/lit/ - Literature

>>23535658
Wanna bet?

— “No sense of right and wrong”
— “All progress demands sacrifice”
— “It’s not a question of could, but should”
— “Sweet, man-made horrors beyond my comprehension”
— “Oh-my-science, what have I done”

All prime wizarding tropes!

>>23431437
Modern day science is indistinguishable from medieval day sorcery.

>>23405828
The same way 21st century science is literal magic, sure.

>>23404072

>>23370466
>So is all of physical law just about regularities, or do physical laws exist beyond that?
Define "exist beyond that".
When you are asking something this outlandish you HAVE to be concrete. When you are discussing fundamental shit you can't just use regular words without defining them first.
Again, it's fine to ask outlandish questions, you just have to do it right.

We have stuff we presume to be real and it has a predictable behavior.
Behavior==laws

>>23369619
How would you imagine the existence of a laws on their own,for what is a law without a subject to govern?

Asking if the laws are real carries with it an aura of arrogance as if we have figured out if all of the other physical concepts are "real" and all that is left are the laws. Which is not true, because take foe example energy.
We don't know if it's a reality or just an abstraction.

>>23156279
What happens when a given setting’s Magic™ butts heads with something even more outlandish and downright “magical” in comparison? Is it (this new and outlandish thing) suddenly not called magic because the name has already been taken? Trademarked? What? Magic—the psychology of it—doesn’t work that way. Literally anyone can use the word ‘magic’ to refer to literally anything sufficiently bewildering or horrifying. “I don’t understand it, it goes against what I believe in, and it scares me, therefore witchcraft”. Magic is literally just a catch-all word for wonder, horror, mystery, heresy, etc.

I’m going to be honest here: I fucking hate, HATE, when people try to hard define magic. It doesn’t work. At all. Magic is closer to a proxy/placeholder. Again, what is magic to one is not magic to another, and you see this in works like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings—his elves don’t believe in (elven) magic. It is entirely relative. A bar to meet. It is higher/lower for others. It’s why the black machines of Mordor are associated with black magic and sorcery.

Magic is what you make of it. Magic lies within the mind’s eye—this should be obvious just from the amount of fantasists and authors arguing over what magic is/isn’t—and you define magic at your own peril, to the detriment of everything else out there that can be described as magical. Magic is, and survives as, something to describe, not to define. If mystery, wonder, horror, heresy, etc, make magic, then ignorance is -the- greatest magic of all.

Fuck me. If people treated math, fucking MATH, as magic for thousands of years, from Pythagoras all the way up to Isaac Newton, what makes you think nothing else can be? Nothing is simpler or purer than math.

Magic exists the same way darkness, cold, or holes exist. It’s not supposed to exist, to exist. It’s an absence. Nuance. It doesn’t go away, it becomes something else, similar to how drugs were once magic, and the word for pharmacy once meant sorcery. The sagely, wizardly stereotype, and all of its trappings, are in-fact derived from past alchemists and astrologers, natural philosophers, etc. the most brilliant in history were also downright nutty, and in many ways the modern magician is just the mad scientist. It is eerily (“sweet, man-made horrors beyond my comprehension”—“it’s not a matter of could, but should”—“all progress demands sacrifice”—etc) applicable.

I think people into magic systems are, for the most power, into them purely for the sake of construction, not the actual psychology surrounding magic, or what keeps the magic, or what makes something magic, etc. It is disappointing, really.

Magic has become a prop.