As a matter of fact, reality is far more exciting than magic. Magic is limited by what our feeble human minds can dream up. Science has shown time and time again that reality is far more complex and far more interesting.
The difference between magic and science is that magic is centered on humans in the way that the entire cosmos was once thought to rotate around Earth. Both a magical universe and a scientific universe contain rules that humans can discover and tools that humans can use to influence their environment, but a magical universe is for humans and about humans whereas a scientific universe is not even indifferent to humans.
I admit that it would be nice to have gods and even the very fabric of reality care about what I want…
Sorry, hon. The magical universe may SEEM to be centered around you, but you’re really just experiencing the side benefits of it being centered around me.
Shut up, Harry Potter.
I think that’s actually a question that can be taken seriously. My answer would be that a Turing-complete universe with a mechanism for decreasing local entropy would be sufficient to make it possible (not necessarily likely) that some sort of computing entity would arise and comprehend something like the anthropic principle.
Pretty much everything in Terry Pratchett’s oeuvre could and should be taken seriously. Praise Anoia that he also took it with a grain of salt, and with tongue stuck firmly in cheek!
That’s, uh… That’s completely not true. I know lots of otherkin magic users. Magic tends to be more popular with otherkin than humans in my experience. Humans are happy to remain in consensus reality because it was built for them. Otherkin need to use magic to find worlds where they can exist.
What?
Translation: my acid was extra spicy today.
Everything I just said is contextualised by the manifesto at http://soulism.net. TL;DR: reality is fake and bad, support minorities.
Reality is a social construct and is therefore limited by human imagination.
As a former evangelical Christian, the natural universe we inhabit is magical and exciting and fascinating in a way that it simply isn’t when you believe it was the creation of an all-powerful God as basically a training ground for Heaven or whatever.
There is so much more to learn and understand. It is fucking awesome!
As someone raised by Christians I’m glad you made it out too.
That is very kind of you to say, and the same to you.
i think if we’re arguing anything as magic, it’s probably the fact that we’re here, on earth, and that earth is the perfect planet, and that it has plenty of resources for us to exploit, and that we just happen to be intelligent forms of life capable of exploiting such resources.
Who gives a fuck about anything else when the pure and fundamental question of “why us” is literally the only thing you need to keep your going until you die.
I do agree but if you wanted to make to case for ‘God’ they could have made sure some of their creatures evolved to understand his work, assuming they did it in a logical way. I’m not a person with faith but just try and think a way is possible, though usually trying to understand weird comic and media universe type actions.
We are the way for a universe to understand itself (paraphrased from Sagan). Though his writing is much more interesting than this comment. I just think there’s room for belief if it works for people, but not for the strict literal interpretations that many seem to believe.
That Sagan phrase inspired me to adapt a Descartes principle:
Because I am conscious, the universe is conscious.
A horse walks into a bar, and the bartender says “Say, you’re in here a lot, are you maybe an alcoholic?”
The horse says “I don’t think I am.” and immediately vanishes.
I would have said at the start that it was going to be a Descartes joke, but that would have been putting Descartes before de horse
I’m not sure I’ve heard that one, very similar and awesome. I should read some of him, yes I know very famous just something I haven’t got around to doing.
I’m glad you haven’t heard it because from my perspective, the universe thought I had come up with it myself, haha. But I haven’t read Descartes either, so I cannot say for certain.
God doesn’t play with dice
-Einstein<An infinite number of dice appear at the plank scale>
Tada!
-GodIf I watch too much fantasy world or read about it too immersively , I think about how all of their powers are normal to them. Light, fire, storms, electricity, the states of water, tides, giraffes, etc., they’re all magical. We’ve just named them and have ways to describe how they work in an orderly, understandable, format.
Ah yes the giraffe, the most magical being
I appreciate you. https://imgur.com/gallery/new-favorite-gif-EkO9uj8
Scientists are this world’s wizards
Science is just a stepping stone to philosophy.
Actually, all roads lead to philosophy.
Philosophy is just science, except without the requirement that things align with reality.
“Philosophy is just science, except without the requirement that things align with reality.”
Philosophy is just history, except without the dates, events, and locations.
As they said in The Muppet Movie, “its like an ocean cruise except there is no boat and you don’t actually go anywhere”.
“Science is just a stepping stone to philosophy.”
I somewhat agree with this.
The most essential activity in science is observation. Consensus on the facts is the most essential thing.
As a bonus, you can propose explanations. The only acceptable ideas are those that agree with observation.
