Indeterminism implies magic
Determinism is the worldview you get when you avoid all magical thinking.
Recall Adolf Grünbaum’s example of magic: If photons came to exist simply because of God’s magical utterance “Let there be light,” then there was no fully specific mechanism that brought photons into existence. If so, then not even God could know exactly how photons came to exist, for at a deep-enough level there’s nothing to know. Magic implies an inscrutable gap between an earlier event and a later one ‒ inscrutable even to a mind that knows everything.
But, as I argued in my previous post, the same description would apply to any event that occurs indeterministically. Indeterminism therefore implies magic.
To be clear, what’s distinctive about magic isn’t the presence of an intentional agent such as a wizard or a deity. Plenty of nonmagical processes crucially involve intentional agents, such as my intentionally turning on the lights in my kitchen. Instead, what separates magic from nonmagic is the absence of any fully specific way in which a magical event happens. Indeterministic events fit that description.
Do you believe in magic? I hope not. We’re grown-ups. We don’t need fairy dust. Now, I love an astounding magic trick as much as the next person. But magic tricks aren’t genuine magic: they’re pseudo-magic. With any magic trick, we know there’s always a fully specific way it worked, hard as that may be to figure out!
