Timeline for Would relatively primitive people really confuse technology with magic?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
70 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 15 at 7:14 | comment | added | Jay | @GoingDurden And yet ancient people talked about "miracles". If people at, say, the time of Jesus, didn't have some conception of the difference between "natural" and "supernatural", then when it was claimed that Jesus turned water into wine -- whether that really happened or not -- they wouldn't have called it a "miracle". They would have just said, Huh, so he knows how to do that. Handy talent. Sure, people in the past and many theories about natural phenomenon that we now know to be false. But no one ever claimed that phlogistan was an evil spirt, or that mice sprouted through magic. | |
| Feb 14 at 8:24 | comment | added | Going Durden | @Jay your definition of "natural" is from the 18th century forward. How would you explain what "super-natural" even means to someone with no scientific background? How'd you explain "technology" as different from "magic"? From the perspective of a pre-modern man, things just happen for their internal reasons, which are intentional. There is no gravity, stone "wants" to fall. Wood burns because it has the Essence of Fire in it. Mice beget from rotten hay, and slugs from dead leaves, because God ordained so. And this was still all believed in 1500s, let alone the more primitive times. | |
| Jan 28 at 7:14 | comment | added | Jay | @GoingDurden That's basically my question: Would primitive people conflate "things I don't understand" with "supernatural". Simply stating that you think the answer is "yes" doesn't really answer the question. "Limited knowledge of science" doesn't explain it. Like, if I saw someone say a magic spell and then levitate off the ground, if I believed it was real I'd call it magic and supernatural. If I saw someone get in some kind of vehicle and levitate off the ground, even if I didn't understand how the vehicle works, I'd call it a technology I don't understand. I wouldn't think it was magic. | |
| Jan 23 at 7:37 | comment | added | Going Durden | @Jay my point is: how would a primitive person know something is supernatural and not natural? For example, how would they know a demon that kills a person is supernatural but a bear that does the same is natural? Our definition of supernatural is "it defies the laws of nature/science" but a primtive person does not know what these laws are. They just observe reality and take practical ques from it. They believe something is "magic" or "witchcraft" when they cannot guess how it is done, but they still know it is done somehow, hence witch-"craft"; they see it as opaque technology. | |
| Jan 9 at 6:42 | comment | added | Jay | @GoingDurden I'm using the word "magic" here in the traditional sense: involving the supernatural. Would a primitive person really not comprehend the difference between "I will invoke a demon to kill my enemy" and "I will kill my enemy by stabbing him with a sword"? If not, that's an answer to the question. But you give no evidence for this claim, just your bald assertion. You can't assume that the answer is "X" based on no evidence but your gut feel or intuition, and then claim that that proves that the answer is X. | |
| Jan 8 at 12:30 | comment | added | Going Durden | Note, Magic IS technology, just ineffective one. Primitive people thought of magic as the same kind of a "craft" as pottery, blacksmithing, weaving etc. They simply failed to notice that magic does not work, due to selection bias (and the fact that magic DOES work sometimes, if by sheer accident it uses some practical science as part of the process. For example, the magic of killing evil disease spirits in the water by boiling it with Holy Fire, actually kills germs). So, primitive people would not understand your question. | |
| Jan 4 at 4:56 | review | Close votes | |||
| Jan 9 at 3:03 | |||||
| Dec 4, 2024 at 13:12 | comment | added | Jay | @Escapeddentalpatient. Yes. Search for "cargo cults" on this page. It's been mentioned. Whether you consider the discussion complete and definitive is another question! | |
| Nov 30, 2024 at 1:33 | comment | added | Escaped dental patient. | Has nobody mentioned the cargo cults? | |
| Nov 29, 2024 at 22:25 | review | Close votes | |||
| Dec 2, 2024 at 23:53 | |||||
| Nov 29, 2024 at 21:15 | answer | added | JBH | timeline score: 1 | |
| Nov 29, 2024 at 20:48 | history | edited | JBH |
edited tags
|
|
| Jun 6, 2018 at 14:09 | comment | added | Jay | @JanDoggen You may be right about Greek mechanical technology. It seems to have mostly been toys for the rich. But most people in the Middle Ages surely knew that the clock on the church tower was built by people and was not magic. I presume most people didn't know how to make one, any more than most people today know how to build a cell phone or a computer. | |
| Jun 6, 2018 at 11:23 | comment | added | user3106 | people in the Middle Ages built complex clocks and other mechanical devices Note that this was not commonly known or understood by the general public. The same for your Greek example. | |
| Jun 6, 2018 at 11:10 | answer | added | DigitalBlade969 | timeline score: 0 | |
| May 14, 2018 at 18:06 | comment | added | Jack R. Woods | "Magic" would have to defy the laws of physics as we know them and would have to be verifiable that it wasn't some illusion or mass hypnosis. | |
