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Science is how we sort out the magic that works from the magic that doesn't. Just because we can observe it repeatedly, and it follows a reliable pattern, doesn

Science is how we sort out the magic that works from the magic that doesn't. Just because we can observe it repeatedly, and it follows a reliable pattern, doesn't mean it isn't magic - it means the magic is REAL. The nature of our universe as we understand it today, and by understand I mean that we can show our constructs are at least partially supported by reality, is far more magical and glorious than anything our ancestors could dream up. Yes - the universe is absent of life (and gods) as far as we can see so far. But the universe is far more grand than anything we dreamed up and human accomplishments through harnessing the magic of our world has put many of our ancient gods to shame. Humans are amazing and this universe is magic. Don't let people rob you of that.

gabereiser 4y ago
The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on Earth, the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars, the high mass ones among them, went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy. Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems, stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky and I know that yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. -Neil DeGrasse Tyson
hprotagonist 4y ago
People have reality-dampers. It’s a popular fact that nine-tenth of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary grey goo if its only purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys. It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual. Because if this was not the case, then human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing big stupid grins, similar to those worn by certain remote tribesmen who occasionally get raided by the authorities and have the contents of their plastic greenhouses very seriously inspected. They’d say “Wow!” a lot. And no one would do much work. Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"
- ntr-- 4y ago
  > ...each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful. - Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954
edgyquant 4y ago
Crazy I’ve been thinking about this all day. The big bang alone is a big fuck you from the gods reminding us we’re in an out of context problem. So I agree, all science has done has helped us to gain a more objective understanding of our shared experience. We still have no idea what the hell is up with the universe, everything above it I guess, is doing existing in the first place. Thinking through all of this has made me realize as an atheist I haven’t actually been engaging the religious honestly. If this is how they view the universe I and most atheists have been strawmanning them, and what they actually believe, without even knowing.
- samplatt 4y ago
  Maybe WE'RE the out-of-context problem, in a universe that hitherto now has not begun to think about itself. Organic chemistry that achieved enough chaos to begin giving order to itself? Sounds fake.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    That used to be my way of thinking about things. I definitely know that we evolved from a random walk of the universes rules. At least that’s closer to the objective truth than not. But debating science is missing the point. No matter the implementation details the fact I’m here looking at a universe is freaking weird. If I wasn’t here a lifeless universe existing would still be weird because wherw does it originate
soupfordummies 4y ago
Radio, TV, Wifi… sure I can kinda see how that works. But wireless CHARGING? Nope, that is definitely magic.
- Retric 4y ago
  I think that’s just what you are used to. I think of radio, wireless charging, and transformers as basically the same thing. Crystal radios for example don’t need external power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio Painkillers on the other hand seem like magic to me.
eointierney 4y ago
Humans are amazing but the Universe is not magic it is mathematical
- gffrd 4y ago
  Are you saying the universe is math?
  - zargon 4y ago
    There was an article posted here arguing that recently. Something along the lines of "Why does anything exist?"
    - gffrd 4y ago
      Thanks for the pointer! Search turned up this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32416003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32416003 "Why does anything exist?" … and also these: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-universe-made-of-math-excerpt/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-universe-m... https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/is-the-universe-actually-made-of-math https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/is-the-univers... Looks like it's reading time!
  - eointierney 4y ago
    Actually yes, I think it is, though not exactly in the Max Tegmark sense (he's much more competent than I). Indeed, I don't think it could be anything other than math as it would be inconsistent (Daithi, where are you, you took me out for dinner and we had a great chat (intoduced me to Haskell he did )). To be clearer, I don't think physical reality is math as we currently understand it, but if there's an aspect of reality that is non-mathematical and you can prove it you've won every significant prize available and started a conceptual revolution without comparison (no, human notions such as "love", beautiful as they are, don't count as we can't begin to mathematise these anthropomorphisations). We need to study more math :)
tsimionescu 4y ago
While I understand and agree with the sentiment you express, I don't agree with using the word "magic" to refer to it. I believe that in the minds of most people, the notion of magic essentially means the ability to use willpower to modify physical laws, or at least that physical laws are ultimately a product of a conscious will (often the will of a God, not a Human - but still a will that can be pleaded or bargained with through prayer or ritual). And in this sense of the word, science has utterly destroyed magic. Not only is it impossible to extend your will to the world, it turns out that it is in fact the conscious will itself that is subordinate to physical laws, not the other way around - or at least this is what science is currently strongly hinting towards (we would know for sure if we had a much deeper understanding of the workings of the brain, and how consciousness arises out of it). It's important to realize that this is vastly different from what scientists/philosophers throughout history have generally believed - even upto fairly recently, some form of Descartes-like dualism, with a mechanistic physical universe and a non-mechanistic spiritual universe of the mind (and God) being the most common way of picturing the world among most scientists even in the 1800s or later.
- rileyphone 4y ago
  Now, once we get proper brain-computer interfaces, the real magic begins.
- ntr-- 4y ago
  > And in this sense of the word, science has utterly destroyed magic. ahh good, so which interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct?
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    How is that relevant? All interpretations agree on the math, and the math leaves no room for consciousness in the equations of motion.
    - eurasiantiger 4y ago
      Somehow we are still claiming that the system is fundamentally random when it is very obvious it is fundamentally deterministic (but not predetermined).
wrp 4y ago
During the period that educated Europeans believed in the reality of magic, it was understood to be of two types. "Natural magic" is when you are manipulating the physical world without understanding the mechanism by which it works. "Demonic magic" is when you are calling upon some spirit-world entity to manipulate the physical world for you. Pre-modern people understood that natural magic was just a matter of having limited understanding of the physical world. They would have been comfortable calling it "technology." The really big conceptual change came when people stopped believing in the plausibility of demonic magic.

