The Great Tree

[Eleri]

CJ's sig came up in a discussion on faith, skepticism, and belief.

[Quaxo]

I like your addition, Eleri. Very much.

I too have been a fan of CJ's siggie.
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Beware the butterflies of DOOOOM! and exposition

KI:671409

[dcos]

Yes I too have noticed it many times and found it interesting and thought provoking. Always intended to mention it but was always too busy, what with just having my thoughts provoked and all

[CuzinJohn]

Aw... Y'all are making my siggie blush from all the love it's getting.

For those who don't know the source, it's a line from "The Books Of Magic" by Neil Gaiman... paraphrased a bit so it fit within the confines this board has on sigs.

Since the thought has been provoked, let's open a discussion!

I've always been a fan of magic... used to love the David Copperfield tv specials as a kid, saw him live twice. Doug Henning was good too, though kinda creepy, even by 1970's standards. I hobbied as a parlor magician in High School, and while my slight of hand skills ain't what they once was, I still know a trick or two.

I know all that stuff is called 'magic' but is really 'illusionism', 'slight-of-hand', 'smoke and mirrors', and any other phrase you'd care to insert.

However, I beleive in Magic. Whether or not it truly exists anymore is open for debate, but I've always believed that it *did* exist. Reach back into mythology and beleifs around the world, every culture believed in Magic. Every culture had stories about people 'turning into' other things, or people turning one thing into another, or doing other sorts of magic. It's often taken names like "Witchcraft", "Alchemy", "Wizardry", "Miracle", but it's all Magic none the less.

Where has all the Magic gone? (Long time passing... )
It's been supplanted by Science and Technology. Science makes Magic mundane. Locks it into an explanation. Duplicates the effect by way of an intellectual cause. But still, Magic exists in small ways, if you look for it. Do we not still have our 'potions'? Today we call them 'pharmacuticals'. Do we not still have spells to warm people's hearts? Today we call them "Peter Gabriel Songs".

While I have no issue at all with Eleri's addidtion, I have to beleive that Faith is transcendant over both Science and Magic. Faith comes from somewhere else, and has a different effect on you. While Science and Magic fight with each other, I don't think either can exist without Faith.

Now that I've exposed a bit of the way I think, who wants to discuss further? I'm curious about what other folks think of when they think of "Magic".

Let me say up front that I'd hate for this to turn into one of those debates over religion and faith and beleifs that always seem to crop up on forums from time to time... they often end with mods locking boards, and feelings getting hurt.

so...


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KI 182798

Science is how you talk about the universe with words that bind it to a common reality.
Magic is how you talk to the universe with words that it cannot ignore.

[Lord Chaos]

I think you're right about faith being the underpinnings of science and magic. If you don't believe that something will happen because of what you're doing, you won't bother to make the experiment.

I wonder, though, about the assumed antipathy of science for magic, and magicians for science. Science is a huge modern edifice built upon a simple idea: predictably repeatable results. Any real magician will be able to reproduce the results of a trick, or else Chance is the real dictator. Science gives you a set of tools to use to understand phenomena. The problem is that many people who take a scientific approcah extend that approch into areas that fuzz out too much for the results to be fully predictable.

The lands of magic and science have mutually interpenetrable borders. There are phenomena going on in our world that are real, sort of repeatable, and inexplicable right now through science. 200 years ago the boderlands were much different: doctors gave you arsenic and mercury to heal you, while bleeding you. Things were made of four elements and fire caused phlogiston to move from one state to another. We now know that fire is actually the rapid oxydation of material and we know the temeratures at which various materials will burn and that the visible flame is made of hot particles woven by air rising in natural convection and affected by other currents. We can still stare at the magical glowing for hours, entranced by the dance of beauty.

[BladeLakem]

The thing is, magic is an art. Like all art forms, it cannot be boiled down to mechanistic processes in any real, productive way. Science is about specifics, repeatable and pragmatically definable realities.

Early magicians produced results mostly because they were guessing right, much like an untrained singer can listen to a song and repeat it. They were winging it, based off of intuitions, assumptions and subjective decisions.

The transfer of topics from 'magic' to 'science' isn't so much a intellectual coup as it is just a reorganization. Like a new musician, they relied on their talent to make intuitive jumps. As Clarke's Third law says: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." What has changed over time is what we see as 'sufficiently advanced'.

However, when we bring into play music theory, formal musical notations, sound theory and acoustics, we begin to apply scientific method. We observe, we hypothesize and we test. We discover that sound is vibration. We discover our ears detect vibration. We discover that our inner ear changes that vibration to bio-electric pulses that are interpreted by our brains.

Of course, as LC pointed out, that doesn't take the beauty of it. It's still a song after all.

I don't see as magic and science as warring concepts, any more than acoustics and music are warring concepts. They are simply different ways of approaching the same topic (reality in the first concept, sound in the second). Science hasn't supplanted magic as much as it has complimented it.

Both affect the world and describe the world. But neither are complete. According to the example of Godel's sentence, no system of logic can cover all possibilities. Paradoxes ensue. So there has to be more to the world than just what can be described by pure logic. That means there's another way.

That's what I would call magic. Now, being something that is not entirely describable by logic, it's hard to codify. It's an art, it has to do with things that science can't adequately describe - things like emotion, meaning. But I do think that these things affect reality more directly than most of us believe, however.

[Lord Chaos]

I got distracted earlier, and forgot a point I intended to make.

It's this: at their core, real science and real magic are really art. Experiments are described as "beautiful," just as are particularly elegant performances of magic. I think anyone sufficiently familiar with our world will recognize there are areas beyond which neither science nor magic can say much, and only the heart of the artist will find the way.