Explain the origins of magic to me

[Shinizak]

What’s the most plausible excuse for why magic exists? Of any setting I mean. I’m never content with “magic just exists,” it’s just extremely unsatisfying. So what is your personal favorite?

I liked the pyre-flies in final fantasy 10, and how they were effectively used to conjure up dreams, memories, and ghost monsters. They were nebulous enough that they could be used to explain a LOT of fantastical powers and antagonists.

Anyway, what’s your favorite?

[NichG]

I guess there are a couple...

One take is that the universe doesn't have strictly forward causality, but there are low level particles/energies which natively form tiny self-consistent time-travel loops in such a way that if the only way for self-consistency to happen is something very improbable to occur, that must occur. And if something very improbable could be made more probable if something else only slightly improbable happened, then that kind of exchange will be favored (basically like a kind of improbability budget getting shifted around). Things which respond to small signals with large changes in macroscopic behavior tend to be convenient lightning rods for improbability to ground itself out like that, and mages are people who have learned to configure their minds in various ways such that some large improbability is resolved only if the particular small improbability they focus on happens in their immediate future. Other kinds of spellwork can involve for example forcing the improbable chain of events to connect through things that are extremely robust, so rather than just letting probability flow as it wants to they have to 'hold out' against undesired improbable events being easier ways to resolve the conflict than the thing they're trying to make happen - dangerous to do in an organic brain since 'the person has a seizure and dies' might be better than fulfilling their byzantine wish, but more feasible in enchantments wrought in metal or crystal, or in magical creatures which have evolved structures designed to be robust against that kind of slippage. Higher level magics consist of chaining and connecting these improbabilities together into networks, traditions, massive delocalized engines and improbability transport networks.

Another one is the dream logic/consensus reality take. The only thing that actually exists is minds, and reality manifests from the barrier between the conscious and subconscious - minds have the ability to step outside of themselves within themselves, surprise themselves, hide things. That ambiguity is an opening that permits a mind to interact with another mind, rather than just being stuck in a solipsistic dream. As such, when minds come together and influence each-other through this pathway, there are mechanisms to accept and integrate events, or reject them. Strong enough rejection means that in the end, it wasn't you that the other mind was interacting with, it was just their subconscious - you kick yourself out of the shared reality by pushing too hard, so over time passive acceptance becomes more common than passive rejection, and some kind of coherent patchwork of contexts is created at a subconscious level. Awareness of this is excluded from the conscious level for the most part, but it's possible to learn to recognize it in the same sort of way you'd learn to lucid dream. That means that one can now consciously choose whether to accept or reject elements of reality. Even without that awareness, one could find that they're able to manipulate the collective subconscious with certain patterns even if they might not know why it works. And those whose subconscious is particularly strongly bent in certain ways will just passively alter the 'weft' of reality around them without even meaning to. At the highest level of intentional practice, one could step outside of the consensus entirely and create their own reality around themselves, fully consciously shaping the nature of the bridges they make with the consensus reality - this would be something like attaining godhood, in that they can fully reject any imposition of the consensus reality on themselves, even while retaining at least some ability to inject their own actions and desires into that consensus.

[Mechalich]

The best generalized setup I've found is to treat the world as a simulation. It goes like this:

• Someone, divine or otherwise, sets about creating the world
• They develop a specialized programming language to do this
• When they finish creation they leave the language in place, in case they need to tweak things later
• In-world agents are able to access this language (probably to allow for divine avatars or the abilities of deputies like angles and demons)
• Mortal in-world agents figure out a way to access this language as well. That's the magic system.

This matches well with mortals and monsters having the same type of powers, but different capabilities of using it, and with magic being reliant on esoteric linguistic structures that don't appear to have any in-universe meaning.

There are a number of examples of fantasy worlds that are explicitly setup this way. For example in Star Ocean, Till the End of Time, the world familiar to your party is a simulation used as a game and you eventually step out of it and smash in the faces of the people who are trying to delete the instance. OOTS, actually, also operates in this fashion, as Thor explained to Durkon that wizards can perform more or less the same arts as deities, only that without divine quiddity they are weaker and less real.

