The central premise is that magic and computation are essentially the same thing, information/entropy exchange that can open channels to other multiverse inhabitants when performed at sufficient scale. As computers have become more powerful and widespread, a secret government agencies have been drafting those who stumble upon particularly dangerous algorithms -- which can invoke bugs and close encounters.
So the central protagonist of an IT guy for the UK secret ministry, "The Laundry". Visual Basic macros are not allowed!
I'm also reminded of Max Gladstone's "Craft Sequence" novels, which have some meso-american themes in a universe where "lawyers ride lightning bolts, souls are currency, and cities are powered by the remains of fallen gods". Highly recommended.
The author has a degree in computer science and worked as a programmer and technical writer before becoming a full-time science fiction author, so yes.
Yes, generally not much in the way of CSI tech... just some magic ;) at least as far as I recall.. the first few books had some pretty amusing 90sish IT stuff but that mostly falls away as the universe gets built / the mc does very little IT.
"""
> dig in remote places
> extract extremely rare rocks
> perform a forming spell on the rocks
> extreme heat and pressure are required
> inscribe microscopic arcane sigils into your magical stones
> imbue the stones with lightning
> the stones gain anima
> the stones speak in a language incomprehensible to all mankind
> certain trained warlocks can control the powers of the stones
> they learn the language of the stones
> the warlocks harness the magical stones powers to bring forth light and image
> the rest of the population is in awe
> you can now access Fortnite p**n anywhere you want from the palm of your hand
"""
As a programmer watching fantasy movies I often wonder at how easily spell casters cast intricate spells like healing people.
I imagine myself trying to cast a spell like that and having to go through fifty iterations to even begin to start doing the right operation without killing the person; and even when fully trained making tons of error while doing it complete with much swearing and cursing.
I then start imagining how a spell academy would create tests for spells to test of unexpected consequences on the patient etc...
It's amazing how much complexity is hidden in a simple spell in fantasy.
I assume most spells are more like executables once they've been studied. So healing somebody without killing them is more like remembering the flags on grep. Maybe some are a pain, but get out your spellbook.
This also explains why our protagonist has time to go around doing adventures and casting spells, while many of the other wizards seem to be old greybeards living in towers. They are actually doing a totally different kind of magic, writing the spells, debugging them, etc.
Hmm, in Harry Potter "wizards" seems to describe the entire human magical society, so I don't think they are using this sort of classification.
A good name for someone who only casts spells could be a magician on a conjurer.
On the other hand, when telling a story, I think it makes sense to make it so that the main character is a wizard just because it has the most cultural cachet. And most people don't want a story about debugging. So either we could be skipping over their day-job debugging (most programmers also have decent computer skills as a side-effect, so when the village is attacked by goblins it makes sense that some wizard would suddenly be flexing their more directly applicable skills). Or wizard could be something broad, like "general STEM person," and the main character is in some applied subfield. Or the magic creators could have some other job title (Mage, although that sounds a little generic for some reason... Sorcerer among people who are into games is sometimes mapped too closely to the wizard/sorcerer distinction from D&D, but not every magic system has to follow D&D tropes and it does have a good pun built in... or something like spell-weaver could be made up).
That is why modern spellmakers have the tlateochihualapaztli, or the Metaspell, in which other spells can be cast and isolated from the outside world, and their effects recorded and carefully combed through for problems; testing of more advanced spells may also need the iztlacatlamatini, or the Fakespell, which can emulate the weave of other spells without actually casting them, letting other spells talk to it without knowledge of its illegitimacy.
Enter the "Hello Mouse" experiment, where a young magichealer-in-training first maims a rodent, and then tries to heal it, to master the technique before being allowed to even think about sentient beings.
> I imagine myself trying to cast a spell like that and having to go through fifty iterations to even begin to start doing the right operation without killing the person; and even when fully trained making tons of error while doing it complete with much swearing and cursing.
This is more or less how AonDor magic in Sanderson's Elantris works. You spell out what you want to do in a sort of kanji language, often with unexpected results. And you have to draw the characters really accurately for it to work.
The Dying Earth books by Jack Vance explore a world where the knowledge to build new spells has basically been lost, and are the biggest inspiration for how DnD wizards work.
Likewise I wonder when the wizard's customers will wise up to the fact that they're being endangered while getting fleeced. Fiction is about suspension of disbelief.
