The proof that there is no magic
What some people call "magic effects" are effects that cannot be explained. For instance, let's assume there's a certain sentence in a witchbook; when you read that sentence, the banana over there will turn blue. Bang. It turns blue. We cannot explain it? Therefore it must be magic?
Yes, we can explain it. The explanation is this: The banana turns blue when someone reads that sentence. That explains it. So it's not magic.
Another example: When you hold a brick in your hands and throw it away, there will be two forces at the same time: Your force that pushes the brick away from your body, and a second force from the brick itself that pushes your body in the opposite direction. Is that second force magic? No, because we can explain it. We explain it with Newton's law of action and reaction. That's the explanation. Since we have an explanation, that second force isn't magic.
There are many things we cannot explain. Nevertheless, most of us don't call them magic as we think some day there will be an explanation; we just don't know it yet.
Some people think those bizarre effects are magic because we don't know any explanation. But that same people will say that there is "something" that causes these effects. So there it is, the explanation: There is something that causes these effects. So it's not magic. We just don't have a name for it yet.
What did Newton do? He just gave his observation a name: "Reaction". We just need to give the effect a name, and herewith we get an explanation as well.
In the end, everything can get a name and therefore everything is non-magic.
What else could "magic" be anyway?
Yes, we can explain it. The explanation is this: The banana turns blue when someone reads that sentence. That explains it. So it's not magic.
Another example: When you hold a brick in your hands and throw it away, there will be two forces at the same time: Your force that pushes the brick away from your body, and a second force from the brick itself that pushes your body in the opposite direction. Is that second force magic? No, because we can explain it. We explain it with Newton's law of action and reaction. That's the explanation. Since we have an explanation, that second force isn't magic.
There are many things we cannot explain. Nevertheless, most of us don't call them magic as we think some day there will be an explanation; we just don't know it yet.
Some people think those bizarre effects are magic because we don't know any explanation. But that same people will say that there is "something" that causes these effects. So there it is, the explanation: There is something that causes these effects. So it's not magic. We just don't have a name for it yet.
What did Newton do? He just gave his observation a name: "Reaction". We just need to give the effect a name, and herewith we get an explanation as well.
In the end, everything can get a name and therefore everything is non-magic.
What else could "magic" be anyway?
Comments (46)
This is not a proof, its a definition. The word magic has a specific meaning which youre ignoring.
Ill do my best to stoke this fire.
Theres your definition of magic that which is unexplainable and then there's the more formal definition of magic, namely:
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(supernatural)
As to magic being the unexplainable, the very occurrence of being per se is devoid of explanation. Ergo, the whole of existence is then, in and of itself, pure magic. Ergo, magic occurs.
As to the referenced more formal definition of magic, it would only not occur were it to be metaphysically impossible that such a thing as causing change to occur in conformity to the will can occur. This being a bit of a catch-22: If you provide proof to evidence magic's impossibility, you will in effect be causing change such that the results end up being in conformity to your will, thereby validating the occurrence of magic thus defined.
Ta-da :razz:
What part of what I said would be "non-magic"? On a related topic, one can call a rose a "buffalo" but it's still going to be a rose.
Quoting javra
I mean, when my will is moving my hand, I can call it "magic" according to Crowley's definition. I can also call it non-magic as I have a scientific explanation for it. (I think, like Popper suggested, science always remains speculation, therefore scientific theories need to be open for tests and improvements.)
This gets at a common concern among fantasy writers and fans. Does a writer go with a "hard magic system" or a "soft magic system." A "hard magic system" is one where there are definite rules to magic, e.g. a strict cause/effect relationship.
The complaint against "hard magic" is that it reduces magic to something that isn't magic. For magic to be "magic" it has to be sort of inexplicable. It becomes a sort of "interesting physics." Whereas people often enjoy "hard magic" particularly because it lets them think about magic in more concrete terms.
Personally, I think a "hard magic" can work quite well, so long as the author just keeps it vague.
As to this:
Quoting Quk
Is why one of Corwley's aphorisms is that "blowing your nose is magical".
The empirical sciences too, bar none, in this more formal definition of magic are nothing but .... magic: the causing of change in conformity to will - here, namely, or at least ideally, the will to gain better understanding of being at large and its specifics.
As the song goes, it's good to be young at heart.
Interesting. Interesting especially for me as I'm not a fan of the fantasy genre. I'm rather a fan of science fiction, particularly of Kubrick and Star Trek. Now what makes the basic difference between the fantasy genre and the science fiction genre? I guess it's what I just learned from you: The spectrum between hard and soft magic ... or between hard and soft speculation? Hehe.
