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I'm reposting Dumber Than Parrot's thread (minus his stupidity) because I thought the topic was interesting.

IMO it's important to define what magic is, because the definition probably varies from person to person. I tend to use the Oxford definition when defining magic:

Magic
[Noun] The power of apparently influencing events by using mysterious or supernatural forces

If I were to use that definition as a starting point it seems like "magic" can be viewed as more of a state of mind than something literal. If I witness something and I have absolutely no knowledge, experiences or senses that can give me an understanding of what it is that I am witnessing, then from my perspective I am witnessing "magic." It doesn't really matter what the thing is so long as I have no ability to understand it via "natural" means. Note that magic doesn't have to be literally supernatural --> anything sufficiently mysterious from my perspective would qualify. And since it is a state of mind, I can end up seeing "magic" due to hallucinations, mental disorders etc.

Of course, this also implies that as I gain knowledge and experiences, and as my ability to sense the universe around me increases, things that were initially "magic" from my perspective would no longer be so once I have the beginnings of the ability to understand them. Note that this doesn't mean that my understanding necessarily has to be correct, merely that I am able to understand it enough to know that there is a rational natural explanation for it.

So, do I believe in magic? I would say yes, in that I believe in the possibility that there may be things in the universe that are beyond the ability of human beings to comprehend or understand, and thus they would seem "magical" from my perspective if I were to witness them (I have yet to actually witness such a thing though). And I believe in "magic" in the sense of hallucinations / mental disorders / my brain trying to "see" things in the dark etc being able to distort my perspective of reality so that I witness mysterious or supernatural things even though they didn't actually happen.

I don't know if my ideas make any sense or not, but that what happens when you try to type something when you are lacking sleep

I tried summoning demons and the like when I was younger. Nothing ever happened and I wound up going full blown atheist.

Sometimes I had dreams that I remember just enough for them to apply in future situations. Or have my life do something or more usually just think something that I feel I already thought about in that distant dream.

I don't think they are necessarily future premonitions. Maybe just thoughts that occur in my dream that later fit thoughts I later have. Maybe later I feel this way because I already thought about something and didn't remember. Deja vu, I think.

Otherwise, I remain pretty thoroughly anti-supernatural. If the supernatural would exist it would be integrated into our existence like many other features of the universe and ourselves.

Nope, I'm a strict materialist. I admit the logical possibility of magic, but the available evidence points to the complete and utter absence of any such thing.

Zeropoint wrote:Nope, I'm a strict materialist. I admit the logical possibility of magic, but the available evidence points to the complete and utter absence of any such thing.

Honest question: is that possible? Isn't "magic" (defined as supernatural, thus outside the laws of physics) outside the realm of logic? If there's an observable effect, there is an explanation for it.

I have to wonder how much of human belief in the supernatural is based on natural selection. Throughout history, there seems to be people "ahead of their time." I recall models being talked about for the Sun's energy source a thousand+ years ago. They knew the Earth was at least a few million years old, and if the Sun burned coal, it wouldn't last but 500,000 years because they also had an idea of the mass of the Sun. These were people wholly ignorant of nuclear fusion.

So, once again I have to wonder if these types are "freaks" in that they have/had a genetic predisposition against belief in the supernatural. No matter what we'd like to think: people are smarter and more educated than they've ever been in history, but there's still a rather large belief in a greater power. Even for me: I believe in a "God" even though I know it's bullshit. But just like I know there's no Grue waiting in the dark to eat me as I stumble around blindly, sometimes I get an overriding sense of fear in the dark, even though it happens incredibly rarely as I've become older.

On the flip side, there seems to be another group of "freaks" willing to believe the most ludicrous of things (flat Earth) no matter how much evidence is shown to the contrary. I won't go as far to say there's mental illness involved, but after talking to these people there's this huge irrational push to believe in the supernatural which tends to clash with their rational side as they look to shoehorn even the flimsiest of "evidence" to their cause.

To paraphrase my comment in the trashheap thread: that fear of the dark and the idea of something just beyond their senses likely kept humans around long enough to develop nukes to fight off those terrors. Some people didn't get that fear and some people have way too much of it.