This is great and I'm a little sad that I wasn't the one to write it. I'm a SWE and my wife is an archaeologist who studies Teotihuacan.
One point of clarification: Teotihuacano ≠ Aztec. The Aztecs discovered the ruins of Teotihuacan (and named it such) and incorporated many of its motifs into their own art.
Once the magic smoke escapes, its vessel is forever tainted and hopeless of recovery - except perhaps by replacement of the specific subvessel that was powered by said smoke.
> Perhaps the magicians whose magic is the most legible to those not acquainted with the Art are the data scientists, or melahuacatlatamachihuani — “those who measure well.” (Data, of course, in an abbreviation of tlatamachihualiztli, “measurement.”) For what is the world if not countless pieces of information that can be, through the clever use of spells written in the language of Quetzalcoatl, the Great Python, made to reveal truths?
VC's described as Mesoamerican Characters: "Moneypriests, using razor-sharp obsidian blades, sliced open the chests of sacrificial victims and offered their still-beating hearts to the gods."
Fantasy writers hate the guts of our real world because it is far beyond their story about a poor kid discovering magic to set bushes on fire. And they still put said kid through “ordeals” which are about enduring the heartless magic teacher and the bully classmates. But I wish that in our stories, the ordeals of the wizards were what they really are: getting that befuddling bug fixed at 1:00 AM in the morning.
If you like that you might also like The Wizardry series by Rick Cook
Here a short description from some bookseller for the first book "The Wiz Biz":
It all began when the wizards of the White League were under attack by their opponents of the Black League and one of their most powerful members cast a spell to bring forth a mighty wizard to aid their cause. What the spell delivered was master hacker Walter Wiz Zumwalt. The wizard who east the spell was dead and nobody—not the elves, not the dwarves, not even the dragons—could figure out what the shanghaied computer nerd was good for. But spells are a lot like computer programs, and, in spite of the Wiz's unprepossessing appearance, he was going to defeat the all-powerful Black League, win the love of a beautiful red-haired witch, and prove that when it comes to spells and sorcery, nobody but nobody can beat a Silicon Valley computer geek!
This reminds me pleasantly of http://grimoire.computer/ - "The Realm of Rough Telepathy", a reimagining of the early days of IP Networking as a mystic arts, somewhat akin to alchemists of old.
And first you have to carve cryptic runes into crystal slates with deadly invisible light and then imbue them with lightning to stir the gods from slumber.
> The Obverse-End Wizards know how to make the Smoke colorful, and make it display letters in a myriad styles, and allow the Onlooker to manipulate the Smoke themselves.
> The Reverse-End Wizards have magics to move knowledge along the many threads of the Web, bringing it to the Smoke for the Onlooker to See, or from the Onlooker to some distant node of the Web where it will be processed into something of use
> The Obverse- and Reverse-End Wizards commonly work together; sometimes they are even the same person, and we call them the Full-Stack Wizards (stack is a corruption of tzahua, meaning to spin or weave, referring to the Great Web).
For all of that redundancy though, their disaster recovery was not well thought out, or it was a good plan that never had a full test. Their first major event, and they were unable to recover and their entire data set was lost for all time. Just the antiquated shells of all of that backend hardware sitting around because nobody can bring themselves to getting rid of it.
Maybe they should have enabled multi-region sooner?
>My corollary of that law: "Any sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from boring technology."
This is a very good corollary, and something I have complained for a long time as it pertains to fantasy fiction (sorry if this is off topic). Modern fantasy authors tend to fall over themselves to over-explain and over-elaborate on "systems of magic" in their works. Many people like that, but I find it often takes away from the "mystery of magic" and results in science-lite element than actual magic. Tolkien was one who did magic correctly, with sufficient vagueness and poeticism to preserve the sense of mysticality in magic.
Sorry for the rant, it's been years since I wanted to write this!
I'm re-reading the Lord of the Rings and I have a grudge with the ring(s), because all I'm thinking is that Sauron is a misunderstood magic engineer that managed to fit a miracle of power into the tiny space of the ring. As the story progresses, I muse about the "magic subsystems" and "magic dev-ops", not to mention the amazing "find-my-ring" mental manipulation subsystem which figures so prominently in the story.
