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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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Yes. At this point in the story, Dumbledore knows a lot more than Harry does about how magical people die.
People believed for a long time that cessation of heartbeat is irreversible. While this is less likely to be such a mistake (wizards have some stasis spells for medical use, so at least sometimes they would have more time to assess whether anything works on such a supposedly dead person), it's still possible.
Also, I'd like to posit this: this is the moment the magic decides the person is no more and from this point on any magic that works on a person won't work on him/her. But, nonmagical intervention and spells that aren't designed to target a person could still reverse it.
This is a good point, and furthermore in the story it goes straight from Hermione saying her last words to her death , whereas in real life I believe if circulation stops instantly (which isn't exactly the case here) you lose consciousness within 15 seconds, but it takes 4 minutes before brain damage starts. Which means they still have time to perform a blood transfusion and try to save her. More generally, has any wizard/witch ever been brought back after their heart stopped? Does the soul reenter the body? If not, do they end up in a coma, or do they maybe get a new soul?
Even if wizards do not practice cpr, surely some wizards would have had heart attacks while in the presence of muggles.
CPR started to spread in the 1960s. Given how few wizards there are, and how little time most of them spend in the company of muggles, my no-actual-math-involved guess is that it isn't that likely.
I seem to remember that the wizard population of the UK is about 10000, which would extrapolate to 1 000 000 worldwide. Given that many wizards do have muggle family...
Ok, some math - conservativly speaking, if 10% of wizards have contact with muggles, and spend 1% of their time in the company of these muggles, with an average death rate of .6%, 40% of which is by heart attack, but only 40% of heart attacks are fatal, and 10% of the times that a heart attack happens in the presence of muggles the wizard dies and then the heart is restarted, then there would be an average of .6 wizards being brought back from the dead per year.
But more to the point, surely some muggle-born wizards would practice cpr, or even improve on it using magic? With a population of 1000000, surely someone sometime would have transfigured a defibrillator in an emergency?
Possibly the Horcrux is simply a spell to transfer the Atlantis user account to a magical soul?
We also have reason to believe Dumbledore has a motive to convince Harry that death is inevitable.
ETA: and no evidence supporting the hypothesis that what was killed is Hermione, instead of a simulacrum; we only have absurd priors that it was her, and the evidence suggests that one of our very likely priors is wrong.
When asked to find Hermione, why would Harry's Patronus have found a simulacrum instead of the real one?
Because the real Hermione was under an invisibility cloak ten feet away. (Not saying this is how it happened, but it does explain that part of the riddle)
From Chapter 56:
It would have had to have been a different cloak than Harry's, but then, I guess Hermione did have one on her; it might not have been good enough to hide her from the troll, but perhaps it would have hid her from Harry. And I suppose that obscuring the real Hermione from Harry would make sense under the 'if you want to change the past, you can't know if you've already succeeded' rule, from the end of 76.
I commented elsewhere that this is a major difficulty with trying to save her. Invisible Hermione would have to scream in the middle of combat to fake out the patronus, which is obviously an incredibly dangerous thing to do.
Hmmm... it's also possible in that scenario that Hermione was hot-swapped out of the combat. Real!Hermione responded with a terrified scream to the Patronus, and while Present!Harry was racing to her on a broom, Time-Turned!Harry did some kind of obscuring spell (fog, blast of light, something like that), tossed an invisibility cloak (not Harry's) over Real!Hermione, and then fed Simulacrum!Hermione to the troll just in time for Present!Harry to show up.
The Patronus that came back to Harry could be Future-Harry's Patronus, if time travel is involved.
Note: I don't personally place a high probability on theories involving time travel in this instance, but they do present a possible explanation for that objection.
Every consistent theory I've seen involves time-travel somehow. The stakes are simply too high for Harry to permit the attempt to not be made.
If the Patronus that came back was Future-Harry's Patronus, then what happened to Present-Harry's Patronus? When Harry's Patronus was countered with Quirell's Killing Curse in Chapter 54, Harry definitely felt it being countered.
It's plausible that having one's Patronus dispelled by one's future self is not as noticeable as having one's Patronus countered by a killing curse.
Alternatively, an even simpler option is that it was still Present-Harry's patronus, just given updated instructions by Future-Harry.
Wait, what about these chapters did you find implausible enough that you want to challenge one of your priors?
The wards against sudden injury didn't trigger, the troll was buffed beyond reasonable expectation, medical treatment which should have worked didn't.
I didn't specify which of (edit) my priors was wrong, because I don't know which one to identify.