Keep the faith, baby!

Andy.

By the way, great job saving Middle Earth! Much appreciated!

Andy.

Yeah you know, this whole thing about the how Catholics view reality is pretty twisted even on the best days. On the worst, it kills people! How that lot can even claim to be ‘rational and sane’ is living proof that mass societal delusion can and does exist. But I won’t go into that here. Far better to write a proper scathing blog entry and flog the bastards in public! I can get some negative publicity mileage out of that as well for my blog, cheap bugger that I am. However I will finish up with a last word (actually two). Catholics: idiots!

So you quantified my paradox in a very scientific way, which incidentally also applies to God and faith. As the saying goes – but I can’t remember who said it – Faith in God belies proof because once you have proved God you no longer need faith. I think the thing here is, when we talk about realms of impossible things, we are talking about things that science could not achieve, even if it was given a sufficiently large amount of time to allow for more sophisticated processes and machines. (Check out this video by Michio Kaku for a small discussion on that). For instance, I don’t ever think science will ever be able take our dreams and make them real, or create Middle Earth as a real place. But this is the kind of stuff that I think magic can do. You could be right about the subconscious applying the right levers to achieve something, like astral travel for instance, but I also think this kind of thing is an innate inability that we all have, but most people don’t develop it. It can be developed by intensively following various meditation practices, in much the same way as you can develop physical skills through training.

In the end, I think belief in “magic” is going to have a lot to do with whether you accept only a rationalist viewpoint of reality to start with. As you say, you will believe what you can experience for yourself. However you believe a lot more than that, because I am pretty sure you’ve never seen a tachyon particle before, but I am betting that you believe it exists. (I bet you’re going to say you don’t just to make me look bad Similarly there is more to reality than can be experienced personally.

For myself I have a big belief in impossible things because I have a big imagination, and I’m not so rationalist. In the whole scheme of things, the world is more than the mass of it’s particles; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So I tend to think there is some force that can be manipulated to change reality as we want. But really, isn’t this the same as what we do with science?

Andy.

But I’m deliberately misunderstanding your point here.

If you define magic as that great paradox you mention, then… well, I could argue that achieving the impossible is impossible by definition, because once you’ve achieved it, you’ve proven it’s possible. Nevermind that, though.

I’d say it’s real. I’d also say it’s far less spectacular and simple as it’s described in fiction. The example I’d give would be the application of Ki in (Ki-)Aikido – you can learn to overcome being restrained by people, or throw them, with little use of force. What force you use is so little that it becomes seemingly impossible.

The fun part of it is that to a large part the trick in achieving this lies in a combination of relaxation and belief. I might go as far as say it’s not really belief, it’s a conviction – there can’t be any doubt, and because there is no doubt, you succeed.

Now I’m too analytical to keep things at that. There’s definitely an element of applying the leverage in just the right way. The “magic”, if I were to be very analytical about it, would be to let your subconsciousness figure out what the right leverage is, because your consciousness wouldn’t manage. And you achieve that through being convinced that you succeed, without having to bother to try (that takes practice though, and I suspect the practice also helps hone your subconsciousness’ abilities).

Magic of this kind, I have little trouble believing in – I’ve experienced it myself, as it were.

The water drop experiment I’m a bit sceptical about. It’s not that I couldn’t come up with plenty of fantastical reasons why it could work – it’s just that people botch up experiments too often for me to not be sceptical about experiments with fantastical results.