Tokien sees all of it as "bad, reproachable perversion that must be destroyed," and the Lothlorien elves give up their really pretty land in a heroic sacrifice to destroy the "evil of the ring tech."
To put it as a mobile tech example, I suspect that cell-phones cause autism in kids. At the same time, my phone is free of games and social-media apps, and it is incredibly useful to find places, check my bank saldo and buy train tickets, among many other things. But if I were Tolkien, we would be throwing the One Phone into a volcano, and after it all cell-phones would stop working and we would be back to using horses to send envelopes with letters. That way, we wouldn't need to find a way for our kids to play with each other in person instead of obsessing with our "rectangular obsidian mirrors".
I loved how 'Monday starts on Saturday' just threw you into a world of magic without explaining anything to you or the protagonist. I'd highly recommend that book.
And another excellent book by the same authors, The Dead Mountaineer's Inn, is exactly the opposite. You spend most of the book thinking you know what it's about, except you really don't.
What you call over-explained magic, others call 'hard magic' (like 'hard sci-fi').
Mysterious magic can give that sense of wonder/ambience, but it's hard to use it in order to satisfactorily solve problems: because it isn't clear what the magic can and can't do, if you have Gandalf whip out magic to fix every issue that comes along, the plot devolves into a series deus ex machinae. This means the more mystic magic has to have a subtler influence on the plot.
It's not as annoying if vague magic causes, or can cause problems, though. Even The Lord of the Rings contains some hard magic: when Frodo puts on the ring, he turns invisible, but becomes more visible to shades. The useful effect is a pretty well-defined and discrete! The full extent of the costs and dangers are less clear, though- which gives you a great feeling of foreboding every time Frodo puts on the ring, or is in a situation where it might be needed.
Harder magic more often gives a character a toolkit, and it means you can have a them come up with a novel combination or application of the abilities they have available to them to solve a problem without it feeling like an ass-pull. It's like a murder mystery, where you can wonder at what the answer is ahead of time, try to pick up on clues.
I think there might be two different genres wearing the same face, here. I like "scientific fantasy" as much as "fantasy", but in general they might appeal to different people.
In the fantasy book 'the misenchanted sword', the main character doesn't understand magic (he's just a scout), but when his sword ends up enchanted to 'protect him' (no other information given), he does what a real person might do- he tries to figure it out, see if it follows any rules! Along the way, he sometimes misunderstands or doesn't know enough, and consequently makes bad decisions. I really liked it, and I wouldn't have liked it as much if the main character hadn't been... doing science on his sword!
I agree that a lot of stories that incorporate harder magic systems also lack some poetry, but I don't think that's necessarily because of the hard magic. I think there's a selection effect going on, where the type of author most likely to write a story with discrete, well-defined powers is also more likely to have a discrete, well-defined, non-mysterious approach to the whole story.
I recently read a story called 'Wander west, in shadow' that has characters with pretty discrete magical abilities (they can learn to use more of 'the Art', but they each only know a few tricks), but magic and the world in general feels mysterious and broad. You know what the characters can do, so when they cleverly improvise it feels earned, but you don't know exactly how big the world is, and the characters are continually coming across things they don't understand. I got a 'Tom Bombadil' or 'Elven tools aren't magic, or are they?' vibe from a few parts of the story, for example. I really recommend it.
A good article, not much to share on it other than a piece of art of the Chilean trading card game called mitos y leyendas, which has a card depicting tezcatlipoca
> For what is the world if not countless pieces of information that can be, through the clever use of spells written in the language of Quetzalcoatl, the Great Python, made to reveal truths?
I'm genuinely curious (because I'd like to apply for the correct jobs in the future)...what are the differences, specifically what duties might each role do at a job that differentiates an engineer from a programmer?
Site won't load when I have Express VPN turned on. I screen shotted the Cloudflare error: https://imgur.com/bIyfcZR
I am not an experienced VPN user (about a month) and I've noticed weird things like Google asking me if I'm a robot or making me solve a Captcha. I only got the VPN so I could torrent in peace, which it does well.
As for Google, god forbid we were allowed to scrape the master scraper in peace, so you get automatic captchas (damn grainy ones too) if you try to google with a VPN on, in my experience.
Science is how we sort out the magic that works from the magic that doesn't. Just because we can observe it repeatedly, and it follows a reliable pattern, doesn't mean it isn't magic - it means the magic is REAL.