Right. But I consider this line poetry. In this line, magic is a metaphor, I think.
Very facile, but completely overlooks the point of explanation. An explanation demonstrates a causal relationship between events, and a correlation is not causation. If a banana turned blue on account of someone doing anything, then presumably a scientific explanation would be sought by first of all examining the banana and trying to understand what about it has changed. As for the 'second force' example, that has never been used as an example of 'magic'. Comparing a 'banana turning blue' and 'classical physics' is entirely specious.
Quoting Quk
Something your post demonstrates no conception of.
That's not an explanation, that's just a sentence describing the phenomenon you want to explain.
There's a damned good argument for the fact that quantum physics is, in fact, magic - specifically the effect known as non-locality or entanglement. This is what Einstein derisively described as 'spooky action at a distance', but despite his scorn, it was proven to occur, and was subject of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.
I ran this idea past Gemini, which responded No, quantum nonlocality, often described as "spooky action at a distance," is a real, experimentally verified phenomenon in physics, not magic, that describes the instantaneous correlation between entangled particles, despite the distance separating them."
But this bypasses the philosophical import of the question. Just because something is empirically observed and mathematically modeled doesnt mean its conceptually understood, especially in causal terms. The mystery of quantum nonlocality isn't dissolved by calling it a real phenomenon. In fact, the phrase spooky action at a distance (Einstein's own) was intended as a criticismit was meant to say, this doesnt make sense under classical ideas of causality or locality.
Traditionally, magic is about non-local influence through sympathetic connectionwhat Sir James Frazer called "the law of sympathy," including "contagion", "sympathy" and "similarity." Two things that were once connected or resemble each other are thought to retain a link, even across space and time. "Like produces like" is known as "imitative magic" and things once in contact remain connected, as "contagious magic".
Now, if you set aside the cultural baggage around the word magic, it does seem that quantum entanglement shares an odd structural similarity to this older idea: two particles, once interacting, retain an instantaneous link, such that the measurement of one constrains the possible outcomes of the other, even when space-like separated. There's no energy transfer or classical information sent faster than lightbut still, theres a coherence.
So in a way, quantum nonlocality is not magical only in the sense that it obeys quantum theorys predictions and doesnt allow for faster-than-light signaling (i.e. it doesnt violate causality in a relativistic sense). But in terms of intelligibility, it still appears as a kind of patterned connectedness that echoes what earlier traditions would have considered magical or symbolic influence.
The real issue is that the nature of the causal relationship involved remains deeply unclear (and hence controversial). Quantum theory points at the correlation, but can't explain the connection. So non-locality is not magic in the pre-scientific sense, but it does reintroduce a kind of pattern-based, holistic connectedness that resonates with what ancient ideas of magic expressed. That doesn't mean we should start casting spellsbut it does mean that the sharp boundary between the scientific and the magical isn't as self-evident as it might seem.
And besides, saith Feynman, 'I can safely say that nobody understands quantum physics'. It works - as if by magic!
(Have a look at my self-published article, Spooky Action in Action!)
An explanation is an answer to a "why"-question.
Why does the apple fall to the ground? Because of gravity. That explains it.
Why does this planet have gravity? Because it's a mass. That explains it.
Why does mass have gravity? Because ...
Which of these answers is a true explanation and which is just a description?
Every statement starting with the word "because" is a description of a causal scenario. It describes cause and effect.
How detailed must an answer be in order to be an explanation rather than a description?
It's not a matter of detail alone. In Greek philosophy, the issue is phrased in terms of explanans and explanandum. In the Phaedo, for example, Socrates argues that knowledge requires a method of inquiry that moves from the known to the unknown. He suggests that in order to explain a particular phenomenon, one must have knowledge of a more general principle or cause that underlies it. Socrates refers to this more general principle as the "cause" or "explanans," and the particular phenomenon as the "effect" or "explanandum."
Socrates asserts that the explanans must be of a higher order than the explanandum, because it is the more general principle that explains why the particular phenomenon occurs. He uses the example of how we explain why a lyre produces sound. Socrates argues that the explanans for why a lyre produces sound is not simply that the lyre is made of wood and strings, but rather that it is in the nature of harmony and discord to produce sound. (Of course, we now understand that it is the effect of the vibrating string on the sorrounding air which generate what we understand as sound waves.)
Thus, the explanans (the nature of harmony and discord) is of a higher order than the explanandum (the sound produced by the lyre).
This idea that the explanans must be of a higher order than the explanandum is sometimes referred to as the "Principle of Proportionate Causality" or the "Principle of Adequacy." It is a basic principle of many philosophical and scientific theories of explanation.