[Mastikator]

Parallel universe with entirely different set of physics, magic is just careful swapping between universes.

[Bohandas]

Parallel universe with entirely different set of physics, magic is just careful swapping between universes.

Or h=just the default game world has diffetent physics to begin with

[Mastikator]

Or h=just the default game world has diffetent physics to begin with

Then the origin is just "the same as the rest of the world"?

[Yora]

Magic is a fundamental aspect of the underlying laws of reality. The magical creatures who were produced by magic at the beginning of time naturally know how to cast spells, and their understanding of what they do gave the first mortal sorcerers the guidance to discover how to cast spells themselves.

I guess magic just does exist.

[Vahnavoi]

"Magic" is a psychological phenomenom and an action. It is born when humans come face to face with causation they can't quite understand and develop rituals, spells and charms in attempt to control such causation.

The common rules of magic are that like controls like (law of symbolism), things that have been in contact remain connected (law of contagion), mental events have direct influence over physical events (law of mind over matter) and that magical things only exist as long as the magician is focused on them (law of object impermanence).

None of the above cares of whether magic works - non-working magic is still magic. What, then, decides if magic works or not? Daemons and Paths. Daemons are the unperceived causal agents or forces, the men behind the curtains who make the world sometimes adhere to the will of the human magician. Paths are the ways which connect the practice of magic to the Daemon who does the work. But don't confuse Daemons for origin of magic. Daemons don't originate magic, they simply facilitate it. If you remove the human practicing magic and the need to interprete them from the equation, there is no magic in what the Daemon does from the Daemon's perspective - it is merely taking the necessary steps according to rules of its world to achieve a task. If you try to be clever and ask "what is th origin of Daemons, then?", you are asking for origin of everything, for Daemons are not of one kind, nor are Paths. The things that make magic work are not unified nor constant in this world, nevermind across all possible worlds. I stress again: non-working magic is still magic. The psychological phenomenom and the practice of magic can and do exist even in absence of any Path or Daemon.

As a corollary to the above, magicians can be split into two main categories:

First, the possessor of true knowledge. These people have peeked behind the curtains and know at least something of how their world works, thus making them an independent agent within it. They are magicians not in their own eyes, but in the eyes of others, who do not know which Paths and Daemons they are using for their work.

Second, the follower of belief. These people do not know how the world truly works, but they have, wittingly or unwittingly, stumbled upon a Path to a Daemon who is at least intermittently co-operative with their needs. They are dependent on their Paths and their Daemons and if stripped from them, would be left unable to continue their work.

Both kinds exist and have always existed in our world. You might not call people in the first group magicians and might argue against doing so, on the premise that you can count yourself among their ranks. There is a a better than even chance that your protest is hollow, because you truly belong in the second group, and simply do not want to admit to yourself how ignorant you are of Paths and Daemons of your world.

[Grod_The_Giant]

"Magic" is a complete theoretical description of reality, from the movement of galaxies to the quantum level where everything smears out into probabilities. Where science explains everything in terms of the four fundamental forces, magic casts all of existence as the byproduct of interactions between the nine* fundamental elements.

The trick is that science and magic are both true. Magic seems impossible when we try to understand it through the lens of science, but only because its internally consistent laws and principles are totally different from the ones we know.

The inverse is also true, though. If all you know are the laws of magic, you'll never be able to explain something like a computer or internal combination engine. You can get close, like how you can describe the expansion of a fireball using science, but eventually you'll have to say "and at this point the demispirits do something that's theoretically allowed but impossibly unlikely," just like the poor scientist will eventually have to say "and at this point an impossibly unlikely quantum fluctuation occurred."

It's just coincidence that while science needs a whole external assemblage to create a blast of fire, with magic the "machinery" is built of thoughts and words--but a flamethrower will work regardless of who you hand it to, while casting a fireball spell requires a great deal of personal expertise.

