spells, or rituals to attempt to produce supernatural effects or control events in nature.
- The charms, spells, and rituals so used.
- The exercise of sleight of hand or conjuring, as in making something seem to disappear, for entertainment.
- A mysterious quality of enchantment.
adjective
- Of, relating to, or invoking the supernatural.
- Possessing distinctive qualities that produce unaccountable or baffling effects.
transitive verb
- To produce, alter, or cause by or as if by magic.
- To cause to disappear by or as if by magic. Used with away.
To which of these definitions do you refer? If none of them, do you believe the dictionary refuses to accept non-Christian ideas about magic?
If redefining the word “magic” in a very Tumblrina way to refer to anything that you think is cool and want to marvel at brings you joy, and calling things magic even when you know how they work is your aesthetic, go right ahead. I’m all for it. I may even join you. But please be upfront that redefining a word is what you’re doing.
Duck Duck Go isn’t a dictionary, it’s a search engine. I prefer Merriam Webster: an extraordinary power or influence seemingly from a supernatural source
KidnappedByKitties nailed it, I think.
But I absolutely love and agree with your perspective, too. I think we went too hard into understanding the physical side of reality while rejecting the role of spirituality with the Enlightenment.
I believe physical reality is just one side of a coin.
We need to regain a spiritual view without giving up how we understand physical reality, and without all the literal trappings of organized religion.
A second Enlightenment?
Why can’t the physical side be magic too? Why did you choose to define magic as nonphysical?
I didn’t. I think reality is made up of both equally. Two sides of a coin.
Why are people hating on this? OP is right! Non of you have any idea what gravity is, besides being some attractive force that starts existing with mass. How? Why? Wtf even is it? NON OF YA KNOW! How is that different from a wizard utilizing limited knowledge of “magic” to create a fire ball spell? All the wizard knows is that some words and imagining some flow inside the body mixed with a bit of contraction produces sparks out of the finger tips. How? Why? Wtf even is it? The wizard sure as hell can’t tell! But can utilize this knowledge to predict processes and make new things! Just like a scientist! Scientists are just a lot more advanced since they view stuff like peer review as a necessity.
This goes hand it hand with the quote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”, read some old legends and be absolutely bored by what they considered magic.
In conclusion scientists are wizards. To a certain extend engineers too, since they practice said “magic”. I mean many iconic wizards in stories didn’t invent the spells and rituals they use.
Actually, in Dungeons and Dragons wizards understand magic very well. It takes years of academic study in order to cast a single cantrip. Magic is governed by the Weave, a sort of field that extends across the multiverse and carries arcane energies of life, necrosis, law, order, good, and evil. For a wizard, spellcasting is based on intelligence. Book smarts and deep understanding.
Didn’t cross my mind that there are settings that explain EVERYTHING. D&D qualifies as less “magical” than real life! xD
Honestly it brings me great joy thinking of me and my programmer buddies as little mages, and wizards respectively. Creating my own world inside my lighting infused rune stone.
I mean. I’m sure those wizards up in the tower are asking. “ok, but WHY does this field cross over planes when others don’t. Why does it carry energy? Why am I able to access this energy the way that I am?” And in the process of answering those questions they discover new ones they never even knew to ask.
