thomblake comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85 - Less Wrong

9 Post author: FAWS 18 April 2012 02:30AM

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Comment author: dspeyer 18 April 2012 02:39:59PM 0 points [-]

But the Potterverse is dualist. Even if horcruxes get some massive retcon, animagi preserve that in MOR.

So maybe souls are immune to the normal patterns of time and causality, and a decision from the soul has special properties for prophecy. Only when all involved souls have chosen does the timestream become fixed enough for prophecies. I'm not sure what that means for time turners. Maybe people who have gone back are out of contact with their souls.

This would cost the story applicability, but it is a story, not a treatise.

Comment author: thomblake 18 April 2012 03:22:27PM 5 points [-]

But the Potterverse is dualist. Even if horcruxes get some massive retcon, animagi preserve that in MOR.

It enjoys the mind/body distinction, for sure, but not necessarily strongly (not more strongly than a physicalist who wants to be neuropreserved). Random proposed mechanisms for animagi:

  • the human mind is very compressible, so it's not hard to build a cat-sized brain that runs a human
  • the brain actually gets teleported to another dimension and operates the cat via telepresence
  • the cat is animated through magic and most of its mass is actually used to run computation (slightly less plausible for a beetle)
Comment author: Armok_GoB 19 April 2012 05:38:45PM 9 points [-]

Or the obvious one: space is compressed using the same method as every other bigger-on-the-inside object wizards use everywhere all the time.

Comment author: cwillu 10 May 2012 07:41:22AM *  1 point [-]

Beetle-sized (of the beautifully blue sort), at least.

Note also that the body the mind wears apparently (according to quirrel) does have an impact on the mind.

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