I’ve read a lot about philosophy, but I don’t read much of it myself. I find the work impenetrable. I admire those who can penetrate it, but I can at most trust what they say about it because I have no way of verifying their meaning. Nor do I understand how it applies to the real world. Yet many intelligent people assure me that philosophy does apply and is an important discipline.
Technology is the real world application of science. I understand small bits of science, but only a handful of people really get the inside of quantum mechanics or thermodynamics, as Stranger says, and nobody who ever lived got all of modern day science. I can say that science is real because technology works, but the vast majority of science and technology is at the belief level for me. I believe that the earth is round because technology works, and the technology of everything from GPS to bridges is scientifically based on equations anyone can study.
What if there were no equations? What if there was nothing to study? What if there were only results coming from nothingness? What if the results could be reproduced reliably and to will? What if the wielders of the technology insist that science was in no way involved? How would we disprove them? Why, indeed, should we not believe the results are not created in exactly the way they claim?
Modern philosophers can and do examine modern belief in what some actual call scientism. Values and culture are more the issues there than technology, but they rebut the conviction that science is the only way to evaluate our world. I take no sides in an argument I don’t understand. Clarke, a believer in scientism to the core, nevertheless could parse the difference between what we can prove to be true and what we don’t.
Now, Fun With Nitpicks Time!
If you have the original of Profiles of the Future, you won’t find that line at all. It didn’t appear until the next year’s revision and then only in a footnote. The phrase originally appeared in a letter to Science magazine, Jan. 6, 1968. And was used in joking reference to UFOs.
This is a good example. Additionally: moving effortlessly through time, mind reading, knowing exact answers to unknowable things, maybe teleportation and telekinesis.
If an alien showed up on Earth doing these things without any apparent device, you might assume there is some hidden technology behind the scenes or you might assume that the alien tapped into some unknown power of the universe. We would only have the alien’s word for it – hence the indistinguishable.
Yes, not that we would believe it’s magic, since we are a technological society, but sufficiently advanced alien technology might as well be magic for as much as we would be able to understand it.
And, as mentioned, a pre-technological society can definitely assume magic when encountering advanced technology. The island residents of Melanesia formed cargo cults when the soldiers left after WWII, literally performing what amounted to magic rituals to try to get the soldiers and their supplies to return.
Also the converse, as any sufficiently understood Magic is indistinguishable from Technology.
Once you learn how to get consistent results from given imputs it is science even if you do not understand exactly why willow bark tea should be given immediately to someone who has been elf-shot.
One key is that how advanced is sufficient depends on who’s doing the distinguishing. Every piece of technology was, by definition, invented and built by someone. That someone most certainly can distinguish the technology they made from magic. So in that sense, every technology is distinguishable from magic… by someone.
But for every technology, there will also be someone who doesn’t understand it, at all, and for whom it might as well be magic. And we have plenty of technologies right now, for which the vast majority of people have no understanding whatsoever.
There was a thread here, a few years ago, from someone who was puzzled how a computer text interface could possibly work. They understood how you could move a file from one folder to another using a GUI, because you can see the thing is actually being picked up and moved from place to place, but how could a text command to do the same thing possibly do anything? That’s an “it’s magic”-level understanding, if I ever saw one.
I don’t think he meant that it would cause us to believe in magic, just that it would be “indistinguishable” from magic. Someone from a time period prior to the industrial revolution would have no idea how it worked, and think “Magic!”, but not us.
It’s just that, there would be no easy way to show that difference. “Pray to god for a miracle” vs “Ask Super-Alexa to cure your cancer” look the same to an uneducated outside observer.
I think this is the sticking point. Yes, actually, I think we could “begin to comprehend” things. It might take a while to fully comprehend everything, but we’d absolutely know how to “begin” to comprehend things.
Because that’s the real difference between science and miracles, or magic. Science in based on a method for systematically understanding the Universe. It’s only underlying assumption is that what is real for you is real for me. So, some alien lands on Earth and shows off some amazing tech, like teleportation. We’d immediately think, “Man, that’s some cool shit, how did he do that?”, and assign large numbers of very nerdy people to the task of figuring that shit out.
And even that is assuming the alien isn’t willing to just teach us how it works. A kid born in the stone age could grow up to build a nuclear bomb, if he just had the right teachers.
If an advanced civilization has technology that to us appears magic, I’m guessing it would be in the world of quantum mechanics, assuming they have a much deeper understanding of QM than we have and harness it routinely in their technology.
Can we even fathom what type of tech they could possess that would appear magic to us? No, because then it wouldn’t appear to be magic. It would just appear to be high-tech that we haven’t achieved yet. It would be like ancient Romans thinking about cell phones (with all the bells and whistles). Could they have even dreamed of something like that? I don’t think so.
Some people believe science has the answer to everything. I consider it a pretty good bet myself so I’m not likely to believe that magic is ever an explanation for the unexplained. The world is full of people who believe in magic though. Most believe in some combination of science and magic, but as long as they believe in enough magic it will always possible to find a magical explanation for what they can’t explain through science. There’s still some possibility I’ll accept magic as an explanation, I don’t need to see the resurrection of the dead from putrid remains, just make me young again and I’ll be fine with magic as an explanation.
