I was listening to a podcast on "consciousness", as in the way that we all believe ourselves conscious, and how in different levels of complex animals that we would also assume that there is a degree of consciousness. But at some point of lower level organism you'd think that there would be a point where there is no light of consciousness, like a worm, perhaps which has senses but is automatic in its responses. We lack the ability to put ourselves in the mind of another organism so never really know, say, cat consciousness but for what we observe and intuit from the contemptuous or smug cat faces and expressions we see. To me it begs the question a little because while we may be able to put ourselves in another human's shoes, we can't really know their mind.
In the brainspace of impossible hypotheticals, we have the thought experiment of contemplating what it's like to be in someone else's head. Why they react or cannot tame their feelings, while they are like the like the anthropomorphic scorpion on the anthropomorphic frog stinging away to their own demise or detriment.
But I digress, what I wanted to talk about was magical thinking. It is probably possible to think that you roughly know how another person thinks, or why another person think it without the fully experiencing their minds. Flicking our minds into the medieval minds we assume that the they were immersed in the magic potential latent in the world, of gods, spirits, miracles, blessings and curses. In magic there is a certainty, a black-and-whiteness: the wicked are cursed; sins stain; there is a divine order; and the pious will win in the end. Such thinking is a salve to the uncertainty and grey that plague the objective world.
If I were to speculate, I would say as the Enlightenment drained this old magic from the world a new magic took its place, and for the exact same reason: without the old magic giving us certainty and confidence, we would have been left without that special something to make the uncertainties of life bearable.
The magical mantra of the moment is, of course, "vaccine". Where in the Grimms tales there were witches and wizards with their spells, nowadays we have things like vaccines, which regardless of how they are explained to people, are always trapped by the common conception of a magic protective charm that makes you able to walk through a viral storm unharmed. Because of the pervasiveness of the disease and also the fractiousness of the community vaccination effort, their weaknesses and side effects, waning immunity and "breakthrough infections" have become headline news. But the vaccines do not give you a force field aura: they're just a drug that stimulates the body in particular ways, how your body reacts is not guaranteed.
The last phase of the trials for Pfizer's vaccine had the headlines showing over 90% effectiveness against symptomatic infection, an astonishing headline which remains largely true. But that huge news still has the inverse fact latent: For every 10 people unvaccinated who would develop symptomatic infection, there would still be one vaccinated for every similar ten vaccinated people who would get symptomatic infection, and probably one or more with asymptomatic infection. This is to say, a vaccine in a league of its own was still expected to have recipients who could become symptomatic and infectious. Even after waning, and for new variants, it is probably though as effective as many of the other vaccines that are given to us, if it were taken by the most of the community.
Which is where we come to the thorny topic of mandates, which I would presume most administrators and officials probably wouldn't want to use. The magical view of vaccines sometimes gets in the way of mandates, but only because of magical thinking. This video by JP Sears, for which he argues against restrictions on the unvaccinated is latent with the magic. The strawman is that vaccines are 100% effective so what do the vaccinated have to worry about the unvaccinated, if the vulnerable are all vaxxed, and why compel or exclude those who choose not to?
Many of the vulnerable people who have done the right thing and got vaccinated also are the ones who the vaccine may have less protective power. In a relatively unvaccinated community, they might still die at a high rate (though lower than without the vaccine). All it might take is for them to have poorer sleep and a period of lower immunity. Vaccines are both for individual protection as well as community protection, yet most of the antivaxx calculations emphasise the individual risks and benefits, which is understandable, and dismiss or ignore that it is a public good to have wide protection for all of society, and depending on the needs of the society it might encourage it in different ways.
There is a similar magic in natural immunity, which does bestow immunity to future infection and thus could be seen similarly to a vaccination, with the proviso that one is ultimately not permanently harmed by their infection (and hopefully nor others by their onward transmission of the virus). Again the magical thinking comes into it, the aura of protection and the need for nothing more.
But the magical thinking about the vaccine and natural immunity, and similar thinking about "young", "healthy" and "vulnerable" are nice to simplify the world. It doesn't take much for the world to shatter that with young people hospitalised by the virus, reinfection and breakthrough infections. None of these phenomena should be remarkable except if one misapprehends how things happen with magical thinking. The fact of breakthrough infections were literally printed on the box when the phase three trials were run. Reinfection is no surprise - some viruses you only get once but others, especially respiratory viruses, like to visit again and again. Some people are "unluckier" with it, sometimes due to innate factors, sometimes circumstantial factors, sometimes with behavioral factors. Sometimes any one kind of factor (for example, an innate risk towards ACE2 receptor targeting viruses) might overcome all circumstantial factors (low inoculum of virus, generally healthy) and behavioral factors (wearing a mask, generally socially distancing). There is plenty of grey to cause a decent number of exceptional cases when something is happening across vast swaths of the population.
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