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Torello comments on Rationality Quotes September 2014 - Less Wrong
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Perceiving magic is precisely the same thing as perceiving the limits of your own understanding.
-Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, (e-reader does not provide page number)
That doesn't seem quite true... if I'm confused while reading a textbook, I may be perceiving the limits of my understanding but not perceiving magic.
Agreed. I think what Lanier should have said that a perception of magic is a subset of things one doesn't understand, rather than claiming that they are equal. Bugs that I am currently hunting but haven't nailed down are things I don't understand, but they certainly don't seem magical.
At least you hope not.
You could also be perceiving something way way past the limits of your own understanding, or alternately perceiving something which would be well within the limits of your understanding if you were looking at it from a different angle
The percept of magic, given its possible hallucination or implantation, is not necessarily an instance of limited understanding; certainly not in the relevant sense here, at least.