The Magical Mind

Hurrah, my semester is done! I have a bunch of books lined up for my holiday reading. First up, a series of articles compiled as Imagining the Impossible: Magical, Scientific, and Religious Thinking in Children, edited by Rosengren, Johnson & Harris (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Yes, they’re academic articles and this isn’t light reading. I was hoping to learn more about how children approach fantastic thinking through fantasy stories. There’s a little of it, but not as much as I anticipated, so I was a little disappointed. But the readings were still interesting overall.

 

The opening chapter, “The Makings of the Magical Mind” was my favourite. The authors provide a point-by-point working definition of magic, which they summarize as: “Magic is a cognitive intuition or belief in the existence of imperceptible forces or essences that transcend the usual boundary between the mental/symbolic and physical/material realities, in a way that (1) diverges from the received wisdom of the technocratic elite, (2) serves important functions, and (3) follows the principles of similarity and contagion.”

 

They focus on sympathetic magic, of which one principle is that if two things resemble one another (“like produces like”) in some way, shape, or form, they have a deeper connection going beyond what we consider as science can explain. Voodoo is one example. Another, more mundane, is our common disgust at the thought of touching fake poop. This also illustrates the principle of contagion whereby some essence can be transferred through physical contact – you might be “contaminated” by the essence-of-poop, whatever that is. The authors provide many examples from a variety of cultures around the world for this seemingly magical way of thinking. After reading the chapter, I started to notice my own magical ways of thinking in ordinary daily life, where I mistake correlation for causation.

 

Chapter 4, “Development of Beliefs About Direct Mental-Physical Causality” usefully categorizes physical and mental cause-effect relationships in the context of whether an action takes place within an individual versus between individuals. For example, if you push someone, this is a physical change acting between individuals. This is normal cause and effect, and no one would be surprised. However, if you willed someone else to fall by pushing them purely with your mind (and your mark could not see you or be physically distracted or influenced by you in any way), this would seem magical. This telekinetic ability represents “action-at-a-distance”, something that seemed magical when Newton’s Law of gravitation was first proposed; scientists readily accept the latter, but not the former.

 

In this blog, I have speculated that magic in the Hogwarts world relies on electromagnetic radiation as a “carrier”, possibly in the same way that photonic particle exchange mediate the action-at-a-distance in Coulomb’s Law of electrostatics – which you’ve likely encountered as “like charges repel” and “opposite charges attract”. These sound uncannily like sympathetic magical principles. Perhaps that’s because I’m still thinking like a scientist, trying to ground the underlying principles of magic, somewhere in the physical principles of the energy-matter continuum. The magical mind should perhaps dismiss such efforts and proclaim that magic is truly action-at-a-distance in a mind-over-matter way. Maybe my attempts are all for naught.

 

The articles in this compendium do feature a number of interesting “experiments” and interviews with children, adolescents, and adults. They explore wishful thinking, imaginary friends, believing in Santa, praying to God, and more. Children are neither scientists-in-the-making as they explore the world around them or purely magical thinkers easily influenced and led astray. Growing into adulthood does not shed all forms of magical thinking, and we continually display approaches that can be classified as “folk-biology”, “folk-physics” or “folk-psychology”, that seem to be evolutionarily primary. These serve useful functions even as “formal education” tries to disabuse us of magical thinking.

 

The final chapter, “Theology and Physical Sciences” traces the intertwining of scientific and theological thought through the ages. The author divides Christianity into four eras: Platonism, Aristotelianism (Thomist and Ockhamist), Newtonianism, and Twentieth Century (with the advent of quantum mechanics and special relativity); framing each of these eras in terms of ontology, epistemology, and cosmology. Examining the “seeming” conflicts between science and religion show that these often are related to differing and evolving frameworks of thinking. Thus, the hotly debated issues of the day change over time, and one sees this through the larger arc of history.

 

Overall, I enjoyed this compendium, but I do take issue with the title. I don’t think it’s ontologically possible to “imagine the impossible”. We can imagine many possibilities that may not correspond to physical or historical reality, but I think our act of imagination makes them exist as possibilities, even if only in thought. The possibility of imagining what’s possible and yet unrealized is what allows us to be creative, to bring out something new that wasn’t there before. You might call it magical. I call it living.