Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic (The MIT Press)

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Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic (The MIT Press)

Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic (The MIT Press)

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Eventually so much oxygen was released by cyanobacteria that the Earth's atmosphere changed. This lead to the great oxygenation event which occurred between 2.4 and 2.2 billion years ago. Up to this point all life on Earth had occurred in an anaerobic environment. The change in oxygen levels probably lead to the Earth's first mass extinction event and changed the nature of the Earth forever. Life remade the world and banded iron formations mark this miraculous moment. It is a magician’s job to manipulate their audience’s beliefs: to find ways of persuading it that the coin is here when really it is there, that you chose the Ace of Spades of your own free will, that the lady really has been sawn in half. Lately, moreover, the practice of magic has been analysed with renewed rigour in terms of the psychological principles at work, giving rise to an emerging field of study dubbed by Kuhn (2019) amongst others, the “science of magic”. These—and related—principles provide both the inspiration for XGR and a practical demonstration of its effectiveness. Goal recognition systems use probabilistic reasoning to predict what an observer is most likely to understand from a given sequence of actions; informally, magicians have been making similar predictions for generations, performing sequences of actions such that human observers reliably draw erroneous conclusions. Importantly, magicians can rely on the conclusions people will draw. Magic works by exploiting flaws in human reasoning that are predictable; and because they are predictable, they are susceptible to probabilistic/mathematical interpretation. Perception is key in many magic techniques. Audience members will follow a magician’s hand when he or she gestures in a curved line - but not when the line is straight, to give just one example.

Some of the magician’s forcing principles share similarities with subliminal perception, a process by which your thought can be influenced by unconscious primes. However, most of the reported psychological effects of unconscious priming are very small, or fail to replicate. The magician’s forcing techniques are surprisingly effective and therefore provide a unique tool to study unconscious mind control. Our sense of free will may in itself be a compelling illusion. Are there factors we have not considered, factors that might influence the development of a science of magic? Undoubtedly. Will any of these ultimately prevent its development? Only time will tell. But there are grounds for optimism. For example, important advances have recently been made toward a science of film and a science of music, involving new issues that touch upon much more than just basic aspects of perception and cognition (e.g., Levitin, 2007; Ball, 2010; Shimamura, 2013; Smith, 2014). Given the nature of their subject matter, these areas are vulnerable to many of the same concerns as have been raised about a science of magic; nevertheless, the scientific development of these areas is proceeding. And if there are worries that no such attempts have ever succeeded, consider the case of steam engines. During the first century of their existence, an enormous number of these were created, with a great deal of variety and contingency in their design. And eventually, work began on a scientific framework to investigate the principles involved (see McClellan and Dorn, 2006). The resulting science—thermodynamics—has become one of the mainstays of modern physics, not only providing considerable insight into what such engines can and cannot do, but also helping us understand other processes of nature, from the metabolism of cells to the energy production of stars. Even if there is only a small chance that such a development could be possible for magic, it would appear to be a chance well worth taking. Conflict of Interest Statement A human-centric goal recognition system should recognise that some observable phenomena are more noticeable than others. Kuhn, G., Olson, J.A. & Raz, A. (2016). The psychology of magic and the magic of psychology [Editorial]. Frontiers in Psychology, 7(1358). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01358 What do we see when we watch a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat or read a person's mind? We are captivated by an illusion; we applaud the fact that we have been fooled. Why do we enjoy experiencing what seems clearly impossible, or at least beyond our powers of explanation? In Experiencing the Impossible, Gustav Kuhn examines the psychological processes that underpin our experience of magic. Kuhn, a psychologist and a magician, reveals the intriguing—and often unsettling—insights into the human mind that the scientific study of magic provides.

The lessons have consequences and their application in the context of goal recognition go a long way towards explaining the persistence of conspiracy theories and fake news, even in the face of contradictory evidence. As we have seen, priming impacts expectation, which we model as prior probability; convincers impact confidence; and the two factors work in tandem. An exaggeratedly confident prediction accentuates the probability of the most probable goal. If, owing to the confidence value ( β in Eq. 8), an observer is sufficiently certain of a particular goal, the probability of that goal approaches 1. At the next time-step, that confident assessment becomes a prior probability. Now the probability of other goals is pushed close to zero with the result that—regardless of implications arising from the most recent observation—they may be overlooked. This matches our understanding from behavioural science and other commentators ( Heuer, 1981) and is precisely the effect noted in ( Masters et al., 2021), where in a fully observable path-planning domain, we find that XGR predicts as most likely a false goal, even after the real but “disbelieved” goal has been achieved.

