Crowley recognized that the invocation of entities through magick was an inherent part of our psyche. In his Introduction to Lemgeton Clavicula Salomonis he explicitly states, “the spirits of Goetia are part of the human brain.”
He named his system “Thelema”, which means will. And will, as in Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies, is at the center of his model of nature. Intention, just like concentration or directed flight, is one of the most recurring themes in Crowley’s vision of magick.
Magic, as he explains, is the “Science and Art that provokes Change in conformity with the Will”, and that “all intentional acts are acts of magic.” So, like Schopenhauer, Crowley noted that will had the agency to merge with the primordial flow of the universe —So, in order to act upon nature all that was needed was to channel that will together with intention.
I'd distinguish (normal) intention from magical intention as being a difference in intensity and effortlessness. Intentions normally compete and conflict with other intentions within your brain. When the mind is unified around an intention, you see the "action getting done by yourself", like "magic", because all (or at least a large subset of) individual parts/coalitions/modules that live up your brain, harmoniously predict the intention to happen. See it "getting done by yourself" as opposed to perceiving yourself doing it. The module that's responsible for self-perception is no longer required to work as hard to establish and reinforce/emphasize the self-narrative, because it's no longer necessary as a coordination mechanism/Schelling point for various subparts forming a coalition to coordinate a winning solution within the fame-in-the-brain competition against other competing coalitions.
The feeling is distinct from hyperfocus, where the sense of self is also suppressed, but that's mainly because internal consciousness itself is suppressed and externalized into the environment (like your computer screen, that's captured some attentive processes that happily program). Hyperfocus is more draining and feels compulsive and is not sustainable, because other coalitions will come to claw back control. Magical intention is like a state of Samatha, where there is a lightness and non-conflictedness to it. Or perhaps more like mental or physical pliancy. It feels extremely good, because most of the mind system is engaged and content with what is perceived. Unified perception, without many prediction errors. It transcends most ordinary experience and is not easy to attain and hard to sustain.
That's why Disney is a magical kingdom for children. The entire environment reinforces the make-belief narrative and children can enthusiastically get behind that and experience it magically. Especially if they're made to feel safe, unburdened and are encouraged to do so. Smaller brains, less complex and more malleable minds are easier to unify, you see.
Mystical traditons like Sufi and things like Magick or Buddhist magic and the like try to capture that feeling as an adult. Often throwing out good epistemics, because they don't have a good model for what's actually happening. And also because it's strategically convenient to believe that you can astral project, if you're trying to astral project. So, people can meditate a lot and with sufficient concentration (often helped by sensory deprivation) and only mid epistemology, will perceive themselves to do so. You can do it with good epistemology too though, if you want to invest the time. It's good fun.
Oh right... uhm... rituals. Well most western traditions are not quite so explicitly meditation-focused. Instead they establish rituals as conditioned Schelling points to coordinate their mind around. That's why witchcraft is often ends up satanic, I think. It's basically playing off preexisting sacred ideas, which are of course Schelling points, as well, if you've been raised very Christian.
Then we have stuff like Stoicism, where philosophers reasoned, that this effortless, light quality of action (later called magical action) is really damn useful, and if you don't have that everyday and at all times, it's really a skill issue. So unify your mind, become like the Sage and never experience large-scale, internal, inefficient prediction error again and become the closest that a mortal can be to a god, effortlessly expressing civic virtues, without being enslaved to fear, pleasure and other passions which is like really... what any good Roman citizen should do! They usually don't link this state with the supernatural/inexplicable, at least the Stoics don't. The sage is really more of a stretch goal, though, as they are not sure, there ever was one (maybe Cato, though). Cultivating your mind to align your actions with the principle of virtue gets you directionally towards sucking less, at least.
Reality is about the actual costs, conditions & tradeoffs of anything we want. Magical thinking is the willful ignoring of those factors.
If that becomes too unbelievable, magic can even substitute some other "magical" cost, like a sacrifice or a blood price, or a magical "condition", like when the Sun Rises in the East. But not the real mundane costs.
Kids love magic because most of the time, their parents pay the costs, and bail them out from the worst consequences. So it's all magic to them, until they learn to see the costs associated with the desires. That's why magical thinking can never be fully banished from society, because we start in that default state.
Sacred is related to magic, because tradeoffs of sacred things are also not allowed to be discussed. Even considering the costs or conditions of achieving sacred things are mostly taboo (we'll pay any price/bear any burden; we do it not because it's easy but because it's hard). So it's adult magic by social consensus.
It doesn't always work, but it does, it feels magical. When it doesn't, we say we're no longer in a Golden Age, and fret about decline. Or in the marriage context, the magic has gone from the relationship.
I'd say here reality refers to "concensus reality" as in your internal model of the world, as perceptually experienced. And that "reality" is the object being transcended (being moved beyond limits). Though anzabannanna may have a different interpretation in mind.
Eh no. Let's distinguish between a) magic as something associated with a spontaneous experience, b) the positive, enthralling mindstate, that c) the practice of magic cultivates.
In a), magic is just a placeholder assessment for something baffling, we cannot explain. It can be deeply surprising and awe-inspiring or become mundane (if we believe the supernatural to be normal, then Zeus doing his lightning in a storm is just a fact of life). Fake, placeholder explanations. Sometimes treated with awe.
Kind of like we use terms like science ("Oh, this can be explained by science." vs "Wow, the rocket went up. Science, fuck yeah!"). Similar to how we just handwave at "science" or "emergence", these days:
Encountering something magical, you might not learn anything and be left with a memory, that was pleasant and inexplicable. Which tends to update your epistemology towards more irrational/supernatural beliefs. Or you might understand the cause (or think you do) of the magical experience/observation/thing and that dispels the magic. It becomes mundane.
b) is when our own mind state/base perception of reality feels magical. It is baffling, because that mind state is depersonalized (compared to our everyday assumptions). If you don't perceive yourself as a person (in the usual way, at least) anymore and you just observe your body doing or feeling good things, that's quite baffling. This is usually pleasant and sometimes even brilliantly useful. It also can mightily mess up someone's epistemology, making them believe in the supernatural and illogical, because they cannot find good explanations. (understandable, as it takes lots of modern neuroscience, like predictive processing and global workspace theory to make sense of it)
c) is just the weird stuff people historically have been trying (with more or less success) to get to b). I wrote about those two at more length, in my other response.
Magical intention(or as I prefer to talk about it, intention) seems perfectly in line with reality. Whatever reality is, "is" , period. There is no "outside reality" or "other-than-reality". There is just reality. Now, there are distinctions here and nuances, like a material occurrence vs. an abstract one. There are things that appear in practice, versus things that could appear in principle. There are even things that can appear in principle in a certain, hypothetical sense, but can never appear in practice due to certain limits that are only possible in a certain sense. Can I shoot up into the sky, after I finish this message? Well... in one sense yeah... there's no real dogma within physics that says I can't shoot up into the sky. Humans do this all the time in some sense. But as a fact, more pragmatically, I "can't" shoot up into the sky after writing this message, because I'm not writing to you from the seat of a space shuttle, nor will my apartment have a massive natural gas explosion, or similar situation that would cause me to shoot up into the sky. We also don't appear to be in the universe where people spontaneously shoot up into the sky in unexplainable ways.
Once you account for these kinds of semantic confusions and ontological nuance, then magical intention was really just intention and the mechanics of causality, and "transcending reality" was really nothing more than reality itself working in the only way it can.
Well, partly, that is if I understood you(and please correct me too if I misunderstood you).
