Newsgroups: alt.magick

I've been thinking a little about my original post, written as it was
during the semi-psychodelic epilogue of a nasty dose of 'flu. I wanted
to check that there was some thread to it, and develop the raggy ends
a little further.

The thread was roughly:

   - arguing that magic exists is messy because you spend your time
      trying to define it and concoct tests of existence.
   - arguing that magic doesn't exist gives you a kind of negative
     definition of magic in terms of causality, and forces the advanced
     skeptic into the "causally omniscient" corner of the ring.
   - magicians understand causality in terms of intentions and outcomes,
     but aren't experts on causality. I used the example of Nigel Mansell,
     who knows that his car goes very fast, but doesn't know enough about
     how it works to say why.

I'd like to say a little more about the last point, because people are
still arguing about the powerbook example  - is it a valid experiment.
My answer was yes and no; yes, because Shava's focus on intention and
outcome is entirely consistent with what I understand of the magical
worldview, and no, because there is nowhere in the experiment where we
can point to anything which is explicitly and uncontrovertibly "magical".
Like Nigel Mansell, Shava can't lift the bonnet of the car and point to
the "closed loop active suspension doofer" which would give a sceptic
cause to believe that the car might be faster "for a good reason" - Nigel
has to keep on winning races to convince the sceptic, and Shava has to
keep doing more and more improbable things.
	Yes, it would be possible to set up an ensemble of Shavas acquiring
powerbooks, and a set of controls, and if you believe that you could
control all the wild elements in such a ridiculous experiment you might
manage to convince yourself that something statistically significant
was going on. The chances are that you wouldn't. If you really had
the resources to set up such an experiment, you would probably have the
common sense to design something with fewer free variables and more
controls. Like the psi tests which evolved out of attempts to establish
claims arising out of spiritualism. There are strong parallels.
	What do we know about psi testing? It depends on your status
as an observer; some observers are hostile to psi and draw one conclusion,
and other observers are sympathetic to psi, and draw a different conclusion.
The hostile observers conclude that no psi experiment has demonstrated
the existence of psi - if anyone wants to follow this up, there was a
hostile review paper on psi published in Nature in the mid-80's which
put the hostile case very well. The sympathetic case (if you can find
an expert on psi who is prepared to be sympathetic) can also sound 
remarkably hostile to anyone who has been brought up on uncritical
popularisations of psi work. It is *extremely* hard to design, conduct,
and assess psi experiments which are not open to a large number of
what are by now (after ~60 years of psi testing) fairly standard criticisms.
There is a guy (whose name I forget) in the Koestler chair of spoonbending
at Edinburgh who claims to have the perfect experiment, and even some
results, but parapsychologists have been saying that since Rhine - time
will tell.
	The point is that I think it is grossly unfair to expect Shava,
or myself, or anyone else, to provide evidence of "doing stuff".
We can't lift the bonnet of the car and show the "psi thang", and it would
be pretty daft to attempt to do what 60 years of psi testing has failed
to do. It is (IMHO) completely acceptable to adopt the stance that
all self-professed magicians are deluded nutcases - I much prefer to present
the world with the lowest possible expectations, and occasionally exceed 
them ;-)

Colin