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:
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.
I would argue that this is what makes it particularly useful. Magic provide a language to describe those phenomena that don’t have a mechanistic explanation yet. That in turn allows people to explore those phenomena in a structured way. That structure may be wrong or arbitrary but it is still better than going in blind.
I agree, but a lot of parties try to co-opt the word to mean other things, which I find less useful.
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.