| May 14, 2018 at 18:03 | comment | added | Jack R. Woods | I guess were back to a definition of "magic". Ancient people probably had a different idea of what "magic" would be than we do today. A tribesman might even think his tribal "shaman" is performing magic, when all he is doing is using herbs or whatever discovered through centuries of trial and error passed down from one shaman to the next generation. Today, if someone passed his hand over two objects and turned them into five hundred (ie. more than could be explained as an illusion), I would think of that as magic and it would change the way i see the world. | |
| May 14, 2018 at 17:28 | comment | added | Jay | "I'm sure there must be many cases" -- I've heard many people say this, but when you ask them to give specific cases, evidence is lacking. That was the point of my question. The idea sounds plausible to many people, but lots of things sound plausible that turn out to be completely false. If Jesus really did feed 5000 people with 2 fish and 5 loaves of bread, than unless you are postulating that Jesus was an alien or a time traveler, that would not be an example of advanced technology being confused with magic, but of an actual miracle. | |
| May 14, 2018 at 17:03 | comment | added | Jack R. Woods | I'm sure there must be many cases in the past, when there were more "primitive, isolated peoples", that someone lit a match or something of the sort and it was thought of as "voodoo" or "magic". An interesting question is "What would modern humans (intelligent ones) actually perceive as "true magic"?". Would it be anything that we can't explain or be able to come up with a "feasible theory" to explain? What if some guy caught five fish and somehow managed to feed thousands of people? | |
| May 3, 2018 at 10:10 | comment | added | Matt Bowyer | @Jay - indeed, the UFO example is a good one; the stronger the belief, the more likely one is to believe that anything not immediately explicable is an alien. It'd be much the same with tech - a loose belief that magic may exist wouldn't necessarily push someone straight to the conclusion that a device is magical, whereas someone obsessed with magic (and looking for it) would be much more inclined to jump to that conclusion. | |
| May 3, 2018 at 5:00 | comment | added | Jay | @MattBowyer Well if they don't believe in magic, then presumably by definition they won't suppose that something they see is magic, so sure. But if they do believe in magic, they may or may not believe that any given thing they see is magic. Like, someone could say that he believes there is life on other planets, but still doubt that UFOs are alien spaceships. | |
| May 2, 2018 at 21:57 | comment | added | Matt Bowyer | Surely the biggest question here is simply - "Do they already believe in magic? If the answer to that is yes, then the chances of assuming some piece of tech is magic will be vastly greater. | |
| May 2, 2018 at 21:25 | history | edited | Jay | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 735 characters in body
|
| May 5, 2017 at 17:44 | comment | added | Draco18s no longer trusts SE | ...enough generations later and it will be magic again. As computers take on more and more responsibilities for managing our world and become smaller and smaller, there will be a point where no one alive even realizes that some things are actually being done for them by computers and it will be indistinguishable from magic. | |
| May 5, 2017 at 17:42 | comment | added | Draco18s no longer trusts SE | @Jay the reason we--as a modern society--don't think about technology as "something supernatural" is because we ourselves might not understand it, but we assume that there is somebody who does. The problem with that assumption is that no one knows how anything works to a significant degree. We've all collectively offloaded that knowledge onto someone else. Yet there's no one single person who actually does know it. I am working with the hololens, a device that I've realized is "every scifi HUD ever" only bulkier. Once it gets small enough to be contact lenses and kids grow up with it... | |
| Dec 6, 2016 at 17:32 | comment | added | speeder | I didn't wanted to add a formal answer. But I am from Brazil, and some early explorers actually exploited this, for example one guy got called by the natives Anhanguera, that means "Old Devil", because he threatened to use his "powers" to set the river on fire if they didn't complied to his demands. Then he proved he could do it by setting a bowl crystal clear ethanol on fire, something the natives didn't knew that existed then. EDIT: forgot to say that his ruse actually worked, and he made the natives mine lots of gold for him in "exchange" of not having river set on fire. | |
| Sep 1, 2016 at 2:50 | answer | added | Ankur | timeline score: 1 | |
| Jun 3, 2016 at 5:08 | comment | added | Jay | "Since the supernatural cannot be verified empirically, it does not exist." Well, that goes rather far. I cannot empirically verify justice and beauty, but it hardly follows that therefore these don't exist. Or in a much more concrete sense, the police may not be able to empirically verify who committed a murder, but that hardly means that therefore there was no murderer and the victim must therefore still be alive. | |
| Jun 2, 2016 at 19:01 | answer | added | KeithS | timeline score: 1 | |
