What is the difference between magic and science?
It’s been a while since I shared an Existential Comic. This one gets at a question we’ve discussed before, although it’s been several years. What exactly is the distinction between the physical and non-physical, in this case between science and magic?
Corey Mohler, the author, has a short write-up under the comic at his site, citing Arthur C. Clarke’s third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and J.R.R. Tolkien having his elves not understand what the hobbits mean when they ask to see elven magic. All the elves have are knowledge and capabilities, some of which seem like “magic” to mortals. (This isn’t always true in Tolkien’s mythology. Divine beings, for instance, have capabilities no one else can attain. But Tolkien mostly implies it’s just more of nature rather than anything distinct.)
Which brings us back to the question, what exactly is magic, the supernatural, or the non-physical? For that matter, what is the physical? The answer I’ve reached before, is the physical is anything that interacts with other physical things and evolves according to rules, rules we can hope to discover, at least to some degree. When we encounter something that doesn’t follow the rules as we understand them, historically we don’t assume we’ve found anything magical. We take it as something for which we just don’t know the rules yet.
Even in cases where we fail to understand the rules for a long time, we tend to just figure out what we can about it, and “black box” the rest. Isaac Newton had to do it with gravity, early modern biologists with the “spirit” that seemed to animate nerves, Charles Darwin with inheritance, and particle physicists today do it with quantum measurement.
Fantasy stories, like Harry Potter, usually present magic as something obviously distinct. But it’s telling that one of the things any fantasy author has to consider is what the “rules of magic” are for their fictional world. Just because it’s fantasy doesn’t mean anything goes, at least not in quality stories that avoid cheating with deus ex machina type events. In that sense, the challenge is similar to the rules of fictional science that sci-fi authors have to work out in their worlds.
Orson Scott Card once said that the real difference between the fantasy genre and science fiction is that one tends to have swords, wizards, and supernatural monsters in it, while the other machines, spaceships, and hi-tech monsters. (Since then, the borders have gotten blurrier, with both genres expanding into each other.)
All of which seems to indicate that magic, as commonly intuited, is just old notions of how the world works, albeit in a caricatured and romanticized form in contemporary fiction. In that sense, science is the successor, the new magic that’s taken us far beyond what the old variety was able to achieve.
Unless of course I’m missing something?
SelfAwarePatterns 
@selfawarepatterns.com
My take on that is
When two individuals, one magic user and one not, create for example a potion with the same ingredients
Unless the ingredients themselves are magical, the potion made by the non-magic user should be non-functional
If the outcome is the same for both then it's science
If in a world, rules are the same for everyone, then it's science
If everyone is magical, it's also science
If they're different per group or person, then it's magic
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@Rana @selfawarepatterns.com
So magic is capabilities only a selected few have. I can see how you get there.
The questions that comes to mind is: What about the differences in capabilities between different species? Is an X-Men style mutant with unique capabilities magic? Science fiction has a long history of positing people with psionic powers that most of us don't have. Is this just magic in disguise? Does getting the power through a tool matter for this?
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@selfawarepatterns @selfawarepatterns.com
Hm I see it more as a perspective thing, where if something goes for everyone, that's just the state of how something is. We tend to only call something magic when it doesn't apply to us, or our world.
Superheroes are an interesting category, they're often lumped together but get their "powers" from different sources.
1/?
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@selfawarepatterns @selfawarepatterns.com
If a character has powers in a world where few or none have them, and it's not dependent on any tools, then it may be magic, yes, even if they're called a superhero
For tools it's more difficult because depending on whether it serves more as an enhancer, or makes a powerless character temporarily powerful, it can be either magic or science
I'd consider Mjolnir a magical tool because not just everyone can pick up and use it
2/?
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@selfawarepatterns @selfawarepatterns.com
Prosthetics or most mechs for example aren't magical, because while they do give the wearer ability, anyone who plugs in can use them
Therefore they're science of the world
In a world where everyone has "superpowers", at what point does it go from being "super" to "just having powers".
Like how some of us are good at art, music, theorizing or writing. In a world where everyone has powers, that may just be the same thing.
3/
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@selfawarepatterns @selfawarepatterns.com
For different species within the same world, unless there's species with no unique traits, pit can be chalked up to biological differences aka science
To take our world for example, if we transplanted or surgically adjusted our skin with the same kinds of skin-hooks some animals have, we'd have similar ability to stick to walls
I'd say the ability to turn into a werewolf could be magic because it's non-transferrable
4/4
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@Rana @selfawarepatterns.com
Mjolnir seems like Arthur's sword in the stone, something only the worthy can use. Although I think of the doomsday weapon in Doctor Who that was intelligent and would only cooperate if she agreed with the user's motives.
But I do think the prevalence or rarity of the capabilities is a good insight between sci-fi and fantasy. (There is fantasy where anyone can buy spells, but it seems far less prevalent than ones where magic is rare.)
