09.29.08
Magic
Perhaps there is magic that some people have and others do not, and cannot, have. I do not know. However there is more than one way to skin a cat.
Consider the maxim, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” What does ‘sufficiently advanced technology’ mean? The words ‘sufficiently advanced’ imply there is something futuristic about this technology, but this is not a necessary requirement; the technology needs to be different from what is known, but not futuristic. Any unknown technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Of course there are plenty of technologies that I am unfamiliar with that I do not count as magic. The upshot is that knowledge is not the determining factor in distinguishing magic because any one of us may be ignorant of a particular technology, but, if we desired to, we could go find out how the unknown technologies work. Magic requires that we cannot simply pick up a book and read how a something happens.
Therefore a more accurate description of magic is: Any unexplainable technology is indistinguishable from magic. If some technology is unexplainable then how it works cannot be written.
We now have a question of technology and meaning: if some technology is unexplainable, then what is the purpose of calling that thing technology? To ascribe a property to some unknown object is begging the question and hence the use of the world technology in this instance is misleading:
Anything unexplainable is indistinguishable from magic.
This description of magic may seem like a non-starter because it would be impossible to learn something that is unexplainable by definition. However, magic only requires a special kind of unexplainability: magic cannot be explained in terms of science. So magic is not completely unexplainable, only scientifically unexplainable.
As broadly construed as possible, science is a description of the world in terms of objects made up of other objects according to some process. Physics tries to find the smallest objects that, when combined by some process, make up all the biggest objects in the universe. Biology looks to find the fundamental objects and processes that make up ecosystems and life.
To get around science we would need something that necessarily cannot be described in terms of another object according to any process. This might seem impossible because of the open-ended ‘according to any process’ clause but, compositional accounts of natural language have consistently failed in certain circumstances. Therefore, if you wish to look for magic, I suggest understanding why this happens.
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