It's a (different) kind of magic

Existential Comics is one of my favourite webcomics, but this one's got me thinking. In the accompanying description :

The term "supernatural" is kind of funny because by definition it sort of means things that don't exist. If something exists, it is part of the natural world, in that it can interact with particles via the rules of physics. If ghosts exist, for example, they can't so much disobey the laws of physics, because scientists would simply adjust the rules of physics to match what they observed in the ghosts. 

Which then goes on to insist that the supernatural must mean things that don't exist by definition. 

Don't get me wrong, this is, as usual, an amusing comic. But I don't think it's at all accurate - I think it's circular and misses the point. The supernatural has nothing much at all to do with “existence” and instead relates to whether such phenomena do obey rigorous laws or not. To me, just because something "exists", in the sense of "being detectable", in no way implies that this is so because it is bound by any scientific rules. Indeed, that's kind of the whole point. Ordinary, mortal creatures are seen because they reflect or omit photons; a creature which was visible to our eyes without doing this would be magical by definition. If you forbid this possibility utterly, saying that there's no way our vision can work in any other way, you've misunderstood the whole notion, and have probably fallen into scientism.

Some examples and further exploration may help. Existential Comics goes on to cite Bigfoot, the Kraken and other mysterious creatures. Now Bigfoot, an undiscovered American ape, isn’t inherently supernatural, but if Bigfoot could behave in such a way as to defy any rational, scientific analysis, then it might be. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be 100% supernatural 100% of the time in 100% of the things it did, there would just have to be some inexplicable aspect to it. 

And to be fair, cryptid animals often do contain a large helping of the truly supernatural about them. A serious academic researcher looking for possible escaped big cats in Britain doesn't entertain the possibility that the Beast of Bodmin has any unearthly qualities to it, but cryptozoologists do. I read a whole bunch of this stuff in my younger days, everything from aliens and monsters to time travel and frickin' Mothman, which is basically where I gave up.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, there's a whole spectrum from the basically respectable to the outright nonsensical. There are those trying to get good, scientific data to prove the existence of unknown but essentially normal species, there are those whole believe that new physics might be found in ball lightning... and then there are the folklorists. Not in the sense of those who study folklore, but those who really believe in it, hook line and sinker. The kind of people who believe the Beast of Bodmin has inexplicable powers, that the yeti isn't just a peculiar ape, but has something genuinely monstrous about it; the demon-bear in The Terror is an excellent example. Ambiguity, mystery and inexplicability are a key part of the the sense of underlying threat for such creatures.

But none of these "researchers" claim that supernatural entities don't exist, because that's just silly. This is an attempt to define the issue away, but I think this is just purely circular logic that avoids the issue rather than addressing it. It makes a good comic, but nothing more.

So what does "supernatural" really mean, then ? You might recall that time I tried to imagine being a ghost, with a view to examining that ever-popular topic of consciousness and minds. We'll get back to that angle later. But to tackle the supernatural itself, I have no conceptual problem with something that interacts with the observable world but is not bound by its rules. Why would something which interacts in some ways therefore necessarily have to obey all the regular rules of ordinary matter ?

It wouldn't. Dark matter pretty much does this, and nobody thinks it's anything mystical (well, except for Philip Pullman, I guess). To be more accurate, it doesn't interact with normal matter except through gravity, but there's no reason to think that it all other respects it somehow defies physics. Quite the opposite : the physics is if anything likely to be simpler than ordinary matter, which is why it's computationally very cheap to simulate. But it's only a short conceptual step from this to imagine something which can interact with the world enough to make itself detected, but in other ways is outside physical laws completely. I'm just not seeing anything fundamentally problematic about this as a concept, even without believing myself that any such thing exists.

The other example that comes speeding into view is obviously consciousness itself. Could we view this as something magical ? Yes, if we want to. I actually do tend to think of this - in a very casual sense - as an everyday sort of routine magic, mind over matter so continuously at work that we take it for granted. And perhaps that is even literally true. But it need not necessarily be so; as I'm often at pains to point out, this is something which does seem to fit the bill of pointing to a gap in our knowledge, rather than anything that truly breaks science. Our ability to think about concepts which don't have physical existence clearly doesn't give us any special control over the world - it's a rather oddly-limited sort of "magic" if all it lets us do is walk around the place and experience ennui.

True magic would be something that was fundamentally inexplicable through physical laws, that fit no pattern whatsoever, or that happened with no connection of any kind between the apparent cause and its effect. Magical spells are a classic example : there's no way that chanting around a cauldron full of boiling newts can cause someone in a nearby castle to turn into a frog. There's just no possible causal connection between these two events. On a James Randi forum many years back there was a guy who claimed he could make UFOs appear on demand by pointing at the sky; that would fit the bill pretty well too.