In later philosophy, David Hume famously cast doubt on the trustworthiness of inductive reasoning - reasoning from effect to cause. He argued that whilst we can give plausible reasons for why an effect follows from a cause, we can't discern a real basis to those causal relationships with the same degree of certainty we can discern in logical relationships. That was the point that was taken up by Immaneuel Kant in his famous 'answer to Hume'.
The question is whether the banana event repeats itself we always have a causal explanation. Hume would say yes. Another thing is to try to know the details in order to have a more detailed explanation that explains the banana event.
The question is in the details.
We must also keep in mind that we already have prior knowledge that explains to us in turn why an event like the banana is not possible or not explainable.
Magic is defined by the inexplicable. So yes there can be magic if an event is not explainable in any possible way. Or maybe there is just unknowing, but we can never rule out magic a priori.
Is our belief that every event is explainable absolutely true? Or is just an induction never proven false?
What Sokrates means by "higher order" is what I mean by "level of detail". They are just different words for the same question. The more detailed, the higher the level. Well, I will rephrase my question:
How high must the described order be in order to be an explanation rather than just a description?
If I mention the gravity being the cause for the falling apple, do I mention a higher order or not?
Good point.
In my example there is that sentence in the witchbook; whenever someone says that sentence, the banana turns blue. The effect is repeatable.
But even if it doesn't seem repeatable, there might be another hidden factor that is just not discovered yet. In other words, we can only assume it's not repeatable. Just like we can only assume that there are no red swans.
He doesn't. Detail is not the same as an explanatory principle. The higher order is more like a framework of explanation.
There's a philosophical point that I think you're sensing, but not describing very well. I agree that 'explanations don't go all the way down'. But there needs to be some clarity as to what constitutes a real explanation, as distinct from just hand-waving about 'magic'. Science and technology and much else besides relies on being able to discern cause and effect relations. But then there are also 'why is it so?' questions that can't be easily answered.
One way to say it might be that when the cause and effect are specific in nature, then the question is narrow enough to answer. But the more general the question, the more difficult it becomes. A falling apple accelerates at a given rate described by Newton's laws. But what is a 'scientific law' is a much bigger question than 'why does the apple accelerate at that rate'. That may be a good starting point - then you're getting into philosophy of science, which has long grappled with these questions.
Quoting Quk
This is just the sort of pretension that Moliere lampooned in one of his plays (The Imaginary Invalid): When a supposedly learned doctor is asked to explain the action of opium, he attributed it (speaking, suitably, in dog-Latin) to opium's "dormitive property whose nature is to lull the senses to sleep." Virtus dormitiva has since become a byword for just that sort of pseudo-explanation that merely names or rephrases the issue without providing any insight.
How high must the described order be in order to be an explanation rather than just a description?
I guess there is a gradual transition.
Magic is the created illusion. As long as the illusion exists, magic exists.
Well, that's a far broader question than the original topic. You won't make much headway on the question of magic if, in order to answer it, you first have to settle the question of what constitutes an explanation.
I think we can all agree that as a general requirement, an explanation should improve our understanding. A description does not satisfy that requirement, since a description is needed before we can even ask for an explanation (else, what are we even trying to explain?)
Yeah, I think it's a similar sort of distinction. Star Wars has a sort of magic for instance, and is generally cited as "soft sci-fi." But soft sci-fi doesn't need to involve magic, it can just involve ignoring science and including magic-like technology without any attempt at explanation.
Whereas some fantasy is largely trying to present the world as it is, just with heroic/mythic elements, e.g., the Iliad, Aeneid, Beowulf, etc. Magical realism, a sort of fantasy, uses magic to investigate the "higher/deeper realities" of our world in a somewhat similar, if more self-conscious way. Whereas Dante's Divine Comedy is a fantasy that is dramatizing the most cutting-edge philosophy and science of its time.
It's only silly if "gravity" is taken to simply mean "falling downwards." However, this is not how gravity is understood. There is a quite detailed explanation of what gravity is and how it works, even if it remains quite incomplete and the subject of much debate and research.
We can think of them as two different types of demonstration:
I have a paper that explains the reasoning in more depth:
This is, though, a bare description not an explanation. We are left with no idea how the "one becomes the many".
I am reminded of Heidegger's time, which to me is a very strong case for "magic". Perhaps you know it. First, an ontology, like everything, is going to be conceived hermeneutically, meaning, if you will, the river stops for no theory. Anyway, he is following a historical example, from Augustine, onward: The past doesn't exist, nor does the future, and the present is a Heraclitean becoming, so how can we ever discover reality which is seems lost in time, so to speak?
