Sometime soon I’d like to write an essay breaking down why I disagree with the belief that magic is just mystified science.

More specifically, the whole “science is just magic when you know the rules” is a very specific concept of magic, and not all magic fits that.

In this view, magic is a form of technology, and the process for activating the technology is mysterious.

I assert that most of what defines magic is that it doesn’t work in an easily reproducible, controlled way in the first place and is always somewhat animal and mysterious

There can be technological, scientific magic—which isn’t to say only magic that also uses machines, but magic that has a kind of predictable physics to it, so that if you learn the right technique, practiced magicians can cause the same outcomes nearly every time.

But there‘s also magic that never could be that way no matter how skillful the magician, in which magic is more like art: some works of magic will never be methodically reproduced, much like individuals novels can never be exactly copied

There’s a difference between mystical and unexplained. Many modern day things can be done that don’t have a scientific precision to them, Iike writing a book or composing a song or meditating or expressing love, and this isn’t because we don’t have enough facts about those things

When we say something has a magical quality (“a magical night,” “it was pure magic”) we mean there is something spontaneous and holistic about it, something mysterious in a way that isn’t about lack of facts but is instead about experience

It isn’t the goal of every process to be like science. Intellectual precision isn’t the highest form every discipline can take.