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Full Version: Science, Magic, and the Inexplicable + The Word and the World
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Science, Magic, and the Inexplicable

EXCERPT: In our scientific age, magic has been reduced to conjurers and wands. Yet, Newton and Wittgenstein saw the accounts of science as ultimately inexplicable. Should we see our theories as limited and, in a sense, magical or would this undermine all knowledge? In our recent IAI TV debate on this subject, mathematician George Ellis sided with Newton: science will not uncover every mystery in the universe; there are some questions best left to philosophers. Ellis made his name focusing on some of the big questions of cosmology and relativity. Along with Stephen Hawking, he co-authored 1973’s The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, which attempted to describe the very foundations of space itself. More recently, Ellis has been focusing on top-down causation. Here he speaks to the IAI about the dangers of magic, the importance of mystery, and the line that separates science from philosophy....



The Word and the World

EXCERPT: Is language limited? We might answer the question with reference to a tragi-comic empirical precept: everything is limited, in the end, in one sense or another. We are mortal; we exist in an unknowable and strange universe, of which we understand very little. Each one of us is limited, by finitude, by vantage point; our species is limited, and, we might reasonably assume, will one day become extinct. Furthermore, these words I am deploying – ‘the universe,’ ‘time’ – are linguistic concepts, not perpetual realities. The word is not the thing. Moreover, the thing is most likely not the thing as we understand it; it is completely possible we have not grasped the meaning of it at all. Despite this, we eagerly apply words to the formlessness around us, and our anointed experts deliver new taxonomies in language, which rise to prominence and then fade, to be replaced by other taxonomies in turn. Meanwhile, another species, with another language and another mode of being-in-the-world, might propound different concepts altogether, and re-taxonomise the prevailing formlessness in completely different ways.....
True magic is merely sensitivity to the energies and unconscious tendencies of your own psyche. It isn't religion, because it posits ultimate freedom and power to reside in yourself. It isn't science, because it doesn't reduce everything to inanimate and random processes. True magic is feeling connected to everything around you and everything that happens in your life. It is grasping that we do indeed live in a construct, and one that we can modify and alter according to our own deepest needs and passions. Is it dangerous? Yes..insofar as all great experimentations threaten our very sanity as "normal human beings."

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl