Magic Is Real & It’s Good Also
By: Online Again
Tags: Art, Science, Synthesis, Conjunction, Magic

Magic Is Real & It’s Good Also

Magic is real, and I’ll not hear your excuses that it’s not! It just requires the step where we have to “research, imagine, & build it first”. Of course magic doesn’t work in a vacuum, but neither does a telephone or a TV remote. You have to create the conditions for magic to function properly, for it to be possible, everything only has meaning in relation to a context, in its relation to an environment, and the same is true for magic systems, items, and processes.

For a long time a bunch of grouchy old cynics have used the phrase “magical thinking” to dismiss anyone who isn’t as grouchy and cynical as they are, as part of an anti-fun protocol which exists at the heart of the industrial prison we were born into.

Every single study they’ve done to “disprove magic” has itself been a sort of magic trick of perception, one the researchers have played on themselves. A scientific study designed to test some magical phenomenon often involves pointing a magnifying glass at some empty space, a place where no magic system has even been constructed and shrugging their shoulders like, “well! i guess we disproved that! now what else can we disprove?” It’s a lot like if I pointed a camera out my window for 1 year as an experiment to see if Giraffes exist, and at the end of 1 year used the lack of Giraffes as evidence that Giraffes are in fact, not real.

It’s comical! This is the point I want to drive home, that if you don’t want to believe in something you will find a way to avoid seeing it. If you wish to believe in a world without magic, that’s the world you’re going to see and experience! I would even say that is the world we’ve been living in, just look around for a moment and consider the technology we now have. Look at the electronic device you’re reading this on! Are you seriously going to tell me this isn’t magic? Do you realize that the antennae inside cell phones are shaped like fractals and that somehow is enough to send and recieve the right signal? How is that not magic? What about those magic light bulbs you can buy that can be controlled from an app on your phone. Is that not the same magic power Dimbledoob has in the first scene of the Hairy Peter series? Yet, few people talk about any of this as magic.

To be clear, I don’t want to dwell on the boring and oft-repeated phrase “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” because I think it only serves to muddy the waters. It’s not untrue exactly, it’s just the wrong framing in my view because…there seems to be this implication that once something becomes “science” it’s not magic anymore, and I think this is silly. It’s not even true! Why should understanding something take the magic away? I don’t agree with that at all. What, are we trying to destroy all magic and turn it into science? Don’t like that. I think we should keep that sense of wonder around, and I don’t at all believe understanding something destroys your ability to appreciate it, quite the contrary actually. Understanding something doesn’t “destroy the magic”, if you understand that the world is forever in motion, dynamic, changing.

But…for a long time folks have been prioritizing something they call “Hard Science” which is really just writing down a bunch of data points and saying that they’ve proved something as a “fact”. Uh, okay! You’re right about this data at least in the context of your experiment, now what? What’s the point of writing all that data down, what are you going to do with it and how are you going to make decisions, on what basis exactly? How does your data change over time, especially once the experiment is over? Beyond that, how are you going to decide which data points to write down or which experiments are important in the first place and which to completely ignore? What is your context, what are your goals? Which data points are relevant and which can be ignored and how do you know that for certain?

There’s no “rational” way to answer these questions, because at some point it all becomes arbitrary and it turns out your unconscious biases were leading you towards one set of data points or another based on whatever it is you “wanted” to be true. It doesn’t mean science is meaningless or even “wrong”, or that we should suddenly throw away all the valuable information we’ve learned from it, only that we should consider taking a couple of steps back. This is a wonderful place for art to enter into the picture, for us to move beyond “hard science” and add a little magic.

Magic is not a matter of conducting some special “test” or anything of the sort, it’s about perspective manipulation of both your own perspective and the perspectives of others. I wanted to see the world as a place where magic could exist, and so I found a way to change my own perspective until my understanding of magic aligned with reality in a way I could explain and understand. You know who else believed in magic and had a collection of magical writings, along with a ton of notes and readings about alchemy? Sir Isaac Newton! It’s true, and he’s far from being the only one! Look it up!

Anyway, let me be clear about something….Magic is not what “scientists” think magic is. Magic is not “shooting lightning bolts out of your hands just because you imagine yourself doing it”. It’s not like that at all. Magic has rules, and those rules are the same laws of physics scientists deal with. The difference between Magic and Science is the approach to situations, the approach to research, and the understanding about what’s possible and what is not possible. It’s a matter of perspective.

Scientists believe in nothing, whereas Magicians believe everything is possible and true, in the right context. It’s a world of difference, and it’s why people who care a little too much about believing in “nothing” spend so much time falling into the nihilistic trap of “compared to the universe we’re such tiny little bugs! wahh! we have no value! we don’t belong anywhere, we’re just an accident and the universe is a big empty vacuum”. All that shows me is a lack of imagination! You know who fills the void? Artists! You know what you call an artist who is also a scientist? A magician! If you disagree with this, I will have to introduce you to…my fists!