It seems as though people really don’t understand what Clarke was getting at. He didn’t say that advanced technology would make you believe in magic, he said that it’s indistinguishable from magic.
If a technology comes into play that not only you don’t understand, but is beyond the limits of human understanding, then that is indistinguishable from magic. You can’t tell how it works, you can’t predict its effects, you can’t reverse engineer and replicate the effects, it is not explainable or understandable by our knowledge of science and physics.
Sure, you think that it probably operates under principles that someone understands, even if that person is not a human that you can ask, but you don’t know those principles, or can even make a productive guess as to them. What else would you call it but magic? You could make up or borrow some other term for it, but it would still end up meaning the same thing.
The reason that an act with a person standing on a stage pulling rabbits out of hats and sawing women in half is called magic isn’t because they are breaking the laws of physics or invoking the supernatural, it is because you don’t know how they did it. Sure, you could get them to teach you the trick, or maybe figure it out yourself, but so long as you are ignorant as to how it works that’s what it is.
I am recalling a thread in the last year-ish on the topic of a 2022-era fully working mobile phone falling into the hands of 1960s scientists and engineers and what they could (or not) do with it. I searched unsuccessfully or I’d cite it here. Anyone else able to help?
Anyhow, many laymen in that thread were astonished to learn from our experts that the consensus answer was very close to “Damn near nothing, except that the device was possible.” Which was itself useful info, but really didn’t offer much purchase towards understanding the phone much less advancing the 1960s state of the art towards duplicating it or any meaningful parts of it.
So in just 60 years we’ve delivered what would be damn-near-magic to state-of-the-art experts of yore. Now ask about what the next 5,000 years of human tech progress will bring and how useless all our current knowledge would be in the face of it. May as well be magic; it’s certainly indistinguishable from it.
As an aside, I think it’s useful in discussions like this to have a clear and useful definition of what “magic” means. One simple definition is that it’s “magic” when someone or something does something impossible… but that’s clearly not a useful definition, because if something is done, it definitely is possible, and there’s no use in having a word that doesn’t apply to anything. And even if we posit a fictional world where things are possible that aren’t possible in our world, the inhabitants of that world would be unjustified in calling those things “magic”, by that definition.
Another definition would be that “magic” is something that happens that the observer can’t explain. It’s clearly possible, but the observer doesn’t know how. This definition, also, I think is of relatively little use, since it means that whether something is “magic” or not depends on who’s doing the observing.
The definition I favor is that “magic” is something that cannot be explained at all. It happens, but nobody can say how or why, nor could anyone ever say. Interestingly, by this definition, not only can magic exist, but we know that it does: Gödel proved nearly a century ago that there are some statements in any nontrivial system of mathematics that are true, but which cannot ever be proven (though of course, lots of luck determining whether any particular statement falls into that category).
Where Clarke’s Law comes in is that, even though the last two definitions are different, it’s not always possible for any given individual confronted with any given phenomenon to tell the difference. If you can’t understand something, and maybe even nobody you know of understands it, how can you tell if there exists anyone, even in theory, who does understand it?
I was going to write a post here, but you’ve summed up pretty much exactly what I would have said.
The key word, as you noted, is “indistinguishable” – it doesn’t necessarily mean that a modern-day person would believe that an advanced technology must be magic, it means that the advanced tech is so outside the realm of that person’s understanding of the world that it might as well be magic, as far as understanding how it works.
No, you don’t have to believe in magic for that to happen, you have to see something happen that you can’t explain how it happens. Unless you don’t believe your own senses, then you would believe that something happened that cannot be explained by the physics you understand.
Or, you can use the definition as Clarke used it, that magic is technology you don’t understand.
Are you just tied to one specific and narrow definition of magic, and so are arguing for merely pedantic reasons, or is there something other point you think that you are making?
The entire point was that he was making a definition of magic. That it doesn’t line up with your personal definition of magic is utterly irrelevant.
I would lower that definition a bit, in that it is something that cannot be explained by anyone that you are able to ask. The aliens that materialize on the National Mall understand how they did it, but no one on Earth can even make a useful guess.
If it’s technology somebody made it, so somebody understands how it works, and it’s not magic to them.
That is close, but no cigar. Thank you though, you did solve the mystery albeit indirectly.
The thread I was thinking of is cited in post #21 of your cited thread:
I see it dates from 2016 which explains why I didn’t find it; I had used 2018 as my age cutoff when searching.
What’s even more impressive about this thread than I had recalled was our experts saying that 1970s/1980s experts would be utterly stymied by much of a 2016 iPhone. The tech moved that fast: 30/40 years of progress was enough to render significant parts of the iPhone “magic”, not 60 years.
People who believe their own senses in contradiction to science can be easily suckered. I don’t need to know the explanation to know that anyone’s sense are highly fallible and a scientific explanation can be found.
If that is his definition then conversely one would have to believe that technology is magic you don’t understand, making it a useless statement. Clarke was talking about magic, (assume Jack Webb is reading the following list like alternate slang words for marijuana) witchcraft, sorcery, hocus-pocus, supernatural mumbo-jumbo, voodoo, hoodoo, and the like. The law only applies to those who believe in magic. And if magic is real I’ll be the idiot who refuses to believe in it.