I think fear is a big part of the equation. Our brains evolved fear to focus our attention on things that endanger us. Our various capacities for reasoning (both good and bad) get turbocharged because of fear. Part of the problem is that so does things like our imaginations and in our imagination, the line between "real" and "imaginary" is blurry in practice. Until you haven't seen a bear or any of its demonstrated capacities, they are practically imaginary creatures.

Of course simply knowing and not knowing is part of magic. To someone who doesn't understand radioactivity, how else can they explain a radioisotopes on the surface of an area that is harmful to those that stay there, that inhale the dust?

Magic is a filler concept. It is not simply about explanations, but knowledge and knowing. "Because magic" is our fist grasp at knowledge of a complex thing. We had magical explanations for things before we climbed the ladder of study towards something scientific as we can make it.

Also it is a filler for experiences that we otherwise are hard-pressed to place. The human brain's perception of reality can easily lag behind actual reality. Dreams and magic are often related because dreams are hard to explain. Out-of-body experiences. Shamans undergo an altered state of consciousness to do their work.

Zixinus wrote:Otherwise, I remain pretty thoroughly anti-supernatural. If the supernatural would exist it would be integrated into our existence like many other features of the universe and ourselves.

I will note that a lot of people think it is. I mean, they think that asking the Virgin Mary for stuff is a normal integrated feature of how the universe works, or whatever.

Isn't "magic" (defined as supernatural, thus outside the laws of physics) outside the realm of logic?

Of course not. If "magic" were supernatural and outside the laws of physics, but real, it would have some sort of observable effect (by definition of "real"). For example, it could be the case that anyone who blasphemes against a particular thunder god while standing outdoors gets immediately struck by lightning, with no regard to the atmospheric conditions required to generate lightning by physical processes. It could be the case that sticking a pin through the heart of a properly constructed voodoo doll gives the victim a statistically significant chance of having a heart attack, regardless of all other factors for heart problems.

However, if we study these things, we find that they don't happen. Over the millennia, humans have imagined countless supernatural phenomena, and countless supernatural explanations for observed phenomena of unknown origin. Every time, without exception, that we have come to an understanding of such phenomena, we've discovered that they either can't be verified to exist or have a perfectly natural explanation. We have given the supernatural far more than a fair chance, and it has failed.

Alejandro Jodorowsky uses psychomagic as in his mixture of the Jungian and Freudian psychology he subscribes to, with his knowhow in the various mystical traditions from Tarot to kinds of Buddhism, to his abilities as a great artist, using a mixture of non-consciously, irrationally meaningful symbols and rituals to therapeutically address people's traumas, neuroses and such.

It's not literal magic as in supernatural forces. But it is beyond physical sciences because it is something that manipulates the conscious and not-so-conscious aspects of not only individual minds, but the stuff passed in between minds, the memes, the social constructs, our interpretation of them, our perceptual tendencies.

It's got more in common with say Campbellian archetypes - monomyths, methemes and art - than it does with Harry Houdini kind of shit.

Same stuff Alan Moore does, what Grant Morrison uses for his sigil magic.

It's more like... social-cognitive hacks. Symbolic gestures of images to jolt your brain programming.

Like how Jodorowsky would say the Tarot isn't about predicting the future. Whoever says that is a fucking charlatan. The Tarot's symbols are more like... when you draw them, the one you draw is not really a predestination of anything. But the one you draw is representative of an aspect of a person's being. His psychosocial being. His character as a person. Because each card does mean something to a person. Like an ink blot test.

From that card, nothing magical in itself happens, but in trying to decipher personal relevance or personal meaning from what the symbol represents, how it relates to their perception of their life-narrative, a person experiences introspection, contemplation, suggestion, etc. that might move him in whatever ways.

The magicians and shamans of the past weren't literally accessing magical mumbo jumbo. They were manipulating - for better or worse - psychosocial constructs. Like what artists do today. But if you come from an era where people were smashing rocks and hunting dinosaurs, of course your language for that will be "magical incomprehensible shit" even though today it would be more in common with "cool marketing advertisements" than David Blaine.

