Let’s start at the beginning. There is magic. I don’t mean this metaphorically.
When I was eleven years old–eleven was a significant year for me, more on that another time–I read a series of issues of a newsletter for an intelligence community that my brother belonged to. I don’t believe it was a Mensa publication, though it might have been. My brother belonged to several intelligence communities several levels above Mensa. In the series of issues was an ongoing debate among the organization’s members on the origin of sentience. A popular materialist atheist theory is that sentience arises out of complexity. Create a complex enough computer, and it will begin to understand that it exists. Understand. Not become merely capable of responding as if it knows. I couldn’t wrap my mind around this idea. It did not ring true. What’s materially different from a simple pile of matter and a complex one? Complex by whose definition? Wouldn’t the pile of matter need to know it was complex before it could know that its complexity was useful for thought? What form did the complexity need to take? Could a library full of books become sentient? Or was this just a thing for biology and electrical circuits? The process seemed to be missing a step. It seemed to require a leap of faith. But I could see that much smarter minds than my own were articulating and defending it. They seemed to be winning the debate. I concluded that they were right.
They were wrong. There is a missing step. We do not know whence sentience.
Then there’s life. And that’s a different thing, isn’t it? It’s one thing for a smart being to become smarter. It’s another for what was stationary to become movement, to become will.
A working definition of magic: more than the sum of its parts.
Love is magic too. I hope. We certainly behave as though it is. We don’t approach an intimate relationship with another person as a highly complex set of reciprocal transactions that benefit each party. We think of a meeting of the minds, not of our own mind banging against an impenetrable humanoid sensory object from which we can reasonably extrapolate useful (if complex) causes and effects.
Is the body sacred? I think so. This isn’t something materialism can defend. Sociology can suggest we’re better off living in peace with others than not. It can’t go further than that. What if we decide not to live in peace with others? Is harming another person qualitatively similar to eating that second piece of pie we shouldn’t eat? A simple matter of shooting ourselves in the foot? I don’t think so. Sentience, life, love. These inform the sacredness of the body. That’s four examples of magic. I could name more. Nature. The stars. Sex, sometimes. The fact that a psychic once said to me, “you have a destiny to fulfill, and it’s to tell your story.”
Physics tells us what. It doesn’t tell us why. Some beliefs have to be axiomatic.
I’ve been obsessed with the crisis of modernity since I’ve known about it. Nietzsche’s death of God. The loss of meaning in life. The loss of magic. More on that another time.
I am here to keep my soul intact, a task that is increasingly difficult in these troubled times.