on the importance of uncertainty in magic

I like to say shit like

Magic is a window left open to let a pie cool.

and

Magic likes to have space to be explained away.

Give it that space, then don't dismiss it.

At the risk of "explaining the joke", I want to expose more of what I mean by this sort of cryptic utterance.

(And that is the risk. Explaining the joke. Closing the vessel.)

I look at a system like Tarot or Astrology and there seem to be parallels. They both have

• a densely intra-referential network of archetypal, resonant symbols

• a stochastic shuffling of these symbols by and arbitrary (but non-random, physical mechanic)

• doubt

Doubt here is "OK, there's no rational, materialist reason this should work but what if it does anyway?" An intentional suspension of disbelief.

Usually when doubt reaches out and seizes us, we experience fear. "What if someone is in the house." "What if this cough is actually cancer?" What if something is reaching into our carefully constructed comfortable, health-supporting nest and violating our ground assumptions. Like, it's possible. Burglaries can happen while you are home. People get cancer all the time and there is a first symptom of it. It's scary.

But what I want to talk about is a sort of positive doubt.

Reality might not be what you have been taught. There might be a step you took a long time ago, a step over a trap door leading to a whole other part of the world, way back when you were a child. When you were eager to grow up, be big, no longer subject to the weaknesses of being small.

Where would magic be? Where would we find it in our modern world of science, of rules. Science seems to banish magic. When we look for magic with science, we seem to find nothing. Coincidence. Ambiguity. Non-replicable results. Confirmation bias. We find placebos (and, importantly, nocebos).

(OK time for a big tangent. I promise we'll remember that pie.)

Placebos are interesting. If you're inventing a drug, you need to test whether it works or not. But the thing is, anything you give someone and call it a drug will work. This is called the placebo effect and it's something you need to "control for", filter out of your science experiment. Otherwise you could just be selling sugar pills, which would reasonably be considered fraud.

To compensate for this, you test effects on two populations: one, the "test group", is given the real drug, the other, the "control group" is given something that looks like the drug, but is inert. Then you compare the effects. The effects on the control group is treated as a baseline. An effective drug must exceed... nothing... in effectiveness.

Researchers discovered that it was necessary to completely insulate the test subjects from any knowledge of which group they were in. Eventually, the standard became the "double blind" controlled trial, where even subjects are randomly assigned to test or control groups and the staff administering the treatment (or non-treatment) are kept unaware of which group each patient belongs to. Apparently the researchers were unconsciously telegraphing this knowledge to the subjects.

During the 90s and 2000s, people started noticing that the placebo effect was getting stronger. Like, measurably. And since drug development at that time was very focused on maladies with strong psychosomatic components: depression, heartburn, chronic pain, this was a real problem.

(Note that psychosomatic does not mean imaginary -- it means connected to mental state.)

My pet theory is that this was caused by the reinvention of prescription pharmaceutical television advertising that occurred during this period. Advertisers found a loophole in the FDA's regulations, which specified that consumer-targeted advertisements for prescription medication that addressed specific symptoms had to list all their side effects.

Since the "side effects" are pretty much anything weird that happened to the test population during the clinical trial, they tend to be a long list of horrible things that happen to people normally as they live their lives. A long list. Of icky things. That would have to be read by one of those specially trained fine-print announcer voice guys. During dinner hour.

Ads like this didn't work so hot. Advertisers realized that they could make ads for drugs that made no health claims, just said "THE PURPLE PILL! ASK YOUR DOCTOR ABOUT PRILOSEC!" or whatever and they worked! People would ask their doctor about the drug and this would dive sales. (Note that advertising is just as rigorously social-scienced as drug development.)

The first drug whose ad agency figured this out made shit-tons of money and soon the airwaves were just blanketed with ultra-high production value commercials for pills for... totally non specific problems. Just, you know, ask your doctor magician authority figure who is allowed by the rules of society to see you naked and that's OK about our beautifully designed jingle-heralded pill.

What might mass exposure of a nation-sized population to this sort of subconscious manipulation have on the psychosomatic power of The Pill in general? That is, of the placebo effect? Might it strengthen it?

Thus the very advertisements that were making these new drugs so lucrative to develop were, paradoxically making them harder to get approved because the baseline effectiveness of placebos were increasing.

What is going on here?

(Intrusive thought: Is advertising a form of magic?)

What is going on is we see science making tremendous efforts to exclude a magical effect. For good reasons! From its point of view!

But here's the thing. Sure it's good public health policy to exclude placebos from your population's pharmacopoeia, but: I am not a population. I'm not data. I'm an anecdote. I ABSOLUTELY want to harness the placebo effect when I am sick. If there is an effective drug for whatever my problem is, great, I get an effective drug and I get the placebo effect on top of it for free. But if there isn't an effective drug (and often there isn't), I still want that placebo effect.

So do I have to fool myself, trying to create a blind trial for myself? I mean, maybe? Homeopathy might be good for this. Science says it can have no effect, which is great because the last thing I want is a placebo that gives me the placebo effect but is actually harmful (see... uhh... early western medicine for lots of gruesome examples of this), but it's just plausible enough (to the irrational, symbolic mind) that it engages the placebo effect.

But, amazingly, the placebo effect seems to work pretty well even when people know what they are doing and are just, like, "Now I will take a placebo. Which is a sugar pill. But will work because of the placebo effect."

You can get benefit from a bottle of empty capsules labeled "PLACEBO" in big blue letters.

This is an example of magic hiding in the shadows that the light of science casts.

Before science these shadows weren't shadows, they were just... the world.

If we want to find magic today, we now have some hints about where to look.

(OK, I think that pie has probably cooled off enough to have a slice.)

If we want to find magick, we can look in places where magic can be explained away.

"It was probably just my imagination."

"Well, to be fair, I was pretty high."

"I mean coincidences happen all the time and they're only meaningful because of confirmation bias."

"Am I sure I'm not just telling myself what I want to hear?"

"I was all alone out in the woods and... maybe I just got a little freaked out."

We can look in places where magic has plausible deniability.

But what if we invert doubt -- instead of saying "I doubt that happened" we could say "I doubt that this is impossible. It might be. But I'm no longer sure."

And we don't have to find naturally occurring zones of positive doubt -- we can deliberately create spaces of "plausible affirmability". A context where we allow ourselves to be unsure whether something might be unexpectedly possible.

This is what we are doing when we draw tarot cards, interpret an astrological chart, recognize omens. When we divine.

When we do ritual, practical or theurgic.

You know what, it's stuffy in here. Let's open a window.