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Heh… I remember debating this at some length with Ahasuerus on rec.arts.sf.written. My take on it is that in science we have finally stumbled across the kind of magic that actually works. Much of it is summarised in this post of mine: https://mipmip.org/polemics/Paradigms.html
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Wow, that’s a good analysis. And I’m impressed with its age. I wasn’t expressing anything even remotely that intelligent back then. (Most of my online conversations back then centered around technology, probably OS/2 vs Windows vs Unix during that period.)
I like the Will vs Law label. It gets at something I thought about mentioning in this post, but decided it would be too much of a rabbit hole, that a lot of the non-physical / supernatural / magical view amounts to the idea of conscious forces being behind reality. Interestingly, the word “law” originally implied a lawgiver, although today it’s more commonly seen as a metaphor.
And to the idea of a paradigm clash, I do think SF often crosses over between them, intentionally or not. For example, what are superhuman AIs in many SF stories other than the gods of old in new clothing? What are the gadgets used other than the magic talismans of old?
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@selfawarepatterns.com
The Stranger: (Neil Gaiman's Books of Magic)
Science is a way of speaking about the universe in terms that bind it to a common reality.
Magic is a way of speaking to the universe in terms that it cannot ignore.
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@MarkRDavid @selfawarepatterns.com
Thanks. I can see the first sentence, but the second isn't clicking. Does it mean controlling the universe through commands? If so, what constitutes a command? Only making air vibrations by uttering a spell? Or does any manipulation of nature count?
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I think that if a magic potion just involves mixing certain ingredients together, then it’s chemistry. As you mentioned in one of your comments, Mike, often magic tends to rest on an idea of conscious beings exerting willpower to alter the laws of the universe. Typically a spellcaster uses their own mind or invokes some supernatural being to assist them in doing something that is outside the rules of the universe. It’s tied to the idea that the stuff of mind is distinct from the stuff of matter.
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Right, that reminds me of our discussion years ago, where I concluded that if we could establish there was something there that only interacted with us mentally, like a ghost, it might provide evidence for the non-physical. Although as soon as it does start having actual physical effects, it becomes part of the causal framework, and something whose interactions would could study. Of course, we already have that if our minds are non-physical, otherwise how could we even discuss it.
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Magic is the word used by the non-scientist for what the scientist can’t explain.
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I’d just point out that magic often deals with demons and spirits, and they are not entirely predictable. One had best be in their good graces. The story of the sorcerer’s apprentice comes to mind. The incantation is there on the page; what could possibly go wrong? I think this speaks to Zeewater’s point above, that the concept of magic may involve an element of personal potency.
I suppose we could ask to what extent demons are theoretically predictable, in the same sense that we ask whether ordinary mortals are theoretically predictable. But for all practical purposes, what someone does next is, to other observers, a matter of probability. For panpsychism, this is where quantum mechanics gets interesting.
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Right, once we have intelligent agents involved, there may be rules by which they operate, but they have their own agenda and history and, as you note, predicting their actions becomes difficult. It’s interesting to think about the parallels here with AI, and the fact that some alarmists consider the development of AI to be “summoning the demon”.
I do think if demons and spirits have physical effects in the world, they become part of the causal chain, and their interactions can be studied, at least in principle. Even if their effects are only on people’s mentality, if that mentality manifests in any behavioral changes, then it too is part of the interactive chain. These interactions would include the ability of some to summon and control the demons and spirits, which also seem subject to study, albeit perhaps with considerable danger.
The thing about panpsychism and QM is that QM still follows rules. The rules can only give us probabilities for individual measurement outcomes, but those probabilities are iron clad, far more reliable than the probabilities associated with agents.
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Another way this could have gone is that quantum effects are vanishingly small at the scale of creatures we’d call “agents.” But when we talk about brains and their role in behaviour, the cumulative effective of incredible complexity seems to be a certain unpredictability, which as you point out is not given to “iron clad” probabilistic analysis.
This complex unpredictability is predicated on simpler phenomena. We could argue that those phenomena themselves are entirely predictable. Alternatively, we could entertain the idea that the complex unpredictability is the snowballing effect of simpler unpredictabilities. Either way we are involved in a “combination problem,” but one seems much thornier than the other. It seems to me that quantum mechanics has handed us a promising possibility on a platter, if we can just get over our shock and horror at the prospect of agency at such scales.
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I think most of the uncertainty in predicting the actions of agents comes from their complexity and the broad light cone they are typically at the center of. I know a lot of people talk about intrinsic randomness bubbling up from chaos theory and quantum physics, but if we think in terms of evolution and adaptability, this can’t be too pronounced. Most behavior needs to be deterministic, in the sense that the agent needs to be able to do what it reasons will further its goals. Intrinsic randomness would just reduce its adaptive fitness (or engineered utility).
However, for an external observer, what the agent sees as furthering its goals is subject to a lot of uncertainty. We’d either have to be privy to the agent’s current internal states (typically involving trillions of parts), or know the agent’s entire causal history. Instead our theory of mind depends on useful heuristics about what the agent will typically do, at least if we’re familiar with that type of agent.
