I like the idea that there is a God, hes just the programmer of our simulation. Magic was real, in the form of exploitable glitches, and got patched out as time went on.
this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2025
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I vaguely remember a quote about magic that can apply to anything. Someone taking something ordinary, and doing something extra ordinary with it.
A deck of cards isn't magic, but what the person DOES with it can be magical. Same with amusician and a musical instrument , or a writer with a pen and paper.
I saw something once along the lines of "if there was a novel where they harnessed a magical force that was thought to come from the sky, and it was used for everything, like powering devices that keep food fresh, and long distance communication, and said the majority of people had no idea of how it worked we'd call it lazy writing, but that's just a description of electricity" paraphrased a bit, but ye :3
Plus we can imbue crystals with thought and knowledge by inscribing them with complex runes and commanding them in a special language.
Main difference is that, in fiction, the "imbuing" doesn't require a billion-dollar fab.
I mean, there are a few intrepid techno-wizards trying to do it themselves, but it's a far cry from what Big Magic can manage.
Yes, but that bullion dollar industry only grew over time. The first crystals were made in small labs pushing the edge of magic. If you let a magical world develop industrialization long enough, surely they will try to optimize their magic as far as possible as well
That's how you tear down the fabric of space and demons ruins the world though.
looks at climate change
Oh...
We used lightning to trick rocks into thinking.
Teaching sand to think was a mistake.
And yet you used sand to transmute this missive into the aether. Curious!
I saw one comment and was sure it'd be the Arthur C. Clarke quote. I like your one, I hadn't seen it before.
Give the book Ra by Qntm a read
The synopsis is strikingly similar... It's not lazy writing, I really enjoyed that book.
As Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Came here expecting someone to have posted this quote, was not disappointed.
I think the MCU of all places summed this up perfectly and I think it was in Thor: The Dark World where Jane has fuck knows what and they operate on her in Asgard and she's giving medical terms and they're like "WTF just hook her up to the whoziwhatzhit and she'll be fine."
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.
Well yeah, if you explain magic it stops being magic, that’s how magic is.
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.
The world was sung into being
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.
What if magic was real, but required speaking actual magic words and we just haven't figured out the right words?
Psychopaths have figured out how to manipulate, or cast a charm spell on people. That’s pretty magical to me. Those are still words, so I’m going to count them as magic words.
Not really a Hollywood style incantation, but results speak for themselves.
What if humans are actually remotely controlled by small alien ants?
ILLUSIONS
sucky magic. Well until we have transporters and replicators.
Technology deals with mostly physical things, magic is mostly non physical. This isn't some official definition just a better one. Real magic doesn't deal with matter or energy in the ways most people are familiar with it.
I think it's magic how the sum time sunk into a thing can be greater than the time it took to make the thing.
It's magic when 20 hours goes into a painting and it generates (5 minutes * 300) worth of emotions.
It took Tolkein more energy / emotion to make LotR than I'm willing to give appreciating it. But everyone combined has certainly outweighed what Tolkein put in. It's magic to me to think of "free" "emotion hours".
Everything else is so... crass. Transactional. A battery that holds X energy means the sum energy people can extract would be X at best. I have 7 hotdogs and so at most 7 people can each have one.
But art? Games? Puzzles? It's magic how there's basically infinite energy inside.
I think it’s magic how the sum time sunk into a thing can be greater than the time it took to make the thing.
It’s magic when 20 hours goes into a painting and it generates (5 minutes * 300) worth of emotions.
This is why I like music. I'm not spending 100 hours to make something someone will look at for 10 seconds.
I played this guitar part for 5 mins? You listen to it for 5 mins. (creation time may be multiplied by fuckups and overdubs/additional tracks)
Magic was never real. It was technology all along.
People were incredibly stupid when the churches didn't allow education for the masses.
A Yo-Yo would have made you a magician. It's not a magical feeling to be worshipped by idiots for knowing how a Yo-Yo works. It's just sad.
I kindof agree but I'd phrase it the other way round: people always tended to call things they don't understand Magic.
The inverse of Clark's saying: sufficiently explained magic is indistinguishable from science (credit: Girl Genius webcomic)
Belief in magic is kind of hard to define, anthropologically—we tend to call anything that contradicts currently-known laws of physics “magic”, but that makes the term contingent on the observer’s knowledge rather than the believer’s. (For instance, things like astrology and alchemy that we regard as magic now were thought to be the result of natural forces in the Middle Ages.) But there are other things the believers themselves agree are “magic”, even if they think they can explain it.
For myself, I would call magic the belief that there are multiple, independent systems of causality, whether the believer fully understands those systems or not—and by that definition, technology isn’t magic for most people.
People look into space and say "I don't see God" like bro- you see objects so huge and so far apart we measure their distance in the time it takes light to travel between them and us- what were you expecting to see?