(There's also a third equally-valid method for understanding the world, where the fundamental underpinnings of reality are imagination and willpower--that's how psionic stuff works)



*Earth, water, fire, air, wood, flesh, thought, sound, and light.

[Lord Raziere]

There can be many explanations, serving many purposes.

For example, the origin of magic could simply be primordial chaos or potentiality all things come from. the world was created from this chaos and thus everything leftover is what is called magic, when really magic is the norm and the world created is the exception to it. to harness magic therefore is to carve out parts of the primordial chaos into familiar or controlled forms. The world is infinite mayhem and all order even physics is mere artifice to filter it out into useable magic so that we mere mortals can live at all. (Exalted uses this)

In other examples, it could be an alien force that came to the planet and changed or disrupted its natural order with its presence. a foreign thing from beyond the world that disrupts and remake the ecology that everyone has had to adapt to, often from some meteor or alien introducing it. this also often causes mutations in the local life forms so that they can use magic naturally. (Elden Ring, Chrono Trigger, FF7, stuff like that use this explanation)

another origin of magic is that it is a thing of thoughts and dreams, and the act of casting is making dreams reality, that magic inhabits its own world of thought connected to our own made of our ideas and imaginations. (WH40k, Dragon Age, Dresden Files and other urban fantasies)

another origin is....that magic is simply enlightenment. as you understand more and more about reality, the more you can manipulate it like a god until you basically become one. this understanding is not through books or science, but introspection, awareness and mystical revelation. there is no energy to magic, reality when you know the truth is simply manipulable like this but most never realize it. (Elder Scrolls, Mage the Awakening, things like that)

a good potential origin is that magic and its uses is what resulted from killing a certain god or godlike entity long ago or perhaps multiple ones, releasing their power into the world. the remnants of magic are thus could be shards or aspects of that beings power in various forms.

if you want to go super-scifi, magic could be the result of a strange plants producing magical energy as a byproduct of photosynthesis and growing, converting sunlight into magic naturally and others simply figuring out ways they can use it. as in, magic is literally produced BY the plants, its the SOURCE of all magic, there is no greater cosmic magical thing that made the plants themselves, they can just... DO that.

[Anonymouswizard]

The universe is shoddily constructed, the logical result of it being subcontracted about six times. Oh sure the cracks have been patched over, but with a bit of luck and effort you can dig around and find those half-finished bits and bodge jobs that if you push them just right let the impossible happen.


Alternatively I'm very fond of the humanocentric universes in Mage: the Ascension and Unknown Armies. Reality is defined by the whims of the population as a whole, and magic is being passionate and bloody minded enough that you can batter down the passive beliefs of those nearby, grab the universe by the ears, and say that this is how reality works. This works somewhat differently in each game, but in broad strokes if you disbelieve in your toaster enough it won't cook your bread.

Unknown Armies has even more quibbles with things like Archetypes, the necessity of a paradox to access certain kinds of magic, and competing in-universe theories, but consensus reality fits most of the facts (including magick changing massively over the 20th century). Actually that shoddy construction theory is also from Unknown Armies, is not mutually exclusive with a consensus reality, and makes a lot of sense. Would you trust humanity with constructing a functional universe without any bugs?

The required level of will and passion is incredible though. We're talking literal one in a million levels of rarity, and not everybody with it is going to have the motivation or insight to become a wizard. But if you can please enjoy your form of magick based around filing systems or whatever.

[Kurt Kurageous]

Magic is the manifestation of will.

Whether that was from a god, gods, sentient universe, or an individual is a moot point.

The means to bring about this manifestation gives us the different kinds of casters in the game. But it all comes back to will/wanting it to happen.

[Willie the Duck]

Then the origin is just "the same as the rest of the world"?