I think the same applies to other mystical traditions.

YES during the past they did literally think there were spirits and such. They explained it as such. But let's remember, back then they didn't have the language or the idea or the system to distinguish scientific approaches from religious approaches, it was the same thing.

So the scientific explanation of "use body mechanics, whip-like movement, of both musculature and tendons, combined with hip and leg mechanics, to make your fist punch the guy's face in" ends up in the past becoming "wooo the chii you harrrnnessss the conflicting pulls of the yin and the draws of the yaaang as your body circulates in the ring of the bagua aligning you with the wooorrrrrlllldddd" because language and thought was different then.

Same with their psychotherapeutic approaches.

Now the explanation will be different. But the ancient symbol-ritualistic ways of punching a guy in the face - or trying to fix his daddy issues or his mommy issues that prevent him from boning his wife properly - may still work in some aspects.

I wouldn't say it's "beyond physical sciences", just at a higher level of abstraction, in the same way that the HTML code for what you're looking at now is a higher level of abstraction than the transistors switching on and off to make the computer work.

Magic is perception in the mind, of both within the mind and outside of it. It is the effect without cause (know to the perceiver). Even when doing it, is manipulating just the effects without knowing the cause.

Man, the thread is turning into a challenge of trying to say the most profound thing about magic. It's a good thing.

Zeropoint wrote:I wouldn't say it's "beyond physical sciences", just at a higher level of abstraction, in the same way that the HTML code for what you're looking at now is a higher level of abstraction than the transistors switching on and off to make the computer work.

No realistic application of the physical sciences directly to an HTML coding problem will give you useful knowledge about how to solve your HTML coding problem. In that sense, HTML coding is also "beyond physical sciences," because it manipulates purely abstract information, which is governed by fields such as information theory, logic, and psychology.

Notably, sciences like psychology and information theory often present alternative means of achieving some of the same results Shroom describes, which traditionally were achieved through 'magic.'

Depends on how baked I am, after a good session in the bong shed, perception & reality start getting a bit confused.
The sober outside observer would tell me I'm high as a kite and to go to bed, but from my altered state of reality I'm seeing magic.

Simon_Jester wrote: Notably, sciences like psychology and information theory often present alternative means of achieving some of the same results Shroom describes, which traditionally were achieved through 'magic.'

I believe psychology and information theory and sociology and applied chaos theory and memetics and whatever - with understanding of the biochemical processes and the "physical science" aspect of the process but taking into consideration and eventually delving into and quantifying the complex "emergences" in the non-physical interpersonal feedback loops and social constructs - will do what "magic" used to do which is pretty much what art does in varying degrees.

Anyway I guess in this field, the term "metaphysical" is really appropriate. The systems of things isn't physical.

Philosophy, epistemology, all that stuff, Wittgenstein, Slavoj Zizek, Noam Chomsky, Sayid. I would say the critique of ideology is a form of studying a certain kind of magic, most certainly more useful than most of the stuff they teach in Hogwarts. Better than whatsherface's Divination classes...

The Karl Roves and Manaforts of the past, riling up the crowds, rousing the tribes and gathering them to support the chieftain and imbuing it with frevor and such potent emotion... those would be shamans.

I think their powers today are so much more than those of the magicians of the past anyway...

Weaponized memetics, arts, magics, we're seeing it today. It will alchemically transmute your Francos, Marcoses, Duvaliers from butchers to heroes and like Prosperity Gospel come true, their descendants will once again swim in wealth and power and the adulation of the masses blinded by mist and mirrors.

Tribble wrote:I tend to use the Oxford definition when defining magic:

Magic
[Noun] The power of apparently influencing events by using mysterious or supernatural forces

I feel that's a pretty weak-arse definition. I mean, I can "apparently" make a coin vanish (well enough to fool a seven-year-old. Let's admit it, they don't take much fooling), and I consider magnetism to be pretty "mysterious", but neither of them are actual magic, so I reject the Oxford definition.
Personally, I define magic as "Something that breaks the laws of nature, not just as we know them, but as they truly are"--which is impossible, so no, I don't believe in magic.

