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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 19, chapter 88-89 - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure what this is referring to. Ghosts? Harry currently thinks those are magical echoes.
Reread the event in question. (I'm trying to keep the start of my comments a little unspoilery, since they show up in the recent comments sidebar.)
In the universe where souls do not exist and people are just electrical activity embodied in lipid computers, that description and it triggering Dumbledore's immediate arrival seem very unlikely. In the universe where souls do exist, it seems very likely.
Oh, hmm. For some reason I thought Dumbledore's arrival was triggered by the wards. Gotcha. But I think what Harry witnessed was still consistent with magical echoes; it sounded like Hermione almost but wasn't quite made into a ghost or something.
Right; I'm using the wards triggering right then as evidence for the souls theory. In a souls world, it's easy to notice when souls exit the body (and set up wards to detect that), and hard to notice when souls are about to exit the body, so you can show up and suspend them or whatever. In a 'people are just computation' world, where you're able to read the computation from afar using magic, a ward that notices "Hermione's not alive anymore!" would require tech that could be used to build a ward that notices "Hermione's going into shock!", which would be a much more useful ward to have.
[edit] I didn't fully remember the wards from the Draco Incident, where they could detect injury. So either there are multiple levels of wards and the injury ward was disabled (or set to death), Dumbledore didn't respond to the injury alarm but did respond to the death alarm (reasonable, if he's somewhere else important, and the Deputy present at the castle would have already known the troll was around and have the castle in high alert by the time Hermione was attacked if she was attacked after Filch's alert), there's a continuity break, or something I'm missing.
Good point, but I'm not sure if the wards triggered right then: Dumbledore said he felt Hermione die, not that the wards alerted him that Hermione died. During the Draco fiasco various characters say the wards are triggered to detect rapid harm to students, which is why they didn't detect the blood-cooling charm (although you'd think that means the wards would have detected what happened to Hermione sooner...). The implication is that if someone hadn't discovered Draco he would have died without the wards detecting it, or at least that's what it sounded like to me.
We don't even know Dumbledore was in the castle, as I understand it. Ch88:
If he's not even at Hogwarts, that seems like it renders it difficult to infer anything from when he shows up since any delay or argument-from-silence could just as well be due to it taking time to phoenix-fire back from whereever and then repoint himself.
Hmm, this does appear to be a hole in my logic, and also the response of "the wards only trigger on death" to "if Dumbledore had show up seconds sooner things would have been different." The text from earlier:
Something else interesting, from Chapter 84:
Grievous bodily injury, unfortunately, is not covered under that warranty.
Also,
Now I guess we know why it started with her legs.
The portkey would only work if she was taken outside Hogwarts.
Not true. Portkeys can work in Hogwarts - cf., the end of Goblet of Fire. It's only Apparation that doesn't work.
In HPMOR, portkeys do not work in Hogwarts (chapter 63).
The wards triggering right then is evidence mostly that somebody is messing with the wards, based on their previous description as being set to trigger on "sudden injury".
Or that since she ran for sunlight, she wasn't inside Hogwarts technically, therefore the wards didn't pick up her injury. We already have proof the attacker expected her to do that.
Which would also explain her last words.
She was still within the wards/within hogwarts grounds.
Oh! What if the wards only work inside the castle? Hermione's battle with the troll was in the sunlight and thus outside. While I would hope that the wards would cover the entire school grounds (rescuing students from the Forbidden Forest seems like a more common use case than rescuing them inside), that's another possibility that seems somewhat more reasonable than some of the others I've listed. (I should also, for completeness, add the "he responded to the injury alarm but it took too long" option, but I find that one unsatisfying for several reasons.)
The wards were drawn up by a schemer in the 12th century. Was shock a concept he was familiar with? (Gryffindor probably would have been, but Slytherin, I'm not so sure)
Possibly not. But as Hippocrates put it,
and so I suspect that trauma surgery was mature enough then that they had some concept of shock after seeing hundreds of people die from it.
Agreed. Salazar Slytherin doesn't seem like someone who has seen a terribly large amount of war, though - he's more of the shadowy type.
That said, thinking and a bit of Google reminds me that Ch. 47 has Salazar Slytherin in a battle scene. I'm no longer confident of the correctness of this point.
He felt something "happen" when Hermione died and Dumbledore also confirmed it. It might just be a magical echo but it's definitely evidence for something like a soul.
This is true, but without further investigation, it fails to distinguish the world where souls are independent from physical form from the world where souls are magical echoes/uploads/backups/etc.
On that note, this would be one convenient time for Quirrel to drop in and say "Oh, by the way, that description of the Resurrection Stone you gave me turned up something interesting..."