gabereiser 4y ago

The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on Earth, the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars, the high mass ones among them, went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy. Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems, stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky and I know that yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. -Neil DeGrasse Tyson

hprotagonist 4y ago

People have reality-dampers. It’s a popular fact that nine-tenth of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary grey goo if its only purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys. It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual. Because if this was not the case, then human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing big stupid grins, similar to those worn by certain remote tribesmen who occasionally get raided by the authorities and have the contents of their plastic greenhouses very seriously inspected. They’d say “Wow!” a lot. And no one would do much work. Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"

ntr-- 4y ago
> ...each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful. - Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954

edgyquant 4y ago

Crazy I’ve been thinking about this all day. The big bang alone is a big fuck you from the gods reminding us we’re in an out of context problem. So I agree, all science has done has helped us to gain a more objective understanding of our shared experience. We still have no idea what the hell is up with the universe, everything above it I guess, is doing existing in the first place. Thinking through all of this has made me realize as an atheist I haven’t actually been engaging the religious honestly. If this is how they view the universe I and most atheists have been strawmanning them, and what they actually believe, without even knowing.

samplatt 4y ago
Maybe WE'RE the out-of-context problem, in a universe that hitherto now has not begun to think about itself. Organic chemistry that achieved enough chaos to begin giving order to itself? Sounds fake.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  That used to be my way of thinking about things. I definitely know that we evolved from a random walk of the universes rules. At least that’s closer to the objective truth than not. But debating science is missing the point. No matter the implementation details the fact I’m here looking at a universe is freaking weird. If I wasn’t here a lifeless universe existing would still be weird because wherw does it originate

soupfordummies 4y ago

Radio, TV, Wifi… sure I can kinda see how that works. But wireless CHARGING? Nope, that is definitely magic.

Retric 4y ago
I think that’s just what you are used to. I think of radio, wireless charging, and transformers as basically the same thing. Crystal radios for example don’t need external power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio Painkillers on the other hand seem like magic to me.

eointierney 4y ago

Humans are amazing but the Universe is not magic it is mathematical

gffrd 4y ago
Are you saying the universe is math?
- zargon 4y ago
  There was an article posted here arguing that recently. Something along the lines of "Why does anything exist?"
  - gffrd 4y ago
    Thanks for the pointer! Search turned up this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32416003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32416003 "Why does anything exist?" … and also these: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-universe-made-of-math-excerpt/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-universe-m... https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/is-the-universe-actually-made-of-math https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/is-the-univers... Looks like it's reading time!
- eointierney 4y ago
  Actually yes, I think it is, though not exactly in the Max Tegmark sense (he's much more competent than I). Indeed, I don't think it could be anything other than math as it would be inconsistent (Daithi, where are you, you took me out for dinner and we had a great chat (intoduced me to Haskell he did )). To be clearer, I don't think physical reality is math as we currently understand it, but if there's an aspect of reality that is non-mathematical and you can prove it you've won every significant prize available and started a conceptual revolution without comparison (no, human notions such as "love", beautiful as they are, don't count as we can't begin to mathematise these anthropomorphisations). We need to study more math :)

tsimionescu 4y ago

While I understand and agree with the sentiment you express, I don't agree with using the word "magic" to refer to it. I believe that in the minds of most people, the notion of magic essentially means the ability to use willpower to modify physical laws, or at least that physical laws are ultimately a product of a conscious will (often the will of a God, not a Human - but still a will that can be pleaded or bargained with through prayer or ritual). And in this sense of the word, science has utterly destroyed magic. Not only is it impossible to extend your will to the world, it turns out that it is in fact the conscious will itself that is subordinate to physical laws, not the other way around - or at least this is what science is currently strongly hinting towards (we would know for sure if we had a much deeper understanding of the workings of the brain, and how consciousness arises out of it). It's important to realize that this is vastly different from what scientists/philosophers throughout history have generally believed - even upto fairly recently, some form of Descartes-like dualism, with a mechanistic physical universe and a non-mechanistic spiritual universe of the mind (and God) being the most common way of picturing the world among most scientists even in the 1800s or later.

rileyphone 4y ago
Now, once we get proper brain-computer interfaces, the real magic begins.
ntr-- 4y ago
> And in this sense of the word, science has utterly destroyed magic. ahh good, so which interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct?
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  How is that relevant? All interpretations agree on the math, and the math leaves no room for consciousness in the equations of motion.
  - eurasiantiger 4y ago
    Somehow we are still claiming that the system is fundamentally random when it is very obvious it is fundamentally deterministic (but not predetermined).

wrp 4y ago

During the period that educated Europeans believed in the reality of magic, it was understood to be of two types. "Natural magic" is when you are manipulating the physical world without understanding the mechanism by which it works. "Demonic magic" is when you are calling upon some spirit-world entity to manipulate the physical world for you. Pre-modern people understood that natural magic was just a matter of having limited understanding of the physical world. They would have been comfortable calling it "technology." The really big conceptual change came when people stopped believing in the plausibility of demonic magic.