| Jun 2, 2016 at 16:23 | comment | added | Anonymous | Arbitrary distinctions between "natural" and "supernatural" are a purely modern phenomenon. Prior to the Enlightenment, there was no distinction between science, magic and religion. As scientific knowledge advanced, what was previously the domain of magic and mysticism was empirically studied and debunked. Individuals who clung to irrational beliefs like magical thinking invented the supernatural to avoid being invalidated by empirical testing. Since the supernatural cannot be verified empirically, it does not exist. | |
| Jun 2, 2016 at 14:21 | answer | added | user20756 | timeline score: 0 | |
| Apr 6, 2016 at 15:20 | history | edited | Jay | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 709 characters in body
|
| Jan 3, 2016 at 17:35 | comment | added | David K | An example of "magic" given by Arthur C. Clarke in his essay, "Hazards of Prophecy" (the usually cited source of the "indistinguishable from magic" notion) was a uranium bomb of the type used over Hiroshima, as explained to a late-nineteenth-century scientist. That's a leap of merely a few decades of technological advancement. | |
| Jan 3, 2016 at 9:59 | answer | added | Christian | timeline score: 1 | |
| Jan 3, 2016 at 3:36 | comment | added | Loki Astari | Thats not that advanced (I can potentially see humanity solving those problems with technology in the next 100 years). Now transporting instantly from Earth to the moon may be significantly advanced enough. | |
| Jan 3, 2016 at 3:12 | comment | added | user16451 | I have a feeling that all that you wrote is what 'Ancient Aliens' are showing for years and years. | |
| Jan 3, 2016 at 2:18 | comment | added | Jay | @LokiAstari magic=not understood? In a sense, but: Suppose, say, aliens came to Earth in faster-than-light ships. Presumably no one on Earth understands how they work. Would you call this magic? Or technology beyond anything we have on Earth? Would you say the aliens must be gods or demons? Or that they are mortal creatures just like us who happen to have access to more advanced technology? | |
| Jan 3, 2016 at 1:26 | answer | added | jmoreno | timeline score: 0 | |
| Jan 2, 2016 at 22:15 | answer | added | Laurence | timeline score: 0 | |
| Jan 2, 2016 at 21:17 | comment | added | Loki Astari | Is magic not just something we (as a society) don't understand (yet). | |
| Jan 2, 2016 at 20:06 | answer | added | Sobrique | timeline score: 1 | |
| Jan 2, 2016 at 3:37 | answer | added | mxyzplk | timeline score: 5 | |
| Jan 1, 2016 at 21:19 | answer | added | Anixx | timeline score: 1 | |
| Jan 1, 2016 at 20:25 | comment | added | SuperJedi224 | Certainly! This was why stage magic was first invented! | |
| Jan 1, 2016 at 10:26 | answer | added | user16713 | timeline score: 2 | |
| Jan 1, 2016 at 5:57 | answer | added | Fred Kerns | timeline score: 2 | |
| Jan 1, 2016 at 2:52 | comment | added | Luaan | I think the main thing here is the scientific culture, so to speak. Any culture that builds on reductionism and naturalism will tend to see advanced technology (and will revise what is and isn't possible over time). On the other hand, a culture where nature is ascribed to the acts of spirits, would not have even a tiny bit of a problem with believing that cell phones are magic - they accept all the "magic" around them already, so what's another piece of magic on top of that? | |
| Jan 1, 2016 at 2:35 | answer | added | Peter | timeline score: 0 | |
| Dec 31, 2015 at 7:17 | vote | accept | Jay | ||
| Dec 30, 2015 at 20:11 | answer | added | Josh Zmijewski | timeline score: -1 | |
| Dec 30, 2015 at 18:48 | answer | added | bradimus | timeline score: 8 | |
| Dec 30, 2015 at 7:45 | answer | added | Morgen | timeline score: 2 | |
| Dec 30, 2015 at 2:25 | comment | added | user2338816 | Re "define 'magic'"... It means what you think of as "magic" in your context. You've excluded religious 'miracles' (whatever those are) and simple mind-reading cons that rely on simple stage tricks (but not ones that rely on advanced technologies perhaps rendered on a mid-air display?) We do some fancy stuff today that most "people" aren't aware of. Technology from just a couple decades from now would baffle all of us. | |
| S Dec 30, 2015 at 1:39 | history | mod moved comments to chat | |||
| S Dec 30, 2015 at 1:39 | comment | added | Monica Cellio | Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. | |
| Dec 29, 2015 at 23:44 | answer | added | user16654 | timeline score: 1 | |
| Dec 29, 2015 at 23:40 | answer | added | pashute | timeline score: 7 | |
| Dec 29, 2015 at 23:38 | answer | added | codeMethod | timeline score: 4 | |
| Dec 29, 2015 at 19:45 | answer | added | Todd Wilcox | timeline score: 112 | |
| Dec 29, 2015 at 17:15 | answer | added | Cort Ammon | timeline score: 8 | |
| Dec 29, 2015 at 16:39 | answer | added | nigel222 | timeline score: 25 | |
| Dec 29, 2015 at 15:55 | answer | added | AndyD273 | timeline score: 8 | |
| Dec 29, 2015 at 14:58 | history | edited | Jay | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 1187 characters in body
|
| Dec 29, 2015 at 10:50 | answer | added | celtschk | timeline score: 39 | |
| Dec 29, 2015 at 9:46 | answer | added | Separatrix | timeline score: 55 | |
| Dec 29, 2015 at 8:28 | answer | added | SudoSedWinifred | timeline score: 10 | |
| Dec 29, 2015 at 8:02 | answer | added | TheSexyMenhir | timeline score: 40 | |
| Dec 29, 2015 at 7:14 | history | edited | Wingman4l7 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
embedded link
|
| Dec 29, 2015 at 7:07 | history | edited | Wingman4l7 |
added tag
|
|
| Dec 29, 2015 at 6:38 | history | asked | Jay | CC BY-SA 3.0 |