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I think this may conflate probability with randomness prematurely. When I ask my wife if she’d like to go to a particular restaurant tonight, I may not be able to predict her answer as anything more than a probability, but I don’t exactly expect a random answer.
Similarly, we don’t have to jump to the conclusion that because quantum behaviour can be predicted only as a probability, that the behaviour is random. It’s a mind-bending stretch, but we can imagine that the quantum result somehow manifests a preference, which may change from time to time but presents an overall tendency. Of course this opens up a radical shift in the way we think about fundamental reality. In particular, the conception of causal forces acting on matter needs revision, for now we must think of agency as the fundamental element, as an irreducible interactional expressiveness from which what we take to be “matter” arises.
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It’s worth noting that any one quantum outcome is random for an observer, but the outcomes aren’t all equally likely. Similar to your wife’s choice of restaurant, some results are much more likely than others, and some have no chance at all. The difference is the probabilities of a quantum outcome evolve in rigidly deterministic fashion. Unlike a human or animal, who could get into a mood and do something utterly different tonight, an electron will always obey its statistics. And a different electron in the same place will obey the same statistics. (Unless both electrons are present, in which case they’ll obey the Pauli exclusion principle.)
You can of course project volition into the data if you want. But it’s an added assumption that Nature isn’t forcing on us, at least not yet.
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To say that an electron “obeys its statistics” is to put the cart before the horse. It does what it does, and from this, the statistics emerge. The statistics don’t tell it to produce any particular outcome, so “obey” is probably the wrong image. At best the statistics might be said to suggest something to the electron; but again, that’s putting it backwards.
Really we are back to the first point about he sense in which our predictions are “iron clad.” The bottom line is that we never know what an electron will actually do until it does it. We can only know what it’s likely to do. Our confidence level is more or less on a par with whether a given person is likely to choose a restaurant at hand, or one a few cities away. But I grant that choosing restaurant is better understood as a much more complex operation, suitable for more complex beings.
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I meant “obey” figuratively, but you’re right, it’s just another way to express what I did above, and I do try to avoid repeating myself in these conversations. Sorry for looping!
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it’s interesting that we sometimes speak of “Schrodinger’s Law,” when really it’s more like guidance. If we want to apply the metaphor of law and obedience, then the electron appears to be constrained, but nevertheless retains a certain degree of freedom.
You said above that volition is an added assumption that nature isn’t forcing on us, but it’s not as if we have a better explanation. We reach for, say, many-worlds theory, where we sidestep the problem by assuming the electron does everything it possibly can all at once, or a hidden-variable theory, where we assume some more laws which we don’t know about, and maybe can’t know about. Nature certainly is forcing something on us, but whether that’s an obligation to rescue the clockwork view of the universe or entertain new ideas about agency is, at this point, our degree of freedom..
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David Wallace, an Everettian philosopher of physics, occasionally says in interviews that when it come to explaining the wave function collapse, we can either change the physics (add or modify the math), change the philosophy, or keep both and change common sense. He notes that physicists are often willing to change the philosophy because they’re not that familiar with it. Philosophers are often willing to change the physics, because they’re not aware of how difficult that is. Of course he argues for the last option.
To be fair, we leave some aspect of common sense behind with any of the options.
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I’m not sure how positing agency as a fundamental element of the universe would require a change to any existing math. Like many-worlds, it pretty much leaves the math alone, but offers a novel conception of what’s behind it. It’s a way of thinking about the world, and to the extent that it may cast light on perennial puzzles about free will, morality, and the like, or even just encourage us to be more responsible toward nature, it could be a useful one. It also might open new, unexplored fields of science or math, or drive advances in mereology.
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I think it would be changing the philosophy, at least for most scientists and philosophers of science. Although if it ever led to the benefits you list, particularly the ones in your final sentence, I would think it could involve changing the math.
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@selfawarepatterns.com isn’t it magic when I can go from a thought to having my hands move in the physical world and touch other pieces of the world and make the world to change? We live in the world with magic. But not with action at all distance.
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@jayalane @selfawarepatterns.com
Depends on our definition of "magic". I'm thinking it probably seemed so before anyone understood how nerves and muscles worked.
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I will go with that quote you have up there about advanced technology and magic
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If you haven’t read HP and the Methods of Rationality…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality
And get a load of who wrote it!!!
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Kind of sounds like that Russian novel that retold the Lord of the Rings from Mordor’s perspective as a scientific society battling medieval dogmatists.
On Yudkowsky, I find him a pretty mixed bag. As one who’s an autodidact on certain subjects, I’m very much aware of all the gaps typically left from self learning. In his case it goes all the way back to pre-high school. Only he doesn’t appear to be very self aware about his particular gaps. I think it makes his reasoning uneven, sometimes insightful, other times not so much.
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The story is at times, better told than Rowlings. It’s worth a read.
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You read it? Sounds like it’s huge. I’m not sure I’m up for 660,000 words, at least not right now.
