Your Life is Full of Magic

What is Magic? Does it involve secret rituals, incantations, fireballs and invisibility spells? Truth to be told, magic is simply that which defies an easy explanation.

Where Magic meets Science

Picture a stereotypical white-bearded wizard, leaning on an ancient oak tree. The old man carries a long wooden rod and wears a blue robe with a cone-shaped hat.

Now the wizard steps aside from the tree, menacingly frowns, and shouts out an arcane spell in a cryptic language. As he waives his rod, its end emits a lightning bolt that violently splits the mighty tree into halves. An explosion of thunder echoes miles away. The wrecked tree is on fire. The mischievous sorcerer is laughing carelessly.

How did this happen? What are the mechanisms that induced the amazingly powerful ray of plasma? If we analyzed the physical properties of the ray, perhaps it would give us a clue about its origins. Furthermore, if we were to put the spell-caster through a battery of biophysical and molecular tests, we would find out whether other humans are capable of casting the same spell! 

Using the scientific method to analyze the event, we can learn how we can cast lightning spells ourselves. It will then be up to us to use this knowledge for our human needs. However, by analyzing the magical event, we will kill magic in it and transform it into science, making the poor old mage lose his job in favor of scientists, engineers and military contractors.

Just by understanding magic, we turned it into something else, which shows that the fundamental property of magic is that it is poorly understood. It can only exist in an observer’s mind, as a property attributed to external events. 

Magic is Everywhere

Whether it’s an African villager visiting a witch doctor to cure a disease or a 20th-century factory worker seeing an airplane for the first time, the universal sense of awe they experience can be well conveyed with one word – magic. 

Once you realize that magic does not have to be something mystic, fake, or forbidden, but rather simply something that is poorly understood, you immediately start seeing it everywhere. A car uses the power of fiery explosions to move you around? Magic! A box of circuits and wires was used to guide humans to the Moon. Magic again! You are using a similar box, only dozens of thousands of times more powerful, to read this article.

Connection with Abstraction

In the modern world, we replaced “magic” with “abstraction” [2]; however, the two concepts are fundamentally similar. Think about helping your grandmother to set up a magic box through which you will be able to talk to her while away in another country. Thanks to abstraction, to use the phone she doesn’t have to be an electric engineer and understand how the screen shows a face thousands of miles away. To her, it is simply magic!

Everyone uses abstraction, some just don’t realize it. Physicists use abstraction to condense enormous quantities of information into beautiful and practical formulas. Office workers use abstraction to get their work done rather than thinking about how the spreadsheet program compiles code for mathematical operations. Doctors prescribe drugs that are known to be effective, even if the exact mechanism of action is rarely fully understood. Finally, if painters thought too much about the “how” and “why” before wielding the brush, we would never be able to experience the enchanting and inspiring effect of art.

This powerful way of thinking can help you solve complex problems. If you think abstractly about a problem, you are freeing out your creative and intellectual powers without distracting to details. 

Magic and Curiosity

Some may correctly argue that abstracting from concepts too much may lead to the mere utilitarian approach and loss of interest in how things work. A prominent example of this is something that many of us have suffered: Typical school and university education systems often teach essential concepts without explaining the essential “how” and “why”, using time constraints as an excuse.   

The good news is that seeing magic in things can help in solving this problem! Here’s how: 

Thinking about something that is not completely understood in terms of magic (e.g. a bipedal black box with something mysterious inside that makes it walk) almost inevitably leads you to the fundamental questions. It is then up to your curiosity, so natural to humans, especially young ones, to drive you onto the path of discovery. Now compare this approach to the miserable route memorization of the walking-bipedal-black-box formula, as a classic high school curriculum would suggest. 

Whenever I perceive something as magical, then at least subconsciously, I treat it as something special. Magical things are by definition poorly understood. Therefore, any knowledge about them holds intrinsic value and power. Everyone wants to possess things of value and power!

By exploring the workings of the black box and asking questions, you will possibly come to the core of the problem, transforming the magic into science (or whatever other model of the world) and reaping the benefits, with infinitely more magical boxes of all shapes and colors waiting for their turn to become an engineering project.

In other cases, you will not be able to find the explanation of the magic workings, and maybe no one can, for now. Some will forget about the problem, leaving a small teasing cloud of mystery in the labyrinth of memory. Others will keep on trying, making valuable discoveries along the way.

Incorporating the “explain the mysterious magical box” model of thinking into individual and institutional learning programs can make the process of education more engaging both for students and for teachers. The least schools and teachers can do is to stop stifling curiosity. Their best shot would be to nurture it by guiding students towards intriguing problems, and answering questions when curiosity sparks.

On a more philosophical note, if you don’t understand exactly how something works, seeing it as something magical is a tribute to the infinite complexity of this universe that lets you pause and ponder on its incomprehensible beauty!

Bonus: Magic and the Supernatural

Historically, the concept of magic is associated with the possession and use of supernatural powers more than with anything else. To use the concept of magic freely and productively in modern life, the relationship needs to be clarified.

Without getting into the discussion of what exactly is meant by supernatural powers and whether possessing them is even possible, I would like to draw a clear line between the use of “magic” meaning fun and useful abstraction of concepts and “magic” meaning the use of supernatural powers by humans. I explored the concept of the supernatural in my essay Supernatural means Unexplained.

Key concepts

• Magic is a form of abstraction used to label things that are poorly understood. 
• The concept of magic sparks curiosity. It promises value and power to those who understand it
• When magic is explained, it ceases to exist, rewarding the discoverer and pointing towards other mysteries
• Curiosity—the drive to demystify the magical— motivates individual learners and should be leveraged by educational systems 

[2] If the meaning of magic is similar to abstraction, why use the ambiguous word historically related to mysticism rather than the generally accepted technical term? For a precise technical use, I suggest using the latter. However, for experiencing the sense of awe when pondering the life around you, “magic” is a better fit.