A more clear way to frame my point is that reality is not just some "external thing"(the appearance of internal vs. external is a kind of ontological illusion because reality is one thing), and non-reality is some abstraction(this is the hard materialist view).
Reality includes your subjective phenomenology. So your visual field right now, as this syntax gets parsed, all your thoughts and feelings and emotions, they are not a part of some "unreal mystery plane", that is an absurd notion. They are simply a part of the totality of reality(how could they be something *other* than this?).
Now, can we just "manifest" whatever we wish(a common magical claim)? Not really. We can achieve our goals, sure. But we can certainly delude ourselves. I can believe I'm actually Spiderman, but I would be delusional if I did. My inner world could be fully validating this belief, but it would not change the reality that I am not in fact Spiderman, except as part of a brittle psychosis that isn't as meaningful as it feels.
So even though subjectivity and objectivity are fully encompassed by reality( everything... is fully encompassed... by reality, it can't be any other way, that's just what the words mean), there's a fact of the matter upon parsing the semantics of subjectivity vs. objectivity, or as mentioned before, "in practice" vs. "in principle". Only through a multiplicity of firmer and softer truths, a tolerance for paradox, nuance, a resistance of black-or-white thinking and rigidity, can we be truly in touch with reality.
It utilizes a wide variety of "mystical techniques" going back to pre-history to intensify and focus the Will through transformation of the self. The "wand" in the magical rituals and in the tarot cards, as well as the symbol of fire in the 4 elements, and also the first Hebrew letter in the Tetragrammaton are all just symbols meant to represent the Will. Thus rituals in this tradition are about taking the will (the wand) and transforming it into action, which is symbolized as the pentacle/disk.
Much of the problem is that many so-called "New Age" people take the symbolism literally and without any skepticism -- which is the same phenomena we see in Christian fundamentalists as opposed to more mature Christians who get how metaphor works.
You don't know that. You're only guessing - just as I am guessing too. My view is that it's possible for all people on the planet to achieve a meaningful degree of spiritual enlightenment. The most important rituals to do so are really not that complicated.
Why isn't it magic then if an uncontacted hunter gatherer gets a cell phone from a rich modern guy who then does him favors or flies in what the hunter-gatherer wants.
Definitions are complex, but I think “magic” in the way you and most of the commenters so far have described it is different from “spirituality.” If “magic” is the inward-focused effort to bend the universe around one’s own will, then “spirituality” is the outward-focused recognition of and connection with a higher power outside oneself. At least 30% of Americans (the number increases as definitions are weakened) claim to have experienced such a connection (and I include myself in this group). I think this is less “rare” and “extreme” than you may think. The persistence of spirituality in the modern world may be explained by the persistence of spiritual experience.
My favourite description of "magic" is that it is when you observe action [A], followed by outcome [B], with no apparent causal connection between [A] and [B].
Then the less you know, the more magic there actually is? The world is full of confusing opaque things that people don't see as "magical". Such things seem far more magical when they are close to strong motivations.
Strong motivations without a transparent natural explanation are an important subject. But connecting them to the "magic" label seems like a mistake.
"Magic" gets used many ways. You refer to the contemporary American use of the word, where it means something like "awesome, surprising". Other times and cultures have used this word to mean things like "secret, hard to learn", "taboo, evil, satanic"; "superstitions, idiocy"; "power wielded by ancestors" or "works but we don't know how". Unless you're going to keep playing defense against these competing meanings, I think all you get from thinking about sacred motivations in "magic" terms is unnecessary confusion.
I do agree with you and Durkheim that magic is related to the sacred in an important way. You may want to read Durkheim's pupil Marcel Mauss, who wrote a short booklet called "A general theory of magic" that I'm almost certain you would enjoy.
What makes something magic is that it's a force you can call on/law of nature that responds to human level concerns like emotions, determination, pain, love etc..
This is what we see in novels. Sci-fi depicts a world where the rules respond just as well to the rich brat who buys the big ship/gun as to the sage who has studied their entire life and where those rules don't care if they are applying to a widget or woman.
Magic is about the idea that something akin to the laws of the world responds to the kind of concerns that motivate your inner life (the wizard can draw on emotional conviction or pain for power). Usually in a kind of moralizing fashion.
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Just ignore this part below since it only seems to confuse ppl and was meant as vague speculation unlike the above.
Maybe the reason for this is that magic is in some sense derived from the idea/wish that you can push your own internal imagined reality out into the world.
If you mean the speculation part...yah that's just a vague idea.
If you mean the human level concerns not at all. A phaser isn't magic because it lets any idiot shoot people -- the power and effect don't reflect the users dedication and your phaser can't shoot extra strong because you call on an internal well of emotional strength or see your friend die.
A lightsaber is magical in that it is responding to the user's determination, equipoise and other things that matter at an emotional level to us. Not every idiot can deflect blaster shots the way they can fire a phaser.
Magic is a way of saying that the universe responds to the kind of things that feel emotionally important/powerful to us. In magic the universe looks inside human brains and says it's going to decide what happens based on things like love, honor, commitment etc. Scifi let's anyone who wants wield that power.
Sure, you can have scifi mind reading interfaces but they can be hooked up to ignore all those things. A story with old technical stuff which you can't modify and determines who can exercise what power based on judging emotional fitness/dedication or that kind of thing starts to bridge the gap.
Your ability to dance, play sport, ride bikes, fly planes, and many other skills depend on your mood, attention, determination, etc. but don't seem "magical".
There is a difference between a law of physics that happens to apply to a toaster insofar as the microphysics apply to everything and a law of physics that has special exceptions for things that happen to be toasters (energy is conserved unless the stuff is part of a toaster).
Same idea here. Magic requires that when a state qualifies as being the kind of emotional/psychological state humans attend to suddenly different rules come into play that didn't for the individual parts.
(As an anology In our world charge is special in that objects with charge get different rules from objects w/o charge but emotional/qualitative states don't need an extra law of nature the way charged objects do.)
In all of your cases, the emotional aspects aren't central to the the operation of those devices because anything that presses the buttons like so and shifts it's weight like such gets the same result.
I'm sure if you try hard to charitably interpret what I'm saying you'll succeed in at least picking out the class of cases I mean to identify because i've managed to convey to plenty of much less intelligent people than you at least how to operationally identify what it means to have a rule (eg natural law) which treats emotional/psych/etc states as getting special treatment in natural law. Not everyone agrees I've identified the right concept but I'm sure you could wager with very high probability as to what cases I'd say fall under this description.
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And while you might say that in principle magic systems assert they do work on totally general rules that are reducible to, say, microphysics this is usually the part of the world where they give up on consistency (tape recorders plus mechanical hands don't do great spells even if supposedly they should)
Shorter version: the user interface merely translates your actions into other actions. It doesn't create a system where what it takes to do extraordinary things is extraordinary emotional/mental states.
What makes a system magical is the fact that extraordinary outcomes are necessarily and directly achieved by extraordinary emotional/psychological states. You are powerful because of great mental strength and dedication not because you found a nice pistol, you can perform that incredible feat because you can draw on your emotional reserves etc
Right...I said that was speculation because I had in mind the idea that somehow reality would be directly responsive to your imagination of it.
Like lots of magic has a representation/reality component. I perform this act on this doll which represents someone and imagine it effects the person.
So the idea would be that what's going on is some kind of cognitive failure to fully distinguish the representation and the reality. And this is something even modern educated people are bad at (often thinking that they can reach substantive conclusions by manipulating the definitions they use to describe them).
I read a fairly clever distinction between "science" and "magic" recently, partly in reference to writing but in relation to world views as well. It was roughly:
Science is a set of rules which, once known, can be worked around such that one can achieve the desired outcome.