Mind might be described as truly magical if it could cause such nonlocal effects. Or, perhaps, if it were really the base level of reality, as idealism posits. In that sense the Ultimate Mind that imagines reality would not be bound by any of the laws that we ourselves feel subject to. Actually, a few weeks ago, I had ChatGPT create a discussion between Morogth and Daniel Dennet on this very point, and it raised much the same argument as Existential Comics did :

Daniel Dennett : Morgoth, I understand that you have witnessed the power of the Ainur, but have you considered that this power might not be supernatural at all, but rather the result of natural processes that we have yet to understand fully?

Morgoth : What are you talking about, Dennett? I was there when the world was created. I saw the song of the Ainur shape the universe with my own eyes.

Daniel Dennett : Yes, but consider this : what if the universe operates according to a set of natural laws that we can study and understand ? What if the power you wield is simply the result of these laws, rather than some kind of divine magic ?

Morgoth : I see what you're saying, but how can you explain the power of the Ainur ? How can you explain the very act of creation itself ?

Daniel Dennett : That's the thing, Morgoth. We might not be able to explain it fully yet, but that doesn't mean it's supernatural. It just means we haven't discovered the underlying natural laws that govern the universe.

The thing is, if the Universe were literally sung into being as in Tolkien's cosmology, I think this would be inexplicable by physical laws. In short, there do exist possibilities which, if demonstrated, I would seriously consider abandoning science and giving up. To cling to rationality in the face of manifestly irrational processes is itself irrational; to try and insist by definition that everything must obey physical laws would be foolishly circular if observational evidence indicated the contrary.

In Tolkien's mythology and Berkeley's philosophy (also Spinoza, the Upanishads, no doubt very many others !), the base level of reality is mind, which is ultimately how the magic works. This is also essentially how Neo can fly and stop bullets in The Matrix. I've compared idealism to the simulation hypothesis before, but there is an important distinction between the two : true, from the perspective of a simulated entity, I as the simulator might appear godlike, but it doesn't follow that I am the base level of that entity's reality. In the simulation hypothesis, if anything the opposite would be the case, that it would be equally likely that I myself am a simulation, and so on ad infinitum... simulations all the way down.

Which raises the question, what is the base level of reality ? Here it's worth reading this very nice little piece from IAI, which postulates that... maybe there just isn't one. Either reality could be infinite, not necessarily fractal but of infinite complexity on all scales, or it could just be self-referential. I'll reverse the order, because infinitism is in some ways the easiest to contemplate (or at least the most familiar to me) :

There are two primary alternatives to foundationalism, the view that reality does have a fundamental level. The second is infinitism, which endorses the possibility of infinite descent and hence infinite chains of dependence. For the infinitist picture to be palatable, we need to abandon the intuition that dependence needs to bottom out in something fundamental. As we saw earlier that intuition is generally tied to explanation. However, it may be driven simply by our psychological need to find the ultimate explanation. While infinite regresses are generally regarded as an alarming sign in philosophy, not all regresses or infinite sequences need to be vicious. 

There is an intriguing, hypothetical version of infinitism that could in principle be corroborated by empirical evidence. This version, sometimes called boring infinite descent, suggests that while chains of dependence could go on infinitely, there could be a point where the entities or the structure involved in these chains starts repeating; it’s turtles all the way down. The thought here is that a full-blown version of infinitism seems very demanding: if each level has a new kinds of entities governed by some hitherto undiscovered laws, then not only would there be infinite chains of dependence, but also an infinite number of different kinds of entities and laws.

I've no idea what's "boring" about this but I'm reliably informed the jargon just gets even weirder and sillier. No matter. Anyway, as far as "batshit crazy" goes, I like this very much : infinite levels of reality each with their own different laws, avoiding the tired cliché of having infinite copies of me (no pesky repeating fractals or the like) and preventing stuff from ever bottoming out. The reason that some things can't be reduced any further is not because they're truly fundamental, some "end of the line" point beyond which there are no more answers*, but because on scales below this things are radically different to the point of being incomparable. This is very appealing indeed. A webcomic version can be found here.

* I would yearn to know the Ultimate Answer, but I have great trouble imagining how this could even be a thing. 

But, while we're on the subject of gloriously crazy ideas, the other option is even more outrageous :

The first is coherentism, which suggests that we should take a more holistic view, whereby the foundation of reality could be constituted by entities that are themselves dependent on each other, in a symmetric fashion. 