That can work. Have a world that works like our own (or close enough for casual inspection, if you want things like square-cube-breaking giants to be non-magical) as the default, but then magic can be another layer of allowable physics within said world. Perhaps it is like various exotic particles or particle constructs that can exist in our universe (various bosons, high atomic number elements), but generally don't except in various high-energy experiments. Spellcasters and magic items and the like can be (to mix my chemistry/physics analogy even more) enzymes and stabilizers towards those states.

[Bohandas]

Basically additional fundamental interactions beyond the familiar four

[KorvinStarmast]

I’m never content with “magic just exists,” it’s just extremely unsatisfying.

How do you feel about gravity? Magnetism?

My favorite 'why magic exists' scheme is very basic, as it is based on the tension between Chaos and Order. The original state of All That Is was Chaos. Taking the stuff of Chaos (which is ever changing) and making permanent, or semi-permanent stuff from it is the function of Order, and is usually an exercise of the mind or the will of {some being}. When successful, that exercise of the mind or the will is often described as magic.

Under this scheme, magic is as dangerous as it is powerful (to the user and to others) but it is also potentially beneficial.

In time most things eventually revert to a more disordered state and either approximate chaos or indeed rejoin primordial Chaos that is the original stuff of Everything.

My most useful mental model for the metaphysics that supports the above is the seven elements of earth, wind, fire, water, spirit, time and location.

[Cikomyr2]

Magic is a storytelling trope that can be explained or left unexplained, at the leisure of the author.

Is it actually important to your lore and story world? If you have people digging for an answer, then you better have an answer ready. Any answer would be satisfying as long as you keep versimilitude in your universe.

If you want to make the entire plot or setting revolving around the nature of magic ("we live in the ruins of a cyberpunk civilization who created an energy field accessible for use by everyone who studied how") or you can just make it a hippy-like universal truth ("magic is the fundamental threads of reality that binds the Planescape together").

Magic is what you make it to be. Dont let yourself be boxed by expectation of what magic "should be".

[Imbalance]

There's no such thing. That's what's so magical about it.

[Chauncymancer]

Magic is the behavior of the Subtle Etheric Body of a mage. Arcane magic is learning to reach out with your body into the Aetheric Plasma that passes through all things and thus connects all things in its currents. You change the currents to create an essential nature of some kind (hot, light, melting) and then bind it to the Etheric Body of the spells target.

Magic is the behavior of an arcane or divine spirit leaving the physical plane. Casters prepare their spells by summoning an arcane spirit, such as a mote of Ignition, or a seraph of Motion, and then bind the being summoned spirit into their own body. The spell 'hangs' off of the mage, following them around until they are ready to 'cast' the spell, which is simply a matter of conducting the spirit to be coterminous with the spells target and then allowing it to revert to its primal nature. Spell effects are simply the side effects of this reversion process.

Magic is an invocation of a commandment of the divine pact, an agreement between the gods of the immaterial and eternal planes and all things living or numbered. Spells are individual paragraphs and clauses of the pact which when invoked in full, specifying the parties of the second, third, agreements implied herein, etc, compel the divine entities to execute their predetermined duty.

[Tawmis]

What’s the most plausible excuse for why magic exists? Of any setting I mean. I’m never content with “magic just exists,” it’s just extremely unsatisfying. So what is your personal favorite?
I liked the pyre-flies in final fantasy 10, and how they were effectively used to conjure up dreams, memories, and ghost monsters. They were nebulous enough that they could be used to explain a LOT of fantastical powers and antagonists.
Anyway, what’s your favorite?

For my own home brew, the gods are responsible.
The gods discovered a primative world (pretty much dinosaurs) - where there was already a "god" there - he/it - did nothing but thrive on the war between dinosaurs.
These new gods, banished him (and he's furious!) - and began reshaping the world.
In doing so they introduced magic.
As the races evolved, some learned how to manipulate that magic (Wizards), which led to portals/planes being accessed that shouldn't have (Warlocks began making packs).
This led to angels and demons getting involved, and eventually some were born with magic (Sorcerers).
As the mortals grew - the gods called on them (Clerics, Paladins) and others learned to use the magic with nature (Druids, Rangers).
So on and so on.