The nature of our universe as we understand it today, and by understand I mean that we can show our constructs are at least partially supported by reality, is far more magical and glorious than anything our ancestors could dream up. Yes - the universe is absent of life (and gods) as far as we can see so far. But the universe is far more grand than anything we dreamed up and human accomplishments through harnessing the magic of our world has put many of our ancient gods to shame.
Humans are amazing and this universe is magic. Don't let people rob you of that.
It’s a popular fact that nine-tenth of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary grey goo if its only purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys.
It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual.
Because if this was not the case, then human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing big stupid grins, similar to those worn by certain remote tribesmen who occasionally get raided by the authorities and have the contents of their plastic greenhouses very seriously inspected. They’d say “Wow!” a lot. And no one would do much work.
> ...each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.
While I understand and agree with the sentiment you express, I don't agree with using the word "magic" to refer to it.
I believe that in the minds of most people, the notion of magic essentially means the ability to use willpower to modify physical laws, or at least that physical laws are ultimately a product of a conscious will (often the will of a God, not a Human - but still a will that can be pleaded or bargained with through prayer or ritual).
And in this sense of the word, science has utterly destroyed magic. Not only is it impossible to extend your will to the world, it turns out that it is in fact the conscious will itself that is subordinate to physical laws, not the other way around - or at least this is what science is currently strongly hinting towards (we would know for sure if we had a much deeper understanding of the workings of the brain, and how consciousness arises out of it).
It's important to realize that this is vastly different from what scientists/philosophers throughout history have generally believed - even upto fairly recently, some form of Descartes-like dualism, with a mechanistic physical universe and a non-mechanistic spiritual universe of the mind (and God) being the most common way of picturing the world among most scientists even in the 1800s or later.
>>the notion of magic essentially means the ability to use willpower to modify physical laws<<
It's interesting that this is how you defined magic, because in a very real sense the ultimate purpose of most science is precisely to use our willpower to modify (what we previously believed to) physical laws.
Physical laws prevent human beings from flying, or breathing underwater, or viewing individual atoms. Until we literally used our willpower to design machines to overcome these "laws."
I have no doubt that eventually our collective willpower will be used to modify other "laws" we believe today, like the law that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Pretty magical if you ask me :)
The “laws of nature” aren’t proscriptive (decrees on the order of nature as commanded by a divine superpower), they’re descriptive - observations about related phenomena that appear (or are theorised) as being universally true.
When humans achieved “heavier than air flight” they didn’t do so by modifying (or subverting) any physical law - they applied imagination to state of the art knowledge of what the laws suggest about reality to create technology that overcomes gravity by harnessing natural phenomena (thrust + angle of attack + properties of air = lift).
I'm going to be prescriptive and say that you meant "prescriptive" rather than "proscriptive".
"Prescriptive" means "requiring" or "normative, specifying, prescribing", while "proscriptive" means (more specifically) "forbidding". It has only a negative sense of saying something is not allowed, while "prescriptive" includes a broader sense of specifying or ordaining something in any way.
> in a very real sense the ultimate purpose of most science is precisely to use our willpower to modify (what we previously believed to) physical laws.
I don't agree at all. The purpose of science is to understand physical laws well enough that we may predict how various objects work. Sometimes this allows us to make things that we previously believed impossible possible. Sometimes physical laws and limits turn out to be different than we thought, other times we simply find a better way to work within the same laws we always knew.
> Physical laws prevent human beings from flying, or breathing underwater, or viewing individual atoms. Until we literally used our willpower to design machines to overcome these "laws."
I don't think anyone has ever believed that one of the physical laws of the universe is "human beings can't fly". We have always known that heavier than air flying was possible (since birds do it). The notion of humans flying (or breathing underwater, or seeing really small things) with some kind of assistance has existed probably since pre-history, but definitely since antiquity - have you ever heard of Pegasus, or Hermes' winged sandals, or flying chariots and such? Airplanes are just a scientific realization of those ideas.
> I have no doubt that eventually our collective willpower will be used to modify other "laws" we believe today, like the law that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Pretty magical if you ask me :)
This is also something you are wrong about. If you look at the progress of science, at least since the 1600s or so, we have almost universally discovered new fundamental limits, not the other way around.
