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Eitan_Zohar comments on Leaving LessWrong for a more rational life - Less Wrong
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He's saying "I don't understand how magic could have come into being, it must have been invented by somebody." When in fact there could be dozens of other alternative theories.
I'll give you one that took me only three seconds to think up: the method for using magic isn't a delusion of the caster as Harry thought, but a mass delusion of all wizards everywhere. E.g. confounding every wizard in existence, or at least some threshold to think that Fixus Everthingus was a real spell would make it work. Maybe all it would have take to get his experiments with Hermoine to work is to confound himself as well, making it a double-blind experiment as it really should have been.
His argument here really is exactly the same as an intelligent designer: "magic is too complicated and arbitrary to be the result of some physical process."
You may be right, but it is still more parsimonious than your idea (which requires some genuinely bizarre mechanism, far more than it being a self-delusion).
Not really. You've seen the movie Sphere, or read the book? Magic could be similar: the source of magic is a wish-granting device that makes whatever someone with wizard gene think of, actually happen. Of course this is incredibly dangerous--all I have to do is shout "don't think of the Apocalypse!" in a room of wizards and watch the world end. So early wizards like Merlin interdicted by using their magic to implant false memories into the entire wizarding population to provide a sort of basic set of safety rules -- magic requires wands, enchantments have to be said correctly with the right hand motion, creating new spells requires herculean effort, etc. None of that would be true, but the presence of other wizards in the world thinking it were true would be enough to make the wish-granting device enforce the rules anyway.