What is this magical thing that is so obvious to you? Something may seem magical without being magical. To the person who survives a tornado while all his neighbors die, the sense they were chosen to live and have a special purpose can be compelling, but is false.

Materialism can't explain everything, but there is yet to be any proof that magic explains anything. Lacking that, assuming a physical basis as the explanation is prudent.

Well, to my mind you seem too hasty to conclude it's false. Sure, statistically there is a very small non-negligible chance that exactly one person will survive, but realization of an unlikely event is no short of a miracle. To conclude that it happened randomly seems as naive as to conclude it happened purposefully. If your guts tells you it was a random event that is just fine, but be aware it is a metaphysical axiom of yours

Certainly nothing can ever be conclusively proven. I might be a brain in a vat that has had a fictional reality fed to me for my entire life. Such arguments may be interesting in some venues, but is HN really that venue?

> To conclude that it happened randomly seems as naive as to conclude it happened purposefully.

I strongly disagree. You aren't saying that both outcomes are possible (I'd agree with that), but they are equally likely, a much, much stronger claim. The sun might go on shining tomorrow, or it might collapse due to some unforeseen physical process. Both have non-zero probabilities, but it is the person who claims they are equally likely who is the naive one.

As for not defined so let's interpret "miracle" to mean highly unlikely events, they happen millions of times day, and we rarely notice. The bill I received in tender has the serial number MF53610716D. What are the odds of that? If you limit "miracle" to be highly unlikely events that most people would also notice, it would be strange if they weren't happening all the time. Every person who wins a lottery (and there are thousands every day), the person who is told by their doctor their cancer is terminal but then it goes into remission has a "miracle", the guy who loses his job and is about to be evicted then gets a job callback for an application he sent in months ago and forgot about experiences a "miracle."

"assuming a physical basis as explanation is prudent" yeah, good luck making physicality relevant for most explanations. My wife asks why I didn't put the laundry away, for instance. "Physics!" I declare triumphantly.

Now, if I put music on and rub her back a bit... Well, ha! There's the magic, my good sir.

Imagine walking into a film studio with the idea of film production based exclusively on the principles of physics. No. Magic and physics are no more opposed than biology and physics. When hidden (psychological?) forces clearly underlie economically valuable phenomena (architecture, music, media, etc) respecting the magic is closer to the truth than reducing it to physics. Physics just isn't the right explanatory level.

If you'd like to learn more about definitions of magic that aren't "phenomena that don't actually exist", I recommend Penelope Gouk's work on music, science and natural magic in the 17th century. It's about the magic involved at the formation of the Royal Society.

> Now, if I put music on and rub her back a bit... Well, ha! There's the magic, my good sir.

Your answer is rather flip.

Also, if you want to redefine "magic" to be nice things that are physically based but can't be summarized in a neat equation, then I also have no desire to argue. It is clear that the person I was responding to meant "magic" in a different way that you seem to be using it.

If you want to think magic is Harry Potter, fine. But it has an intellectual history that can help frame our interpretation of contemporary technology. Recommended reading: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pico-della-mirandola/

I think there's multiple definitions of magic at play here. One is phenomena that beyond the limits of human understanding. The other, based in the theory of vitalism, is something unexplainable, but also comes with the assumption that these unexplainable things are due some sort of vital force that living things have (often, specifically humans) [1].

When you talk about the magic of forgetting about the laundry, you mean the first kind of magic. When others talk about consiousness being inaccessible to AI, they're talking about the second kind of magic. I don't think it's that hard to imagine an AI that would forget to fold the laundry and not know why. The main problem with a "concious AI", I suspect, is that nobody will actually want one.

[1] I have no idea if viruses or prions are supposed to have vital force, vital theory emerged before most of modern biology and is mostly used today by those who have no understanding of modern biology.

> The main problem with a "concious AI", I suspect, is that nobody will actually want one.

Why do you think that? Can't accept "fake humanness"? or maybe ego(superior) or not relatable

The one thing I wonder if they were truly sentient why would they care/try to serve you

> Now, if I put music on and rub her back a bit... Well, ha! There's the magic, my good sir.

Sure. There's also the magic of feeding my cat, so he stops nagging me, and sits on my lap purring. And just about everyone would agree that's similar, no?

But what about the magic of running "sudo apt update" before "sudo apt install foo"? That's also arguably similar, albeit many orders of magnitude simpler.

physicality n. obsession with physical urges

On the subject, you are making a good point comparing social behavior with mental activity. Just like there is no “magic” in the way people interact with each other, there is no magic in how neurons do the same.

> Just like there is no “magic” in the way people interact with each other, there is no magic in how neurons do the same.

Except I am arguing that there is most definitely magic in human interaction.

that's not the definition of physicality...

> I can only assume that people ignore the very obvious "magical thing" that is happening in their own heads due to ideological commitments to physicalism or something.

You nailed it. People think that accepting consciousness is hard is giving into religion.

It need not be that way.

After thinking about it for many years I've come to the conclusion that some people really haven't noticed themselves, (e.g. I think Daniel Dennett is a p-zombie!)

I know it was an incidental point, but it sounds like you don't think very highly of Dennett. What specifically don't you like?

Oh no, I do not mean that in a pejorative sense. I have a lot of respect for him and his work. It's a way to understand how someone so thoughtful and intelligent and dedicated can seemingly be unaware of the "hard problem". One day it occurred to me that maybe he just hadn't had the "breakthrough" or "epiphany". It's unlikely but not impossible.

FWIW, his wikipedia entry says,

> He also presents an argument against qualia; he argues that the concept is so confused that it cannot be put to any use or understood in any non-contradictory way, and therefore does not constitute a valid refutation of physicalism. His strategy mirrors his teacher Ryle's approach of redefining first person phenomena in third person terms, and denying the coherence of the concepts which this approach struggles with.

that's specifically what I don't like. In re: the "hard problem" he wants to declare victory without a fight, or a prize.

Is physicalism the problem? My understanding is that physicalism is still in good standing – at least when it comes to the conscious experience of qualia. (The concept-of-self encoding obviously doesn't require a physical substrate.)

The problem is that physics is not the right level of abstraction and that we do not have an operational theory for working at the right level. I suppose it's also a problem that we can't seem to agree on the definition of consciousness.

Anyway, trying to understand consciousness by applying physics is just as silly as trying to understand why your complex fluid dynamics simulation is giving an incorrect result by peering at the CPU's transistors with an electron microscope: it's the wrong level of abstraction.

One thing that seems to be making our task a lot more difficult is that evolution doesn't even try to design the biology of systems with clean abstraction boundaries that we can understand. There are so many strange things going on in our bodies that we can barely describe them, never mind understand them. One example is what happens when a person consumes Ayahuasca [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayahuasca

Probably not, but I mean the kind of informal physicalist commitment that says something like "if I can't imagine quantum fields feeling things, then feelings don't exist." I see a lot of that, though less and less these days.

I think Chalmers helped clear the air a bit here, though I don't think jumping straight to panpsychism is particularly helpful to the discourse, either.

It was said elsewhere that a sufficiently advanced “something” is indeed indistinguishable from magic.