Meaning and Magic

Penn Gillette once said, “real magic is fake, and fake magic is real”, in response to whether he and Teller did “real magic”. Since all the magic anyone has ever seen is based on illusions, he was saying that the “real” type (i.e. supernatural) is actually the fake one because it doesn’t exist - illusions do.

I was talking to a friend the other day about the meaning of life, and we both agreed that life has no knowable meaning. However, we both came to very different conclusions as to what implications this has. His response was that, absent meaning, we really can’t say what choices are right or wrong because there’s no way to judge. Therefore, do whatever you’d like - it doesn’t matter.

True, there’s no one but ourselves to answer to, but that doesn’t mean that we should think our own opinion is irrelevant to the choice. Instead, I think we actually should try to find whatever gives us meaning personally and try to pursue this because it makes us happy and has a good chance of bringing other happiness*. This isn’t perfectly defensible, as if an immutable god carved it in stone, but it doesn’t have to be. If all "real" meaning is fake, fake meaning is the only real kind.

Joseph Pine had an interesting TED Talk on “What Consumers Want” (see below) where he defined a simple system for describing authenticity. He said that truly authentic things are “real real” - true to the world, true to themselves. Think of a climbing to Mt. Everest or some similar visceral experience. Then there are the “fake real” things: fake to the world, true to themselves. His example was Disney World - where everyone knows it’s not really "The Magic Kingdom", but it’s supposed to be fake, so we accept it and enjoy. Likewise, his example of "real fake" is Universal's City Walk where you can see behind all the scenery (true to the world), but it's not really true to itself (it's not a real city).

I think meaning and authenticity are really the same thing. Authenticity is an expression of meaning itself. There is no “real real” meaning, but it doesn’t matter. Accept the real fake magic and enjoy yourself!

*People aren’t that different, usually people aren’t isolated in their views of what has meaning. 

Comments

[Seth]

There COULD be a "real, real" thing. We just wouldn't know it. Our individuality precludes a bias that keeps us from knowing things as they are were they to exist outside our perceptions. It's Rumsfeld philosophy, about things we don't know we don't know, but it's also a thought that things will exist with or without our seeing them.

From this point, it's best to take what we do and can know and work with it, but there is/could be more out there. Thus I'd argue that meaning is based in authenticity (and our personal preferences, of course), not t'other way round.