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There’s a downloadable version that’s novel length…
https://github.com/rrthomas/hpmor/releases/tag/v1.2.7
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The epub version pulls down, loads in Calibre with no trouble — should mount into a Kindle or an Android reader.
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Thanks! The PDF version is 2000 pages. 😜
I haven’t had to use Calibre in a while. Usually you can send the epub version to your Kindle account with the Send to Kindle feature. It’s what I do with Gutenberg books. That way they sync between devices. (At least when things are working right.)
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Damn! Maybe he wrote more years than just the first. I read this some years ago.
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@selfawarepatterns.com I read somewhere that some anthropologists define magic as "wish fulfillment." If I want to have light to see, I can light a candle or flick a light switch, and that's what causes the light to exist. Using the above definition of magic, magic is when the room lights up for no other reason than because I willed it to. In other words, it's belief shaping reality, rather than reality informing belief.
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@Space_Burger_Steve @selfawarepatterns.com
That's an interesting way to define it. Although if we include the intervening physics of actually enacting the wish, then it seems equivalent to agency. OTOH if I could make the light come on without actually flipping a light switch, that does seem magical.
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Especially after reading some of the comments, I’ve concluded that the main indicator of magic is mental causation: the idea that the mind is separate from the matter but can still interact with matter. Like someone suggested above, maybe even potions only work if someone capable invested some of their will into the potion.
I’m also reminded of one recent attempt to physicalize magic. Remember midichlorians? I’m not steeped in the canon, so I wonder if midichlorians were ever used to explain the mind continuing after death aspect. (“Use the Force, Luke”)
I have to admit, being on old D&D hack, that I’ve worked up some physics to explain magical capabilities. Did you know that there are enough neutrinos flowing thru you right now to provide a significant source of energy? Maybe if there was a significant source of anti-neutrinos, say, a jet from some deep space black hole phenomenon, and some quantum mechanically interesting biological structure like microtubules that could help them interact …
*
[that was actually a premise of a story I was thinking about writing — about magic coming back. The anti-neutrino jet comes and goes due to the rotation of the source. The ability to harness the power would lie in some dormant genetic feature.]
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I’m one of the few people who weren’t outraged by the idea of midichlorians. It sounds like George Lucas had big plans for the concept in the third trilogy. (Although based on the history, I’m not sure he would have ever actually made it himself.) If I was writing Star Wars, there’d be force using droids and other machines that can manipulate it by now. But that would make it much more sci-fi than fantasy, and probably not nearly as popular.
I noted to someone in this thread that there is fantasy where people can go to a shop and buy spells, I was thinking most specifically about D&D when I said that. You do have to be the right kind of player in order to hold and use spells, so there’s that. Although often anyone can use a magic artifact, albeit sometimes with hidden costs.
I hadn’t heard that about neutrinos. I knew about their prevalence, but not about any energy potential. Alastair Reynolds uses them for communication in some of his stories, a type of communication almost no one can block or intercept. I also sometimes hear about vacuum energy, although when I read about the actual numbers it seems less compelling.
I do think Zeewater got it right though when she noted that how widespread a capability is goes a long way toward whether we consider it magic or science. It’s why Jedi powers seem magical while hyperdrives don’t, even though they’re both fantasy.
Sounds like an interesting story idea. I remember seeing a series on the bookshelves decades about the magic going away and later returning (just based on the book titles and descriptions), but never got around to reading any of them.
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Hi Mike,
I’ve thought about this quite a bit and I think there is a distinction to be drawn, but I’d say it’s the distinction between the supernatural and the natural rather than the magical and the physical. If we define magic as supernatural, then we can fold this issue into the more general distinction. Of course we could imagine a fantasy world with natural “magic”, but then, as pointed out in the comic, I’m not sure why it would deserve the term (unless maybe we mean stage magic).
What characterises the natural, to me, is that we can understand the mechanisms underlying the phenomena we observe in terms of what’s going on at a lower level. You can always try to pin down how exactly something works. Broadly, and to simplify, we can understand economics and sociology in terms of the psychology of interacting humans, psychology in terms of neurology, neurology in terms of biology, biology in terms of chemistry, chemistry in terms of physics. At some point we hit the bedrock of fundamental physics, which can only be described mathematically.
What characterises the supernatural is that the explanations are irreducibly high level. They make intuitive narrative sense, but don’t really have underlying mechanisms. The fundamental concepts at play are concepts like “love”, “destiny”, “evil”, “soul”, “(libertarian) free will” etc. While maybe you can do some qualitative studies like we get in sociology or psychology, we are not really encouraged to think there is an underlying mechanism we could explore more deeply.
