Monday 3 March 2003

Pic of the day: Picture from the anime Someday's Dreamers. In this memorable scene, the bureau of magic gets anxious phone calls because people view a common lunar eclipse and believes it to be powerful magic. At least we are spared that kind of worry. Well, most of us.

Consensus reality

Let us start with the simple enjoyment of unpretentious fiction. The last few days, I have watched the 8 first episodes of the anime Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto. It was recommended by my online friend LightHawk, a young man renowned for his purity. Some people remain pure through sheer inexperience, but only a few actively and tirelessly choose purity over other available options. In matters of entertainment, I consider his advice second only to my own heart. I got the first seven episodes without having watched even one of them, because I knew if LH liked it, it would be good. Not just wholesome – there is some wholesome but really boring stuff out there – but good.

Taisetsu (usually called Someday's Dreamers in English, it's a subtitle in the Japanese original) is set in a world very much like our own, more exactly in Tokyo. But it is a world in which magic exists and is acknowledged. In order for magic and society to get along, there is a bureau of magic that supervises all use of magic and approves all requests for magic. Use of magic in populated areas is prohibited unless after an approved, formal request. (Though you may also use magic to save your own or others' lives, but you will have to explain yourself to the authorities afterward.) The main characters are young mages who are torn between their loyalty to the laws and regulations, and the need to do the right thing according to their heart.

In the fantasy world, mages with special talents work for the police, fire corps and so on, while private licensed mages have office hours and get their jobs through the bureau. The mages are not numerous enough or powerful enough to change society beyond recognition; they just add to it.

***

In our reality, of course, magic is pretty much out of the picture. You cannot call a levitation mage to move your furniture up to your top floor apartment. At best you can sneak off to see a healer when the doctors have given you up.

By and large, we don't miss magic much. Technology does much the same things and in a more egalitarian way. But it wasn't always like this. The major religions agree that magic was alive and well, covering a period from about 1000 to 3000 years ago. As late as three hundred years ago, witch hunts were quite common. (Contrary to common belief, painstakingly recorded court processes show that not only women were arrested for witchcraft, and only a minority of the convicted were killed, not always by burning. Male warlocks were actually more likely to be executed than female witches. Of course, today warlock is no longer the correct name for a male witch, but I digress.)

Of course, our ancestors were a superstitious lot. They were just plain dumb, and we are so much more enlightened. They simply did not know better, so they saw things that weren't there. We all know that magic is impossible. Our teacher in school told us so, while their teachers (priests mostly) told them lies. So even though we have never really thought the matter through, we just know that we are right. Aren't we always?

***

I first noticed the expression "consensus reality" in connection with a role playing game system, but I now find it quite frequently. The idea is that reality is the way it is because people believe in it. The implication is that reality isn't really as limited as we perceive, we are just unable to lift our eyes because nobody else does. Many "new age" people use it in a condescending way, much like I made fun of our superior knowledge in the previous paragraph. But the truth may be more complex.

It is unlikely that science, as it is understood in March 2003, defines the exact truth of the universe. It certainly hasn't in the past. Even when I was young, it was not commonly accepted by medical science that belief played an important role in healing. Today, this is thoroughly documented and called the placebo effect. There is still much doubt that other people's belief can play a role in your healing, but some experiments show that this is the case. Of course, these experiments tend to be done by the very people who believe in this ... But unless they're actually cheating and lying, this simply proves what they try to say, that belief does matter.

A couple hundred years ago, scientists made fun of the idea that stones might fall from the sky. Today, meteorites are quite common. On the other hand, not long before the meteorite thing, it was commonly accepted that flies and even rats might come into being spontaneously from non-living matter.

Big Bang was still a new and exciting idea when I was a kid. Ten years ago, we had a pretty good idea about how it all worked. Now, we are facing the puzzling evidence that the universe is expanding faster and faster, propelled by some kind of energy – or perhaps something too alien to even call energy – and that cosmic constants aren't constant at all, but change over time. In the very latest news, visible matter and energy is calculated to make up about 4% of the universe. The rest is utterly unknown. We seem to be backsliding into ignorance by learning more. The neat models that explained everything don't work anymore, and we haven't quite got the new ones up yet.

***

So, if you believe in magic, can you Just Do It? Try and see. I am not overly optimistic on your behalf. Even if magic did exist, it is possible that the combined psychic pressure of several billion humans is too strong for you to break through. You can say that you don't believe in their consensus reality; but if you have magic, then probably so have they, or at least a good number of them. And their magic will constrain and counteract your own, and you will fail.

Of course, this is pure speculation. It makes for good role playing games, but poor mental health. If you want to transcend consensus reality, I advice you to first reach your highest potential inside it. This might well prove quite enough for one lifetime.