Subbotsky, E., Hysted, C. & Jones, N. (2010). Watching films with magical content facilitates creativity in children. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 111(1), 261–277. Each observable element o∈Ω has a base magnitude mag*( o), which may be infinite but is otherwise subject to decay at a rate determined by an individualised decay factor calculated from the default. Thus, at any given time-step, an observation has an effective magnitude mag( o), which may differ from its base magnitude.Here, the ball is first, partly hidden when in the magician’s hand but second, we have the reasonable expectation that it will not dematerialise just because we cannot see it. Magic, which has exploited such aspects of the visual for centuries, offers us a framework to explore perception in an intriguing way, and the potential for understanding our perceptual system by investigating how magic exploits its blindness and gaps is enormous. A fully relevant observation (i.e., one that, when concatenated to observations already made, conforms to an optimal plan for one of the goals), decays at the default rate. The less relevant an observation, the lower the decay factor and therefore—through multiplication—the faster its corresponding rate of decay. Practically, to incorporate the notion of forgettability, all observations must be tested for relevance, not only those that may initially be overlooked as a result of selective attention (as at Section 5.3). What we also learn from this neurologically is that implied movement stimulates brain functioning in much the same way as watching an actual movement. Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design.

MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, AustraliaI think the turn that Francis Bacon embodied was -- as you state -- not from magic to science but from the Arcane to the Technological. When you see magic as Arcane it becomes immediately obvious why it's not "falsifiable" or more to the point why it probably seemed to be generally confirmed. The key point is that the failure of magic was by all accounts -- including that of the magician -- going to be primarily a reflection of his grasp of the Arcane rather than on the Aracne's veracity. This indeed, made a lot of sense, as there was a great deal of knowledge that could be obtained from old Greek and Arabic texts. It has become a sophisticated research method and field helping to create more intuitive human-computer interface designs and advance rehabilitation techniques for people physically impaired by neurological conditions like strokes. Labrocca, G. & Piacentini, E.O. (2015). Efficacia dei giochi di magia sul dolore da venipuntura: Studio quasi sperimentale. Children's Nurses: Italian Journal of Pediatric Nursing Science/Infermieri dei Bambini: Giornale Italiano di Scienze Infermieristiche Pediatriche, 7(1). Lesson 9. The Disappearing Coin. The magician takes a coin in his right hand, then passes it to his left hand. In case we might suspect that he did not really pass the coin, he shows us that his right hand is empty. But then he reveals that his left hand is empty too!

We could say something similar about Isaac Newton. It is well-known that Newton was obsessed with alchemy and hidden codes in the Bible. But Newtonian physics was also not a stripped-down mechanics, but a dynamic cosmos inclined toward apocalypse and dissolution. Not only was gravity an occult force, but, and this is an important point, Newton’s physics required active divine intervention and the supernatural. As he put it, “ nothing is done without [God’s] continual government and inspection,” and added: Definition 1. A generic cost-based GR problem is a tuple P = ⟨ D , Ω , o ⃗ , G , s , P r o b ⟩ where: Definition 9. An extended GR problem is a tuple P x = ⟨ D , Ω , m a g * , δ , O ⃗ , G , s 0 , P r o b ⟩ where: While much of the science behind magic has been understood only relatively recently, magicians have been exploiting it for a lot longer. Areas covered include our perception of reality, which a magician exploits whilst performing; how our eyes deceive us; illusions and how they work; and the many ways to elicit mind control. Even Michael Faraday, the godfather of modern scientific thought, carried out ground-breaking studies on people’s consciousness during séances. Faraday concluded that the key to the apparent magic observed during the classic table turning phenomenon was simply down to the participants’ involuntary movements. Here at last my own beliefs in science, rather than taking away from the magic, increased my appreciation of it in a way I had never experienced before.

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Our everyday perception is littered with episodes that psychologists call “ inattentional blindness” and “change blindness”. To formalise the concept, we propose to measure confidence in terms of progress made towards the goal previously thought to be most probable (i.e., the goal estimated to have the highest prior probability at the previous time-step). Remembering that o i is the most recently added observation at time-step i, the following definition measures the difference between optimal expected and actual progress.



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