[Draconi Redfir]

it's not my setting, but i remember reading a thread here on the forums once that took place on a spaceship or a simulation or something, but nobody alive was fully aware of this fact.


So "Magic" was done by speaking "magic words" and using "Mystical hand motions" to cast "Spells"

in reality, the caster was activating the ship's environmental controls, pressing buttons on an invisible keyboard (invisible due to the ship being damaged or something) and speaking commands in the ship's original language to cause a brief, rapid change in the ship's simulated environment.

So things like Control Weather would just be the cleric programming rain into the ship's environmental control, and Fireball could be activating a hidden weapon's system or triggering a localized Contamination-purging device.


So less "Magic", more "Sufficiently advanced technology"




In my personal setting, think the closest thing i have to an explanation is two factors:

Magic comes from the soul

and Magic ages like a fine wine.

So if you're a normal, every day person, and you spend a lot of time with a particular item, lets say a necklace, and that necklace is very important to you, then that necklace just might become enchanted due to prolonged exposure to you and your care for it.

After that, the longer that enchanted necklace exists, the more powerful it will become. Even when you are dead and gone, that necklace will be more powerful in 100 years then it is now.

The most magical location in the setting is actually a place where a caveman who had an enchanted weapon of some kind got into a battle, but the weapon cracked but wasn't destroyed, so magic has just been leaking out of the thing for millions of years all while growing more and more powerful. Thanks to this occurring in a valley surrounded by mountains, it has kept the magic contained and concentrated. Slowly creating this setting's version of the Feywild, and the creatures inside evolving with exposure to this raw magic in mind, creating fey things like gnomes.

[wilphe]

Magic is a creation of our world, or at least those parts of it where the world view is informed by things like science, enlightenment and rationality - or banality and mundanity.

Its a word for something that doesn't exist and can therefore be clearly defined and when writing about it writers in our world tend to draw a clear distinction between mundane and magical.

In an actual magical world it is very likely there will not be a clear difference and people will no more understand you if you say you don't believe in magic anymore than a fish can disbelieve the existence of water.

This tends to be hard to write though

[OldTrees1]

Level 1:
It is not actually magic, it is physics and technology that differ from our world.

In universe:
They call it magic because any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. They did not understand how it works, so they made up explanations and called it magic. Some left it at that. Others tinkered to expand their knowledge of how to use it, without understanding why it works. A few study it and find out parts of how it works, but they too call it magic because by now the word "magic" in universe has a different meaning than the word "magic" in our language. Magic is just a field of physics and a category of technology.

Out of universe:
The game calls it magic because we bring preconceptions about what is possible. It is more comfortable to describe it as magical (our comfortable reference frame) rather than learn a new language (the in universe reference frame).

Level 2:
Sorcerers are hard to explain. Sometimes they are described as using their force of personality to demand reality change, and reality complying. You could base the entire physics and technology of magic around this principle that reality can change itself upon request. When a dragon beats its wings, reality complies to allow the dragon to fly. Wizards speak to reality through a complex low access user interface. Divine Clerics speak to reality through an easy to use restrictive medium access user interface created through their faith. Sorcerers have a high access very nitpicky terminal but no assisting documentation. Most input is gibberish but they remember the ones that worked.

PS: There is also the phrase "any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science" - Agatha Heterodyne (Girl Genius).

[Cluedrew]

Then the origin is just "the same as the rest of the world"?

This is my default explanation, even if there is a solid line between the magical and non-magical parts of the world, usually they come from the same place.

I have broken this rule many times for various settings. Some magic entered the setting later, like when one world "bumped into" another and the interference caused strange effects. Sometimes magic forces predate the universe and may have played a role in its creation. In at least one it was created by a team of researchers as an infrastructure project.

