this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/887096

I mean anything like cursed or lucky objects, ghosts, etc?

Figured it's the spooky season and I don't know too many people irl to talk to about the supernatural without discovering q-level brainworms.

I'll comment in the thread with my answer.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Magic to me is an imprecise term because before the "enlightenment" magic was used as an umbrella term for natural philosophy (science not yet partitioned from religious/occult practices or the "liberal arts"), mathematics (arithmetic, algebra, geometry), chemistry (not yet distinguished from alchemy). The 14th century definition of magic was "art of influencing or predicting events and producing marvels using hidden natural forces." Key word natural forces. Nothing supernatural necessarily implied. To date a tree using its rings is "magic" by this definition. To draw a line graph using existing data points and predict future trends using that data is "magic" by this definition. Calculating interest on a loan is "magic" by this definition. Brewing alcohol is "magic" by this definition. In fact, the loosest definition of the word "science" is also in line with this really loose definition of "magic". When Engels wrote "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" it's important to remember that he was writing in 19th century German. And in Germany, in the 19th century, the word "Wissenschaft" (science) still encompassed the humanities, as well as the "hard" sciences. The borders between science, magic, and the humanities were much blurrier in the past. You can still see echoes of this sentiment in the Arthur Clarke quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic" as well as the way some people seem baffled by the powers of LLMs and neural networks. But today if you mean purely supernatural phenomena, then no, I don't believe in the supernatural because I think the supernatural is a contradiction in terms. Every time we discover something new that was outside of our previous idea of what is possible (general relativity and quantum physics are entirely outside of the Newtonian conception of physics that reigned from the 1600s to the early 1900s) we simply incorporate that new discovery into our understanding of what is natural, rather than ascribing supernatural qualities to it. What are the actual qualifiers for what is supposed to be supernatural? Something without an explanation? Something not made of matter or energy?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

stalin-point you did the leftist "nuances of the word wissenshaft" meme stalin-point

we simply incorporate that new discovery into our understanding of what is natural, rather than ascribing supernatural qualities to it

this is an excellent point though

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

you did the leftist "nuances of the word wissenshaft" mem

1000 years gulag for me