For instance, quarks do not exist independently; they come in groups of two or three, such as in the case of mesons (group of two), and protons and neutrons (groups of three). So, you do not get freely existing quarks, simples though they may be. This immediately suggests that quarks lack one of the defining features that are typically ascribed to fundamentalia, namely, independence. In some sense, the quarks in these quark pair or triplets seem to be symmetrically dependent on each other… Ultimately, this could lead to a completely circular picture, where everything, or at least all the candidate fundamentalia, end up being dependent on each in a circular fashion.

I bloody love this. And I hate it too. Just have things defined entirely by other things ? That's... bold. You'd have something akin to fundamentalia but not really, there would be no single base component of reality, only base relations. That's going to need some more follow-up, but not right now. My instinctive suspicion would be that this can't work, but I'm not going to attempt to say why.

Which brings me to the final article I'll mention in this increasingly-meandering post :

A realist approach is one that takes the old-fashioned point of view that what is real in nature is not dependent on our knowledge or description or observation of it. It simply is what it is and science works by observing evidence or a description of what the world is. I’m saying this badly, but a realist theory is one where there is a simple conception, that what is real is real and [not] depend[ent] on knowledge or belief or observation. Most importantly, we can find out facts about what’s real and we draw conclusions and reason about it, and therefore decide. It isn’t a way most people thought of science before quantum mechanics.

The other kind of theory is an anti-realist theory. It’s one that says there are no atoms independent of our description of them or our knowledge of them. And science is not about the world as it would be in our absence—it’s about our interaction with the world and so we create the reality that science describes. And many approaches to quantum mechanics are anti-realist. These were invented by people who didn’t think there was an objective reality–instead, they understood reality to be determined by our beliefs or our interventions in the world.

The key idea, in society as well as physics, is that we must be relationalists as well as realists. That is, the properties we believe are real are not intrinsic or fixed, rather they concern relationships between dynamical actors (or degrees of freedom) and are themselves dynamical. This switch from Newton’s absolute ontology to Leibniz’s relational view of space and time has been the core idea behind the triumph of general relativity. I believe this philosophy also has a role to play in helping us shape the next stage of democracy, one suited to diverse, multicultural societies, which are continually evolving.

To recap from an earlier post, "there are no things, only stuff". All our understanding is flawed due to our limited perception, atoms aren't "real", they are just, in effect, labels for things which are real, whose true nature cannot be known to us. Maybe.

Leaving aside the question of the nature of the "stuff", what about the rules that govern the stuff ? Could they be said to be, in any sense, "real" ?

I think science in general assumes that they can. That nature operates on a fundamental set of inviolable principles, with our attempts at ascertaining what they are becoming progressively more accurate the more we learn, the more knowledge we have to develop our models from. The point is that some sort of rules do exist, even if might never grasp them perfectly. Whether this would imply determinism I don't know, but I suspect not, as in the last post, I think there is a valid space between the purely deterministic and purely random.

Which brings us back to magic. Something which violates an inviolable rule would count as magical. This may not necessarily be a logical contradiction, in that all ordinary matter might obey these inviolable laws (in relation to itself) but some other entities might not. This raises yet another definition of magic, that of different levels of reality following distinctly different but internally self-consistent rules. Hence the idea that you can go to a school for witches and wizards and learn how magic works : it would actively violate laws which otherwise are unbreakable, but is still limited by its own set of rules, much as in the "boring infinite descent" described above. Terry Pratchett made the point that all fantasy novels have to have rules for how magic works to avoid magic being the solution to everything*.

* Though I've heard it claimed that in the medieval period, the point about witchcraft was that it broke the normal rules of how the world worked, and the idea that you could go to a school with teachers and homework exercises to learn how to do it just wouldn't have made any sense. However, I can't remember where I heard this, and I can't find any references to it.

In this sense, we could consider almost everything magical. Atoms are magically miniscule because they operate on different principles from macroscopic reality; they experience all kinds of effects that we just don't. Conversely, galaxies are magnificently magical for exactly the same reason. It's only we, in this Middle Earth, that lack any sort of magic because we understand our own set of rules far better than those on any other scale.

Well, that was fun. To summarise the different kinds of magic considered, magic could be :

• When something interacts with us (or the world around us) by a mechanism other than the typical, well-understood methods of interaction
• When something behaves in such a way that is actively prohibited by known laws of physics, without any sort of pattern or following any rules whatsoever
• When something induces an effect without any physical connection of any kind, with no causal relation
• In general, when something does anything that is considered impossible, and no solution can be found to incorporate it into the known laws of physics, nor any problem found with those laws
• Or, when something operates on an entirely different set of its own rules that are present but inapplicable to our own lived experience. 

Some types of magic could indeed point to simply gaps in our knowledge, "any sufficiently advanced technology" and all that. But personally, I don't have a problem with the idea that some things just might not obey any laws at all and still exist - even if I don't actually believe in any of them.