Skip Navigation

Showerthoughts @lemmy.world

ssillyssadass @lemmy.world

1w ago

Magic is real, we just know how it works and call it technology

62 comments

I saw something once along the lines of "if there was a novel where they harnessed a magical force that was thought to come from the sky, and it was used for everything, like powering devices that keep food fresh, and long distance communication, and said the majority of people had no idea of how it worked we'd call it lazy writing, but that's just a description of electricity" paraphrased a bit, but ye :3
- Plus we can imbue crystals with thought and knowledge by inscribing them with complex runes and commanding them in a special language.
  
  Main difference is that, in fiction, the "imbuing" doesn't require a billion-dollar fab.
  I mean, there are a few intrepid techno-wizards trying to do it themselves, but it's a far cry from what Big Magic can manage.
  
  Teaching sand to think was a mistake.
  
  We used lightning to trick rocks into thinking.
- I saw one comment and was sure it'd be the Arthur C. Clarke quote. I like your one, I hadn't seen it before.
- Give the book Ra by Qntm a read
  The synopsis is strikingly similar... It's not lazy writing, I really enjoyed that book.

Software is the closest thing we have to magic spells. You need to know the correct "activation words" and make sure they follow the correct order. If that aligns, your magic spell works; suddenly there's something on the screen that just wasn't there before. Congratulations, you completed your first summoning.
- And the magic words are powered by magic stones that we write certain sigils in it to make it think.
  
  Don't forget to hit the sigils with lightning
- Techno-mages enter the chat
- lol no. Software is just a written form of logic.
  Writing incomprehensible hexes onto stone wafers then harnessing lightning to make them think is where it is at.
  
  Have you read SICP?
- Me when I draw ritual sigils in silicon to summon demons that mimic the speech of humans to decieve us (I asked ChatGPT to explain special relativity)
- I cast Alexa Play Back To The Jungle By Michael Guy Bowman

As Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
- Came here expecting someone to have posted this quote, was not disappointed.
- I think the MCU of all places summed this up perfectly and I think it was in Thor: The Dark World where Jane has fuck knows what and they operate on her in Asgard and she's giving medical terms and they're like "WTF just hook her up to the whoziwhatzhit and she'll be fine."

Magic, by definition, is supernatural. If you know how it works it's not supernatural ... thus not magic.
- Show a sentinelese person a smartphone, they're gonna say it's magic.
  
  I wouldn't count on it.
  Most people don't understand how most technologies work, but they still don't call it magic. We know that someone understands how it works, because they build it. I'm pretty sure the Sentinelese are capable of understanding that concept as well.
- Does that mean Eda the Owl Lady was wrong to call her spells magic?
  
  It's not a character I'm familiar with, sorry.

What if magic was real, but required speaking actual magic words and we just haven't figured out the right words?
- or if it required the appropriately complex sexy dance with pronounced hip thrusts?
  
  "I'm gonna cast a spell of insanity!"
  does the Time Warp
  "Oh no! That pelvic thrust is really driving me insaaaaaaaane!"
- Psychopaths have figured out how to manipulate, or cast a charm spell on people. That’s pretty magical to me. Those are still words, so I’m going to count them as magic words.
  Not really a Hollywood style incantation, but results speak for themselves.
- What if humans are actually remotely controlled by small alien ants?

ILLUSIONS

Fire, electricty, gravity and magnetism is magic, and you cant convince me otherwise.

Magic was never real. It was technology all along.
People were incredibly stupid when the churches didn't allow education for the masses.
A Yo-Yo would have made you a magician. It's not a magical feeling to be worshipped by idiots for knowing how a Yo-Yo works. It's just sad.

I kindof agree but I'd phrase it the other way round: people always tended to call things they don't understand Magic.
- The inverse of Clark's saying: sufficiently explained magic is indistinguishable from science (credit: Girl Genius webcomic)

I think it's magic how the sum time sunk into a thing can be greater than the time it took to make the thing.
It's magic when 20 hours goes into a painting and it generates (5 minutes * 300) worth of emotions.
It took Tolkein more energy / emotion to make LotR than I'm willing to give appreciating it. But everyone combined has certainly outweighed what Tolkein put in. It's magic to me to think of "free" "emotion hours".
Everything else is so... crass. Transactional. A battery that holds X energy means the sum energy people can extract would be X at best. I have 7 hotdogs and so at most 7 people can each have one.
But art? Games? Puzzles? It's magic how there's basically infinite energy inside.
- I think it’s magic how the sum time sunk into a thing can be greater than the time it took to make the thing.
  It’s magic when 20 hours goes into a painting and it generates (5 minutes * 300) worth of emotions.
  This is why I like music. I'm not spending 100 hours to make something someone will look at for 10 seconds.
  I played this guitar part for 5 mins? You listen to it for 5 mins. (creation time may be multiplied by fuckups and overdubs/additional tracks)

Technology deals with mostly physical things, magic is mostly non physical. This isn't some official definition just a better one. Real magic doesn't deal with matter or energy in the ways most people are familiar with it.

sucky magic. Well until we have transporters and replicators.

Yes to the former no the latter.
https://norse-mythology.org/concepts/magic/

I argue that magic doesn't exist by definition. If it actually, provably, exists we define it as not magical. Why isn't magnetism considered magic? Because it exists and can be studied.

I vaguely remember a quote about magic that can apply to anything. Someone taking something ordinary, and doing something extra ordinary with it.
A deck of cards isn't magic, but what the person DOES with it can be magical. Same with amusician and a musical instrument , or a writer with a pen and paper.

I like the idea that there is a God, hes just the programmer of our simulation. Magic was real, in the form of exploitable glitches, and got patched out as time went on.

Belief in magic is kind of hard to define, anthropologically—we tend to call anything that contradicts currently-known laws of physics “magic”, but that makes the term contingent on the observer’s knowledge rather than the believer’s. (For instance, things like astrology and alchemy that we regard as magic now were thought to be the result of natural forces in the Middle Ages.) But there are other things the believers themselves agree are “magic”, even if they think they can explain it.
For myself, I would call magic the belief that there are multiple, independent systems of causality, whether the believer fully understands those systems or not—and by that definition, technology isn’t magic for most people.

I definitely think electromagnetism is magical from our perspective.
Everything else is pretty crude and we have to start looking inward for anything resembling magic.

62 comments