Heidegger calls this "vulgar" time that is conceived as a linear sequence, the kind of thing in everyday use, but is ontologically irresponsible. We need to think of the three modalities of time as ecstatic, meaning, essentially, no one stands apart from the others. The "not yet" is the "having been" and this is realized in the "nothing" of the present. This is Section 64 and onward in division 2 of b and T.
Why is this magical? Because first, it is impossible to conceive. One would have step outside of "vulgar" time to do this and this is impossible; it would be like stepping outside of one's own ipseity (dasein). Second, YET: one has to admit that it must be right. Past as such never even began to make sense. As with future as such or the present as such. It must be a "unity" and sequential time just, as with many things, a manner of speaking and getting things done.
A settled issue? I suppose not. But, a compelling argument that says our very thoughts and feelings and moods and everything, belong to an impossible and unspeakable primordiality (this is me. Heidegger would never talk like this), well, far more magical than Kant's formal transcendentalism.
One finds what is there that is not among the many, not "a" being. This being as such. Difficult to confront. It does take some of what you could call magic because being is not an empirical concept, nor is it merely analytical. It is apriori existential, meaning the meaning of being as such has to be discovered in a certain "yielding" (meditative thinking?) to the world as opposed to some aggressive analytic approach which forces things into categorical place, reducing the world to an deflating concept in a word game. Keeping in mind that Wittgenstein adored Kierkegaard as Tolstoy. He just thought philosophy cheapens everything it touches. I think he was right.
Seems to me that is just a general idea of existence. When it comes to what we encounter that we are able to talk about, it is only particulars.
There is a sense in which, as Markus Gabriel says the world does not exist. This is because 'world' signifies the totality, and this totality is never encounteredit is just an idea.
This totality is the totality of one's own past. Look around a classroom, e.g. and note how everything makes sense, the chalk/markers, desks, chairs, textbooks and so on.
Put it this way, when you have an object sitting there before you, what is it that singles it out as an object? Its singularity is a universal, like seeing a tree and knowing its a tree is an instantiation of the general idea. No general idea, no singularity. It has been argued that one never really acknowledges anything as it is because to acknowledge anything at all is a matter of bringing it into general comprehension, and so all one ever understands is this conceptual form that makes understanding what it is. Pull away from this, and the one is seized not by the singularity, but by what is their PRIOR to the sigularity, and this is being as such.
It is a reduction that makes this possible, a reduction down to the very existence that stands before you released from presumptions of contingent language affairs, from Kantian synthetic structures, if you like. The point is, it is possible to "liberate" the world from this usual way(vulgar way, says Heidegger, not to belittle, just to say it is prior to ontology) of perceiving things. Particulars yield to a very meaningful foundational primordiality. You know, the original "wonder" of things (says Kierkegaard).
I disagree. One can see a tree without thinking of it as a tree. Animals obviously do this.
But can an animal see a tree as animals see trees prior to some measure of history in which trees have been encountered. A bit like asking what an infant human knows of mother's milk prior to understanding, social and language modelling, and general experience that engenders familiarity. No familiarity and it is as William James called it, a world of blooming and buzzing, with no "seeing" at all.
So if it is admitted that an animal requires time and experience to "see" things as animals typically do, then analysis asks what this familiarity is about. It is memory, the "having been, having seen, having done" already that mediates the perceptual event when a cow, say, sees greener grass on the other side and sees this and knows this. I call this proto-linguistic regard for things, not taken up in language, but surely when the cow looks up, sees the greener grass and picks herself up to move over there, there is something of the conditional proposition in this, the "if...then" of the activity, as there is something of the affirmation when settling down to eat.
Not thinking, really, but mediated; and not language, but the proto linguistic recollection and repetition. For us, of course, memory language memory. You may not be thinking in the recognition of, say, everything in someone's kitchen as you wander through, but to be asked about anything and a moment's notice, and there is the language, always already there, ready to hand. This is implicit knowledge, and this kind of thing one's perceptions possess like a halo that surrounds any object that comes to view. There is never a completely novel experience, for it is language and familiarity that seize hold in the inquiry itself, that is, even if things are alien, even uncanny, the approach to this issues from a body of assumptions already in place.
On the conceptual end, these are universals.
Magic is when you do a series of rituals in order to cast a spell that causes an effect in reality. I believe that I can prove right now that there is in fact magic.