A “good” scientific idea is one that not only agrees with known facts but also predicts facts not yet known. That way you can “test” the idea to get a stronger sense of how useful it is. Most ideas are not even valid, never-mind good.
So the most important aspect of science is to test ideas against observation. But where do the ideas come from?
That brings us to philosophy…
You need philosophy to do science. So, philosophy leads to science, not the other way around.
Philosophy is the way we try to assign (semantic) meaning to science/scientific observations.
Does the universe really exist outside of our minds? Is the position of matter actually the position we view it at? What is consciousness? I mean it depends on what you mean by existing, or being in a state, or consciousness. When you break language down far enough it becomes clear that it’s not objective, and it’s entirely suited to each person’s unique subjective understanding and interpretation with the context. Language is definitions all the way down. It doesn’t make sense to use human language to describe anything objectively, yet we try anyways.
At least, that’s how I feel about philosophy as a linguist and someone who really likes theoretical universe stuff.
A good illusion is still spectacular even when the illusion is broken. The magical world was boring to begin with.
its funny to me, the existence of science being something as mundane as “rubbing three moderately flat surfaces against each other in succession will inevitably produce a flat plane as it is the only functional outcome for that problem”
opposed to the incredibly complex and intricate technicalities of steel smelting, and even beyond that, casting properly.
and then also, we know why cicadas make so much noise, it’s really simple. Just a little bit (ok well a lot of bit) of constructive interference. But actually, we also have no fucking clue how they manage to count such long periods of prime duration reliably and consistently.
There’s also the technicality of being able to explain how molecule level physics works, but then not being able to comprehend molecule scale physics in something like biology until recently.
I’m convinced that science is just reverse engineering the universe. Eventually, one day, we will figure out how to create an entire universe, and we will.
Science is the ultimate version of philosophy.
Science shows us why the world is excting and lets us find even more exciting things. That beings said, it’s still a funny joke.
All basically being bubbles of probability where a field of energy exists, in a seething universe of virtual particles (fields) coming into existence and getting annihilated by it’s anti-part again.
The “universe of whirling chaos, birthing existence” i’ve seen in some Manga as origin story of gods, doesn’t seem so far fetched now.
The woo doctor says there’s fairies in the garden and unicorns in the forest, and never shows them to me. The biologist says there’s birds the size of your thumb that flap their wings so fast they become a buzzy blur, and there’s huge winged creatures that fly through the ocean called “Manta rays.” He shows me pictures and specimens of both.
The woo doctor says my fever is caused by a lack of yellow bile, eat this dandelion it’s yellow. The physician says my fever is caused by an infection of tiny creatures inside my body, look you can see them if you look at this snot sample under a microscope. We have a chemical that kills these organisms called antibiotics, eat those and you’ll get better.
The woo doctor says the dot in the sky he thinks of as the god of time has traveled into the crab part of the sky so I probably shouldn’t make any big decisions this week. The astronomer looked through a bunch of old records, noticed a pattern, and predicted the next appearance of a comet down to the finest detail, years in advance.
The woo doctor says things that can burn are full of a substance called phlogiston, which is released by fire into the air, which can only hold so much phlogiston. The chemist says it’s hydrocarbons or carbohydrates combusting into carbon dioxide and water vapor, and proves it by burning a variety of things and condensing water from the vapors that emerge. He’s built way better lamps and is starting to build these powerful engines based on his techniques.
The woo doctor tells fun stories sometimes I guess. The scientist has all the actual cool stuff.
The woo doctor says there’s fairies in the garden and unicorns in the forest, and never shows them to me. The biologist says there’s birds the size of your thumb that flap their wings so fast they become a buzzy blur, and there’s huge winged creatures that fly through the ocean called “Manta rays.” He shows me pictures and specimens of both.
This sounds so much like a writing prompt.
Does it? Because it sounds like history to me.
“Tell me the history of the world using a woo doctor and a scientist as actors.”
Joe wonder why great sky fire rise from mountain every morning, you will explain this to joe.
I dont care about particles moving through walls because of science, i want to move through walls by yelling a word because of magic
Quantum mechanics is not magic. Magic specifies the outcome, but not how a system evolves to reach that outcome. Quantum mechanics has precise equations describing how a system will evolve over time, but is famously bad at describing the outcome.
By the same token, we can see that thermodynamics and conservation laws, while widely accepted, are magic. I have heard legend of a deeper magic known as “Lagragians”, although knowledge of that lost art remains confines to the warlocks’ ivory tower.
Every coin has two side, uh…
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Wow, this is the first time I’ve disagreed with an Existential Comics take
