I started the thread to discuss concepts of magic. The concepts I am personally discussing here are concepts of magic as understood by people who actually practice ritual magic.
The point of the ritual, part of what Bob understands makes it work at all, is the silliness of it.
I would disagree. The silly part is Bob (as you present him) confusing conditioning and 'magic'. As you describe it, Bob would believe that a dog being conditioned (trained) to sit, lie down, play dead, etc. when given the appropriate cue would be magic.
Bob is not conditioning himself by conventional means. What you call conditioning, Bob, and many like Bob, call "magic". As much as you would like to call it conditioning at all, if it is to be considered such it is a third kind from operant and classical not generally discussed in literature: indirect mnemonic conditioning.
Ah, but Bob is conditioning himself. He just does it weirdly because he thinks it is "magic". Now if Bob did his "ritual" to make someone not involved in and unaware of the "ritual" and it made them have an urge to brush their teeth, then that may be called 'magic'.
Someone convincing themselves that they they should do something when seeing a specific cue, even if they use a weird ritual to do so, is only self conditioning.
Your calling it magic just because he uses a really weird ritual only makes the word, "magic", pretty much meaningless.
Again, "No True
Scotsman Magic".
Your wishing to use the term "magic" to only refer specifically to "that which is explicitly ineffective make-believe" makes the term pretty much meaningless, especially when that is NOT how it is used or meant in fact by the people who live their lives effectively doing
something, and generally done so under the term "magic".
Using it in such a way essentially legitimizes the oh-so-christian tendency of trying to bury a thing that is not understood within the Christian dogma as something ridiculous, hijacking a term so as to perform an erasure of knowledge.
There are a lot more interesting, powerful, and even psychologically dangerous things Bob can do with this model.
Bob can, for example, leverage the mental process that creates "sunk cost fallacy" beliefs using a "sacrifice" in his ceremony, pinning his intent on something much more truly traumatic in some way (a physical loss), the more impactful the more effective!
Of course this touches on something widely acknowledged within occult communities: "magic" as used by Bob can only modify intent, solidify resolve, and put the mind in the right place to allow success and prevent self-defeat.
And if you observe carefully, this is how most actual users of magic use it, but often they step beyond the bounds of rationality to ascribe additional, non-existent mechanisms, mostly as an effect of the obscurity created by certain propaganda efforts wages by various parties some of which include the bigger names in esoteric history.
Without accepting this definition, one cuts themselves off from actually being able to reach any of what one might judge of Bob as irrational beliefs, and allows Bob a justification to make the same category error you do: to judge all things "magic" as real because the "magic" they do IS, mostly, real, and the claims you make are laughably uninformed from Bob's perspective.
It is like taking your entire model for understanding drug use from Reefer Madness, to take your definition of "Magic" from The Catholic Church's dogma.