Magic is when the stated outcome is declared, and then it is achieved (or something close, or not...) with no attention to how it is achieved.
Breaking the rules of reality as we know and interact with it is sort of what magic does, via jumping past the how and going directly to "desired outcome achieved". So any time we don't care about the why and how such that we could teach others to achieve the outcome in the same way, it is just magic. Which means it is related to the distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge: unteachable/inexplicable things are more magical, things you can convey to others are mundane.
I don't think that's quite right. Consider phasers or transporter beams in star trek. They are clearly scifi yet are essentially just arbitrary tools with no real concern to how they work.
But they aren't magic because you can hand them out to anyone at scale and if they press the button it works while magic needs to respond to more human level concerns (eg willpower of user or the extent of their studies etc etc).
OTOH lightsabers are magic bc only a select few special people can use them effectively by dint of great dedication and training and the emotional need/calm/etc of user is deeply relevant to efficacy.
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I think the inability to explain how magic works is merely a consequence of the fact that once you start to give precise rules it's virtually impossible to retain the responsiveness to human level concerns.
I would disagree a bit: phasers and transporters ARE basically magic in Star Trek. They only lightly get into the implications of how they work later in the series, (well they being the transporters; no one cares about blasters) and then start to use the rules of how they work to achieve other goals. Transporters and by extension the holodeck and... whatever the machine that responds to "Computer: tea, Earl Grey, hot" by creating it is called... a very much magic for most of the show.
Consider that it takes a long time for the show writers to include that fact that transporters can make duplicates of people. That is a massive implication that clearly wasn't included when they decided they wanted a way to get people from space to the planetary surface without using the shuttle craft set the entire time. Likewise how much they have to bend over backwards to come up with limitations to keep every situation from becoming "just transport them away when it becomes dangerous".
In other words, to explain why people don't abuse the rules of teleportation and exact duplication of anything including living beings they accidentally introduced, the writers had to come up with scientific-ish rules to limit the magic they had started with. They wanted sci-fi but created magic for expedience, then had to correct it to fit with the sci-fi.
Thinking of it another way, note that in Trek people have to travel by ship. With transporter tech, however, it is feasible to have relay stations instead, because you just need to transmit the data to the nearest transporter to your destination. Communications are apparently instant or real time (for the most part) so whatever relays your data can be used to relay you at roughly the same speed. If you can talk with the Enterprise you can show up on their transporter deck, regardless of where the two of you are.
Yet that isn't what we see. Why? Because they didn't start with rules of how transporters work, they started with "I want to get characters from the ship down to the planet faster and without another prop and set". So they made a machine that allows people to say "Take me down there" instantly. Only after people started noting how that breaks the universe did they start coming up with rules. It started as magic and they had to retcon it to be science.
Lightsabers are, well part of a magic sci-fantasy world, but in themselves are not magic because they do very specific things and anyone can use them even if they are super dangerous without proper training (and possibly the force to keep you safer). They added a lot of woo woo about how light sabers work later, but the original three movies had them just as a very dangerous weapon that without training was nearly as dangerous to the user as his opponent. Like a forklift. Granted, it is damned close to magic because Lucas doesn't care about sci-fi, but they are basically just swords that cut through anything but another sabre and can deflect lasers. They get used to achieve ends by applying those rules, not by asking for the end state and just getting it, as opposed to the Force, which does... stuff... and just does it because you want the end to happen.
I don't disagree with what you say descriptively I just don't think that being unexplained or even arbitrary technobabble is the same as being magical.
For most people iphones are unexplained yet not at all magical. And if I work in fiction not non-fiction it doesn't become magical bc you don't explain how and when the pocket communicator works.
Imagine Harry Potter but where a Petronius was more powerful entirely based on your ability to pronounce the words correctly not your emotional resources (so some random person w/ good diction makes the strongest petroni) it needs to be about the person doing the magic not just about being friends w/ Geordie.
It isn't just about being unexplained, however, but rather the focus on achieving the desired end without a process that determines how the end comes about. If your pocket communicator can communicate with anyone anywhere, regardless of distance, that is getting close to magic because it doesn't follow the normal laws. If your communicator does that while no one else has one that can, it is getting even closer.
Or in the case of the Petronius, how does it know what you need protected against? In fact, I don't know Harry Potter well enough, so I will use old school AD&D. Protection from Missiles: it stops things that are being shot at you, but how does the spell know what is a missile weapon being shot at you as opposed to say an air molecule zipping your way? If your friend is under the protection of the spell and you toss a knife in a sheath at him to use, does it get deflected? What about a baseball? How hard do I have to throw the baseball before it turns into a missile weapon?
Of course none of that matters, because the intent of the spell is all that matters: the caster intends for the slings and arrows of his enemies to be stopped, so they are. It's magic.
Now if the spell said "any object flying at the caster with KE greater than 500 mega joules is stopped" that is getting closer to the science end of the scale. Not only do you know how the intended effect happens you can use the rule to figure out how unintended effects happen, because they can. Intent is no longer the primary determinant of outcomes, but rather the rules are.
Arbitrary technobabble isn't the same as magic, if that technobabble actually binds in rules and can be used in ways outside the "I intend X, so X happens." You can withhold explanations, or as in the case of the iphone not have the characters understand how it works exactly, but if they have to follow rules to get an outcome in particular instead of just wanting the outcome, it is farther from magic.
When you find a magic lamp and wish to be rich the genie doesn't personally go out and rob a bank or set up a number of businesses that pay a handsome residual every year and the sign ownership over to you; rather he snaps his fingers and gets gold from somewhere. A genie acting as a wealth advisor but just a really good one isn't magical, but one who can conjure gold into existence is.
I agree with and think the key point there is "the intent of the spell is all that matters" that's responding to human level concerns. The range and space of options is constructed to correspond to the kind of concerns relevant to people. It's adjudicated in the same way judges interpret human laws not the way physics is done.
Why I think it doesn't track unexplained mechanism is that a blaster (star wars plasma pistol) or a phaser may not ever have a coherent (or any) explanation for how they work but if it works in a simple consistent fashion (anything but a shield it's pointed at goes this much boom) it's not very magical.
Now there is no sharp dividing line which I think speaks to the need for the criteria I'm suggesting. Yes, phasers and blasters may be a very tiny bit magical in that they tend to always kill/stun the human they hit even w/o center of mass shot but they tend not to hit the hostage or pet they are clutching. They take out a full droid but not the whole system they are physically networked to. But that's a relatively tiny amount of taking into account human level concerns/cares. It's more magical if your weapon has more power if you are pure of heart or angry or draw on your emotional pain.
But that doesn't track how unexplained the technology is. A phaser or disruptor is no more explained than the magic of Excalibur. It is more predictable by someone w/o human psychological understanding but not more explained.
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And I guess that in some sense almost all our fiction stories are a tiny bit magical in that there are protagonist powers, people fight through being drugged by strength of will not random biochemistry variation but only a very tiny bit and I think this does a good job generally of tracking how magical something feels.
I wrote about this in the context of fiction on my blog recently. I think it makes most sense as a set of vaguely related aesthetics rather than a coherent thing, https://osmarks.net/magic/
I think you are on the right track there but the key unifying feature is that magic responds to human level concerns/features/aspects. In other words, it's magic because things like our hopes, dreams, convictions determination grit etc play a central role in the laws (how things turn out).
For instance, if you allow anyone to cast the spell if they know the right words it feels less magical because the outcome is less connected to an individual's effort/virtue/studiousness. Super powers feel less magical because they are random and don't reflect the individual's characteristics. That's also why it tends to be ancient tombs and lost rituals rather than a group effort.