It’s like…hey scientists…lighten up a little won’t you? Why not spend some of your time imagining what might be possible in the most complex possible world, which we can someday build, instead of dwelling on the limitations of the one we appear to live in now. Through technics, philosophy, experiments, imagination, research, through the development of tools and magic technologies like the internet we do have the power to change the rules of the world we live in, and magic is both a way of helping us imagine what we might someday be able to achieve and a way of feeling wonder about the world we already live in. It’s an understanding that the world is dynamic, in motion.

Any system we can imagine, we can create with enough effort and in the right context. Sometimes the context is just “inside a computer program” but then…if you’ve been following developments in quantum computing and cybernetics you may be aware that mind-uploading or similar technologies may eventually be a thing, heck maybe we’ll be able to get star-trek beamed inside the internet through some sort of quantum tunneling effect. Maybe the internet will begin to re-shape the so-called “real” world via nanotechnology, quantum computers, or through something subtle like sending information packets from place to place very quickly thereby re-arranging actual physical matter of the earth and subtly affecting things like the distribution of heat, information, and energy. Maybe the internet has been a quantum computer this whole time, using various sensors and also you and me as quantum circuits in the system! Maybe new environments where the rules work differently are already possible and we just haven’t put the puzzle pieces in the right order yet, did you ever think about that?

Speculation aside, we often need to ground ourselves just enough to address the contexts we find ourselves in while also recognizing that the world is almost entirely socially constructed. We need both imagination and a way of turning data points into “scans” of our immediate environments. It isn’t always helpful to have your head in the clouds when your feet are stuck to the ground, but keeping your feet stuck to the ground without any imagination is the path to stagnation and death. The point is just that an important part of magic is having some amount of grounding in the material conditions you find yourself in and balancing that with an understanding of dynamism, change, and creativity.

I would argue understanding your material conditions is far more important in magic than it is in the scientific perspective with a few exceptions because your material conditions are the “rules” you are presently subjected to, those material conditions are where creative materia comes from.

Scientists often ignore tons of variables through acts of blatant omission in their data sets, but with magic you have no such luxury, you must take the entire interconnected fabric of reality into account at every moment including the biases of yourself, those around you, their personal histories, histories of the world, the ways your understanding of history have been warped through biases of the people writing about said world, and so-on. It’s a holistic approach. Science is rarely holistic, which is why it often fails. Science asks very little self-awareness from people, whereas magic is impossible without it.

I suppose my interest in this topic comes from the perspective of having developed a sociological interest in magic as a social construct, an interest in science fiction, in fantasy novels, and an understanding that magic is kind of a metaphor-which-is-not-a-metaphor. I also, as a computer programmer, can sympathize with the very real value of hypothetical processing systems, of which I believe magic to be one, and through my recent readings on cybernetics have realized that cybernetics and computer science are probably a bridge between art & science as we know them. It is possible to build re-usable mental algorithms to help with things like visualization, creativity, and so-on.

The bottom line really is that where Alchemy is a Synthesis of Chemistry and Philosophy, Magic is a Synthesis of Science and the Arts. It was a mistake to break Alchemy apart, and it was a mistake to separate Art and Science. Art + Science = Magic. Alchemy is of course Chemistry + Philosophy. I bet there are other fields like this lying dormant, merging Philosophy and other Arts back with various sciences could be very productive and might lead to many technological breakthroughs.

Every invention begins as a dream, as magical thinking, as projection into an imaginary symbolic context, like how Star Trek basically invented the idea of an iPad-like-device decades before somebody else made it real. Before the internet ever existed nobody would have believed global telepathy would be possible, yet here we are! It exists right now, and we’ve been part of it for years. Magic has been real this whole time, and it’s been here from the start. It’s only when we decide to embrace it as a possibility that it becomes real to us, it’s only when we accept it that the world changes from an empty place to one full of magic potential.

We just have to remember that not all magic works in all contexts, and that it does not work like magic works in a “Harry Peter” story. The way it works is much closer to physics or computer science than it is to saying a magic command to accomplish something. The “saying a magic command” thing is how voice-activation technology works, and that had to be built by someone before it became possible. That’s the point I am trying to make here. Just like there are frauds in science, there are frauds in Magic. It’s the same everywhere and it’s the frauds you’ve probably heard of, they’re who you’ve dismissed, and it may be their version of magic you think of when you claim someone is doing “magical thinking” in a derogatory manner.

Name a type of magic, and then imagine the context which would have to exist for it to work. Don’t throw your hands up in despair when you realize you don’t yet live in a context where it’s possible to fly or travel through magic portals, instead imagine a world where something like that would be possible, and build a bridge from here to there. In your imagining, understand that a change in perspective may be necessary to see the change for what it is. It may be easier than you think!