Look at almost any Harry Potter spell (for example) and you see how it depends on high level concepts like this. A magic word is uttered. A wand is waved. OK, but what counts as uttering a magical word? Does subvocalising count? Do only the mouth movements count or does air need to pass? Do the vocal chords need to be engaged? What if the speaker has a very nonstandard accent? You can imagine the universe would need to have a speech-to-text algorithm listening out for the magic words, but from which vantage points does it listen and what exactly is the algorithm it employs? Then what counts as a wand, and what are the tolerances for the appropriate gestures, etc.? Then you have the result of the spell. Suppose you are turned into a toad. Which kind of toad? What determines the genetic sequence of the toad you turn into? Is it an overweight toad or an underweight toad and why? When it hasn’t developed naturally, why should it be one way rather than another?
The same questions arise in all sorts of supernatural contexts. If Jesus really was the son of God, then where did his Y chromosome come from? If we had a sample of his DNA, then would we have a sequence of God’s own DNA, or did God merely author it, and if so, was it based on some actual human’s DNA or what?
You could invent answers for these questions of course. But the point of appealing to the supernatural is to discourage that sort of thinking. The assumption of naturalism is that these questions do actually have answers for any real phenomena. Whereas for the supernatural to be true, the right attitude would be to embrace the mystery and stop asking.
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Hi DM,
So the distinction would be between things that are, at least in principle, reducible, vs things that by their purported nature aren’t. I can see that. But as you indicate, it seems to come down to how we’re encouraged to approach it.
This reminds me of the people who say that things like consciousness or quantum measurement are fundamental, with any attempts to understand them in terms of their constituents discouraged. Although the proponents of these propositions would almost universally bristle at having their stance described as magical.
The difference in attitude also comes out in the approach scientists took to the other examples I listed in the post: gravity, biological movement, or heritability. These phenomena could not be reduced when they were initially included in scientific theories, but no one took them as magical. (Well, some did, but the people we now think of as scientists didn’t seem to.)
All of which is to say, I think what you’re saying is it comes down to how we think about it and our approach to dealing with it. I’m onboard with that, but it means the magical attitude is broader than contemporary use of the label. (I can imagine Philosopher Eric nodding.)
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But recall I was focusing on the supernatural, not the magical. People who might be offended at the term “magical” as applied tontheir views might not be at the term “supernatural” and often do not identify as naturalists.
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Good point, and you’re right, I forgot your distinction. Sorry. Although I wonder how many would see the “supernatural” label as any better.
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Well, for instance if you suggested to a devout Christian that Jesus turned water into wine by magic, they might be a little offended. If you said that Jesus had supernatural abiltities, or defined miracles as supernatural, I don’t think they would take offence. “Magic” has connotations of being trivial, or pagan, or even evil (witchcraft). “Supernatural” is more neutral.
Most philosophers identify as naturalists, and want to deny that their ideas entail anything supernatural. But I think some might be willing to embrace it, because they think there is something overly scientistic about the naturalist paradigm.
I think “magic” if defined as a supernatural activity probably does relate to what other people are saying about minds and wishes/will making things happen, but also possibly ritual, which is often a large part of magic. Like, if some fictional character just has supernatural telekenetic abilities, like Carrie, say, then I’m not sure “magic” is the best word for it. Magic has to have some sort of ritual element, even if it’s just saying “Expelliarmus” and waving a wand.
On whether it just comes down to how we’re encouraged to approach a phenomenon, I guess that is what I’m saying. But keep in mind that when we’re talking about magic we’re often talking about fiction, so arguably the intent of the author matters. For authors who conceive of their imagined otherworldly phenomena as having mechanistic underpinnings, then I would say they are at least attempting to portray a natural world. For authors who don’t think that way, and instead think exclusively in high-level, narrative terms (and I would put Rowling in this category), then they are portraying a supernatural world. This is for me the key distinction between sci-fi and fantasy, more so than robots vs elves. Star Wars is pure fantasy in my mind (midichlorians notwithstanding). Dragonriders of Pern is sci-fi.
If the world were actually like that of Harry Potter, then of course we could do science and undertake a reductionist program and work out the answers to the kinds of questions I posed before. But that’s just because I don’t think supernatural worlds can exist. If the world were actually like that, then it would necessarily be a natural world amenable to that kind of investigation.
But the author of a work of supernatural fiction is inviting us to imagine that the world doesn’t have to be naturalistic. What this means, I think, is that to engage with supernatural fiction as the author intends is to suspend disbelief and actively block out the impulse to understand the underlying mechanisms. Imagine that high-level concepts can exist sui generis. It’s fun to try to work out the rules as if it were a natural world, but it’s also beside the point. That’s what the word “magic” is intended to signify.
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I can see a devout believer accepting the “supernatural” label without much concern. The supernatural is a concept invented by theologians to distinguish divine action from nature, so unless they’re a religious naturalist (who do exist) then I’d think they’d be okay with it.
It’s philosophers and scientists who might baulk. I think of people like David Chalmers, who sees consciousness as fundamental, yet considers himself a naturalist (and as far as I know is in most ways aside from consciousness). As you note, some philosophers might be okay with it, but I see the vast majority of scientists taking it as an insult if their view is labeled that way.
