It makes a good point, that magic
isn’t an explanation for much of anything — you need some chain of causality
and evidence, with some mechanism at each step. You don’t just get to say “it’s
magic” or “it’s a miracle.”
Bonus, the comic pokes fun at
that absurd ad hoc magic system in the Harry Potter books that is nothing but
lazy plot gimmicks.
I know that PZ Myers has got a downer on JK Rowling and that explains some of his aversion to H. Potter, but I ask myself this: Do I agree with him? Sort of, but I'll have to qualify.
Firstly, the cartoon starts off with a chair that is actually being levitated by, well, "magic". So in this context, whatever "magic" is within this cartoon world, it is predicated as a real phenomenon. So given that this so-called magic is real our young heroine in the cartoon does have a point: The curious have every right to usefully ask: "How's it done?" By smoke and mirrors? By thin wire suspension? By a newly discovered anti-gravity ray? Or by something even more exotic (like psychokinesis) of which we know nothing? I assume that when Myers tells us there's need for some explanatory chain of causation along with its accompanying evidence, he's asking for a closer linked cause and effect connection than the utterance of "Floatularis" and the wave of the wand; otherwise, there is a big gap there!
In our world cause-and-effect entails the transmission of the energy & information from A to B. So where's the energy & information coming from to lift that chair? But then this question presumes that the energy/signal transfer paradigm is the correct one to use. Perhaps it doesn't work like that at all when we are dealing with so-called "magic"! But assuming that the cause-and-effect paradigm applies here by what mysterious ways does energy get from A to B? Cause-and-effect "explanations" fill in some of the "in-between" details and often in ways that allows those details to be predicted using those succinct laws of physics to generate those details. But apart from this clever mathematical trickery I have to confess that's as far as our understanding goes and just why those physical algorithms work is as good as "magic"! As I would contend, this kind of science is, in the final analysis, mere description, albeit clever description that comes out of asking the kind of questions our heroin above, at risk of her life, is asking. Of course, it may be possible to further improve on the elegance and comprehensiveness of the laws of physics in hand but in an absolute sense the descriptive role of science's physical "algorithms" means that ultimately it leaves us with wall of explanatory incompleteness, what is in fact an explanatory silence. It's ironic that as science fills in the gaps with more descriptive details, we zoom in only to find just more finely spaced gaps!
***
So, is it all magic & mystery? No, it's not magic and the mystery is better described as the miraculous, an idea pregnant with meaning which stimulates curiosity and prompts further questions. Contrast that with a purely secular take on the cosmic perspective which posits the organization of the universe as either a meaningless brute fact or proposes that the apparent selective contingency of cosmic organization is a human perspective effect on the infinite sea of randomness in a multiverse. It goes to show that a magical paradigm is not the only way of thinking which stifles curiosity. Do you hear "multiverse" and just stop asking questions?
We really need to supplement the past tense question "Where did it all come from?"
with the present tense continuous question " Where is it all coming from?
I was fascinated, gob-smacked in fact, by the rather curious YouTube video (above) by atheist Rebecca Watson and published by PZ Myers on his blog. At first, I thought I'd take a look because PZ Myers billed it as video about schismogenesis in the New Atheist and secular communities. I have followed this theme for some years and wanted to see how these divisions were shaping up. Not that I thought any worse of the atheist community for it: After all, the historical Christain subculture of which I'm part has a lot more experience of sharp schisms than these atheists; about 2000 years' worth more of experience! When it comes to humanity, Christian and otherwise, schism is the name of the game: As Sir Robert Walpole might have put it in my all-time favorite quote, it's "The natural state of human affairs".
But I was in for a big shock if I thought this video was going to be just another archetypical story of human epistemic challenge and disagreement, whilst I looked on with unsurprised and jaded cynicism. Rebecca Watson is seldom lost for words but today she gave a lot of airtime to atheists Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein with whom she is very much at odds. In fact she just let Eric and Sam pay out enough rope to hang themselves.
In the video we hear both Harris and Weinstein claim that they have been contacted by government insiders telling them that we are due for a big official disclosure about the UFO phenomenon being utterly real. Harris referred to his contact as a "private outreach" and that this contact informed him that government sources, especially the military, have incontrovertible evidence of the presence of alien technology. Eric Weinstein, a man who also entertains Covid conspiracy theories, says that his inside informer has told him that a "big update" is due from government on the subject of UFOs. He's been told that he will be flown out to Colorado Springs, met by a car, blind folded and taken to a place where he will be shown stuff which means we'll never be the same again! Weinstein has been "on standby" sitting on this promise of UFO disclosure for all of three years, sometimes being told "not this week because we are too busy". But one can't help the idea popping into one's head that he is being strung along by a hoaxer. Apparently, he along with Sam Harris and others in their orbit, have been flattered by the suggestion that they will be needed to bring this news to the world.