Similarly, the mistborn stuff feels less magical than other systems because it responds less to the emotions of the user. Usually things feel more magical when emotional resources correlate directly with power.
I think of magic as arising from the capacity for different psychological distances in relation to actual distances and feeling and/or emotions are clearly activated and important in this context. Perhaps motivations is a deeper core answer to this although I am unsure.
To me, magic is about hacking physics. It does not appear to be a thing in our universe, but in many fantasy/sci-fi (or simulated) universes, it is precisely just that - a complement or substitute for technology.
Magical things are not mechanistic in the same way as natural things.
The strongest possible magic is granting wishes; you simply say what it is you want and, with no attempt at explanation in material terms, reality changes as you requested.
I think ‘magic’ and ‘the unnatural’ cover certain kinds of causation. Physical-to-physical causation is natural: it just follows the laws of physics. Mind-body interaction is also lawful and natural. But *direct* interaction between a mind and a body-that-is-not-*its*-body, or between two different minds, is *unnatural*.
Exs.: By a mere act of will I make a candle across the room alight; a distant physical event causes me to form an accurate image of it, with no intervening physical process; any purely mental (mind-to-mind) telepathy. These are all unnatural, and those where the cause is an act of will are magical—they are the practice of magic by the agent.
Evidently, unnatural causation is thought to be rare, or at least very difficult, and special, perhaps non-lawful (but maybe diabolical rather than sacred).
"Evidently, unnatural causation is thought to be rare, or at least very difficult, and special, perhaps non-lawful (but maybe diabolical rather than sacred)."
Well, unnatural causation like that is not rare. It is non-existent. The practice of magic, is making yourself perceive it otherwise. Controlled hallucination in essence. (though also a kind of emotional manipulation)
"Exs.: By a mere act of will I make a candle across the room alight;"
Great, traditional example of the practice of magic, similar to some hardcore Buddhist practices, that these days Daniel Ingram has made some progress via his Fire Kasina practice. Are you skilled at such things, by any chance? What else can you do and how do you do it? I have experimented quite a bit, made marginal progress and attained only marginal skills. Like I can make my fingertip slightly glow in purple (on command, no less), but it's depressingly weak. In the end, I found such practice more trouble than it's worth.
"Evidently, unnatural causation is thought to be rare, or at least very difficult, and special, perhaps non-lawful (but maybe diabolical rather than sacred)."
Well, such practices are very difficult and usually require some degree of sensory deprivation, if one doesn't use drugs (but that shouldn't count, because how cheap!). Or probably a mind that tends towards schizophrenia. These experiences can feel pleasant, meaningful and coherent, so no wonder they are sacred to the practitioner. They also probably make someone become extremely out of touch in an antisocial way (especially if it fires on schizoid or manic episodes), so diabolizing such practices (and the practitioners leaning into the narrative in turn) makes sense, too.
One of one’s own impulses to act may seem magical if it is so unusual as to seem not to have been produced by one’s normal psychological processes—perhaps rather by the direct action of another mind on one’s own mind.
Of course, all this is based on mental-material dualism, and so is quite untenable.
"One of one’s own impulses to act may seem magical if it is so unusual as to seem not to have been produced by one’s normal psychological processes—perhaps rather by the direct action of another mind on one’s own mind."
Oh yeah, definitely. Though I think "perhaps rather by the direct action of another mind on one’s own mind" is a failure mode. Know thyself, is the advice of sages.
I don't think, the issue comes up so much in magical Buddhist practices. But probably a lot more in European ritual-based tradition, where they summon demons and such. And Internal Family Systems, apparently? Scott Alexander wrote a massive book review recently on that. Did not care to read it though, since the topic does not confuse me, anymore.
Anyway, the correct interpretation is not that of another mind (still the same old brain), but rather that of a freshly unified mind (which could seem strange to your self conception, as you do not usually feel this state of artificially induced unification of the mind system). Lacks familiarity. So in that case, the advice of the sages would be "Get to know yourselves!" :)
...no? I'm not entirely sure how you got that. I suspect you may be construing terms differently from how they are being used?
Like, OK, one could say that mathematics is "mental" in the sense that it is done in the mind, and the mathematics *itself* does not decompose into physical things, certainly sometimes we imagine mathematics as a sort of disembodied spirit; but the mathematics *itself* has no causative power, only the doing and use of it, which is done by actual instantiated minds that do in fact reduce. Or to put it differently, it might be mental but it's not an entity! Contrast this with, say, a sleeping potion or a demon, where the mental entity acts on the world.
I guess my comment was a bit off-base though, in that it focused on the supernatural rather than on magic per se. I guess magic is more based on things like the law of similarity and the law of contagion. Which, hm -- I guess that's evidence against Carrier's proposed outline, since I'm not sure either of those is necessarily *mental* per se. Although there really ought to be a common unification here? I mean these are both based on a particular sort of naive human view of the world, but I don't know how to succinctly describe it.
OK, maybe Carrier's article is a bit off after all, but for a pretty different reason...
Stage hypnosis is when a hypnotist induces a trance-like state in participants from a show or other audience, leading them to perform various actions or behaviors on stage.
Here is an except from Richard Feynman's experience of getting hypnotized:
Hypnosis is one way of changing how we perceive our motivations. In Feyman's words: "I could do that, but I won't"--which is just another way of saying that you can't.
I'm not sure that video really says anything more than that sometimes people feel bad/hopeless/unmotivated in ways that can be helped by being kind/understanding -- which is important to remember but we all knew. But that's also true about pretty much all human emotional relations, in some situations people will be demotivated because they feel lonely or because they feel disrespected or because they feel they won't be rewarded.
Yes, if you define empathy so broadly it just means: understanding someone well enough to figure out how to help motivate them then it is fully general but empathy isn't actually doing the work anymore then -- just understanding the problem and fixing it.
Unknowable, because we cannot ask God to check the validity of our explanations. (well you can, but if you get an answer, best not to trust it) But I would say about 90% is explained correctly on a conceptual level, if not more. Robin Hanson's work is part of that canon, of course. The trouble is, that we also have incorrect or flawed explanations going around. So we might not know what the 90% are. Depends on who the "we" is in question. I can only speak for myself and I say, I understand at least 90%.
The best writer for understanding magick (the religious practice, as distinct from "stage magic" illusions) is Aleister Crowley. His definition which serious occultists today understand well: https://www.faena.com/aleph/what-is-magic-aleister-crowley-explains
A useful excerpt:
Crowley recognized that the invocation of entities through magick was an inherent part of our psyche. In his Introduction to Lemgeton Clavicula Salomonis he explicitly states, “the spirits of Goetia are part of the human brain.”
He named his system “Thelema”, which means will. And will, as in Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies, is at the center of his model of nature. Intention, just like concentration or directed flight, is one of the most recurring themes in Crowley’s vision of magick.
Magic, as he explains, is the “Science and Art that provokes Change in conformity with the Will”, and that “all intentional acts are acts of magic.” So, like Schopenhauer, Crowley noted that will had the agency to merge with the primordial flow of the universe —So, in order to act upon nature all that was needed was to channel that will together with intention.
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For further explanation, consult "Magick Book 4" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magick_(Book_4)
Our ordinary universe seems to allow intention; what is different about "magical" intention?