Magic is a creation of our world, [...] Its a word for something that doesn't exist and can therefore be clearly defined and when writing about it writers in our world tend to draw a clear distinction between mundane and magical.

To the point when "magic is right" people start proclaiming it is not magic and science appropriates it. I've done some study on what people considered magic in the past and it was much fuzzier back in the day. Something that creeps into my settings fairly frequently.

This also reminds me of Avatar: The Last Air-Bender where bending is not considered magic. I think they might call spirit world shenanigans magic, but bending is just a useful cultural practice. Other than the fact you just have to have a certain aptitude for it to do it at all it is pretty interchangeable with many other practices.

[Vahnavoi]

PS: There is also the phrase "any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science" - Agatha Heterodyne (Girl Genius).

A better formulation would be to say that empirical analysis of magic is a science. It naturally follows that any application of science of magic is technology. In any case, real life anthropologist have already found out that sharp delineation between "magic", "technology" and "science" is a cultural trope and in actual application they differ mostly, or even only, in idioms used to describe them. Magical thinking and ritual behaviours relate to the same cognitive abilities and attempts to learn through trial and error as empirical sciences do - which is why going back in history, a good chunk of proto-scientific academics and scholars were some flavor of magician, and created the mythical and fictive archetypes for wizards and clerics.

[NichG]

Maybe rather than 'magic vs science' it's better to think of it more like 'magic vs technology' - more about the style of exploitation of the available forces than about whether some forces are natural and others supernatural.

I do tend to draw a distinction that 'magic' generally means forces which appear to operate in a cognitive fashion - any time physics cares about intent, resolves what someone 'means', reacts to words and language, is influenced by moral or karmic considerations, cares about equivalent exchange in terms of emotional or historical weight rather than raw materials, etc. The fictional impact of magic vs tech to me is that magic promises the possibility of a personal and internal relationship with power - by wanting something hard enough, thinking the right way, training and meditating, being born chosen, etc, this force is accessible at a personal level and one's circumstances can be directly negotiated with. Whereas technology is more about external power - multitudes build and maintain the infrastructure that lets you replicate your favorite food, teleport around, etc - you can understand how those things work and how to build them and invent new ones, but that doesn't make those effects innately something you can do on your own.

Basically, fictional universes with magic are (to me) ones where parts the laws of physics are best understood by modeling them like you would an intelligence, rather than through invariant mathematically simple local interactions (simple as in having few terms/constants, not simple to calculate or understand necessarily).

Of course stuff blurs these lines, and those blurred cases can be the most fun... It looks like the universe is intelligence, but actually it was just a mirror of people's intelligence; it's 'magic' and individually cognitively accessible, but enchanting lets people automate that cognition so it behaves more like tech.

[Vahnavoi]

The most relevant blurred line is when mechanical technology begins approaching the point where a machine can purposefully be made to act as a Daemon - interpreter of human language, emotions and intent, translating those into physical action. Modern information technology already qualifies - I'm drawing two thousand year old symbols mapped two human vocalizations on a screen, with the expectation that they'll be turned into unseen waves of energy capable of going through walls, their meaning preserved and transmitted to people I have never met.

[NichG]

The most relevant blurred line is when mechanical technology begins approaching the point where a machine can purposefully be made to act as a Daemon - interpreter of human language, emotions and intent, translating those into physical action. Modern information technology already qualifies - I'm drawing two thousand year old symbols mapped two human vocalizations on a screen, with the expectation that they'll be turned into unseen waves of energy capable of going through walls, their meaning preserved and transmitted to people I have never met.

Well, when such things become so omnipresent and inescapable that society forgets how they work or where they came from, such that it becomes a feature of the self rather than the device. Or if it's hidden well enough.

E.g. society with so much automated autonomous surveillance that no one controls it anymore, but certain eigenbehaviors that look similar enough to those of past rulers get awarded different permissions from the system -> people come to believe that eating avocado toast for breakfast leads to financial fortune.

