>Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was being uncharacteristically unambitious. He once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced technology is going to be indistinguishable from magic. If you dropped in on a bunch of Paleolithic farmers with your iPhone and a pair of sneakers, you'd undoubtedly seem pretty magical. But the contrast is only middling: The farmers would still recognize you as basically like them, and before long they'd be taking selfies. But what if life has moved so far on that it doesn't just appear magical, but appears like physics?
>These possibilities might seem wholly untestable, because part of the conceit is that sufficiently advanced life will not just be unrecognizable as such, but will blend completely into the fabric of what we’ve thought of as nature.
>In other words, part of the fabric of the universe is a product of intelligence or is perhaps even life itself.
https://archive.is/20230517105657/https://nautil.us/is-physical-law-an-alien-intelligence-236218/

Designers are lazy and fall back on marvel movies or comic books. This is too woo-woo for real philosophy but I think the most fitting "magic system" for scifi would be very lovecraftian. If someone a billion years ago rewrote the laws of physics, we might be able to exploit the bugs in his code. I'm going to use a sapient math problem to break physics and drop the room BELOW absolute zero motherfucker, make a sanity check and a save against frostbite. Thus is also basically how Vancian magic works in-universe.