Ta-da!! Magic (Descartes blog 2)

I’m still sticking to the same topic about how your senses deceive you. When we discussed about this topic this automatically made me think of magic. Magicians have many techniques to make you see and to belief something that isn’t real. Magicians use misdirection to get you to not focus on what they’re really doing. I’m not a big magic fan because I just never really believed in it. I guess my mind is stronger than my senses on this particular subject. Magicians play on your senses and make you want to doubt what your mind really perceives. But Descartes teaches us to not doubt ourselves..right? “I am, I exist” (pg.17). So we can’t go wrong. Let’s break down a magic trick. Let’s use our reasoning and not use our senses to see reality. Descartes says that we use our senses to see reality, “whatever I have up till now accepted as most true I have acquired either from the senses or through the senses. But from time to time I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once”(pg.12). Magicians are the deceivers trying to get you to think a certain way different from reality. There was a show on Fox network called ‘Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed’. The show explained the methods behind magic tricks and illusions. One of the most famous tricks was revealed, how to “saw a woman in half.” Now we know that can’t be true. I mean in reality if that were to happen, that person would be dead. But remember the magician is trying to deceive you because they want you to use your senses, you see it so it must be true. Well here is how they perform the trick. They get an assistant that is willing to participate in the trick and shackle her at the neck and her ankles on a table. The magician shackles her to make you think that she cannot move. Two special boxes are then put on top of her and are then strapped to the table. The doors of the boxes are then open so we can see the assistant. By doing that, this is what makes the trick so effective. We rely so much on what we see, our senses! Her hand is then tied after they open the doors of the box. The magician then closes the doors and brings out the saw. The saw is real and is very sharp. He then cuts through the middle of the box and sometimes the assistant in the box will scream (another sense that would make us think it’s real) as if she were getting cut. To even add more effect he gets out more blades to “cut” the lady in the box and acts as if he was cutting bone (appearing to struggle to put the blade completely through). After the blades are inserted he removes them, and pulls the assistant in the box apart. He spins the table around to give more of an illusion. The magician then brings the table back together and then removes the blades. After that, he then unties the restraints and the boxes are removed. Low and behold, the assistant is still shackled to the table. The shackles are removed and magically she seems to be still whole, uncut. Well here is what really happens. The shackles that were placed on this assistant gave us an illusion that she can’t escape, when really she can. All the locks placed on the shackle made us think, “oh there is no way to escape.” But, when the doors of the boxes are closed, she can slip her feet out of the shackles and positions herself so that her whole body will fit in one box (the top half). Magicians sometimes even put fake feet that move around on the 2^nd box to create that illusion that the person hasn’t moved. So after the trick has been performed, she then slips her feet back in the shackles. So there you have it, our senses lying to us. But using our reasoning is the only solid foundation to not be deceived by magic. There are so many tricks that have been revealed on that show. I will post a few more. Challenge yourself. Watch the magic trick, and then use your reasoning to explain how the magic trick works before they tell you how it’s really done.