A human-centric goal recognition system should be capable of recognising that some observable phenomena are more relevant than others.

We often think of the scientific revolution as having displaced a belief in magic, the supernatural, and the occult. But paying a closer look at premodern writings on magic, we find that they explicitly reject the supernatural. What is more, the key figures of the scientific revolution like Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon, and even Isaac Newton, all believed in the occult. According to Newton, gravity required the supernatural. Even today, philosophers of science have a hard time demarcating science from pseudoscience or magic, argues Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm. MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology.The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Publisher’s Note Kuhn, G., Olson, J.A. & Raz, A. (2016). The psychology of magic and the magic of psychology [Editorial]. Frontiers in Psychology, 7(1358). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01358 While much of the science behind magic has been understood only relatively recently, magicians have been exploiting it for a lot longer. Areas covered include our perception of reality, which a magician exploits whilst performing; how our eyes deceive us; illusions and how they work; and the many ways to elicit mind control. Even Michael Faraday, the godfather of modern scientific thought, carried out ground-breaking studies on people’s consciousness during séances. Faraday concluded that the key to the apparent magic observed during the classic table turning phenomenon was simply down to the participants’ involuntary movements. Here at last my own beliefs in science, rather than taking away from the magic, increased my appreciation of it in a way I had never experienced before. the definition is comparative (we seek the maximum value), use of multiplication is somewhat arbitrary. It does, however, conveniently constrain the result within bounds [0,1]. In implementation, multiple observations might return the same maximal result in which case selection could be randomised. To formalise the concept, we propose to measure confidence in terms of progress made towards the goal previously thought to be most probable (i.e., the goal estimated to have the highest prior probability at the previous time-step). Remembering that o i is the most recently added observation at time-step i, the following definition measures the difference between optimal expected and actual progress.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article. Further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author. Author Contributions Are there factors we have not considered, factors that might influence the development of a science of magic? Undoubtedly. Will any of these ultimately prevent its development? Only time will tell. But there are grounds for optimism. For example, important advances have recently been made toward a science of film and a science of music, involving new issues that touch upon much more than just basic aspects of perception and cognition (e.g., Levitin, 2007; Ball, 2010; Shimamura, 2013; Smith, 2014). Given the nature of their subject matter, these areas are vulnerable to many of the same concerns as have been raised about a science of magic; nevertheless, the scientific development of these areas is proceeding. And if there are worries that no such attempts have ever succeeded, consider the case of steam engines. During the first century of their existence, an enormous number of these were created, with a great deal of variety and contingency in their design. And eventually, work began on a scientific framework to investigate the principles involved (see McClellan and Dorn, 2006). The resulting science—thermodynamics—has become one of the mainstays of modern physics, not only providing considerable insight into what such engines can and cannot do, but also helping us understand other processes of nature, from the metabolism of cells to the energy production of stars. Even if there is only a small chance that such a development could be possible for magic, it would appear to be a chance well worth taking. Conflict of Interest StatementLesaffre, L., Kuhn, G., Abu-Akel, A. et al. (2018). Magic performances – When explained in psychic terms by university students. Frontiers in Psychology, 9(2129). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02129 Similarly, the so-called “father of modern science”, Francis Bacon, argued that “ Magic aims to recall natural philosophy from a miscellany of speculation to a greatness of works,” which was exactly what he was trying to do with his own project, as is clear from his definition of magic “as the science which applies the knowledge of hidden forms to the production of wonderful operations; and by uniting (as they say) actives with passives displays the wonderful works of nature.” Magic was a pragmatic or instrumentalist form of natural philosophy of exactly the sort Bacon saw as missing from scholasticism. Moreover, although Bacon often gets accused of despiritualizing nature, in texts like Sylva Sylvarum and the Historia vitae et mortis , he described a natural world overflowing with spirits with their own particular powers and appetites. Science, in this account, was the manipulation of spirits, not their elimination. Given an observation sequence o ⃗ t = o 1 , o 2 , ‥ o n, at every subsequent time-step, t+ 1, t+ 2, etc., the effective magnitude of each element mag( o i) is multiplied by a decay factor δ < 1 ∈ R +. If magnitude drops below some threshold of negligibility ϵ, the observation is removed from the sequence at the next time-step. Scientific attempts to understand perceptual processes have largely relied on functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging ( fMRI) - medical imaging techniques that identify brain activity through changes in its blood flow.