Well, I was in stitches especially as Rebecca Watson (like PZ Myers) always finds exactly the right words to lampoon this kind of claim, and especially so if the claimant looks to be motivated by all-too-common human weaknesses & conceits! Watson floats the thought that Harris and Weinstein are being hoaxed and that these two big names, who she thinks are getting far too big for their boots, were easy targets for to this kind of flattering hoax because their (masculine) hubris means they always think of themselves as "the right men for the job"! I was very much reminded of the hoax played on Tim Ventura by "flying saucer engineer" Bob Lazar and the way Tim was strung along by Lazar for about a year. But Tim Ventura has always come across (to me at least) as Mr. Nice-Guy and he was only open to Lazar's hoax because like the rest of us he had career ambitions and a natural vanity which can sometimes be exploited. But in credit to Ventura he is humble enough to admit he was hoaxed, but then only for a year and not 3 years. (See also here for more on Ventura). Is that because Eric Weinstein's ego is 3x bigger that Tim Ventura's?
And yet....and yet...like Weinstein I have heard the testimony from so many disinterested witnesses who have had firsthand encounters that I too feel sure they are genuinely experiencing something unusual although I'm not sure exactly what that something is - but I very much doubt it is technological aliens as we think of them. Also, Weinstein was clearly gen'd up on the Skin Walker Ranch case and the scientists involved who have seen "things". He just couldn't believe that these people were lying and frankly neither can I. As he said "there is too much data; something is going on". But Weinstein thinks it's down to technological aliens; that I very much doubt. The Skin Walker Ranch case is too bizarre and looks more like the loose associative, drifting & phantasmal thinking of the human vision-generating mind somehow spilling over into reality: The paranormal has its roots in the earthly biosphere and in particular human consciousness.
Yes, I agree something's going on, but it's not little gray men with their technology: They are just a facade for something else and not a very convincing facade at that: My best guess is that it is more to do with the nature of reality which like our own minds may at times be subject to some kind of delusional dysfunction. After all, what makes reality but the fact that those laws of physics are primarily a way of organizing our experiences with such a replete coherence that they provide the equivalent of a physical version of a "Turing Test" facade, ensuring that our epistemic interrogations are answered so fully that a picture of an all-round "solid" reality appears to emerge. But these strange paranormal experiences are the opposite. It's as if they are to the rational world of physics as our visions, dreams and hallucinations are to the wakeful rational mind. Our dreams appear to have a loose associative meaning, but sleep brings on a very chaotic synthesis of elements from our waking life, driven by a mix of emotions. Apart from being a fragmented recapitulation of elements we know from waking life the chaotic juxtapositions of our dreams are largely without meaning and appear to be a consequence of some mathematically chaotic logic that rules the night visions. Likewise, ghosts, UFO's and the apparitional in general looks too much like the contents of the human id & ego somehow projected out on to reality itself in a chaotic mishmash.
The chaotic states of mind and the paranormal (the latter embraces the whole of gamut of apparitions from ghosts, alien animals & life forms to UFOs) are far too erratic, singular, irregular, complex and probably subject to some underlying chaotic dynamic to make them easily amenable to a scientific epistemology that can pin them down. Scientific epistemology depends above all on a stable status quo.
As for the relationship of government and UFOs, I'll wager that government doesn't have any special inside knowledge of the phenomenon apart from having bigger databases; in fact just more of the same puzzling observational traces, but, I'll hazard, no hardware, no alien bodies and no Lazar-sport-model flying saucers. Official institutions are probably as puzzled by the whole thing as are the rest of us. But officialdom needs to appear competent and in control, therefore they are loathe to admit their ignorance and lack of control. To my mind this is sufficient to explain the authority's reaction to the paranormal, a reaction which ranges from outright denial to at best an embarrassed evasiveness & silence.
But be all that as it may: The question remains: Who is hoaxing the Intellectual Dark Web? Some kind of Bob Lazar figure? The whole thing looks so much like the bizarre Bob Lazar fraud where Tim Ventura (initially at least) was strung along with promises, promises, promises.