Korto wrote:

Tribble wrote:I tend to use the Oxford definition when defining magic:

Magic
[Noun] The power of apparently influencing events by using mysterious or supernatural forces

I feel that's a pretty weak-arse definition. I mean, I can "apparently" make a coin vanish (well enough to fool a seven-year-old. Let's admit it, they don't take much fooling), and I consider magnetism to be pretty "mysterious", but neither of them are actual magic, so I reject the Oxford definition.
Personally, I define magic as "Something that breaks the laws of nature, not just as we know them, but as they truly are"--which is impossible, so no, I don't believe in magic.

So if I am interpreting your definition correctly magic is impossible? Even if the Harry Potter universe's feats were real that still wouldn't be magic, as it would just be a branch of science or "laws of nature" that is poorly understood?

Tribble wrote:

Korto wrote:

Tribble wrote:I tend to use the Oxford definition when defining magic:

Magic
[Noun] The power of apparently influencing events by using mysterious or supernatural forces

I feel that's a pretty weak-arse definition. I mean, I can "apparently" make a coin vanish (well enough to fool a seven-year-old. Let's admit it, they don't take much fooling), and I consider magnetism to be pretty "mysterious", but neither of them are actual magic, so I reject the Oxford definition.
Personally, I define magic as "Something that breaks the laws of nature, not just as we know them, but as they truly are"--which is impossible, so no, I don't believe in magic.

So if I am interpreting your definition correctly magic is impossible? Even if the Harry Potter universe's feats were real that still wouldn't be magic, as it would just be a branch of science or "laws of nature" that is poorly understood?

I've never seen anyone give a definition of magic that didn't involve "stuff we don't understand and can't explain". Frankly i'm partial to explaining it off as a way to manipulate reality using your mind.

I like to think of real-life magic as sort of... the feelings you get from things that most other beings just don't interpret (visual art, music, etc.).

Boards of Canada says something similar:

We do care about people and the state of the world, and if we're spiritual at all it's purely in the sense of caring about art and inspiring people with ideas.

do actually believe that there are powers in music that are almost supernatural. I think you actually manipulate people with music... [SolarpunkFans' note: I think when they say "manipulate" it's not in the sense of "brainwashing" as some conspiracy nuts think, but rather emotionally and on what kind of thoughts you might focus on (for a little while at least).]

The idea of the perfect album is this amorphous thing that we're always aiming at […] the whole point of making music is at least to aim at your own idea of perfection.

So something like that, only involving broader categories than just music. If that makes any sense at all.

Tribble wrote:

Korto wrote:

Tribble wrote:I tend to use the Oxford definition when defining magic:

Magic
[Noun] The power of apparently influencing events by using mysterious or supernatural forces

I feel that's a pretty weak-arse definition. I mean, I can "apparently" make a coin vanish (well enough to fool a seven-year-old. Let's admit it, they don't take much fooling), and I consider magnetism to be pretty "mysterious", but neither of them are actual magic, so I reject the Oxford definition.
Personally, I define magic as "Something that breaks the laws of nature, not just as we know them, but as they truly are"--which is impossible, so no, I don't believe in magic.

So if I am interpreting your definition correctly magic is impossible? Even if the Harry Potter universe's feats were real that still wouldn't be magic, as it would just be a branch of science or "laws of nature" that is poorly understood?

I'll describe it like this. Imagine there was a Unified Theory of Everything, and it described exactly how the universe worked, from the quantum level, from time absolute zero, in the centre of black holes. It was complete and it was correct. This IS how the universe works.

'Magic' is anything that can ignore those laws. Nothing can ignore those laws, but it can, because it's magic.

Just insufficiently understood natural laws aren't enough. A mobile phone to a lost tribe deep in New Guinea might seem like magic, but 'seems like' isn't 'is'.

I won't judge on Harry Potter. If the laws of nature state absolutely that energy cannot be created or destroyed, and yet Potter magic can, then it's magic.
Of course, Potter's fiction, and the OP was referring to the real world as far as I'm aware.

