Nope, I wouldn't necessarily say that. Just as there's many people who don't acknowledge the spiritual in their model of the world, there's many, many people who do very real magick using nothing more than the commonly acknowledged laws of physics! We generally call them scientists and engineers. And the kind of magick they customarily deal in (known, somewhat conventionally, as "natural magick") is probably the most powerful of all, at least wrt. its effects on the purely physical plane. Other, more spiritual kinds of magick then act in a strictly subsidiary role, to "fill in the gaps" and "augment" this work in ways that aren't generally overt or amenable to be described by some outward "law". I realize that this description will probably seem very frustrating to you if you're inclined to very literal thinking, but that's how this stuff works. It's silly and childish to expect that "spiritual" magick will ever substitute for effective science and engineering.
While I understand and agree with the sentiment you express, I don't agree with using the word "magic" to refer to it.
I believe that in the minds of most people, the notion of magic essentially means the ability to use willpower to modify physical laws, or at least that physical laws are ultimately a product of a conscious will (often the will of a God, not a Human - but still a will that can be pleaded or bargained with through prayer or ritual).
And in this sense of the word, science has utterly destroyed magic. Not only is it impossible to extend your will to the world, it turns out that it is in fact the conscious will itself that is subordinate to physical laws, not the other way around - or at least this is what science is currently strongly hinting towards (we would know for sure if we had a much deeper understanding of the workings of the brain, and how consciousness arises out of it).
It's important to realize that this is vastly different from what scientists/philosophers throughout history have generally believed - even upto fairly recently, some form of Descartes-like dualism, with a mechanistic physical universe and a non-mechanistic spiritual universe of the mind (and God) being the most common way of picturing the world among most scientists even in the 1800s or later.
Given that we don't totally understand reality, is it not a little premature to be taking the "magic" out of it? I mean, what if the base substrate of all that is (underlying subatomic particles, at the tiniest levels we don't have the technology yet to explore) is actually what we commonly consider to be "magic"? :-D
In my nearly 40 years of being alive, I've personally encountered 3 broad "categories" of people so far:
1. Religious types, who are super uncomfortable with the unknown and wave it away by pointing to "God".
2. Scientism adherents, who are also super uncomfortable with the unknown, and wave it away with, what looks to me like, a magical belief in science ("science can't explain this, but I totally trust that it eventually will"). They like to denigrate people in category (1) without realizing they're guilty of a similar kind of magical thinking.
3. Mystics. They appreciate science and its shortcomings and don't resort to magical thinking. They're capable of non-dualistic thinking. They don't resort to "God" or "science" to wave away the unknown. They're comfortable with being uncomfortable as just yet another part of the human experience. They accept their personal limitations and make no declarations about the existence or non-existence of things about which they could not possibly know.
1, 2 and 3 also roughly model the various stages of individual development outlined by M. Scott Peck in "Further along the road less traveled" [1].
This field has its own version of Pascal's wager - if magic isn't real, knowing that puts one in a minority of people correct about the matter globally but only reduces social friction in a modern western society. If it is real, it has the potential for a Copernican-scale revolution in worldview. So it's a question worth taking seriously.
I suspect a Copernican revolution of that nature would only happen with some kind of innovation that's too big to be ignored, people have been publishing rigorous experiments on magic for decades and they're just too easy to ignore. I hope we can see an outflow of noetic science into noetic engineering.
Hmm, not exactly, I think. If, I dunno, Merlin showed up in Times Square tomorrow and started summoning angels, that wouldn't mean that our world is a Lovecraftian place filled with unnatural phenomena forever beyond mortal comprehension; it would just mean that our models of reality didn't go far enough, and we need to do some research and start updating them.
I guess I'm saying that actual magic wouldn't be merely indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced science, it would be sufficiently advanced science. Magic is just the flashier, stagier term for the same thing.
I think people have said that, but not in a way that means it's true, or unique, or helpful. Sufficiently advanced metallurgy is indistinguishable from magic.
This is hardly Newton we're talking about or the unknown appearing as magic as Asimov pointed out all new technology might appear. No this is doing spells and trying to call on mystical powers. And where I'm from, that's called bullshit. If you want to practice science then do so. But don't pretend doing a spell led to a certain result because you "believe".
Magic is real. Look anywhere in the world outside of modern urban areas and you will find people who have experienced it first hand. It is true that every culture in the world has different gods and spirits, but they all have some conceptions of magic and a spirit realm. The existence and character of this phenomenon has been discovered and independently rediscovered many times throughout and preceding recorded history, but because of the conditions of their environment and because of their philosophical preconceptions western technocrats deny it. Magic is an antifragile phenomenon; it lives in and feeds upon chaos. It can't be tested in a controlled environment anymore than you can study primate mating habits in an environment devoid of oxygen. But in real life it works, and the only truly empirical thing to do is to try it for yourself, in the context of your own life, and see how real it can be.
That's what Aleister Crowley was trying to do. His initial goal was to connect science and magick into a complete system. (He kinda devolved into crazy)
Why do some people feel it? Why do some dont? What is the nature of this "energy"? Can devices do magick instead of humans?
There's enough coincidences that should make most at least curious what's going on. It may be nothing... but probably isn't.
I think there may be a problem with the word "magical" in this context, just like there is a problem with nature-worshipers talking of "supernatural powers".
If we've made a science out of it, no matter how advanced it is, it's not magic — e.g. if telekinesis was possible, it would have a scientific explanation and be a natural power — which bares some similarly to the way things are called "artificial intelligence" when they're impossible, only to be reduced to "trivial" when someone makes a machine do them: Chess, Go, having a large vocabulary or knowing many languages, being good at arithmetic or being able to do calculus at all, writing music or news stories, trading on the stock market — all things that used to be synonymous with genius, yet all done by machines we don't call intelligent.
Only in the same sense as dark matter or string theory are "basically magic". It is naive to assume we've already discovered all properties of matter and energy and are now only refining our understanding of those.
Are you seriously saying that your idea that magic is a fifth force (which you called "energy") of physics is as scientific as modern medicine or machine learning?
I have found truth in your take recently in my life when previously (majority) I was against such a notion. Out of curiosity, could you expand on what you might be able to describe as magic from your perspective? I understand it is a slippery _thing_ or _suchness_ to describe but I appreciate any attempt. Thanks!
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