I'm not sure if you were disagreeing with the accidental secret Dark ritual part or not.
If you weren't then ignore this.
If you were then this is my response.
"the Killing Curse rebounded upon Lord Voldemort, and a fragment of Voldemort's soul was blasted apart from the whole, and latched itself onto the only living soul left in that collapsed building."
This arguably solves my problem with it being an accidental piece of magic specifically.
I still don't like it though.
First, this is Dumbledore guessing, not a technical description. It's very vague, and his guess only makes sense as a post de facto explanation when you already know that Harry is a Horcrux. Even then it's not the only plausible explanation.
Secondly, we were previously given no reason to believe that when people died their souls could randomly latch on to other people. It would seem like jettisoning your soul would be an intentional kind of thing, if I had to give a guess about what souls would do if they were real.
Third, if this happened, it would seem like we would have seen that happen before, at some point in time. It makes no sense given everything that we were told about magic and about souls. Why aren't there accidental Horcruxes all over the place?
Fourth, transferring souls is still inherently magical (and also evil according to PotterLogic), so I think that my above criticism based on the nature of accidental magic, and on the nature of forbidden rituals, specifically, all still applies to this case. Even though it's explained in the paragraph you cite as a consequence of the Killing Curse, soul transferring is a very magical type of consequence and magical consequences have previously been goal oriented, and not complex enough to cast Horcrux ritual spells.
if this happened, it would seem like we would have seen that happen before, at some point in time.
Why? Someone having multiple Horcruxes is explicitly unprecedented, and having the Killing Curse not kill someone it hits and instead rebounding to hit the caster is explicitly unprecedented. An unprecedented result isn't particularly improbable.
Yes, "accidental Horcrux" is inherently less probable than the broader category of "random magical accident", but that's only because "accidental Horcrux" is a subset of all possible "random magical accidents".
The next discussion thread is here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 85. The previous thread has long passed 500 comments. Comment in the 15th thread until you read chapter 85.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.
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