There aren't a lot of things that scare me, but one of them is a world without logic. Gods, spells, all that shit, are not things that I will accept. If they are real and they kill me, fine, I was wrong, but until that happens, fuck them. And if it is real, I will stride into Hell with my head held high, holding a fire sword of my own invention, and hold my own as long as I can.

Raw Shark wrote:There aren't a lot of things that scare me, but one of them is a world without logic. Gods, spells, all that shit, are not things that I will accept. If they are real and they kill me, fine, I was wrong, but until that happens, fuck them. And if it is real, I will stride into Hell with my head held high, holding a fire sword of my own invention, and hold my own as long as I can.

By this logic people must scare you (and that's totally logical cause people suck ). Do you accept daddy issues, neuroses, complexes, traumas, delusions and mental illnesses? On individual and collective levels, even multigenerational ones?

My goodness illogical things don't have to be shit that'll make you stride into Hell. That you automatically assume so and proclaim to grandiosely wave a flaming phallus you'll hold high is in itself a sign of magic anyway.

You know what's even more magical than literal Gods and spells and shit that you won't accept? Gods and spells that utterly don't exist at all and that don't need your acceptance and yet still manage to define the lives of countless people over countless generations for better or worse. You'll dismiss that as delusion and not "real magic" yes, that is true. But for it to have that kind of effect - without literal Vlodemorts spewing Aveda Kalaberas at Dumblydores - in a way, paradoxically, makes it all the more potent. Or potent in a different way.


Wasn't this a plot point of the Wizard of Oz, by the way?

Shroom Man 777 wrote:By this logic people must scare you (and that's totally logical cause people suck ).

People scare me a lot. I can't read them. Sometimes they give me money or hugs; sometimes they give me broken bones. I don't know until it happens.

Shroom Man 777 wrote:Do you accept daddy issues, neuroses, complexes, traumas, delusions and mental illnesses? On individual and collective levels, even multigenerational ones?

Not much choice in the matter, except for the delusions. I'm as crazy as a shithouse rat, and I have no delusions about that.

Shroom Man 777 wrote:Wasn't this a plot point of the Wizard of Oz, by the way?

I've always thought so.

See, that's magic and you've gotta understand it so you can defend yourself against the dark arts.

(And ironically that means the Vlodemorts of real life are all pretty much shams like Gilderoy Lockheart... which I don't know if it's scarier or less-scary. That the ones who do Dark Lord bullshit aren't really much in person and are just shysters.)

On the other hand you've gotta realize that the irrationality and illogicalness also create wonderful things. Arts and such. And they have their own method, operate on another level, so while on the surface one will be moved by an art and might have no comprehension of how something incredible is made, it might be utterly irrational to be reduced to a weeping mess because some dude in a ridiculous wig is bellowing on stage, but the practitioners of it likewise know their craft and the minutiae of it and its technical aspects... even if their explanations are wrong, even if it is akin to an 18th century scientician making incendiaries but thinking the flames are caused by phlogistons, the effects are still there...

I've gone at length to mention what I think of magic - differing terminologies and differing levels of understanding of old ass psychosocial phenomena that people have been tapping into throughout the ages, with varying degrees of skill, varying degrees of intuition and effectiveness...

I think the effects are a kind of emergence. Fractal components (individual psychological, group psychosocial, environmental, dialectic, ideologic...) all combining and becoming more than the sum of its parts.

And hey - it might seem like total nonsense, it might be total nonsense. But if someone has cultivated into his tribesfolk the belief of a Jabbowocky and that belief either scares the shit out of the people into doing something (running away, or hurling rocks at the enemy tribes), then despite its total nonsense, the shaman's myth... is SUPER EFFECTIVE! Just like pokemangs!

Like, I don't think Richard Dawkins could galvanize ancient stone-age or bronze-age peasants to genocide ancient Canaan. So if you're a milwanker who likes oorahooah military science fiction then there, the Old Testament was totally military science fiction that got the job done.

