Wh… why are you telling me what I believe and think?

Also, no, you would not be scientifically accurate in describing computer wizards as summoning spirits from magic rocks, because spirits are not a scientific concept.

Spirit means many different things to many people, such that few will 100% agree on its qualities on properties. It is basically a religious concept with an extreme amount of variance depending on who you talk to, generally it could be said to be a sort of ‘essence’ of a person or thing, but some would even disagree with that.

What does or does not have a spirit? People? Animals? Rocks? Only magic rocks? Water? Concepts (Zeitgeists)?

What does a spirit do? How does it do what it does? How can you know whether it is present? Is it limited by time and space, temporarily and spatially localized? Or is it in many places at once, or does it persist through time? Do spirits have personalities? Do they have forms, or bodies?

What you mean by spirit?

I don’t know, but I also won’t presume to know someone else’s thoughts.

Anyway, I did not define magic as anything, though I love studying the esoteric and the occult and learning what different peoples in different times have believed.

There are many forms of magic. Some of them relatively simple in both exercise and effect, others vastly complex and purporting astounding powers and abilities. Alchemy (Spiritual Purification / Inner Alchemy / Gnosis Englightenment and Proto Chemistry), Divining, Scrivining, Tarot, Evocation, Wards, Spells, Charms, Hexe/Curses, Secret Languages… theres so much more.

What typically differentiates magic from non magic for most people is probably the idea of a well understood, provably reliable causal mechanism.

In the past, when little was understood, concepts from religion, folklore, philosophy, mathematics, medicine, chemistry… much of this was jumbled together such that dividing those listed ideas into their modern constituent concepts would be anachronistic for to varying degrees for different places and time periods.

Over time, more and more ideas were tested via experimentation, experimentation itself became more rigorous, and our understanding of those causal mechanisms, and technological use of them, increased dramatically.

I would say that ‘Magic’ can be said to be the ideas, that were not found to reliably have a reproducible effect, that were found to not be functionally useful beyond creating an experience of profundity to the practitioners.

As an example I can attempt to speak Enochian to evoke Metatron to aid in sealing some particular demon by using the Lesser Key of Solomon, but this will not actually do anything unless I convince myself that it has in fact done something, that there was a demon to be sealed, etc.

It would be extremely helpful if you could describe precisely your conception of magic so that an actual discussion could be had, as that seems to be what you are looking for.

In my experience with magic believers/practitioners, all of them will tell you that their specific conception of magic is correct and nearly all others are wrong, so it is quite difficult to avoid accidentally strawmanning them.

But uh, you later switch to a different meaning of the word magic when you describe it as a wondrous and whimsical way to experience the world.

Personally, I find wonder and whimsy through understanding the vast intricacies of nature as science describes it.

How wondrous it is that we live in a world where the laws of optics allow a crepuscular ray from a burning star, following the laws of nuclear physics, to illuminate a lonely grove of plants, whose biology is wonderfully complex.

In closing, I do not know what you mean by magic.

Could you perhaps describe magic as a concept, or some specific instance of it or magical procedure?