creepy

I'm an anti-reductionist, but I don't think that "higher level" or emergent features of the world can properly be called "magic." While a purely physical description doesn't exhaust the interesting facts (and predictively useful patterns), any real pattern does need to be consistent with what physics tells us about the world. In other words, you should be able to redescribe any event in the language of fundamental physics and still get a consistent "story," even if there's some information lost by neglecting the higher level patterns in how a given system changes over time. True magic in the interesting sense seems to me to imply things happening outside the purview of physics, in that it would describe events/patterns/forces that operate as ad hoc exceptions to physical law. I don't think we live in a world like that.