I'd distinguish (normal) intention from magical intention as being a difference in intensity and effortlessness. Intentions normally compete and conflict with other intentions within your brain. When the mind is unified around an intention, you see the "action getting done by yourself", like "magic", because all (or at least a large subset of) individual parts/coalitions/modules that live up your brain, harmoniously predict the intention to happen. See it "getting done by yourself" as opposed to perceiving yourself doing it. The module that's responsible for self-perception is no longer required to work as hard to establish and reinforce/emphasize the self-narrative, because it's no longer necessary as a coordination mechanism/Schelling point for various subparts forming a coalition to coordinate a winning solution within the fame-in-the-brain competition against other competing coalitions.
The feeling is distinct from hyperfocus, where the sense of self is also suppressed, but that's mainly because internal consciousness itself is suppressed and externalized into the environment (like your computer screen, that's captured some attentive processes that happily program). Hyperfocus is more draining and feels compulsive and is not sustainable, because other coalitions will come to claw back control. Magical intention is like a state of Samatha, where there is a lightness and non-conflictedness to it. Or perhaps more like mental or physical pliancy. It feels extremely good, because most of the mind system is engaged and content with what is perceived. Unified perception, without many prediction errors. It transcends most ordinary experience and is not easy to attain and hard to sustain.
That's why Disney is a magical kingdom for children. The entire environment reinforces the make-belief narrative and children can enthusiastically get behind that and experience it magically. Especially if they're made to feel safe, unburdened and are encouraged to do so. Smaller brains, less complex and more malleable minds are easier to unify, you see.
Mystical traditons like Sufi and things like Magick or Buddhist magic and the like try to capture that feeling as an adult. Often throwing out good epistemics, because they don't have a good model for what's actually happening. And also because it's strategically convenient to believe that you can astral project, if you're trying to astral project. So, people can meditate a lot and with sufficient concentration (often helped by sensory deprivation) and only mid epistemology, will perceive themselves to do so. You can do it with good epistemology too though, if you want to invest the time. It's good fun.
Oh right... uhm... rituals. Well most western traditions are not quite so explicitly meditation-focused. Instead they establish rituals as conditioned Schelling points to coordinate their mind around. That's why witchcraft is often ends up satanic, I think. It's basically playing off preexisting sacred ideas, which are of course Schelling points, as well, if you've been raised very Christian.
Then we have stuff like Stoicism, where philosophers reasoned, that this effortless, light quality of action (later called magical action) is really damn useful, and if you don't have that everyday and at all times, it's really a skill issue. So unify your mind, become like the Sage and never experience large-scale, internal, inefficient prediction error again and become the closest that a mortal can be to a god, effortlessly expressing civic virtues, without being enslaved to fear, pleasure and other passions which is like really... what any good Roman citizen should do! They usually don't link this state with the supernatural/inexplicable, at least the Stoics don't. The sage is really more of a stretch goal, though, as they are not sure, there ever was one (maybe Cato, though). Cultivating your mind to align your actions with the principle of virtue gets you directionally towards sucking less, at least.
Magical intention can transcend "reality".
And what is " reality"?
Reality is about the actual costs, conditions & tradeoffs of anything we want. Magical thinking is the willful ignoring of those factors.
If that becomes too unbelievable, magic can even substitute some other "magical" cost, like a sacrifice or a blood price, or a magical "condition", like when the Sun Rises in the East. But not the real mundane costs.
Kids love magic because most of the time, their parents pay the costs, and bail them out from the worst consequences. So it's all magic to them, until they learn to see the costs associated with the desires. That's why magical thinking can never be fully banished from society, because we start in that default state.
Sacred is related to magic, because tradeoffs of sacred things are also not allowed to be discussed. Even considering the costs or conditions of achieving sacred things are mostly taboo (we'll pay any price/bear any burden; we do it not because it's easy but because it's hard). So it's adult magic by social consensus.
It doesn't always work, but it does, it feels magical. When it doesn't, we say we're no longer in a Golden Age, and fret about decline. Or in the marriage context, the magic has gone from the relationship.
I'd say here reality refers to "concensus reality" as in your internal model of the world, as perceptually experienced. And that "reality" is the object being transcended (being moved beyond limits). Though anzabannanna may have a different interpretation in mind.
So "magic" is when you learn new stuff about reality? Doesn't seem how we use the term.
Eh no. Let's distinguish between a) magic as something associated with a spontaneous experience, b) the positive, enthralling mindstate, that c) the practice of magic cultivates.
In a), magic is just a placeholder assessment for something baffling, we cannot explain. It can be deeply surprising and awe-inspiring or become mundane (if we believe the supernatural to be normal, then Zeus doing his lightning in a storm is just a fact of life). Fake, placeholder explanations. Sometimes treated with awe.
Kind of like we use terms like science ("Oh, this can be explained by science." vs "Wow, the rocket went up. Science, fuck yeah!"). Similar to how we just handwave at "science" or "emergence", these days:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8QzZKw9WHRxjR4948/the-futility-of-emergence
"learn new stuff about reality"
Encountering something magical, you might not learn anything and be left with a memory, that was pleasant and inexplicable. Which tends to update your epistemology towards more irrational/supernatural beliefs. Or you might understand the cause (or think you do) of the magical experience/observation/thing and that dispels the magic. It becomes mundane.
b) is when our own mind state/base perception of reality feels magical. It is baffling, because that mind state is depersonalized (compared to our everyday assumptions). If you don't perceive yourself as a person (in the usual way, at least) anymore and you just observe your body doing or feeling good things, that's quite baffling. This is usually pleasant and sometimes even brilliantly useful. It also can mightily mess up someone's epistemology, making them believe in the supernatural and illogical, because they cannot find good explanations. (understandable, as it takes lots of modern neuroscience, like predictive processing and global workspace theory to make sense of it)
c) is just the weird stuff people historically have been trying (with more or less success) to get to b). I wrote about those two at more length, in my other response.
That depends on who you ask. Reputedly, The Experts know.
Magical intention(or as I prefer to talk about it, intention) seems perfectly in line with reality. Whatever reality is, "is" , period. There is no "outside reality" or "other-than-reality". There is just reality. Now, there are distinctions here and nuances, like a material occurrence vs. an abstract one. There are things that appear in practice, versus things that could appear in principle. There are even things that can appear in principle in a certain, hypothetical sense, but can never appear in practice due to certain limits that are only possible in a certain sense. Can I shoot up into the sky, after I finish this message? Well... in one sense yeah... there's no real dogma within physics that says I can't shoot up into the sky. Humans do this all the time in some sense. But as a fact, more pragmatically, I "can't" shoot up into the sky after writing this message, because I'm not writing to you from the seat of a space shuttle, nor will my apartment have a massive natural gas explosion, or similar situation that would cause me to shoot up into the sky. We also don't appear to be in the universe where people spontaneously shoot up into the sky in unexplainable ways.
Once you account for these kinds of semantic confusions and ontological nuance, then magical intention was really just intention and the mechanics of causality, and "transcending reality" was really nothing more than reality itself working in the only way it can.
Correct me if I am misinterpreting you, but are you asserting that what "reality" "is", is what you think it is?
Well, partly, that is if I understood you(and please correct me too if I misunderstood you).
A more clear way to frame my point is that reality is not just some "external thing"(the appearance of internal vs. external is a kind of ontological illusion because reality is one thing), and non-reality is some abstraction(this is the hard materialist view).
Reality includes your subjective phenomenology. So your visual field right now, as this syntax gets parsed, all your thoughts and feelings and emotions, they are not a part of some "unreal mystery plane", that is an absurd notion. They are simply a part of the totality of reality(how could they be something *other* than this?).
