Sorry, but I can't agree with any of that at all. The first and the third point are basically just nonsense, and the second point is based on a misunderstanding of quantum entanglement.
Occultists deal with the immaterial. It does a disservice to both science and spirituality to misappropriate it and misunderstand it in order to justify our art. We don't need science to justify the human experience. Both can be true at once.
I don't think Carroll so much distanced himself from it, as that he got distracted by his ideas for hypersphere cosmology, which although fascinating, do not really bear much on magic. I had an email conversation with him where I sent him a copy of my book and tried to discuss it with him, but it was clear from his conversation that a) he didn't bother to read any of it and b) he was, sadly, a bit of a dick. Never meet your heroes etc.
Sure - if you're doing magic any belief system will do as long as you believe it. We're talking about explanation. Crowley said "you don't need to know how a tractor works in order to drive one" but, to be honest, that wasn't good enough for me.
Just because you can't explain something, it doesn't mean that it has no explanation. However, if you want to use the idea that our most accurate physical theory is 'weird' and 'spooky' to supercharge your magic, then go for it.
I agree that you shouldn't try and justify magic (or indeed many realms of human endeavour) with science. It's as nonsense an idea (and closely related) as trying to justify art with science. But the two parts of the Venn diagram (magic and science) can still have an intersection that is worth investigating.
Yes I am always intrigued and grateful for the parapsychologists and rogue scientists who investigate this discipline. There is a lot to learn from them. Its just always felt really uncomfortable this lingering 20th century rationale that in order for something to be justified as "factual" it must fit into a mechanical scientific framework. Quantum mysticism is probably the worst offender of this. I think that when we experience magic its much more acausal and points to something transcendent of cause and effect. Which obviously cant be approached by empirical scientific method.
I understand your viewpoint; we are always given this picture of what the 'mechanical scientific framework' looks like, but the history of science is built by scientists who thought outside the box, driven by the idea that whatever the world is, it is explicable. Whether that is ultimately true or not, it has shown that something being explicable does not mean that it must also be intuitive. Until Einstein explained Brownian motion (random movements of tiny particles in liquid) many scientists did not believe in the existence of atoms, because there was no direct experimental proof for them
And ofc if relativity was intuitively obvious, it wouldn't have taken someone as clever as Einstein to work it out It is not enough to have the data; you must have a theory to successfully explain the data.
