"Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke didn't go far enough!
We live in a world surrounded by magic. Our minds evolved in a world of magic. It is no wonder that it is such an ongoing struggle to think about the world in a rational way. No one would question that our ancient ancestors, the prototypical hunter-gatherers on the savanna, were embedded in a world where magic was an everyday phenomenon. Their lives were dependent on the sun rising in the morning (where did it go at night anyway, and how did anyone know it would come back the next day all the way over there!), on the vagaries of the weather; they grew ill and died from unseen, invisible enemies. They attempted to make sense of the world by developing myths and deities. They would have no trouble with some of the explanations being bruited about concerning the provenance of the recent tsunami: the Gods must have become angry with us. The idea that sophisticated 21st century, technologically adept people could be equally seen as surrounded by magic would, to many, be a non-starter. However, I believe it is the necessary starting point in trying to make sense of the world.
When we say something is magic, it can have various meanings. It could mean that the event in question is impossible in our experience (a sophisticated and more nuanced comment would be that it violates the laws of physics); an alternative meaning is that we do not understand what is causing the event in question to occur. For example, how many people do you know who can explain why light appears out of darkness when you flip the switch. And donbt bother telling me about electrons flowing through wires and heating up when the wire/filament forces them through a narrow space with higher resistance. In a very fundamental way, this is not a meaningful explanation. All of our science and technology have simply removed the locus of the magical activity. To our aforementioned cave ancestor, a flashlight is a magical instrument of the gods. We, of course, take lights for granted and yet, I would suggest that for all intents and purposes, most of what surrounds us is the equivalent of magic. If we can not directly experience an action's cause and effect, we can ultimately only hope to infer its source. No one has ever seen, or will ever see, an electron. We can build complex machines and apparatuses which allow us to connect a long chain of experimental observations to deduce the existence of electrons. We then hold forth that their existence has been conclusively proved and no longer is in question. There is no doubt that this works for us (the computer I am typing this on is sufficient proof of that) but in reality it is a constructed world view; it has great predictive power and is therefore said to be an accurate representation of reality, but it is fundamentally a construct. (This is, in part, where the deconstructionists have a point, which they then take to such ridiculous extremes as to render their philosophy meaningless, which I suppose is pretty consistent, when you stop to think about it; but I digress.) The fact is that the construct can only be a reflection of some deeper level of reality, not the reality itself. Furthermore, the failures of the construct are pretty obvious, even a little embarrassing: just try to wrap your mind around the concept that an electron is both a particle and a wave (and what is a particle, or a wave, anyway?), and let's not even start with Quantum Mechanics!
We apprehend the world around us through our senses. We say that a brick wall is hard and solid because when we punch it, we damage our fist and our brains receive input from our peripheral nervous system that our minds interpret as pain. Anything out of our immediate experience can only be taken on faith. As a scientific observer of the human mind, I believe in our consensus reality, our theories of the world, but I do not mistake them for reality and I certainly do not expect them to be immutable.
At the moment there is an ongoing argument/discussion taking place in the fields of Psychiatry, Psychology, Neurology, Neurophysiology and various related endeavors. The question is asked whether or not the mind is an emergent epiphenomenon of the brain (think of the mind as the person/homunculus who sits right behind your eyes explaining to you why you just did what you did; but then, where does the YOU come form? Better yet, don't think of it; it gets confusing and causes headaches.) In any event, we know the mind and brain are pretty important and intimately related to each other. It would surprise no one to recognize that changes in the brain can change the structure of the mind (think of frontal lobotomies) but you might be surprised to know there is considerable evidence that changing the mind (as in psychotherapy) can change the structure of the brain. At the same time, humans (and animals) can do quite well without much of a mind (I love my Golden Retriever, but he is not much of a deep thinker) so why do we have or need a mind anyway?
As you can see, we can not even agree on a theory of the mind (is it unitary or compartmentalized?) and where it comes from so trying to find a consensus reality is a daunting task. (As an aside, I do not disparage or question those who believe it is a gift from the Deity; I would love that to be true. Unfortunately, that idea is not testable, even using the rather inadequate tools of the scientific method, and since the only weapon we have against magic is the scientific method, I am going to confine myself to theories that can pass itbs test. If, one day, we can use our scientific method to prove the existence of God, I will rejoice; until then, we are talking about faith, not knowledge.)
To summarize where we have come so far: we are forced to use instruments we poorly understand (our senses) to interpret data from the environment that is even more poorly understood (photons, etc) that can then be translated, ie given meaning, by an object we have even less knowledge of (our minds). Our rationality is the thinnest of veneers covering a shaky edifice sitting on a shelf of thin ice which is constantly melting away beneath us; the merest touch looses the Monsters from the Id.
More to follow.
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