“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Clarke’s dictum seems to be perfectly reasonable, and it certainly is a useful observation; but it also makes a pretty profound statement about nature, or reality; a statement that may or may not be true, or even provable, one way or the other.

It implies that even though technology and magic can be mistaken for one another, that they are not the same thing. Technology and magic may not both exist in the universe. Do we know this? Can we really know this, even if it is true?

Let’s paraphrase Clarke somewhat and reformulate the Third Law.

Any sufficiently advanced and capable intelligence, particularly if equipped with a technology beyond our comprehension, is indistinguishable from god.

For example, could a member of some advanced extraterrestrial civilization (particularly one capable of using a highly advanced but incomprehensible technology) be mistaken for the divine? It could be argued that exposing a primitive, tribal culture to our machines and science might make them believe we were dieties. After all, early European explorers certainly intimidated Neolithic cultures with gunpowder, horses, and steel swords–but not for long. The primitives soon learned the strangers could bleed….

These kinds of statements raise some profound questions about the nature of reality. They raise the possibility that there is no such thing as magic, or the divine, at all; that given enough time and science ordinary beings just like us could develop natural powers that appeared supernatural. It raises the question, “is there such a thing as “supernatural” at all, or just a continuous spectrum of “natural” activities. I personally believe this to be true, but I would be a fool to claim that I knew it for sure; after all, no one can really know that for sure.

Wasn’t this the great breakthrough of the pre-Socratic philosophers of Ionia about 3000 years ago, the world view that led to modern science? They discovered Nature, a reality independent of human thought or dreams, open to human understanding and reason and governed by law, a universe where even the gods had to obey the rules.

Our pets, or perhaps our children, may believe we have godly powers, but we certainly don’t believe it. We see our differences as one of kind, not degree. We know we have capabilities and sophistication that the bacteria in our gardens, or our intestinal flora do not possess, but we don’t consider ourselves magical or divine. At least, most of us don’t.

The very idea that there are some kinds of knowledge that we can never learn without the assistance of intelligences already capable of them, that we can never learn on our own by reason and perception, is a pretty definite, and perhaps even outrageous statement about the universe. After all, we realize that there may be some things about the cosmos not accessible to human thought and logic (hell, Kurt Godel actually proved it mathematically!), but that is not quite the same as dividing the totality of all things knowable into two parts, one of which we are forbidden to explore and incapable of participating in, except by communication with some fundamentally divine being. Our priests and shamans derive their powers from the gods, but they are not divine themselves.

There is a difference between saying there are some things we will never know, and that there are some things we are not meant to know. Or is there?