And as I think about it, if the phenomena had resisted reduction for a long time (think gravity between Newton and Einstein), yet its causal role and structural relations could still be studied, then I think the scientists might be right. Which leans me back toward the rule based criteria. Mike Arnautov above linked to an old post he did where he distinguished between the Law vs Will views of reality. Of course, this might be another way of saying what you are, since a naturalist sees Will as a complex high level concept.
Anyway, definitely, in fiction we often take our cue from the author and their characters on what is or isn’t magic. And I agree that in the real world, we would just be unlikely to act that way. Mostly because, and this get to my overall point, the real distinction between the concepts isn’t really coherent.
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There need not be anything supernatural (on my view) about taking consciousness as fundamental. Because they’re not necessarily saying that any observable phenomenon behaves in a way that cannot be explained mechanistically.
It’s more views like free will libertarianism I would want to call supernatural.
Moving away from fiction, part of what it is to be a naturalist in this world is to think that there are always underlying mechanisms. And this means that we should be highly skeptical of phenomena for which underlying mechanisms seem very implausible. Belief in Harry Potter style magic is not -quite-but-almost incompatible with naturalism for this reason — because it’s hard to see how any plausible naturalistic mechanisms could underlie anything so obviously dependent on high-level concepts.
As I said, for magic words to work you’d need something like a speech-to-text algorithm embedded into the laws of physics. And that just doesn’t seem like the sort of thing we should expect to find embedded into the laws of physics. This echoes what Paul Torek was saying to some extent when he says supernaturalism is about complexity. This kind of thing is too complex and specific for it to be plausible that it should be there at the base level of reality, at least unless you think we’re in a simulation or something. If we’re in a simulation then all bets are off.
But that’s also why I don’t quite go along with Paul. If something like a magic word text-to-speech algorithm were built into the laws of physics, then that would be natural. Supernaturalism is the idea that we don’t need underlying mechanisms. Naturalism is the idea that we do, but doesn’t by itself rule anything out. It just suggests that phenomena that need very implausible strongly emergent complex mechanisms probably don’t exist.
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It seems like many of the fundamental consciousness people are in fact denying that it can be explained physically (which I basically equate with mechanics). Chalmers advocates for expanding our ontology for it. Russelian monists talk about “things in themselves”, which can never be known structurally. It doesn’t sound like an expectation of underlying mechanisms.
If reality responded to speech magic spell style, I think my credence in the simulation hypothesis would skyrocket, since that seems like the most plausible explanation, that some people have access to the command interface. Consider TNG characters giving orders to the computer on the holodeck. (It’s sometimes tempting to think of Tolkien’s Valar and Maiar as players in a simulation, everyone else being NPCs, and the rest of the Ainur sitting outside with the sim creator watching the game play out. I know there are books and anime that go there.)
I’m with you on expecting underlying mechanisms, but I’m a stone cold reductionist who reflexively assumes any apparent irreducibility of a complex system is a temporary roadblock. But it seems like there are a lot of people who call themselves naturalists who aren’t completely onboard. If they still expect to be able to discover the rules for irreducible phenomena, should they be booted from club naturalism?
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As long as consciousness-fundamentalists are just talking about stuff *is* rather than how it behaves, then I think that’s compatible with naturalism, because physics doesn’t talk about what stuff is. That’s a philosophical/metaphysical issue, and to me, naturalism is about expecting explanations to be reducible to physics. So as far as I’m concerned, the natural/supernatural distinction is about behaviour and explaining public observations only.
But where some people like Philip Goff recently start talking about consciousness having a causal role, then I think it begins to diverge from naturalism — but only as long as this causal role is supposed to be irreducibly high-level and cannot be captured mathematically (Goff is sort of noncommittal on this).
Nice interpretation of Tolkien!
> If they still expect to be able to discover the rules for irreducible phenomena, should they be booted from club naturalism?
No. As long as they think we can understand the rules to a mathematical level of precision, then mere belief in irreducibility is not enough to boot them from club naturalism. Because it seems that something has to be irreducible. At some point you hit bedrock physics. String theory, the standard model, whatever. You’re going to get to a point where you have a mathematical description that perfectly captures how nature behaves. At that point there’s no reason to think it can be reduced. Indeed, there is no possibility of reducing it, because if you really have a perfect description, then no further detail is possible.
Suppose that all electrons are actually made up of two smaller particles, one with charge -2 and one with charge +1, but that there is no possibility of ever teasing them apart or detecting them alone, and no empirical consequences at all of this being the case. Then we could never discover it. Once we have an accurate description of how nature behaves, there is no possible further reduction (and so, on my view, I would say that what I just supposed about the electron is meaningless or false).
(I might make an exception for some sort of theoretical reduction that had no empirical consequences but which simplified our existing theories — e.g. replacing a perfectly accurate geocentric/epicycle model with an equivalent heliocentric model — but at the same time I wouldn’t say one empirically equivalent model is more true than another, it’s just more useful)
Now, you can say that what is not irreducible has to be simple. It can’t be anything as complex as a speech-to-text algorithm. But I don’t know why that should be. The fundamental laws of physics could be extremely complex as far as I know. I don’t think they’re going to contain a speech-to-text algorithm because that’s really specifically tailored to some readily identifiable purpose and so extremely strong evidence of design. But nothing in my view of naturalism rules out some very complex irreducible phenomenon from being built into the laws of physics.