Now, can we just "manifest" whatever we wish(a common magical claim)? Not really. We can achieve our goals, sure. But we can certainly delude ourselves. I can believe I'm actually Spiderman, but I would be delusional if I did. My inner world could be fully validating this belief, but it would not change the reality that I am not in fact Spiderman, except as part of a brittle psychosis that isn't as meaningful as it feels.
So even though subjectivity and objectivity are fully encompassed by reality( everything... is fully encompassed... by reality, it can't be any other way, that's just what the words mean), there's a fact of the matter upon parsing the semantics of subjectivity vs. objectivity, or as mentioned before, "in practice" vs. "in principle". Only through a multiplicity of firmer and softer truths, a tolerance for paradox, nuance, a resistance of black-or-white thinking and rigidity, can we be truly in touch with reality.
Do you believe in omniscience?
It utilizes a wide variety of "mystical techniques" going back to pre-history to intensify and focus the Will through transformation of the self. The "wand" in the magical rituals and in the tarot cards, as well as the symbol of fire in the 4 elements, and also the first Hebrew letter in the Tetragrammaton are all just symbols meant to represent the Will. Thus rituals in this tradition are about taking the will (the wand) and transforming it into action, which is symbolized as the pentacle/disk.
Much of the problem is that many so-called "New Age" people take the symbolism literally and without any skepticism -- which is the same phenomena we see in Christian fundamentalists as opposed to more mature Christians who get how metaphor works.
Who among us has the ability to apply the optimal level of "skepticism" to any given proposition though:
a) in general?
b) considering the nature of reality?
The Scientists? The Rationalists? The Experts? All mere mortals, who believe (during *realtime* cognition) otherwise.
I do :)
All of us have that ability. The problem is that few choose to do the hard work of developing it.
Or that you know what "the" problem is?
That most of humanity has yet to achieve spiritual enlightenment is the primary problem.
What if I know you don't have the ability to know what all people are capable of though? 😉
You don't know that. You're only guessing - just as I am guessing too. My view is that it's possible for all people on the planet to achieve a meaningful degree of spiritual enlightenment. The most important rituals to do so are really not that complicated.
Why isn't it magic then if an uncontacted hunter gatherer gets a cell phone from a rich modern guy who then does him favors or flies in what the hunter-gatherer wants.
Definitions are complex, but I think “magic” in the way you and most of the commenters so far have described it is different from “spirituality.” If “magic” is the inward-focused effort to bend the universe around one’s own will, then “spirituality” is the outward-focused recognition of and connection with a higher power outside oneself. At least 30% of Americans (the number increases as definitions are weakened) claim to have experienced such a connection (and I include myself in this group). I think this is less “rare” and “extreme” than you may think. The persistence of spirituality in the modern world may be explained by the persistence of spiritual experience.
Love this distinction, Stephen.
My favourite description of "magic" is that it is when you observe action [A], followed by outcome [B], with no apparent causal connection between [A] and [B].
Then the less you know, the more magic there actually is? The world is full of confusing opaque things that people don't see as "magical". Such things seem far more magical when they are close to strong motivations.
Strong motivations without a transparent natural explanation are an important subject. But connecting them to the "magic" label seems like a mistake.
"Magic" gets used many ways. You refer to the contemporary American use of the word, where it means something like "awesome, surprising". Other times and cultures have used this word to mean things like "secret, hard to learn", "taboo, evil, satanic"; "superstitions, idiocy"; "power wielded by ancestors" or "works but we don't know how". Unless you're going to keep playing defense against these competing meanings, I think all you get from thinking about sacred motivations in "magic" terms is unnecessary confusion.
I do agree with you and Durkheim that magic is related to the sacred in an important way. You may want to read Durkheim's pupil Marcel Mauss, who wrote a short booklet called "A general theory of magic" that I'm almost certain you would enjoy.
What makes something magic is that it's a force you can call on/law of nature that responds to human level concerns like emotions, determination, pain, love etc..
This is what we see in novels. Sci-fi depicts a world where the rules respond just as well to the rich brat who buys the big ship/gun as to the sage who has studied their entire life and where those rules don't care if they are applying to a widget or woman.
Magic is about the idea that something akin to the laws of the world responds to the kind of concerns that motivate your inner life (the wizard can draw on emotional conviction or pain for power). Usually in a kind of moralizing fashion.
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Just ignore this part below since it only seems to confuse ppl and was meant as vague speculation unlike the above.
Maybe the reason for this is that magic is in some sense derived from the idea/wish that you can push your own internal imagined reality out into the world.
That is called a "user interface". Most user interfaces don't seem very magical, and aren't of much interest to those interested in "magic".
If you mean the speculation part...yah that's just a vague idea.
If you mean the human level concerns not at all. A phaser isn't magic because it lets any idiot shoot people -- the power and effect don't reflect the users dedication and your phaser can't shoot extra strong because you call on an internal well of emotional strength or see your friend die.
A lightsaber is magical in that it is responding to the user's determination, equipoise and other things that matter at an emotional level to us. Not every idiot can deflect blaster shots the way they can fire a phaser.
Magic is a way of saying that the universe responds to the kind of things that feel emotionally important/powerful to us. In magic the universe looks inside human brains and says it's going to decide what happens based on things like love, honor, commitment etc. Scifi let's anyone who wants wield that power.
Sure, you can have scifi mind reading interfaces but they can be hooked up to ignore all those things. A story with old technical stuff which you can't modify and determines who can exercise what power based on judging emotional fitness/dedication or that kind of thing starts to bridge the gap.
Your ability to dance, play sport, ride bikes, fly planes, and many other skills depend on your mood, attention, determination, etc. but don't seem "magical".
There is a difference between a law of physics that happens to apply to a toaster insofar as the microphysics apply to everything and a law of physics that has special exceptions for things that happen to be toasters (energy is conserved unless the stuff is part of a toaster).
Same idea here. Magic requires that when a state qualifies as being the kind of emotional/psychological state humans attend to suddenly different rules come into play that didn't for the individual parts.
(As an anology In our world charge is special in that objects with charge get different rules from objects w/o charge but emotional/qualitative states don't need an extra law of nature the way charged objects do.)
In all of your cases, the emotional aspects aren't central to the the operation of those devices because anything that presses the buttons like so and shifts it's weight like such gets the same result.
I'm sure if you try hard to charitably interpret what I'm saying you'll succeed in at least picking out the class of cases I mean to identify because i've managed to convey to plenty of much less intelligent people than you at least how to operationally identify what it means to have a rule (eg natural law) which treats emotional/psych/etc states as getting special treatment in natural law. Not everyone agrees I've identified the right concept but I'm sure you could wager with very high probability as to what cases I'd say fall under this description.
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And while you might say that in principle magic systems assert they do work on totally general rules that are reducible to, say, microphysics this is usually the part of the world where they give up on consistency (tape recorders plus mechanical hands don't do great spells even if supposedly they should)
Shorter version: the user interface merely translates your actions into other actions. It doesn't create a system where what it takes to do extraordinary things is extraordinary emotional/mental states.
What makes a system magical is the fact that extraordinary outcomes are necessarily and directly achieved by extraordinary emotional/psychological states. You are powerful because of great mental strength and dedication not because you found a nice pistol, you can perform that incredible feat because you can draw on your emotional reserves etc
We can turn what we imagine into reality.
Right...I said that was speculation because I had in mind the idea that somehow reality would be directly responsive to your imagination of it.
Like lots of magic has a representation/reality component. I perform this act on this doll which represents someone and imagine it effects the person.
So the idea would be that what's going on is some kind of cognitive failure to fully distinguish the representation and the reality. And this is something even modern educated people are bad at (often thinking that they can reach substantive conclusions by manipulating the definitions they use to describe them).