Given Newton's laws of motion, we thought that we could reach any speed we wanted to, if only we had the right technology. It was a new discovery that actually speed is limited. We also thought that an object can have any density, until GR showed that past some density, it ceases to be an object in the usual sense (it becomes a black hole). We used to think that energy can vary continuously between any two values, until we discovered that it can only vary by fixed quanta. We used to think that we can measure the position and velocity of an object to arbitrary accuracy, but then we discovered Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
So, as science advances, I'm looking forward to finding out what other thing we currently think is possible will turn out to be impossible.
> the notion of magic essentially means the ability to use willpower to modify physical laws
so the harnessing of nuclear power was not due to willpower..?
and of course reality is dual- otherwise what is mathematics made of? or how is anything similar to or separate from anything else, without some out-of-band judgement?
> so the harnessing of nuclear power was not due to willpower..?
Let me put it like this. We know that we can use water to grow vines, harvest and ferment grapes, and make wine. However, we still see Jesus/God turning water into wine as a magical event.
Harnessing nuclear power is like turning water into wine by using it to grow grapes. We have discovered that certain materials have the property that they become very hot in certain conditions, and we can use our willpower to move our hands and feet to build machines that do this.
But magic refers to us (or some other being) using its willpower to achieve such effects directly. Just like you or I can will our hands into moving, a wizard or god can will the seas into parting.
> and of course reality is dual- otherwise what is mathematics made of? or how is anything similar to or separate from anything else, without some out-of-band judgement?
What is a Linux made of? Ultimately, it is some configuration of fundamental fields that defines it, either in a computer or in our brains.
Now, did Linux, or Pyhtagoras' theorem, exist immediately after the Big Bang? In some sense, you can say that they did, because a hypothetical sentient being would have been able to formulate them just as much as we can today.
But then, in this sense, the Empire State building also existed at the time of Big Bang. In a much more concrete sense, no - these things only started existing when they were thought up or built by some human minds, and in this sense the copy of Pythagoras' Theorem in my mind is just as much a physical object as Linux is on my phone and as the Empire State building is in Manhattan.
> While I understand and agree with the sentiment you express, I don't agree with using the word "magic" to refer to it.
The word is historically accurate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_magic Prior to the scientific revolution at least, this really is how "tech" was conceptually understood.
(This becomes quite clear when considering how e.g. Newton was equally involved in highly "scientific" (by a modern standard) and highly "occult" pursuits. The two would've been essentially indistinguishable at the time.)
I don't claim to have very deep historical or anthropological knowledge, but I have to say I find it hard to believe that there wasn't a separation between "tech" and magic before the scientific revolution.
For example, is it really true that people viewed the construction of chariots, windmills or watermills etc as a magical endeavor?
I do know that for a long time smithing had a magical mistique around it, so yes, some things we view as technological today were viewed as magical in the past. But the distinction between magic and "tech" I think has always existed.
>It's important to realize that this is vastly different from what scientists/philosophers throughout history have generally believed - even upto fairly recently, some form of Descartes-like dualism,
This spirit-physical duality is mainstream in the West, however you are reaching when you say that every culture and their thinkers held the same beliefs.
"And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness, Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will."
Any definition of consciousness in which a human is conscious while a rock isn't conscious will do for my statement above.
And if your definition of consciousness makes rocks or electrons conscious, I don't think you're really capturing what most humans mean by the concept.
Note: animism or something like the Hindu concept of Brahman still imply the same kind of consciousness that I'm talking about. The soul (for animism) or Brahman itself are the conscious things, they just happen to live in/encompass rocks or electrons.
Though, the loss of magic is most likely more correlated with approaching this mostly rationally and analytically, than our scientific progress as a species.
You seem to be confusing your personal semantics with fundamental truth (we're all slaves to this tendency, I think). If you're looking for magic you need to look inward, not outward. And see if you can make that voice of reasoning be quiet for some extended time.
IIT is exactly what I was thinking of as a bad definition of consciousness. Any theory that assigns a non 0 amount of "consciousness" to a rock is defining a completely different concept than what people mean when they say consciousness.
Also, IIT has no basis at all. They've just found some measure that satisfies the property "human brains have more of it than insect brains, and insect brains have more of it than rocks do". Nothing else makes the II measurement in IIT related to consciousness, as far as I've ever found.
Somehow we are still claiming that the system is fundamentally random when it is very obvious it is fundamentally deterministic (but not predetermined).
