Lugodoc's Theory of Magic

How Can A Rational Mind...

... believe in MAGIC ?

As an ex-engineer with training in science I get a lot of this. So this is how I see the world -

Consider The Monkey

The monkey has a very limited understanding of the universe. It has a working knowledge of gravity and inertia (it can swing through trees and throw stones) and even psychiatry (an ability to model the mind of its prey during rare hunts), and this is enough to survive in the jungle. Monkeys can even be taught new things in the lab, such as which button to press to get food, or even a few "words" to communicate with its human captors.

But it is never going to figure out algebra or calculate planetary orbits. It can see an eclipse, but it will never be able to predict one. It can see lightning, and even get killed by it, but it will never have a theory of electrodynamics to explain it. Monkey troops go pub-crawling to places where falling fruit has naturally fermented into alcohol, so they can get drunk, but they will never suspect the existance of microbes or design a brewery.

In short, monkeys are smarter than most of the other animals on this planet, but there is an endless list of things that they will never, never understand.

Even though these things are real, and may be useful or even hazardous.

One Per Cent

It is often quoted that human and monkey DNA differs by only one per cent. This seems surprising, but it shouldn't. Monkeys look very different from us, but we still need most of the DNA that they use to metabolise the common nurturing environment of air, water, carbohydrates, proteins and vitamins into bone, muscle, hair, brain etc. That one per cent is only the fine tuning that makes the difference between a pack primate and a tool-using hominid.

It seems unlikely to me that a one per cent change in DNA is enough to turn a monkey that understands almost nothing of the universe into a being that can understand everything. Whatever new life form is created by such a minor tweaking of the building instructions may well understand more than the old one, but why should it suddenly make the massive leap to become a life form that can understand everything in the universe?

The Limits of Human Knowledge

It is important to understand that we are not just talking about more difficult phenomena that will take longer to figure out. A monkey could spend eternity staring at the stars without realising that they are balls of plasma billions of miles away held together by gravity and creating light through fusion. It would have to actually evolve first. Into, say, us.

Similarly, this author argues that the universe must contain countless phenomena that will always confound Homo Sapiens, no matter how hard and long we try and no matter what clever tools we build. We would first have to evolve again to increase our potential for understanding, and even then the change would only be incremental, not absolute.

Science

... is the philosophy that made the industrial revolution work. Nobody can argue with science. In just one century (the twentieth) it gave us radio, man-powered flight, space travel, nuclear power, electronics, computers and genetic engineering.

But do you actually know what science is?

The Controlled Experiment

... is the bedrock of all science. It is any experiment that can be carried out repeatedly, with every factor under control, so that the same experiment can be repeated indefinitely (hopefully with exactly the same result every time, thus proving that every relevant factor really was under control) or so that one single factor can be changed, and its effect on the experiment observed.

Instrumentality

Science also requires instruments that can measure and record the results of the experiment. Just looking at it isn't enough, because humans don't quite see the reality in front of them, they see the subjective experience. Each human sees things differently, which can cause arguments, but it is harder to argue with an unemotional, objective measuring instrument.

Units

... and of course a measuring instrument is useless without units - an objective scale which is the same no matter who is using it. Typical units are metres, kilograms, seconds, Volts and so on, carefully and exactly defined so that everyone is measuring nature with exactly the same yard-stick.

The Limits of Science

So science requires three main things to function:

Control
Instruments
Units

If any one of these is not possible in a given situation, then that situation is beyond science. Indeed, it is invisible to science. And in our rationalist, materialist, science-worshiping culture, if a thing is not visible to science then it does not exist. It is coincidence; imagination; magic.

Over the last couple of hundred years science has been fantastically useful (both constructively and destructively), but the narrow, precisely defined scope of science restricts our view of the universe. Any phenomenom whose component factors cannot be controlled falls outside the scope and is invisible.

Ghosts

Magic might be said to include all the phenomena which lie outside the scope of science. Take, for example, ghosts.

Ghosts appear when and where they feel like it. Nobody can call one up at will. Even haunted houses do not present their occupants for inspection every time a tourist turns up. Ghosts cannot be controlled, nor do instruments exist to measure them, and therefore science does not believe that they exist. And yet everyone has their own ghost story, even this author. Everybody knows what a ghost story is, and so there must be an unspoken consensus about ghosts that enables us to recognise one when we see it, even though science has no such working definition for them.

It is possible that one day real ghost meters will exist (like the ones in Ghostbusters), but we have no reason to believe that they will. Ghosts may be just one of those phenomena in the universe some of whose factors lie permanently outside human ken, impossible to control or measure. And yet they are real, able to affect us and be influenced by us, just as a monkey can be struck by lightning without ever having the slightest idea of what lightning is.

Forteana

A better word than "magic" for such mysterious phenomena is Fortean.

Charles Fort (1874 - 1932) was a journalist who made it his life work to investigate and catalogue anything weird. He included ghosts, myths, religious phenomena, coincidences, freaks of nature, strange accidents... just about anything that had no rational explanation. Later the field grew to include flying saucers and so on.

It is important to realise that Fort did not necessarily believe in any of the phenomena he catalogued. Nor did he disbelieve. He merely assumed that there must be phenomena outside of science, and that the evidence for these phenomena must therefore necessarily be unscientific and weird, and most likely to be found in the strangest of places.

The investigation of such phenomena is paradoxical. Science doesn't work, and if it does then the phenomena is scientific, just another part of the universe that we can understand, and not one of the parts of it that we can never understand. Investigators are forced to rely on subjective experience, which science despises. In subjective experience the observer can be affected by the subject he is observing, and many Fortean experiences are famous for their disturbing effects on observers. Forteans who contact their material sometimes go apparently mad, or at least eccentric.

Because, after all, anybody who does not believe absolutely in science must be mad.

Conclusion

This author believes that the universe is full of things that we will never control or even understand, until we have evolved an awful lot more than we have. We can affect them, sometimes, and they can affect us, but they will never be amenable to scientific method.

Some of these things will be billions of light years away in other galaxies. Some of them are under our skin.

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