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I guess if we’re going to let 18th century deists count as naturalists, there’s no reason to exclude people who hold to an epiphenomenal view of consciousness. But as you note about Goff, it’s a tough stance to stick with consistently. Philosophers often seem to want to have their epiphenomenal cake and causally eat it too.
On complex irreducibility, I think I agree. As I noted above, personally I expect that kind of irreducibility to be temporary, although “temporary” could last for centuries. I disagree with people declaring something like that fundamental, but as long as they’re still trying to understand the rules by which it operates, I’m not going to accuse them of taking a magical or supernatural position. Although the word “dogmatic” might come up if they insist any investigation or theorizing about its components shouldn’t happen. (Here I’m thinking of the people who blocked work on quantum foundations for decades.)
I’m with you on sub-electron particles. If their existence proved useful, then I’d be inclined to accept them provisionally. But that would mean they have some kind of structural relations to phenomena we can observe. Without that, we’re back to epiphenomenalism. I might tolerate the people who think that way, but I’m not inclined to join them. It seems like the probability of any guesses we make about epiphenomenal realities is so unlikely to be right that there’s little value in spending time on them (except maybe for entertainment).
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DM stole my thunder on this one (well, part of my thunder). But I don’t think it comes down to the attitude of the audience. Rather, it comes down to a combination of Strong Emergence and high complexity. The complexity part, I’ll explain in another reply. But the Strong Emergence part, DM already explained: a pattern emerges at a high level (wands, magic words) which cannot be predicted from the behavior of components in a general context.
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Maybe I explained a bit better what I mean about attitude in my last reply to Mike.
I think strong emergence could potentially be naturalistic as long as the rules can be defined without any ambiguity, i.e. mathematically. It’s supernatural if your explanation bottoms out in high-level intuitive concepts like ‘will’.
Naturalistic strong emergence might be the kind of thing we see in computer games like Minecraft. There’s a block-level simulation of what goes on from one frame to the next. Water flows. Lava burns wood. Sand falls down. Etc. All local, low-level laws.
But there are also higher-level “strongly emergent” laws. Like if you place three iron blocks and a carved pumpkin in a certain arrangement, they disappear and an Iron Golem is spawned in their place. This is a pattern emerging at a high level that cannot be predicted from the behaviour of components in a general context, so it counts as strong emergence by your definition. But it counts as naturalistic in my definition because what happens is utterly precise and mathematical, without ambiguity: it has to be to be codified into a system that can be simulated on a computer.
So while I think the world has to be natural, that doesn’t necessarily rule out strong emergence as a possibility.
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Right, the Iron Golem is scientifically analyzable. That’s why high complexity is my second requirement for non-naturalism; strong emergence is not enough. By high complexity, I mean that any attempt to specify the rules is comparably complex to just listing all the instances.
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I think the distinction between physical and non physical is roughly between explanation in terms of immutable laws and explanation in terms of free agents.
The distinction between magic and science appears to me to be that magic operates more by formal and final causality, and has a distinctly mental element to it, without being understood as reducible or convertible to material and efficient causality. That’s why magic relies on magic words and a person’s intentions, and science generally does not (psychology and social sciences are arguably exceptions). It’s also why magic generally has no trouble identifying the object it applies to, and excluding other things in the region.
I think it also explains why ideas like vitalism have been seen as unscientific.
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The laws vs free agents seems to be a recurring theme in this discussion. I like the idea of adding irreducible teleology to the idea of magic.
It seems like vitalism today is regarded as unscientific, to the extent it’s discussed at all. But scientists seemed to treat it as a legitimate concept before the modern synthesis unified genetics and evolution. Similar to phlogiston and the ether, it’s one of those concepts that just turned out to be redundant.
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Lol
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The argument proves too much. Consider this rough parallel:
The economics prof is explaining how prices are set by supply and demand. A student objects: this is just sociology! You’re just making observations about how people interact with each other!
Words pick out clusters of objects or processes that occur in human experience. Clusters of things that resemble each other strongly and resemble things outside the cluster less strongly. Two clusters can touch, or fuzzily overlap, without merging into one. “Birds” and “reptiles”, for example (think about evolution here). Or “economics” and “sociology”.
“Magic” and “science” can be separable, provided that their overlap is small compared to their areas of within-category resemblance. To borrow DM’s example, if the scientific analysis of various “magic wands” yields wildly different things, and if trying to specify the boundary between wand and non-wand in physics and chemistry terms is a fool’s errand, then you’re off the edge of the map, matey. Here there be monsters – and magic. The fool’s errand is a matter of the physical complexity of the boundary between wand and non-wand. From within a magical approach, the boundary is far simpler, even if still complex enough to require years of study.