[Bohandas]

Maybe rather than 'magic vs science' it's better to think of it more like 'magic vs technology' - more about the style of exploitation of the available forces than about whether some forces are natural and others supernatural.

I do tend to draw a distinction that 'magic' generally means forces which appear to operate in a cognitive fashion - any time physics cares about intent, resolves what someone 'means', reacts to words and language, is influenced by moral or karmic considerations, cares about equivalent exchange in terms of emotional or historical weight rather than raw materials, etc. The fictional impact of magic vs tech to me is that magic promises the possibility of a personal and internal relationship with power - by wanting something hard enough, thinking the right way, training and meditating, being born chosen, etc, this force is accessible at a personal level and one's circumstances can be directly negotiated with. Whereas technology is more about external power - multitudes build and maintain the infrastructure that lets you replicate your favorite food, teleport around, etc - you can understand how those things work and how to build them and invent new ones, but that doesn't make those effects innately something you can do on your own.

Basically, fictional universes with magic are (to me) ones where parts the laws of physics are best understood by modeling them like you would an intelligence, rather than through invariant mathematically simple local interactions (simple as in having few terms/constants, not simple to calculate or understand necessarily).

Or, similarly, where it operates in a top-down rather than a bottom-up fashion, starting with the big picture, and filling in the details from there, rather than starting with details and aggregating them to form a big picture.

(The closest real world analogy would probably be classical or relativistic mechanics versus quantum mechanics. In classical mechanics everything everything has and maintains a definite state, we always can say for sure where it is, where it's going, and how fast (and in relativity we can do the same thing once we specify a refrence frame), but on the scale of quantum mechanics, according to the copenhagen interpretation at any rate, the universe only keeps track of a particle's position and so forth in general terms, there's a general area where it probably is but it doesn;t have a specific location until some reaction or another occurs which forces it to commit to being either here or there. The universe knows its general vicinity and that determines its state, rather than the universe knowing its state and that determining its general vicinity. But this weak real world analogy falls far far short of what I'm talking about)

In a magical world you might get a similar lackadaisicality on a much much grander scale. You can make a wish for a spoon and the universe can grant it without you having to wish for a specific spoon, and it's highly plausible that certain highly magical creatures, particularly outsiders, might not have any organs until somebody cuts them open

This also gives the advantage that a lot of the game's abstractions can be handwaved as part of the magic of the world

Also, I think that ultimately this synergizes well with the Intelligence/Artificial Intelligence analogy (provided it's he kind that generates images (or text or whatever) rather than interpreting them), and it occurs to me that if we combine these with the multiple parallell universes idea earlier in this thread that they could all combine together to something that has the further advantage of also more-or-less literally describing a multi-player roleplaying game

[Vahnavoi]

Also, I think that ultimately this synergizes well with the Intelligence/Artificial Intelligence analogy (provided it's he kind that generates images (or text or whatever) rather than interpreting them), and it occurs to me that if we combine these with the multiple parallell universes idea earlier in this thread that they could all combine together to something that has the further advantage of also more-or-less literally describing a multi-player roleplaying game

Reality-as-simulation, reality-as-dream and reality-by-consensus all dance around the idea that tabletop roleplaying games are behaviorally magic rituals, where the participants engage in symbolic actions to purportedly enter an altered state of concsiousness, to create a world that only exist when and as long as the participants spend mental effort on it. The obvious corollary being that the players, and specifically, the game master is the Demiurge / Evil Daemon of the illusory world. Some games already go all in with this, for example indie supplement for D&D and OSR games, Dragon Union, makes "Game master is God" into outright game rule and the roles of characters are adjusted to suit (f.ex., the Cleric has direct hotline to God and is responsible for holding the Fighter (=party leader) for following God's commandments.)

[No brains]

My favorite origin of magic is when the primordial matter of the big bang slowed down enough to produce electrons. If electrons aren't magical, why can they do so many magical things? Shoot lighting! Grant life! Organize matter! Behave differently going backwards in time!