I'm not sure what this has to do with consciousness.
We can go into the details of what various interpretations of QM mean for determinism vs indeterminacy (e.g. MWI implies that there is fundamentally no randomness of any kind at the universal level, and everything is predetermined, but also every possible outcome will happen; Copenhagen implies a kind of epistemological randomness - the outcomes of measurements are random, and it's meaningless to talk about anything other than the outcomes of measurements; Pilot Wave theory implies that QM only has randomness in the sense that Newtonian mechanics already does - we can't measure the starting state well enough to say for sure what would happen, but the process is fundamentally deterministic and peredetermined).
However, there are only two possibilities: completely random (nothing can predict or influence which value the wavefunction will take after collapse) or fully determined (what you're eating for lunch today could be predicted by studying the initial state of the universe at the time of the Big Bang). There is currently no room for any other possibility in physics.
I feel most comfortable with the pilot wave approach in this regard; it is generally compatible with emergence-from-causality type theories.
Free will in the fundamental physics sense is most likely an illusion, probably one that confers mental hardiness in face of adversity out of one’s control.
However, it could be an emergent phenomenon and thus irreducible to individual quanta anyway: more than a sum of its parts. Fundamental interactions do demonstrably yield complex structures itself capable of higher order interactions.
It’s not obvious at all at the quantum scale. Nothing we’ve seen indicates that eg. the timing of the decay of a single particle, or the ability of a single electron to escape an energy well is deterministic, though they are easily predictable in aggregate.
What does “deterministic but not predetermined” mean?
The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on Earth, the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures.
These stars, the high mass ones among them, went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy. Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself.
These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems, stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself.
So that when I look up at the night sky and I know that yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us.
Crazy I’ve been thinking about this all day. The big bang alone is a big fuck you from the gods reminding us we’re in an out of context problem.
So I agree, all science has done has helped us to gain a more objective understanding of our shared experience. We still have no idea what the hell is up with the universe, everything above it I guess, is doing existing in the first place.
Thinking through all of this has made me realize as an atheist I haven’t actually been engaging the religious honestly. If this is how they view the universe I and most atheists have been strawmanning them, and what they actually believe, without even knowing.
Maybe WE'RE the out-of-context problem, in a universe that hitherto now has not begun to think about itself. Organic chemistry that achieved enough chaos to begin giving order to itself? Sounds fake.
That used to be my way of thinking about things. I definitely know that we evolved from a random walk of the universes rules. At least that’s closer to the objective truth than not. But debating science is missing the point.
No matter the implementation details the fact I’m here looking at a universe is freaking weird. If I wasn’t here a lifeless universe existing would still be weird because wherw does it originate
During the period that educated Europeans believed in the reality of magic, it was understood to be of two types. "Natural magic" is when you are manipulating the physical world without understanding the mechanism by which it works. "Demonic magic" is when you are calling upon some spirit-world entity to manipulate the physical world for you.
Pre-modern people understood that natural magic was just a matter of having limited understanding of the physical world. They would have been comfortable calling it "technology." The really big conceptual change came when people stopped believing in the plausibility of demonic magic.
I think that’s just what you are used to. I think of radio, wireless charging, and transformers as basically the same thing. Crystal radios for example don’t need external power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio
Painkillers on the other hand seem like magic to me.
Actually yes, I think it is, though not exactly in the Max Tegmark sense (he's much more competent than I). Indeed, I don't think it could be anything other than math as it would be inconsistent (Daithi, where are you, you took me out for dinner and we had a great chat (intoduced me to Haskell he did )).
To be clearer, I don't think physical reality is math as we currently understand it, but if there's an aspect of reality that is non-mathematical and you can prove it you've won every significant prize available and started a conceptual revolution without comparison (no, human notions such as "love", beautiful as they are, don't count as we can't begin to mathematise these anthropomorphisations).
In mathematics we're currently living through what is from one vantage a dark age that started when Spaniards arrived in Yucatán. So stuff they had was just...but it's cool I managed to salvage some. It actually works out great in digital circuits, uses the exact same number of transistors as current stuff but better answers. Well however it is wildly incompatible with the current way things are done and can literally induce brain pain or headaches or confusion when explained. Only time I felt pain from thought. And it screwes up mathematical ability for hours.
