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Currently On Hiatus: Please Enjoy A New Reader Question Every Weekday!

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Given we as a society can make synthetic diamonds amongst other rare minerals. How does that react to supernatural spells, rituals or beings? Is a naturally occuring mineral or other such things, more or less effective comparatively speaking.

Ooh, nice question – whether magic is ‘hard science’ and only relates to atomic this or that right here, right now, or whether it matters how those atoms came to be in those arrangements – some sort of entanglement and uncollapsed waveforms, or more nebulously, ‘woo-woo’.

It feels similar to the question of whether there’s some ‘woo-woo’ element to the ‘me’ part of consciousness, or whether it’s just an emergent – and perhaps entangled – property of a complex system.

Oh… I can’t edit my response after posting? I thought I could.

Anyway – I was disussing this area with an atheist friend of mine a few years back, and we kinda came to a couple of conclusions

1. The rather weak one, which is probably useful in avoiding arguments, that you either believe in woo-woo or you don’t, and it’s unlikely either side will manage to convince the other; and

2. A practical solution that it’s often possible to view the woo-woo view as an implementation of a strategy that the sceptic side wouldn’t have an innate problem with: it often helps people to have a story to hang a behaviour on, because psychologically people generally find plain facts less motivating than examples and metaphors.

So long as folks remain generous and admit they don’t know for sure, things can work out comfortably.

…wait, do Naiads have to be from natural water sources, or could there be a Naiad for say, London’s water pipes?

And for that matter, if a swimming pool is only open during the summer (say, if it’s outside and in a small town), would it have a water spirit that really doesn’t like winters, when it gets left alone, stagnates and probably dries up?

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