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bogdanb comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81 - Less Wrong
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If you’re going for “what’s going on”, you might as well ask where does the “excessive” come from. I mean, you could switch to a “lever” instead of a “button” analogy to “justify” that the magician provides energy for the “magical mechanism” of a spell, but the ridiculous amounts of energy implied by even some low-level spells means that won’t actually explain much.
(For example, first years can fly broom-sticks with non-Newtonian mechanics. This either means that a large amount of energy is used to simulate them over normal physics—compensating for inertia with very high accelerations—or that the “normal” physics is actually simulated on a completely different real physics substrate, in which case all bets are off.)
Also, the reasoning for the single-magic-gene, if true in-universe, raises the question of where do all differences in magic ability come from. Sure, Harry considers training and conscientiousness and talent, but only that seems to me not enough to explain differences that we see. Alohomora is explicitly said to balance the casters’ magic powers, and the interaction of many spells (e.g., shields and shield-breakers) are seen to depend on the relative ability of the casters.
There are huge differences of ability between a talented painter and the average person, but that would only explain stuff like creating spells. Pushing a button on a printer works the same for both.
And in the “lever” analogy, just as relative strength is not governed by a single gene, differences between magical power are hard to explain with a single gene. (Even if there are more than two alleles, some of which are magic but with varying strength, and some of which are not, that should result in quantified levels of power rather than what appears to be a continuum.)
I would just go with a combination of “it just ignores the rules” and “intuitive user interface”. If whatever causes magic allows spells like Somnium, it can make you progressively tired and then unconscious as you exhaust your magic ration, just to make a point.
There could be multiple factors that govern the strength of wizardry. For example the base could be a trained component like muscle strength, but the total observable strength also depends on your ability to control it. If you have very fine control over the magic (ie very precise wand movements, nearly perfect self control for spells that require it), you can make your magic flow much more efficiently. A bit like pulling a lever into the exactly correct direction, or a bit in the wrong direction -- it'll still work, but requires more strength.
If it worked like that, there’s still the question of “what component?” Muscles becoming stronger as a result of exercising them is a complex behavior, governed by many genes. Harry’s reasoning towards one “magic marker gene” suggests that is not the case.
I can think of all sorts of possible explanations, I just can’t see one that looks really reasonable; since we have no actual explanation about how stuff works, you need a lot of assumptions for anything and stuff tends to be arbitrary. If you think about it, all substances being combinations of four elements, or Lamarckian inheritance, are plausible explanations if your only observations are on the level of “some stuff burns” and “water quenches fire” or “children kinda look like parents”.
(“Inventing” new charms is mentioned several times, but there are basically no details about how that works. Harry just changes how to apply a couple of existing charms, and he seems to have figured out how he might pick ingredients for potions, but even there he’s not told where the gestures and ritual come from.)
Maybe using magic doesn't strengthens your magic the way that physical exercise strengthens your muscles, but rather similar to a river carving its way through the landscape -- the more water flows, the deeper the river bed becomes.
Such a mechanism wouldn't require any more genetic information, because it's not a property of the individual magic user.
But can they build them?
I don’t think so—I read something about it being somewhat hard, but I don’t remember the details or the source.
Hmm, you got a point. The energy required to fly them should be spent while flying; if you’d do it on creation, there would be the risk of it being exhausted at some point. But Hogwarts has been running for centuries and it’s constantly doing stuff that needs lots more energy than a broom.
I guess my example is just silly. Without more information guessing about the relative magnitude of energy expended for various magics is useless.
I’d say that the energy involved for pretty much all spells is too huge to give any plausibility to the idea that it’s somehow generated by the human body through the genome, with or without a magic gene.
I tend to think of spells as being less like a button or a lever, and more like a high striker. If the spell is the ringing of the bell, then you've got to put sufficient energy in to attain that. More energy will allow you to hit the bell harder, and thus ring it louder, but you have to be able to put enough in to reach the basic threshold in order to ring it at all.
Of course, spells routinely output more energy than they could be getting out of the metabolisms of their casters, so for the analogy to hold up under extension, it's more like an electronic high striker, which sounds a siren at different volumes depending on how hard you hit the target.