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Your model is similar to DM’s (and I see you guys talking up above), but more ontological. But my concern is similar. Even if we have wand actions which seem irreducible and unrelated to anything scientific, they’re still having effects in the world, and still follow some patterns, otherwise no one could figure out how to use them.
It also seems like someone would have had to have made the wand. Even if it’s just a broken off tree branch, someone consecrated it, or did something with it to make it more than just a tree branch. We may not be able to understand how the wand works. It itself could remain a black box. But we could still study everything around it, including all its temporospatial interactions.
All of which brings us back to the comics’ point, that if it’s something we can make observations of, learn patterns, use those patterns to make predictions, and then use that to control its effects, it still seems like a science of some kind. Maybe science for something irreducible, but still something amenable to learning the rules of how it works.
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You seem to be equating “science” to its Latin root ancestor meaning, IIRC, knowledge. That’s not what science means today. If it did, music, auto repair, and a boatload of other human activities would be “science” because they involve a corpus of knowledge (music theory, etc.). That’s not how people generally use the word “science”. You’re off the edge of the science map, matey.
In various fictional universes, magic *can* sometimes be so systematic that it’s subject to the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” and so, a science. But not in all such universes.
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Roughly speaking, my definition of science is making observations and coming up with theories to explain the observations that can then be tested and refined against additional observations. The methods in the various fields of professional sciences seem too diverse to be much more specific than that. And yes, that does mean a plumber testing a theory about what’s wrong in my pipes is being scientific. I’ve always found objections to that odd. It risks adding a mystique to science that I don’t think serves us well.
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You can be scientific, i.e. take a scientific attitude, without thereby making your field into a science. I don’t see that as demeaning, it’s just using words in a conventional way. Which we have to do in order to avoid miscommunication.
I suspect you’re trying to make science into an Aristotelian category, with necessary and sufficient conditions.
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Nothing so ambitious. Just exploring whether there’d be any real difference between magic that actually worked and science.
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“science is the successor”
Exactly as Clarke said…anything sufficiently etc. This goes to the heart of everything I have been saying over the past few years.
I may talk in terms of art and religion, but I always think of Teilhard de Chardin and the (discredited?) Frank Tipler. Both had their Omega Point, and, leaving aside ethics (difficult to do in a religious context). they were effectively talking about much the same thing.
I can’t be bothered to develop my argument, but I think you will know what I mean.
The mind is calmed and transformed by meditation and plainsong. Think of that creature in the Banks book who becomes the head nun in a monastery in the hell world.
She knows there is no “god” as such and yet her life in that monastery brings her to that same place that Julian of Norwich reached. A sort of Elysium.
I am not a believer in gods, as you know. But as I have said many times, like de Chardin and Tipler, I believe intelligent life may/can/ should become godlike.
But you know my odd views well enough.
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I think the idea that the capabilities of our distant descendants will seem like magic to us is entirely plausible. I haven’t studied Tipler in detail, but I suspect what got him in trouble wasn’t the speculation, but claiming contemporary physics supports it, along with some apparently misleading characterizations of it.
I will say I’ve read some of his scientific papers and they seemed reasonable (to this non-physicist anyway). But I haven’t read any of his books or other philosophical writing.
That nun, if I recall correctly, went on to become an angel of merciful death. That book went all kinds of places.
Nothing wrong with odd views. The typical person’s views today would be shocking for anyone from a century ago.
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The Heinlein story variable star(co written with spider robinson after roberts death) looks at an aspect of the science that we know from the perspective of the future. The commentary is how now we believe we know facts about how the universe works simply from computer modelling based off the minuscule amount we actually can verify. This commentary reverses the view of clarkes statement. We are lucky enough to be living through magic coming to life. My mum was born in 1950 and i argue in her 75 years she has seen the most amazing technological advancements humans have made in a tiny period of time. If we simply take a smartphone and break it into its main features camera both still and video with amazing zoom and editing capabilities, music player(and maker) games, software applications, storge and within the last decade the ability to video chat with someone anywhere in the world. Its also a phone. Stop and look at these digital capabilities and track them back to their analogue anncestors through 75 years…..its magic.
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There was a science writer, I think John Horgan, who noted that his grandmother lived from something like 1915 to 1975. She went from a world where horse drawn carriages were still the norm, to men standing on the moon. Horgan went on to argue that progress has slowed, but to your point, progress overall hasn’t. We now all carry around computers in our pockets orders of magnitude more powerful than the ones used in the moon landings.
And the fact that we all carry around cameras has unveiled a lot of the world no one could catch before, like car accidents as they happen, crimes in progress, police misbehaving, and many other things. It’s also worth noting what’s not included in that; we still have no clear pictures of aliens landing on country roads, Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness monster.
And definitely, for most people, the computer / camera / music sound system we’re all carrying around amounts to magic. Only those who’ve spent a lot of time learning the right arcane arts have any idea how they work.
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Awesome i now get look into a new science writter. Thanks
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