this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2025
100 points (80.1% liked)
Showerthoughts
37400 readers
404 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Magic, by definition, is supernatural. If you know how it works it's not supernatural ... thus not magic.
Show a sentinelese person a smartphone, they're gonna say it's magic.
I wouldn't count on it.
Most people don't understand how most technologies work, but they still don't call it magic. We know that someone understands how it works, because they build it. I'm pretty sure the Sentinelese are capable of understanding that concept as well.
I dunno about that. The sentinelese don't even have a written language or engage in agriculture, if you show them a glassy black rectangle covered in strange glyphs, that squawks and speaks without a mouth, and glows like a fire while remaining cold to the touch, how can they assume it's anything but an enchanted object? I can't imagine they have the slightest clue of the simplest procedures for constructing something like that, they don't know what a diode or a battery is or how doping works. They don't even understand electricity.
You can also look at the cargo cults of Melanesia. They saw WW2 operations in the area and interpreted them as rituals to summon goods (cargo) from their deities. How does a member of a non-industrial society interpret an airdrop if they have little to no concept of airplanes, parachutes, or even advanced metallurgy?
Sure, if you just toss a phone on the island and let them try to figure it out with no context, some might reach the conclusion that it's magic.
But if you actually show it to them in person, it don't think it would be hard to convince them it's man-made. They are familiar with tools and making stuff and the fact that there are other people that have stuff they don't have.
Well yeah, if you explain magic it stops being magic, that's how magic is. If you explained the magic of Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings using advanced quantum physics or something you'd turn it into an explainable, mundane world, like what we have done with the real world. But the magic remains under different terms.
Yes, it's fundamentally something supernatural that can't be explained. That's what I've been saying in my first comment. So what are we arguing about?
Does that mean Eda the Owl Lady was wrong to call her spells magic?
It's not a character I'm familiar with, sorry.
What about Gandalf? Is it wrong to call his spells magic?
I don't think so, he is literally a wizard. And LotR does have a famously soft magic system, so no one knows how it works. That's magic.
The world was sung into being and that's how magic works. Everyone knows that.
That is not an explanation for how something works.
Well it's what it says in the Silmarillion
I know, but it's still not an explanation.
Songs don't actually create worlds and characters, that only happens in this fictional story. So from our perspective this is something supernatural aka magic.
If the character Gandalf himself does understand how his spells work in detail, it might not be magic to him. Be we don't know if he knows that.
By that logic, anything fictional is magic, including science fiction.
Basically, yes.
Well we already have the word "fiction", I want magic to mean something else
Oh sorry, i glossed over that a bit. You can of course have fiction without magic. Take any story that plays in our world and doesn't have any supernatural elements.
But most science fiction will have "magic", though it usually marketed as some future technology. Like Star Trek, for example. In-universe they don't have any magic (I think, not a hyper-trekkie), because everything can be explained by in-universe technologies and phenomena. But of course it might as well be magic to us, because that stuff doesn't work in the real world.