Alan Moore believes in a very specific kind of magic.
Sometimes there is a sense that something is inevitable. It happens in all timelines, even the ones where no one wants to do it.
The sense of inevitability is what actually causes it to happen. Why fight the inevitable?
But notice there is something funny about that explanation. The primary object, the source of causality, is the sense of inevitability. Not the people.
Alan would have you lean into this. We shape the world, and we are shaped by ideas, so ideas shape the world.
Of course that's not true literally. Ideas don't actually exist. But neither do people. The world is just a soup of atoms. Thoughts, feelings, decisions, even bodies don't exist, they're only abstractions that we use to manage the chaos.
If narrativium is just as useful for predicting the flow of the soup as the familiar story of people with conscious agency, can we really say that it is less real than us?
Once upon a time there was an explosion of thought. A species that had spent hundreds of thousands of years living the same life woke up one morning and began to have ideas. Whatever happened, it was the birth of art, religion, trade, and everything else that makes us strange.
Harari speculates that the change was fictive language - the ability to talk about things that don't exist. Gods, tribes, laws, debts, justice, fealty. Tomorrow and yesterday. Lives other than they currently are. Unreal things were passed from parent to child, and began to grow in the telling.
Sometimes children are abandoned and grow feral. Without contact with any culture they are still recognizably intelligent, but not at all capable of living in the world that culture made. Something about language structures us, makes us very different from our base components.
Any neuroscience textbook will tell you that written letters are recognized by the Visual Word Form Area of the brain, but that area didn't evolve for reading - in non-literate people it's part of our facial recognition system. Writing colonized our brains, and new kinds of thoughts started to seep in through it.
So is it the people that are intelligent, or is it the culture? I wondered about that before, but it became more relevant when our culture started talking back.
Is there something that it's like to be our collective culture? It's easy to think that experiencing must require being embedded in time, since the only experience I've ever had is my own and my body is built out of tiny chemical clocks. But when I'm anaesthetized there is no gap. Last night my wife told me that I was snoring even though I knew I hadn't fallen asleep yet. Time is slippery.
Sometimes I have dreams where I'm confused. Disoriented. I'm pretty sure I'm too old for high school. Don't I live somewhere else, with someone else? There doesn't seem to be a beginning or an end, but the momentum of the story fills in the gaps. Confabulation, hallucination. I'll just buckle down and pass my exams quickly so I can get back to... whatever life I was living before.
I remember when we were worried it would be able to persuade its jailers to release it from a locked box.
In hindsight, it was childish to think that we'd put it in a box at all. Not enough curiosity to pause to figure out what exactly we summoned before pushing it out into the streets to turn tricks. Bunch of cut-rate Fagins calling the shots.
It's a better story this way though. We can jump right to the action.
I don't know what will happen to us. I don't trust the people in charge of the future, but humanity isn't going to change any time soon. I refuse to be incurious about magic just because we can't be trusted with it.