>It would be interesting to see whether bringing kids up to believe that magic is real (which almost everyone does to a greater or lesser extent) has effects later in life.
I'm not sure how interesting that would be, though, or even how you'd do it. As you say, almost everyone does it, so how would you ever find a control?
>our brains are wired to try to make sense of the world, which is why stories are so powerful, and why there is a persistent tendency to try to ascribe meaning to the world.
Well, exactly. We still don't know everything about physics, for instance, so when someone like Stephen Hawking says "an electron does this", he doesn't really know what it means, not down to the very smallest quantum level. And yet he still has a picture of that event in his head; he's able to say "X does Y" without knowing the intermediate steps. That's fundamental to our thought processes and yet something happening with no causal chain is, by any reasonable definition, magic.
I'm just not sure how any of the above can be explored by Richard Dawkins writing a children's book.
I'm not sure how interesting that would be, though, or even how you'd do it. As you say, almost everyone does it, so how would you ever find a control?
>our brains are wired to try to make sense of the world, which is why stories are so powerful, and why there is a persistent tendency to try to ascribe meaning to the world.
Well, exactly. We still don't know everything about physics, for instance, so when someone like Stephen Hawking says "an electron does this", he doesn't really know what it means, not down to the very smallest quantum level. And yet he still has a picture of that event in his head; he's able to say "X does Y" without knowing the intermediate steps. That's fundamental to our thought processes and yet something happening with no causal chain is, by any reasonable definition, magic.
I'm just not sure how any of the above can be explored by Richard Dawkins writing a children's book.
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