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chaosmosis comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85 - Less Wrong
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I was thinking about it earlier and Harry has massively underranked the utility of Horcruxes. If one person must die so that a different person can live 100K+ more years then that is an incredibly desirable tradeoff from an impartial utilitarian standpoint and everyone should be doing this. You could even choose to murder only old and dying people so that there would be almost no loss of net time that people spend alive. He dismissed it way too quickly during his conversation with Dumbledore.
I think it has to be cold-blooded murder, not a utilitarian sacrifice.
I wonder if burning Narcissa Malfoy to death would count, or if it had too many positive externalities. (I'm less and less sure how to model Dumbledore as MoR proceeds, particularly since even if he's "supposed to be good", Eliezer is writing him and Eliezer is some sort of consequentialist; I wouldn't want to rule out the possibility that Dumbledore deemed himself indispensable and his soul's contiguousness dispensable to the war effort.)
It would explain why Harry always has to carry around an otherwise normal-seeming rock...
How would it do that?
It was a lame joke about Dumbledore making Harry protect his Horcrux by telling him it was his Father's Rock. Nevermind me...
I actually consider that to be a very likely case.
This would explain why Dumbledore is so worried about becoming a Dark Lord. It's also less improbable than it initially seems because Harry already established that Dumbledore hasn't thought through his views about death, etc, very well, and that Dumbledore has some nearly contradictory beliefs.
The rationale that I imagine him using is: "I would sacrifice my immortal soul to save my friends mortal lives". Which is incredibly generous and would make him into a praiseworthy hero.
The most probable way I see EY working in a "Dumbledore has a Horcrux" thing is through a plot where Dumbledore is not a Dark Lord, but thinks he is, and Harry thinks Dumbledore is evil, and Quirrell is manipulating both of them. Even then, I still don't think this is very probable.
Of note - the canon version is that murder rends the soul, and a horcrux merely preserves one part of it in a separate object than your body. Dumbledore did not need to create a horcrux to have sacrificed the contiguousness of his soul, assuming canonical soulphysics at least.
Of course, I see no reason not to create a horcrux if you're doing murder anyways(unless there are significant additional costs associated), but then Dumbledore has a very different view of death than I do.
This might put something of a different slant on the events surrounding the death of Narcissa Malfoy, if true.
Could you explain? I don't see how "Dumbledore killed her" is a 'different slant'.
I think he's getting at the horcrux theory?
I keep getting confused by people reading "murder" as "created a Horcrux", I really should have learned that lesson by now.
I hadn't previously seen any clear motive for Dumbledore to kill Narcissa. That he might have done so to help keep himself ready to defend Magical Britain at least provides a possible explanation.
Assuming that he did, in fact, do broadly what Draco said, anyhow.
Pedanterrific, I'm not conflating the two acts, merely observing that one may illuminate the other.
Evidence in favor: Dumbledore thinks it's plausible that he's the Dark Lord from the prophecy, which would require it possible to destroy all but a remnant of him.
The standard theory is that he killed her to show the death eaters that attacking families of Order of the Phoenix members will now be repaid in kind.
You said "this" as though it were a reference to "deemed his soul's contiguousness dispensable to the war effort", which just means "he was willing to commit murder". It's the murder that splits the soul, not the Horcruxing.
(upvoted chaosmosis) How is utilitarian not cold-blooded? As far as I understand, utilitarians work by assigning utility values between different outcomes and choosing the one with the most utility. That seems pretty cold-blooded.
100k years worth of life > 2 minutes of intense pain and loss of 2 years of life.
Utilitarianism has to be equally-blooded for all outcomes, but this can also be accomplished by being hot-blooded about everything. Instead of shrugging and not caring about the pain and two-year loss, you can mourn it while also grinning and clapping your hands and jumping around shouting for joy at the perspective of someone gaining so much life.
Because any utilitarian with a brain will also think of things like "What will the consequences on society be if this sort of thing becomes normal?".
In ch.79 Dumbledore mentions the human sacrifice has to be "committed in coldest blood, the victim dying in horror"
How about some kind of Russian roulette -- two people get wands, one is magical, one is not, they are supposed to cast some paralysis spell and then Avada Kedavra on each other. The paralysis spell gives the victim enough time to realize they have lost, and thus to die in horror.
Yet, if average(years gained) is more than average(years lost), the transaction is good from utilitarian viewpoint. Especially if both parties are volunteers. I don't know whether this qualifies as "cold-blooded murder", though -- I would need more precise definition.
Yeah. Alternatively Harry could seize power and then force gladiators to murder each other and have perform Dark Rituals to create a Horcrux after the killings, that would probably be evil enough. Also, this would be a better sport than Quidditch, so it's win-win.
