My cached thoughts start with a somewhat different question—not “what role does magic play in fantasy fiction?” (e.g. what fantasies does it fulfill), but rather… insofar as magic is a natural category, what does it denote? So I’m less interested in the relatively-expansive notion of “magic” sometimes seen in fiction (which includes e.g. alternate physics), and more interested in the pattern called “magic” which recurs among tons of real-world ancient cultures.
Claim (weakly held): the main natural category here is symbols changing the territory. Normally symbols represent the world, and changing the symbols just makes them not match the world anymore—it doesn’t make the world do something different. But if the symbols are “magic”, then changing the symbols changes the things they represent in the world. Canonical examples:
Wizard/shaman/etc draws magic symbols, speaks magic words, performs magic ritual, or even thinks magic thoughts, thereby causing something to happen in the world.
Messing with a voodoo doll messes with the person it represents.
“Sympathetic” magic, which explicitly uses symbols of things to influence those things.
Magic which turns emotional states into reality.
I would guess that most historical “magic” was of this type.
Ancient polytheism seems to basically go: the rituals are a deal or diplomatic ritual with powerful beings, and so they have a focus on orthopraxy (doing the thing) instead of orthodoxy (believing the thing). So does pouring wine on the dirt while reciting a nitpicky contract about how you formally request a good harvest from the Earth god count as symbols affecting reality? Technically yes, but I don’t really feel like that’s a good descriptuon of what’s going on here, not in the way that it is for magic circles or spoken spells or voodoo dolls.
Fantasy depictions of alchemical rituals would be a counterexample if you were including fiction (because you take some stuff, do processes to change the stuff, and then you eat the stuff to change yourself, aka cooking/chemistry). Historical alchemy seems iffy (lots seems like “preparadigmatic chemistry and drug development”, but they did use mystical reasoning).
A previous natural category attempt for magic, that I think I read Eliezer cite from someone else: the characterizing feature is that the ontologically basic elements are rather complicated, and often mentalistic, instead of the itsy bits of physics. I see this as coarser/more incomplete than yours.
So I saw the Taxonomy Of What Magic Is Doing In Fantasy Books and Eliezer’s commentary on ASC’s latest linkpost, and I have cached thoughts on the matter.
My cached thoughts start with a somewhat different question—not “what role does magic play in fantasy fiction?” (e.g. what fantasies does it fulfill), but rather… insofar as magic is a natural category, what does it denote? So I’m less interested in the relatively-expansive notion of “magic” sometimes seen in fiction (which includes e.g. alternate physics), and more interested in the pattern called “magic” which recurs among tons of real-world ancient cultures.
Claim (weakly held): the main natural category here is symbols changing the territory. Normally symbols represent the world, and changing the symbols just makes them not match the world anymore—it doesn’t make the world do something different. But if the symbols are “magic”, then changing the symbols changes the things they represent in the world. Canonical examples:
Wizard/shaman/etc draws magic symbols, speaks magic words, performs magic ritual, or even thinks magic thoughts, thereby causing something to happen in the world.
Messing with a voodoo doll messes with the person it represents.
“Sympathetic” magic, which explicitly uses symbols of things to influence those things.
Magic which turns emotional states into reality.
I would guess that most historical “magic” was of this type.
Ancient polytheism seems to basically go: the rituals are a deal or diplomatic ritual with powerful beings, and so they have a focus on orthopraxy (doing the thing) instead of orthodoxy (believing the thing). So does pouring wine on the dirt while reciting a nitpicky contract about how you formally request a good harvest from the Earth god count as symbols affecting reality? Technically yes, but I don’t really feel like that’s a good descriptuon of what’s going on here, not in the way that it is for magic circles or spoken spells or voodoo dolls.
Fantasy depictions of alchemical rituals would be a counterexample if you were including fiction (because you take some stuff, do processes to change the stuff, and then you eat the stuff to change yourself, aka cooking/chemistry). Historical alchemy seems iffy (lots seems like “preparadigmatic chemistry and drug development”, but they did use mystical reasoning).
A previous natural category attempt for magic, that I think I read Eliezer cite from someone else: the characterizing feature is that the ontologically basic elements are rather complicated, and often mentalistic, instead of the itsy bits of physics. I see this as coarser/more incomplete than yours.