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Eitan_Zohar comments on Leaving LessWrong for a more rational life - Less Wrong Discussion
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How is this 'literally the exact same logic that ID proponents use?' Creationists fallacize away the concept of natural selection, but I don't see how Harry is being unreasonable, given what he knows about the universe.
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."
He actually does kind of address that, by pointing out that there are only two known processes that produce purposeful effects:
So, yeah, I disagree strongly that the two arguments are "exactly the same". That's the sort of thing you say more for emphasis than for its being true.
I stand by my claim that they are the same.
An intelligent designer says "I have exhausted every possible hypothesis, there must be a god creator behind it all" when in fact there was at least one perfectly plausible hypothosis (natural selection) which he failed to thoroughly consider.
Harry says essentially "I have exhausted every possible hypothesis--natural selection and intelligent design--and there must be an Atlantean engineer behind it all" when in fact there were other perfectly plausible arguments such as the coordinated belief of a quorum of wizardkind explanation that I gave.
That doesn't address the question of why magic exists (not to mention it falls afoul of Occam's Razor). You seem to be answering a completely different question.
The question in the story and in this thread was "why purposeful complexity?" not "why magic?"
Your proposal is equally complex, if not more. What's causing the hallucinations?
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.