I've no personal interest in magic as most esotericists practice it, but I'm open to the possibility that the human psyche is capable of shaping reality in ways that make no sense if understood in purely materialistic, mechanistic terms. Materialists believe that Mind is an epiphenomenon of Matter, a kind of steam that is emitted from the brain in some unexplainable way. That makes hardly any sense, and the only people who believe it are those who have a religious commitment to a materialistic ontology and those who are thoughtlessly influenced by them.
If, on the other hand, your ontology presupposes Mind as primary and that matter is something that is constituted by Mind, i.e., made of Mind stuff, then it follows that Mind should be able shape Matter, and do it in more ways than are imaginable to most of us now.
It would not surprise me terribly if in the next hundred years or so, that human minds will become more adept in using psychic powers to shape the material world. An interesting thought experiment in how this might happen is explored in the Hugo-Award-winning novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, which takes place in an alternative history around the time of the Napoleonic Wars.
In Clarke's imagined England, the recovery of practical magic, after a shock to an initially skeptical power establishment, becomes accepted as just another kind of technology. And the military wastes no time in finding ways to employ it to defeat Napoleon. What interested me about the book is its matter of factness about something that seems so impossible. As soon as something thought impossible becomes clearly possible, most people adapt rather easily and it becomes part of the everyday social imaginary. The public comes to see Strange and Norrell much as we see Einstein. They have no idea how they do what they do, but waddyaknow, it works.
And so the book, among other themes, poses a question about magic, which is the same as the fundamental question about any technology: To what ends? The problem is that we hardly ever ask this question with regard to our invention and use of technologies. We just assume that the employment of any technology is justified by a kind of Social Darwinian logic, which is that it should be used to increase our individual or collective aggrandizement. It is capable only of using a utilitarian calculus regarding how it might increase our personal or collective power, glory, and wealth. Since we have no robust collective idea about humanity having any higher moral purposes except those as defined by such a utilitarian calculus, the Social Darwinian aggrandizers win by default.
Liberalism hasn't the resources to push back against the Social Darwinians because utilitarian logic is the warp and woof of Liberal morality. There are nice utilitarians and mean ones, aka respectively as Democrats and Republicans. But recently the Republicans have become something else, conduits for a repressed, dark irrationality in the American soul, which, if left unchecked will bring down what's left of the Liberal Order and its open society.
Some believe that the old must die so that the new might be born. Out of the chaos something new will emerge. Well that's something to look forward to only if you're ok with the 'new' looking like Russia after its suffering through the chaos of the collapse of the USSR. If you're not, and I'm not, then the Liberal "Nice" Order and its vestigial habits are the only thing that provides a bulwark against the chaos that leads to a post-truth, warlord thug like Putin. There is a basic decency in Niceness that should not be dismissed, morally shallow though it might be. I prefer overly sensitive snowflakes to Neo-Nazi skinheads any day of the week.
Yes, the lust for power, glory, wealth is the way of the world from time immemorial. This is the Social Darwinian logic of evolution without grace. And yes, it seems naive to think that it should ever be otherwise. I don't think it will be otherwise any time soon, but I do think that there is an alternative, nobler way of imagining the human project, and I do think it's possible that there be a more robust push back against the aggrandizers by people of good will who have a foothold from which to push. Right now they don't. It seems to me that nothing is more important in the coming decades than framing such an alternative imagination of future human possibility. My own view is sketched out in posts like this one.
So my point here is that the truly important question is not whether humans will develop psychic or spiritual powers they currently don't have, but whether they can develop an inspiring imagination of noble human moral purpose and with it a sense of possibility to which human energies and efforts might be employed. We need a contemporary Pico moment to go viral.
Technologies are neutral; everything depends on to what purposes humans employ them. This is where the real problem lies for the future, whether we're talking about advancements in biotech or AI or the psychic powers of the human mind. To what ends? The bad guys--the Social Darwinian aggrandizers in the private and public sectors--will co-opt any new powers unless we develop a higher sense of moral purpose to guide the human project into the future. Such nobility of human purpose is not going to supplant the Social Darwinian impulse any time soon, but it might at least neutralize it in the short run and provide a foothold that will enable an effort in the long run to transform it.
So the more important question is not whether magic is possible. If it is, it's just another technology. Big whoop. That is really inconsequential in comparison to the question whether there will be a retrieval of some cross-cultural understanding that the human project is fundamentally a moral project, i.e., something bigger and nobler than using power--any kind of power--for personal, tribal, or national aggrandizement.
I believe the human project going forward is about the renewal of the face of the earth, which is the spiritual project of redeeming evolution without grace. If this is a project that is understood as effected from as yet unrealized powers within the human soul, then that's the kind of magic "thing" I could get behind.
See also "The Coming Discontinuity".