Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 4597582" data-attributes="member: 30001">In a magical system, human beings are at the center of the universe and are the measure of reality.  The stones and trees have an intelligence because people do, and people project themselves and their psychologies onto the surrounding reality.  This makes the reality of a magical world extremely significant to human beings.  Magic is always perfect, even if people aren't prepared for the results (ie. Monkey's Paw) or someone elses magic is stronger.  There's never a "better theory" when it comes to magic. On the other hand, science, by it's own definition, avoids this projection.  It's a tool for measuring a predicting things, but it does not purport to capture the essence of reality.  Quantum mechanics is not magic because it's fallible.  For instance, it doesn't predict the results that relativity does - the two theories are well known to be incompatible but are reasonable approximations for their respective scopes and will be replaced when something better comes along. I would imagine that a wizard, if there were such a person, would understand his world totally different than a scientist does (at least a good one that's learned from the past 400 years of scientific mistakes).  Most scientists that I knew (that I took classes from) would acknowledge that science will always be an approximation of reality.  On the other hand, wizards seem to think that magic is capable of achieving perfection, past which there is nothing (ex. the philosopher's stone).   IMO the real historical world is an example of a world where the inhabitants believed their magic to be real, and IMO it certainly was treated with a level of awe/fear/respect that is not comparable to the way a person casually aquainted with quantum mechanics would think of it.  The philosophy at the root of the Scientific Method, and the one at the root of "Magic" are significantly different.</blockquote>

Verification