Theories of Magic: Exploring Belief

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In the previous post, we looked at how reality works, and learned that it is really far stranger than we thought. Indeed, it looks as though what we perceive to be true could have some effect on what actually is true. This idea has gotten us from what is going on in the universe to what is going on in our own brains, because our brains decide a great deal about what we perceive to be true, as much if not more than our actual physical senses.

Personal Perception Driving Reality

For a quick personal experiment on how important perception is, imagine that you had no concept of the color blue (or any similar shade, e.g. teal or azure). You perceived the frequencies that we now call blue, but you don't have a name for it. What color would you call the sky on a clear day? This seems like an academic or theoretical question at first, until you learn that Homer described the sky as "bronze" and made similar odd color descriptions, because his version of Greek has no word for "blue". And by all appearances, Homer, lacking the word and the concept of "blue", truly saw the sky and the sea as other colors.

Taking this a step further, it suggests that your reality is defined not only by what you can perceive, but what you can conceptualize. And that means truly and completely changing your concepts, either by adding something, redefining something, or removing something from your vocabulary, will effectively change your reality. And this, in essence, is what magic does.

This at first glance seems ridiculously empowering: If you truly and completely believe you are able to fly, then you can, right? Many pop magic books will indeed push you towards the idea that magic can allow you to do absolutely anything given sufficient study.

Of course, there is a catch: "truly and completely". To convince yourself you can fly will require a great deal of throwing out all of your life experience, including the experience of your life right this very second, that pretty solidly tells you that you cannot. Your brain has thoroughly absorbed the concept of gravity, and removing it would be excessively difficult.

And there is another problem as well ...

What About Everybody Else?

You might have noticed a second problem with believing you could fly. Remember, reality is, per our previous discussion, about collective belief, which while made up of many individual beliefs is not necessarily identical to your own belief. Indeed, if your beliefs about what reality is differ too strongly from everybody else's, you will not be judged a visionary but instead as somebody afflicted by a mental illness such as schizophrenia.

Even if you are not that far away from everyone else's reality, where your belief of what is happening differs from others' belief of what is happening, there is now a question as to which perception is going to end up being part of the collectively understood reality. What that means in a practical sense is that magic is most effective when it is directed at that which is not easily visible and thus not easily contradicted by others. It also means magic is very ineffective when surrounded and monitored by scientifically knowledgeable skeptics, which is perhaps one reason why nobody was able to win the $1 million offered by the James Randi Educational Foundation to anyone who could demonstrate any kind of supernatural ability.

How This Helps

Looking at magic through a lense of manipulating personal and collective belief about reality, in order to manipulate reality in very subtle ways, now provides us a way to think about using magical effects in a world dominated by modern scientific understanding of nearly everything. The magician acts most effectively when they act behind the scenes to make tiny changes with large consequences.



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