I know some people that also view much of the technology around us as "magic", but for them, that's less a statement of appreciation and wonder, and more of a statement of opaque complexity and a complete unknowability.
I can appreciate how Lightroom works, or an electric car, or the electrical grid, etc. I don't have to know every last detail, but I should have some awareness of the fundamental principles on which these things are built.
Deferring this to "magic" in the sense that I say "I don't know how that works, no one can know, it's MAGIC" can be a lazy way to think. I think it's a slippery slope that gets us closer to psuedoscience, new-age gimmicks, and other forms of poor thinking and manipulation. We should all seek to understand how things really work (even at a coarse level) in this Demon Haunted World of ours.
(Even if this isn't how you interpret this word, I'm suggesting there is a risk that others do).
As far as most people are concerned, it may as well be magic. It certainly doesn’t lend itself to understanding in the general sense. We must explore wholeheartedly and with integrity to even begin at comprehending the possibilities of connecting with it.
Even rocks and dead sticks have it. Some of us know how it works. I don’t claim to know, but I know more about it now than I did, let us say, some years ago. So it is like learning most any other complex thing, it is done over time. It can’t be replicated because it cannot be contained, and it is too expansive to be emulated or cloned with any sufficiency to have any substantial meaning.
And, as long as we know how to invoke it reliably and properly, we don't __need__ to understand how. (Though, being nerds, we often want to.) I agree: "Magic" is one of the best shorthands for "We can explain that later but for now let's assume this works".
Thank you for explaining. I never really looked into this to understand it and because of that it felt like magic, which is always in indicator that you just don’t understand something. I was going to add “in tech”, but it is an indicator of that with anything in life.
The most startling sort of magic exists in our world, but we don't call it magic when it works. For instance, we can inscribe complex patterns on silicon crystals and accomplish incredible things like this, but it's "not magic" because it actually works.
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