A medieval peasant would gawk at an electric light, but that doesn’t mean magic doesn’t appeal more to the human psyche than technology in a way that would cause a person in a world with magic to be more easily able to find wonder in the real than someone in our world—magic and reality are not “identical on some calibrated amazingness metric”. This was the point of my previous post; I disagreed with Eliezer’s implicit message in the original post that a world with magic would be no more wonderful, once you’re used to it, than the real world. The fundamental/natural part was secondary, although I do think that fundamental magic (which I realize is paradoxical) would be more wonderful to the average human than reducible magic (because it would imply that “human beings are fundamentally a part of the most basic aspects of the world and are thus important”), and natural magic would be more wonderful to the average human than manmade magic (same thing, plus people seem to prefer natural to artificial, all else being equal).
A medieval peasant would gawk at an electric light, but that doesn’t mean magic doesn’t appeal more to the human psyche than technology in a way that would cause a person in a world with magic to be more easily able to find wonder in the real than someone in our world—magic and reality are not “identical on some calibrated amazingness metric”. This was the point of my previous post; I disagreed with Eliezer’s implicit message in the original post that a world with magic would be no more wonderful, once you’re used to it, than the real world. The fundamental/natural part was secondary, although I do think that fundamental magic (which I realize is paradoxical) would be more wonderful to the average human than reducible magic (because it would imply that “human beings are fundamentally a part of the most basic aspects of the world and are thus important”), and natural magic would be more wonderful to the average human than manmade magic (same thing, plus people seem to prefer natural to artificial, all else being equal).
I’m surprised nobody’s said the words “hedonic treadmill” yet.
Eliezer has three of his stories on his webpage, for those interested.