It depends what you mean by magic. Nowadays we communicate by bouncing invisible light off the sky, which would sure as hell qualify as “magic” to someone six hundred years ago.
The issue is that “magic”, in the sense that I take Minchin to be using it, isn’t a solution at all. No matter what the explanation is, once you’ve actually got it, it’s not “magic” any more; it’s “electrons” or “distortion of spacetime” or “computers” or whatever, the distinction being that we have equations for all of those things.
Take the witch trials, for example—to the best of my extremely limited knowledge, most witch trials involved very poorly-defined ideas about what a witch was capable of or what the signs of a witch were. If they had known how the accused were supposed to be screwing with reality, they wouldn’t have called them “witches”, but “scientists” or “politicians” or “guys with swords”.
Admittedly all of those can have the same blank curiosity-stopping power as “magic” to some people, but “magic” almost always does. Which is why, once you’ve solved the mystery, it turns out to be Not Magic.
Take the witch trials, for example—to the best of my extremely limited knowledge, most witch trials involved very poorly-defined ideas about what a witch was capable of or what the signs of a witch were.
Consider something like this and notice that our modern “explanations” aren’t much better.
And wrong. E.g., the perihelion precession of Mercury turned out to be caused by all matter being able to warp space and time by its very existence. We like to call that Not Magic, but it’s magic in the sense of disagreeing with established scientific theory, and in the sense of being something that, if explained to someone who believed in Newtonian physics, would sound like magic.
I wouldn’t say it would sound like magic. It would sound weird and inexplicable, but magic doesn’t just sound inexplicable, it sounds like reality working in a mentalist, top-down sort of way. It sounds like associative thinking, believing that words or thoughts can act on reality directly, or things behaving in agentlike ways without any apparent mechanism for agency.
Relativity doesn’t sound magical; in fact, I’d even say that it sounds antimagical because it runs so counter to our basic intuitions. Quantum entanglement does sound somewhat magical, but it’s still well evidenced
Interesting. I hadn’t thought about that. Now that I think about it, you’re right; most fictional magic does act on things that are fundamental concepts in people’s minds, rather than on things that are actually fundamental.
That said, I still say it all sounds like magic. I couldn’t tell you exactly what algorithm my brain uses to come up with “sounds like magic”, though.
Now that I think about it, you’re right; most fictional magic does act on things that are fundamental concepts in people’s minds, rather than on things that are actually fundamental.
I didn’t just have fictional magic in mind; concepts like sympathetic magic are widespread, maybe even universal in human culture. Humans seem to have strong innate intuitions about the working of magic.
It depends what you mean by magic. Nowadays we communicate by bouncing invisible light off the sky, which would sure as hell qualify as “magic” to someone six hundred years ago.
The issue is that “magic”, in the sense that I take Minchin to be using it, isn’t a solution at all. No matter what the explanation is, once you’ve actually got it, it’s not “magic” any more; it’s “electrons” or “distortion of spacetime” or “computers” or whatever, the distinction being that we have equations for all of those things.
Take the witch trials, for example—to the best of my extremely limited knowledge, most witch trials involved very poorly-defined ideas about what a witch was capable of or what the signs of a witch were. If they had known how the accused were supposed to be screwing with reality, they wouldn’t have called them “witches”, but “scientists” or “politicians” or “guys with swords”.
Admittedly all of those can have the same blank curiosity-stopping power as “magic” to some people, but “magic” almost always does. Which is why, once you’ve solved the mystery, it turns out to be Not Magic.
Consider something like this and notice that our modern “explanations” aren’t much better.
And because of those damned atheists we can’t even start a witch hunt to figure out who’s responsible!
Sure we can.
We just need to rephrase “witch” in scientific terms.
(Also sorry about the political link, but with a topic like this that’s inevitable).
UPDATE: This post goes into more details.
I think Tim Minchin was using “magic” the same way most people use “magic”—meaning ontologically basic mental things
To be fair, I’ve never asked him. But he included homoeopathy, which its practitioners claim isn’t mental.
So he was using magic in the sense of “disagrees with current scientific theory”, in that case the initial quote is circular.
It’s possible, but when I first heard it I honestly thought he meant “fundamentally mysterious stuff”.
And wrong. E.g., the perihelion precession of Mercury turned out to be caused by all matter being able to warp space and time by its very existence. We like to call that Not Magic, but it’s magic in the sense of disagreeing with established scientific theory, and in the sense of being something that, if explained to someone who believed in Newtonian physics, would sound like magic.
I wouldn’t say it would sound like magic. It would sound weird and inexplicable, but magic doesn’t just sound inexplicable, it sounds like reality working in a mentalist, top-down sort of way. It sounds like associative thinking, believing that words or thoughts can act on reality directly, or things behaving in agentlike ways without any apparent mechanism for agency.
Relativity doesn’t sound magical; in fact, I’d even say that it sounds antimagical because it runs so counter to our basic intuitions. Quantum entanglement does sound somewhat magical, but it’s still well evidenced
Interesting. I hadn’t thought about that. Now that I think about it, you’re right; most fictional magic does act on things that are fundamental concepts in people’s minds, rather than on things that are actually fundamental.
That said, I still say it all sounds like magic. I couldn’t tell you exactly what algorithm my brain uses to come up with “sounds like magic”, though.
I didn’t just have fictional magic in mind; concepts like sympathetic magic are widespread, maybe even universal in human culture. Humans seem to have strong innate intuitions about the working of magic.