Think about it, our liberal secular progressive possibly-leftist order will be eroded in due time by all these mouthbreathing demagogue asses but centuries from now rock-chuckers in the Middle East will still be murderizing each other. Hah. So which of us are peddling the ineffectual BS and which of us are peddling SUPER EFFECTIVE ideas driving people on for eons?

General Zod wrote:I tried summoning demons and the like when I was younger. Nothing ever happened and I wound up going full blown atheist.

You obviously succeeded and that's why you're a filthy heathen and will burn in hell for all eternity. But it's cool (not hell) I'll be there too!

I read out loud the Necronomicon spell to raise the dead in a veterans cemetery on Memorial Day while a boy scout sticking little American flags in front of the headstones. It didn't work. But the old cow grazing grounds through the trees behind it with rock hard cow pies grew some awesome magic mushrooms, if that counts.

As far as actual supernatural shit, I believe I may have had a dream predicting the Oklahoma City bombing but I think it more likely the dream was kind of warped because it was 2 weeks before it happened and I probably just remember the bits of dream and fill in the facts without being conscious of it. I also have a magnificent psychopath radar.

I'm a firm believer in magic, albeit mostly in the sense of alchemy-as-Jungian-psychology sense that a lot of rational believers (insofar as any of us nutjobs who believe in this bullshit can be rational, at least) have. It's less the usual 'I cast fireball' and more 'I summon and empower Abraxes, who is emblematic of an unmastered force in my own psyche that I need to harness for a purpose'. It becomes an interesting take on the ability of the human mind to create and empower alternate selves and voices and hand them control - essentially, if you decide you need the assistance of Duke Vassago to win the love of a woman, you'll get it. It won't be Duke Vassago literally handing you her heart on a silver platter - it will be the part of you that, as a goetic magician, you build in the archetypal image of Vassago's power to do the job, which will entail changing your own habits and behaviours to make you more appealing to that woman on some level. In this respect it's not really meaningfully different from the masks we construct and wear on a day-to-day basis, with the exception that it is a conscious decision that is reinforced via archetypal images that speak to the goetic magician (etc, same for other traditions more or less) on a deeply personal level.

I also think that there's more to a lot of 'magic' than we currently understand, but that magic in its proper sense usually has either an existing rational explanation (e.g. in pointing the bone cases, there's either the incredible power of the human mind to literally kill its own host body with psychosomatic symptoms or lethal wound infections inflicted covertly, depending on which tradition it comes from) or an explanation that has yet to be determined but will one day be established, either reconciling the phenomena with currently understood physics or forcing a shift in the perspective of those physics, with the vast majority of cases falling firmly into the first category or being disprovable or impossible to verify with current tools, methods, and models of both science and magic.

The human mind can also be deliberately induced, with effort, to enter into visionary and trance states with meditation, which is where a lot of the occultists who literally 'see' their demons etc go. Add old tricks like King Solomon's Triangle actually being a mirror with two candles (which produces the same visual warping that makes the 'bloody mary' game work), the habitual use of entheogens, and the deliberate inculcation of a visual, linguistic, and symbolic coding on the mind, and you start seeing the demons you summon up, along with the other elements of rituals that magicians insist can be 'seen/felt/touched' and are 'real'. In that sense, magic is both real and unreal.

It is illusory, hallucinatory, and impossible to prove as a physical reality, but the experience of seeing the demon/etc is very real in the same way that a schizophrenic's voices are simultaneously false on the objective level (they are not actual voices others can hear...) and terrifyingly real on the subjective (...but good luck ignoring them if you have them.) It can be used for personal good or for personal ill, or used against those who believe in it by exploiting the same pathways and archetypes they've built in their own minds, and much as my mindset lends credence to ideas of curses etc, that is probably the real extent of it: Magic is subjectively real, and objectively false. Becoming a practicioner of a magical art (or of numerology, especially kabbalistic gematria) is essentially the process of inducing an altered state of consciousness that overlaps strongly with mental illness, which is part of why a lot of people who believe and practice wind up utter nutters if they weren't in the first place.