There’s much more to it than that.
That part wasn't meant to be a necessary or sufficient condition at all -- merely a thought as to why we might be so enamored of the concept.
I read a fairly clever distinction between "science" and "magic" recently, partly in reference to writing but in relation to world views as well. It was roughly:
Science is a set of rules which, once known, can be worked around such that one can achieve the desired outcome.
Magic is when the stated outcome is declared, and then it is achieved (or something close, or not...) with no attention to how it is achieved.
Breaking the rules of reality as we know and interact with it is sort of what magic does, via jumping past the how and going directly to "desired outcome achieved". So any time we don't care about the why and how such that we could teach others to achieve the outcome in the same way, it is just magic. Which means it is related to the distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge: unteachable/inexplicable things are more magical, things you can convey to others are mundane.
I don't think that's quite right. Consider phasers or transporter beams in star trek. They are clearly scifi yet are essentially just arbitrary tools with no real concern to how they work.
But they aren't magic because you can hand them out to anyone at scale and if they press the button it works while magic needs to respond to more human level concerns (eg willpower of user or the extent of their studies etc etc).
OTOH lightsabers are magic bc only a select few special people can use them effectively by dint of great dedication and training and the emotional need/calm/etc of user is deeply relevant to efficacy.
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I think the inability to explain how magic works is merely a consequence of the fact that once you start to give precise rules it's virtually impossible to retain the responsiveness to human level concerns.
I would disagree a bit: phasers and transporters ARE basically magic in Star Trek. They only lightly get into the implications of how they work later in the series, (well they being the transporters; no one cares about blasters) and then start to use the rules of how they work to achieve other goals. Transporters and by extension the holodeck and... whatever the machine that responds to "Computer: tea, Earl Grey, hot" by creating it is called... a very much magic for most of the show.
Consider that it takes a long time for the show writers to include that fact that transporters can make duplicates of people. That is a massive implication that clearly wasn't included when they decided they wanted a way to get people from space to the planetary surface without using the shuttle craft set the entire time. Likewise how much they have to bend over backwards to come up with limitations to keep every situation from becoming "just transport them away when it becomes dangerous".
In other words, to explain why people don't abuse the rules of teleportation and exact duplication of anything including living beings they accidentally introduced, the writers had to come up with scientific-ish rules to limit the magic they had started with. They wanted sci-fi but created magic for expedience, then had to correct it to fit with the sci-fi.
Thinking of it another way, note that in Trek people have to travel by ship. With transporter tech, however, it is feasible to have relay stations instead, because you just need to transmit the data to the nearest transporter to your destination. Communications are apparently instant or real time (for the most part) so whatever relays your data can be used to relay you at roughly the same speed. If you can talk with the Enterprise you can show up on their transporter deck, regardless of where the two of you are.
Yet that isn't what we see. Why? Because they didn't start with rules of how transporters work, they started with "I want to get characters from the ship down to the planet faster and without another prop and set". So they made a machine that allows people to say "Take me down there" instantly. Only after people started noting how that breaks the universe did they start coming up with rules. It started as magic and they had to retcon it to be science.
Lightsabers are, well part of a magic sci-fantasy world, but in themselves are not magic because they do very specific things and anyone can use them even if they are super dangerous without proper training (and possibly the force to keep you safer). They added a lot of woo woo about how light sabers work later, but the original three movies had them just as a very dangerous weapon that without training was nearly as dangerous to the user as his opponent. Like a forklift. Granted, it is damned close to magic because Lucas doesn't care about sci-fi, but they are basically just swords that cut through anything but another sabre and can deflect lasers. They get used to achieve ends by applying those rules, not by asking for the end state and just getting it, as opposed to the Force, which does... stuff... and just does it because you want the end to happen.
I don't disagree with what you say descriptively I just don't think that being unexplained or even arbitrary technobabble is the same as being magical.
For most people iphones are unexplained yet not at all magical. And if I work in fiction not non-fiction it doesn't become magical bc you don't explain how and when the pocket communicator works.
Imagine Harry Potter but where a Petronius was more powerful entirely based on your ability to pronounce the words correctly not your emotional resources (so some random person w/ good diction makes the strongest petroni) it needs to be about the person doing the magic not just about being friends w/ Geordie.
It isn't just about being unexplained, however, but rather the focus on achieving the desired end without a process that determines how the end comes about. If your pocket communicator can communicate with anyone anywhere, regardless of distance, that is getting close to magic because it doesn't follow the normal laws. If your communicator does that while no one else has one that can, it is getting even closer.
Or in the case of the Petronius, how does it know what you need protected against? In fact, I don't know Harry Potter well enough, so I will use old school AD&D. Protection from Missiles: it stops things that are being shot at you, but how does the spell know what is a missile weapon being shot at you as opposed to say an air molecule zipping your way? If your friend is under the protection of the spell and you toss a knife in a sheath at him to use, does it get deflected? What about a baseball? How hard do I have to throw the baseball before it turns into a missile weapon?
Of course none of that matters, because the intent of the spell is all that matters: the caster intends for the slings and arrows of his enemies to be stopped, so they are. It's magic.
Now if the spell said "any object flying at the caster with KE greater than 500 mega joules is stopped" that is getting closer to the science end of the scale. Not only do you know how the intended effect happens you can use the rule to figure out how unintended effects happen, because they can. Intent is no longer the primary determinant of outcomes, but rather the rules are.
Arbitrary technobabble isn't the same as magic, if that technobabble actually binds in rules and can be used in ways outside the "I intend X, so X happens." You can withhold explanations, or as in the case of the iphone not have the characters understand how it works exactly, but if they have to follow rules to get an outcome in particular instead of just wanting the outcome, it is farther from magic.
When you find a magic lamp and wish to be rich the genie doesn't personally go out and rob a bank or set up a number of businesses that pay a handsome residual every year and the sign ownership over to you; rather he snaps his fingers and gets gold from somewhere. A genie acting as a wealth advisor but just a really good one isn't magical, but one who can conjure gold into existence is.
I agree with and think the key point there is "the intent of the spell is all that matters" that's responding to human level concerns. The range and space of options is constructed to correspond to the kind of concerns relevant to people. It's adjudicated in the same way judges interpret human laws not the way physics is done.
Why I think it doesn't track unexplained mechanism is that a blaster (star wars plasma pistol) or a phaser may not ever have a coherent (or any) explanation for how they work but if it works in a simple consistent fashion (anything but a shield it's pointed at goes this much boom) it's not very magical.
Now there is no sharp dividing line which I think speaks to the need for the criteria I'm suggesting. Yes, phasers and blasters may be a very tiny bit magical in that they tend to always kill/stun the human they hit even w/o center of mass shot but they tend not to hit the hostage or pet they are clutching. They take out a full droid but not the whole system they are physically networked to. But that's a relatively tiny amount of taking into account human level concerns/cares. It's more magical if your weapon has more power if you are pure of heart or angry or draw on your emotional pain.
But that doesn't track how unexplained the technology is. A phaser or disruptor is no more explained than the magic of Excalibur. It is more predictable by someone w/o human psychological understanding but not more explained.
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And I guess that in some sense almost all our fiction stories are a tiny bit magical in that there are protagonist powers, people fight through being drugged by strength of will not random biochemistry variation but only a very tiny bit and I think this does a good job generally of tracking how magical something feels.
I wrote about this in the context of fiction on my blog recently. I think it makes most sense as a set of vaguely related aesthetics rather than a coherent thing, https://osmarks.net/magic/
I think you are on the right track there but the key unifying feature is that magic responds to human level concerns/features/aspects. In other words, it's magic because things like our hopes, dreams, convictions determination grit etc play a central role in the laws (how things turn out).
