I would attribute the necessity of using children to the ethics board, not to a weakness of the fundamental approach in today’s culture. In order to have this experiment approved, it was probably necessary to avoid outright lies. Thus, it was necessary to find subjects where they could appear to honestly explain what they were doing without the subject actually understanding. If they were able to tell outright lies, I bet they could have success with adults as well, at least ones that aren’t experts in the domain of Science they draw their magic from.
Which raises an interesting question: is it possible to invoke these forces ethically in the modern world? One work-around to the ethical problems is if the subject knowingly learns to manipulate themselves. I suspect that’s the root of disciplines like self-hypnosis, neuro-linguistic programming, and some aspects of meditation…
"...indigenous shamanism is the forebearer of modern show business..." This reminds me of the idea that theater started as an offshoot of the cult of Dionysus.
I bought, but never read, an earlier book by David Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous. Now I might have to drop everything else and dig into it.
What some call magic, others call miracles, though I like “spooky events”. Some say we cannot disprove that bona fide miracles happen. There may be a good retort to that: genuine miracles, if they exist, are so rare as to be pointless to contemplate.
I once did a thought experiment wherein I estimated the total genuine miracles (~1 million) of the last 20,000 years and the total experienced events. There would have been “quintillions of events if everybody who ever lived averaged [experiencing] a couple of events per minute.” If so, “the probability of any human life event being a spooky miracle … is at most something like 1 in a few trillion.”
These miracles would be ones for which a non-biased person could rule out natural explanations, such as charlatanism, coincidence, or placebo effects.
So, there’s just no point in hoping for a miracle. For a person’s entire life there might be about 1 chance in 200 million of experiencing one.
And there’s no point in trying to explain the agency behind them, because humans can hardly keep themselves from attributing agency to numerous natural things that don’t have it, and to myriads of supernatural beings that don’t exist. Which of those many agents caused a particular miracle? There’s no way to even narrow it down.
Theory of mind works so well for us that we will attribute mental intentions to just about anything. “Some things in the world around them did not truly have agency: weather, objects in the sky, plants, seasons. But agency is a powerful predictive model. So our ancestors lost little by attributing agency to anything that affected them.”
Still, we love our magic. Lots of us stiff-necked secular materialists enjoy or even prefer fantasy stories. To paraphrase John Lee Hooker: it’s in us and it’s got to come out.
I would attribute the necessity of using children to the ethics board, not to a weakness of the fundamental approach in today’s culture. In order to have this experiment approved, it was probably necessary to avoid outright lies. Thus, it was necessary to find subjects where they could appear to honestly explain what they were doing without the subject actually understanding. If they were able to tell outright lies, I bet they could have success with adults as well, at least ones that aren’t experts in the domain of Science they draw their magic from.
Which raises an interesting question: is it possible to invoke these forces ethically in the modern world? One work-around to the ethical problems is if the subject knowingly learns to manipulate themselves. I suspect that’s the root of disciplines like self-hypnosis, neuro-linguistic programming, and some aspects of meditation…
Great post, thank you
"...indigenous shamanism is the forebearer of modern show business..." This reminds me of the idea that theater started as an offshoot of the cult of Dionysus.
I bought, but never read, an earlier book by David Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous. Now I might have to drop everything else and dig into it.
What some call magic, others call miracles, though I like “spooky events”. Some say we cannot disprove that bona fide miracles happen. There may be a good retort to that: genuine miracles, if they exist, are so rare as to be pointless to contemplate.
I once did a thought experiment wherein I estimated the total genuine miracles (~1 million) of the last 20,000 years and the total experienced events. There would have been “quintillions of events if everybody who ever lived averaged [experiencing] a couple of events per minute.” If so, “the probability of any human life event being a spooky miracle … is at most something like 1 in a few trillion.”
These miracles would be ones for which a non-biased person could rule out natural explanations, such as charlatanism, coincidence, or placebo effects.
So, there’s just no point in hoping for a miracle. For a person’s entire life there might be about 1 chance in 200 million of experiencing one.
And there’s no point in trying to explain the agency behind them, because humans can hardly keep themselves from attributing agency to numerous natural things that don’t have it, and to myriads of supernatural beings that don’t exist. Which of those many agents caused a particular miracle? There’s no way to even narrow it down.
Theory of mind works so well for us that we will attribute mental intentions to just about anything. “Some things in the world around them did not truly have agency: weather, objects in the sky, plants, seasons. But agency is a powerful predictive model. So our ancestors lost little by attributing agency to anything that affected them.”
Still, we love our magic. Lots of us stiff-necked secular materialists enjoy or even prefer fantasy stories. To paraphrase John Lee Hooker: it’s in us and it’s got to come out.