First, an algorithm is a set of purposeful steps used to accomplish an overall goal. For example, solving a Rubik's cube. What this means is that for our purposes here, algorithms are rituals as both are purposeful set of steps meant to achieve an overall goal.
Thus, this algorithm:
[hide="Reveal"][Step 1: Assign, Popularize, or Hijack a Label]
?
[Step 2: Frame the Identity]
?
[Step 3: Create Behavioral Scripts]
?
[Step 4: Reinforce With Social Validation]
?
[Step 5: Punish Deviation and Enforce Conformity]
?
[Step 6: Create Feedback Loops for Reinforcement]
? ?
[Step 7] [Step 9]
(Harvest) (Normalize Cycle)
? ?
[Step 8: Capture the Next Gen]
?
[Step 10: Identity Becomes a Self-Spreading Brand][/hide]
Is actually a ritualistic spell that shapes reality itself by hijacking identity and redefining what those identities are in reality.
So there you go, I just proved magic exists - just probably not in the way you may have thought it did.
Which misses the point that supernatural typically means inexplicable using the natural laws as we know them. Very obviously believers in such things (FTR: not me) accept that supernatural phenomena would belong to the set of things which exist / are real.
Of course, this isn't what the OP is doing but it is another definition error IMO. "Magic" means something pretty close to "supernatural". It doesn't mean you can't even put the phenomenon in a sentence like "when the magician reaches into the hat, a rabbit appears"; that would be absurd.
By that definition a genie emerging from a lamp and granting my wishes doesn't count as magic, because we have a predictive model: "When I say a wish, that thing manifests".
Instead it means we don't have a predictive model based on known natural laws.
True (Dark) Magics are done by finding the bugs in the system and capitalizing on them.
Miracles happen when something beyond the system/program is observed from within the system.
Yes, if you can't give a hypothetical example of a supernatural event (i.e. it exists in no possible world), then it owes it non-existence to it being a logical contradiction and not just an empirical absence. That is, it's analytically true, but synthetically true.
I believe that I can prove that a pig is a kind of dog. A dog is an animal with four legs and a tail. A pig is an animal with four legs and a tail. Therefore, a pig is a kind of dog. QED
Ok, what's the difference between an algorithm and a ritual and why doesn't the comparison work here?
The two should be too different to compare by your logic, a pig and a dog - and I'd like to know why you think so?
So I will just dismiss your argument until you do.
What stands out to me is that our experience is never just raw or untouched. Even when we say I see a tree, what we see is already shaped by memory, language,, and what weve learned before. Heraclitus was right: we dont step into the same river twice, and in the same way we dont name it the same way twice either.
Maybe thats the real wonder here that in a world always changing, we can still speak about it and make sense of it. That sense of wonder, as Kierkegaard said, is where philosophy begins.
On the other hand, when one puts the question to the world as to whether what stands before one really is all just a recollection in play, and not, as K put it to us, a repetition, one has to ask first, what is it that one stands before? in the sense that the analysis that is sought presupposes something else, something that sits there prior to the analytical process of discovery, something "there" that the explanatory work must deal with, and yet, when it looks to this very slippery substratum of what is there, the recollection is "there" as well, IN the event of what might seem as a true primordial disclosure. The recollection is omnipresent in all beingS: cats, clouds, trees, and anything you can bring to mind, for in the bringing it to mind at all, one bound to the understanding even in the spontaneity, and the question is, is there "something" lost in the recollection's hegemony, if you will? And this takes one out to an exercise of a very unique sort: the standing in the openness of existence, realizing that the moment is bound to recollection and its finitude (for recollection comes from a totality of remembered things), and allowing that wonder to possess the moment, rather than the "same" of what language and memory would commit the moment to. This is a critical turning point, because this, call it an existential alienation is not about the cloud or tree, but you; it is a discovery of your self, the beholding "stills" the cloud, but, and this is critical, we are not in Plato's wonderland of conceptual absolutes finding a "share" of the universal in the particular (or however you want to talk about that), but rather, the understanding is put in suspension. An idea as a rational category is part of the essence of what is remembered and what is being transcended (in this thought experiment), and this is not alienation at all; it is the very nature of the "same".
My experience is, if you do this kind of thinking enough, it will drive you a bit crazy, but philosophers are supposed to be eccentrics. It's not like being a banker or a plumber. Philosophy invites one to stand apart from the world, not integrate oneself in the commonplace more deeply. Heraclitus was right, but it has to be understood that terms like flux and change are themselves impositions that move to articluate andin the articulation create as well as discover. In pther words, Heraclitus's "flux" is ALSO a concept, and as such belongs to the very Parmenedian "being" it stands in contradistinction to.