It seems like that's a questionable assumption that Harry would be eager to test, once he found out about Horcruxes. For example, can you cast a Horcrux on the power of, say, Avada Kedavra-ing a nonmagical nonhuman creature? If not, how about a magical creature?
What if you could create a low-quality backup that way? Wouldn't it still be better than nothing?
OTOH if true it does provide some evidence for Dumbledore's belief that souls are real things distinct from the body they work on.
One possible explanation is that the horcrux doesn't require a murder to create, but it does require a human brain to restore the backup to. This doesn't seem terribly likely, but I think it would be a elegant solution to why horcruxes need murder.
Doesn't the latter tend to involve the former when the 'sacrifice' is the life of another?
One thing I'm missing from this whole horcrux discussion is: What happens if you die of age, and have a horcrux?
People just seem to assume that once you have a horcrux, you won't wither and die.
But we have no indication to believe this is what actually happens. canon!Voldemort catches a rebounding killing curse, and the horcrux doesn't make him live on in perfect health. Instead he is very close to death, has no body, and needs to possess animals or other humans to extort some influence.
So what happens if you have a horcrux, and come close to dying from old age? It seems to me that your body would die, and you'd need some avenue to live again, and that is not a nice prospect at all. If you have access to a philospher's stone you wouldn't have such a problem, but then you wouldn't need a horcrux in the first place. What else can you do? Possess another human, who suffers greatly from it. Or the ritual that requires a servant of yours to sacrifice a limb; oh, and there's only a limited supplies of bones from your father, so you can't repeat it indefinitely.
In summary, it seems that a single death doesn't give you 100k+ years of live without additional major costs.
This is daft. Horcruxes are not the only available means of life extention, which voids the entire rest of the debate. There is the stone, whatever he can think up independently and worst come to worst, from harrys point of view, the odds of him, personally, dying of old age before the muggles come up with a hack to fix ageing is very low. 170 years, starting the clock in 1980 gets him to 2150!
2120-ish given Time Turner abuse.
Edit: Oh wait, that's already included in your 170-year figure, isn't it?
None of those other options have a very high probability and all of them will lose lives while they are being discovered. At the very least, Harry should implement a mass Horcrux program and at the same time or after its implementation he should also continue to search for better ways to make people immortal.
If your utility function assigns utility exclusively to "time spent alive," sure. But Harry's utility function also assigns utility to "keeping people alive", regardless of time.
You could create Horcruxes as a side-product of capital punishment, something Harry doesn't seem to mind.
Maybe you could kill people who were about to die anyway, and consented? Could you use abortion in this manner?
That seems rather naive of him if so. Advocating a justice system run by humans with that kind of moral hazard is a recipe for disaster.
With time travel you could pull off last minute injunctions on people who were going to die anyways. Think of it as Prisoner of Azkaban escapes, except instead of preventing deaths you just make use of them.
I think it'd work best as a mirror to the organ donor / organ recipient list. You sign up, and when you would normally have a catastrophic broomstick accident (or whatever), you instead have a couple medical professionals and the horcrux maker visit you 5 minutes before your appointed time.
Why do you say that ? He seems very opposed to capital punishment to me, that's why he takes the resolution to try to not kill Voldemort. That's also why he wants to destroy Azkaban.
Harry's a little inconsistent about this, depending on his mood. He's definitely talked at least somewhat seriously of just rounding up and killing all former death eaters etc.
Yeah, I think Harry didn't want Dumbledore to see him considering it. He was trying to maintain the moral high ground, so he could condemn Dumbledore for thinking it was good to die of old age. Not that I think this was a conscious act, but he sensed that thinking seriously about it wouldn't make the conversation go his way.
It's an interesting idea, especially since Harry is entirely on board with dying wizards using their magic to fuel Unbreakable Vows. I forget, do Horcruxes require a murder of an unwilling subject specifically, or can they be created if the subject willingly sacrifices himself to fuel the ritual ?
In Cannon you had to split your soul, which according to Slughorn required an act of evil. The supreme act of evil - murder.
If Slughorn is right, then no, a willing sacrifice wouldn't do it.
He implies though, that it's not the external consequence of the act that counts, so much as the internal soul wrenching aspects. For some, it might be enough to strangle a puppy. And as you progressed in evil, murder most foul might not be sufficient to tear at your soul. When you've killed four, it's easy to make it five.
You would think so, but that doesn't seem to be how it works in canon. The diary and Nagini were both Horcruxed with one murder. In fact, it's suggested that making Horcruxes makes your soul "unstable", making it easier to make more (canon HP was even unintentionally pseudo-Horcruxed).