For instance, if you allow anyone to cast the spell if they know the right words it feels less magical because the outcome is less connected to an individual's effort/virtue/studiousness. Super powers feel less magical because they are random and don't reflect the individual's characteristics. That's also why it tends to be ancient tombs and lost rituals rather than a group effort.
Similarly, the mistborn stuff feels less magical than other systems because it responds less to the emotions of the user. Usually things feel more magical when emotional resources correlate directly with power.
Love is magic.
I think of magic as arising from the capacity for different psychological distances in relation to actual distances and feeling and/or emotions are clearly activated and important in this context. Perhaps motivations is a deeper core answer to this although I am unsure.
To me, magic is about hacking physics. It does not appear to be a thing in our universe, but in many fantasy/sci-fi (or simulated) universes, it is precisely just that - a complement or substitute for technology.
For these universes to be self-consistent, magics have to be quite rigorously defined. I think Brandon Sanderson has some excellent thoughts about this: https://faq.brandonsanderson.com/knowledge-base/what-are-sandersons-laws-of-magic/
Magical things are not mechanistic in the same way as natural things.
The strongest possible magic is granting wishes; you simply say what it is you want and, with no attempt at explanation in material terms, reality changes as you requested.
This seems very similar to saying that magic refers to an external locus of control.
I think ‘magic’ and ‘the unnatural’ cover certain kinds of causation. Physical-to-physical causation is natural: it just follows the laws of physics. Mind-body interaction is also lawful and natural. But *direct* interaction between a mind and a body-that-is-not-*its*-body, or between two different minds, is *unnatural*.
Exs.: By a mere act of will I make a candle across the room alight; a distant physical event causes me to form an accurate image of it, with no intervening physical process; any purely mental (mind-to-mind) telepathy. These are all unnatural, and those where the cause is an act of will are magical—they are the practice of magic by the agent.
Evidently, unnatural causation is thought to be rare, or at least very difficult, and special, perhaps non-lawful (but maybe diabolical rather than sacred).
"Evidently, unnatural causation is thought to be rare, or at least very difficult, and special, perhaps non-lawful (but maybe diabolical rather than sacred)."
Well, unnatural causation like that is not rare. It is non-existent. The practice of magic, is making yourself perceive it otherwise. Controlled hallucination in essence. (though also a kind of emotional manipulation)
"Exs.: By a mere act of will I make a candle across the room alight;"
Great, traditional example of the practice of magic, similar to some hardcore Buddhist practices, that these days Daniel Ingram has made some progress via his Fire Kasina practice. Are you skilled at such things, by any chance? What else can you do and how do you do it? I have experimented quite a bit, made marginal progress and attained only marginal skills. Like I can make my fingertip slightly glow in purple (on command, no less), but it's depressingly weak. In the end, I found such practice more trouble than it's worth.
"Evidently, unnatural causation is thought to be rare, or at least very difficult, and special, perhaps non-lawful (but maybe diabolical rather than sacred)."
Well, such practices are very difficult and usually require some degree of sensory deprivation, if one doesn't use drugs (but that shouldn't count, because how cheap!). Or probably a mind that tends towards schizophrenia. These experiences can feel pleasant, meaningful and coherent, so no wonder they are sacred to the practitioner. They also probably make someone become extremely out of touch in an antisocial way (especially if it fires on schizoid or manic episodes), so diabolizing such practices (and the practitioners leaning into the narrative in turn) makes sense, too.
One of one’s own impulses to act may seem magical if it is so unusual as to seem not to have been produced by one’s normal psychological processes—perhaps rather by the direct action of another mind on one’s own mind.
Of course, all this is based on mental-material dualism, and so is quite untenable.
"One of one’s own impulses to act may seem magical if it is so unusual as to seem not to have been produced by one’s normal psychological processes—perhaps rather by the direct action of another mind on one’s own mind."
Oh yeah, definitely. Though I think "perhaps rather by the direct action of another mind on one’s own mind" is a failure mode. Know thyself, is the advice of sages.
I don't think, the issue comes up so much in magical Buddhist practices. But probably a lot more in European ritual-based tradition, where they summon demons and such. And Internal Family Systems, apparently? Scott Alexander wrote a massive book review recently on that. Did not care to read it though, since the topic does not confuse me, anymore.
Anyway, the correct interpretation is not that of another mind (still the same old brain), but rather that of a freshly unified mind (which could seem strange to your self conception, as you do not usually feel this state of artificially induced unification of the mind system). Lacks familiarity. So in that case, the advice of the sages would be "Get to know yourselves!" :)
I still say Richard Carrier got it more or less right: Things that are "supernatural" are things that involve the mental but which do not decompose into nonmental things. http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2007/01/defining-supernatural.html
So all math is "magical"?
...no? I'm not entirely sure how you got that. I suspect you may be construing terms differently from how they are being used?
Like, OK, one could say that mathematics is "mental" in the sense that it is done in the mind, and the mathematics *itself* does not decompose into physical things, certainly sometimes we imagine mathematics as a sort of disembodied spirit; but the mathematics *itself* has no causative power, only the doing and use of it, which is done by actual instantiated minds that do in fact reduce. Or to put it differently, it might be mental but it's not an entity! Contrast this with, say, a sleeping potion or a demon, where the mental entity acts on the world.
I guess my comment was a bit off-base though, in that it focused on the supernatural rather than on magic per se. I guess magic is more based on things like the law of similarity and the law of contagion. Which, hm -- I guess that's evidence against Carrier's proposed outline, since I'm not sure either of those is necessarily *mental* per se. Although there really ought to be a common unification here? I mean these are both based on a particular sort of naive human view of the world, but I don't know how to succinctly describe it.
OK, maybe Carrier's article is a bit off after all, but for a pretty different reason...
Stage hypnosis seems to fit the bill well.
What is that?
Stage hypnosis is when a hypnotist induces a trance-like state in participants from a show or other audience, leading them to perform various actions or behaviors on stage.
Here is an except from Richard Feynman's experience of getting hypnotized:
https://www.reddit.com/r/hypnotizable/comments/ki73ad/richard_feynmans_experience/
Hypnosis is one way of changing how we perceive our motivations. In Feyman's words: "I could do that, but I won't"--which is just another way of saying that you can't.
We actually know quite a lot about motivation, from humanistic psychology and management science (Herzberg). I like this summary:
https://www.productiveflourishing.com/p/10-types-of-demotivation
Dominic Barter from www.restorativecircles.org is very good on how empathy removes obstacles to motivated action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-olmJVxNvYo
I'm not sure that video really says anything more than that sometimes people feel bad/hopeless/unmotivated in ways that can be helped by being kind/understanding -- which is important to remember but we all knew. But that's also true about pretty much all human emotional relations, in some situations people will be demotivated because they feel lonely or because they feel disrespected or because they feel they won't be rewarded.
Yes, if you define empathy so broadly it just means: understanding someone well enough to figure out how to help motivate them then it is fully general but empathy isn't actually doing the work anymore then -- just understanding the problem and fixing it.
What percentage of motivation do we understand, correctly?
Unknowable, because we cannot ask God to check the validity of our explanations. (well you can, but if you get an answer, best not to trust it) But I would say about 90% is explained correctly on a conceptual level, if not more. Robin Hanson's work is part of that canon, of course. The trouble is, that we also have incorrect or flawed explanations going around. So we might not know what the 90% are. Depends on who the "we" is in question. I can only speak for myself and I say, I understand at least 90%.