Yourself?

Magic

We've got a grand piano in KE hall that people can use. It's tucked behind the stage, unlocked, and turning on the light involves a walk of faith in the absolute dark backstage. I've been playing with it, and it's the closest to ephemera I've ever been. With each press of the keys, I shimmer into being, and dissolve almost as quickly.

If I didn't have a being, I might be deluded into thinking I were God. Because in the dark, sound is energy.

If sound is energy, then the piano must be magic.

Is the piano magic? How does a metal and wooden frame with strings move the dark?

Any sufficiently advanced technology is magic. No one would have figured out that we didn't need physical media for music anymore. If we showed Edison an iPod, he'd wonder, where exactly do you put the record in the thing? If you told him, it is recorded on this metal disk that spins around at 4800rpm, his mind would boggle and his eyes would fall out, as records spin at 33rpm/45rpm during his time, and would be hand cranked. And even if you gave him a microscope, he could not see the magnetic bits written on the hard disk platter, as in his time, they were analogue physical grooves.

Even the MP3 would have been magic. In his time, each note corresponded to a physical groove on a record. But with MP3 compression, the bits do not represent any note, but the whole song in it's totality, which has to be expanded by a software mechanism. Suddenly, 48 megabytes of music can be compressed into 3 megabytes or so, and we don't even think about it.

The expansion of DNA makes a human out of a 3.2 billion base paired molecule. Over 9 months, a complete functioning human being is formed from that single DNA molecule. This is a direct expansion(decompression) of the DNA molecule, as a baby in its mother's womb does not yet experience the external world. Compared to MP3 compression, which is roughly tenfold, a DNA molecule must have been expanded a millionfold. How did the human body develop that? It must have been magic.

In Biology, we are as Edison was. Any sufficiently complex develoment by millions of years of evolution would appear like magic to us. But that cannot be a justification for belief in God. I don't know how you might prove the existence of God, but we live in a sufficiently complex world that to the best of our abilities, we do not understand. The existence of magic is not proof of existence of God.

posted by Downhere. @ 8:54 am