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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 23, chapter 94
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 94. The previous thread has passed 200 comments.
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, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:
You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
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Comments (343)
I am predicting that Harry has Hermione's body, though I'm not yet sure where. The reason is that Harry, from whose POV we see Chapter 94, does not seem especially concerned or upset that someone has run off with Hermione's body. If someone else had taken it, and thus interfered with his plans, he would be. He'd be thinking hard about who has it, where they've put it, and how to get it back. He'd probably be yelling at the professors for being stupid and incompetent. Instead he barely reacts when the headmaster tells him "Hermione Granger's remains are now missing."
He has probably transfigured the corpse, since that explains all the emphasis on maintaining transfigurations of large objects like his father's rock earlier in the book.
You're right Harry's mood is some evidence for his having the body. And from his behavior I think it's clear where it is:
From this and putting the ring as far away as possible I'm pretty sure the body is the ring and the rock sits on it to fool the magic detector. Someone called it in the comments on last chapter, when I get a chance to check I'll edit their name in so they get the appropriate Bayes points.
Yes. Note this part:
He was putting the ring on, because he was afraid of wearing it while asleep, because the transfiguration might fail. Waking up with a dead girl is better than waking up without a finger and with a dead girl.
Ringmione seems to be the most popular hypothesis at the moment. It strikes me as extremely careless a plan for Harry to attempt; recall Quirrell's comments after the battle with the transfigured armor, and the first battle where passing out ended the transfiguration on the marshmallow he was practicing with.
However, I took "Harry's parents come to Hogwarts" as a completely insane move that Dumbledore/Macgonnagle would be highly unlikely to pull, and yet the elder wizards thought rather differently from me and did it anyway. I still think using the ring involves Harry assigning way too little cleverness to Dumbledore, but in light of the ordeal with his parents I'll give it a little more probability weight.
(Note also that Harry did something under the covers when Flitwick showed up.)
Hum, well, if you think like a general wanting to win a war, yes. If you think as a teacher preoccupied about a 11-yo boy's mental health after he literally saw his best friend bleeding to death in his arms, fetching the boy's parents feel like the thing to do. And my own mental model of McGonagall is more that of a teacher preoccupied with a child's mental well-being than of a general.
McGonagall is upgrading herself and questioning her previous stances, but still, she seems like the only one who actually cares for a Harry as a child in distress, nearly as much as she cares about the war.
Harry will already lose a finger if anyone finite's his ring. He practiced with the marshmallow because the rapid expansion of the rock would tear off his finger.
Ringmione isn't much more of a personal risk to him.
This is a world where there are potions that can regrow bones in a single night. I think it wouldn't matter that much to Harry if he did lose his finger.
Cannon!harry does NOT like skele grow. I don't expect Rational!Harry would like it any more, even if he wouldn't complain about it to anyone.
No, but Hermione's life is on the line - he'd bite off his own fingers to save her.
No, the rock might crush his finger, or cause other problems, but it would push his hand out of the way, while with a ring, the center would close.
ch 30
This implies to me that that his finger would've gotten wrecked if that was a rock. Remember, finite on the rock blew out both the front and back of the troll's head. It wasn't just expanding in a confined spot; it expanded fast enough to blow out both sides. Explosive de-transfiguration. Certainly enough to tear off a 10 year old's finger.
Remember that Harry only needed to keep Hermione in the ring until after his stuff was searched; it strikes me as improbable that Dumbledore will demand to search the gem again. (Of course, having Hermione's body magically appear would still be a bit awkward, but the losing-a-finger part was the only one which I would expect to truly scare Harry.)
I still don't think the ring theory is correct, though. Harry has no reason to bring Hermione's body with him to the meeting; at best, it is an unnecessary risk. There's a Time-Turner theory elsewhere in the thread that seems far more elegant to me.
I did too at first, but when Harry reads the follow-up letter from his father we see that it turned out for the best.
And there's a clue that I should remember it when I twitch slightly. When Harry was worried about whether he'd wrecked his relationship with his parents, I wondered whether that actually made sense.
If Ringmione is true, then I would assign over 50% probability to Dumbledore having noticed it and not called out Harry on it, in the same way that Dumbledore appeared to have noticed Harry in Azkaban and chose to not reveal it. I suspect Dumbledore is still just fighting the War, and believes that Harry is the key to defeating Voldemort and/or actually is Voldemort, and so Dumbledore did not reveal Ringmione because he believes Harry is trying to do the right thing and revealing Ringmione would cause a disastrous confrontation.
Given that all of Dumbledore's subsequent actions, including some pretty drastic decisions, were made on the assumption that Voldemort had returned, based solely on the evidence of the Azkaban break-in, this seems unlikely.
He even told Bones that he had only given each cell a quick examination due to the sheer number he had to look through, which is an unnecessary detail in-universe, but out-of-universe explains to the reader how he could have overlooked Harry's concealment.
ETA (this does mean "edited to add", right?): If Dumbledore was already working on the assumption that Harry was involved in the breakout, he would not have been so surprised that retrieving him from Mary's Place early would cause a paradox.
Really?
Maybe only part of the ring is Hermione?
How would that help if Dumbledore Finite the ring? The dispelling doesn't seem that specific.
It wouldn't - but it would reduce Harry's risk of losing a finger to a Finite Incantatem in combat. And Harry does take pains to physically separate the ring from the stone before Dumbledore inspects the stone:
Unless that's just an intended second red herring, to make Dumbledore feel even worse about mistrusting Harry a second time. But just like Harry, Dumbledore, McGonagall, and Snape err in completely distrusting the wards when they say the Defense Professor killed Hermione, we can't treat possibly falsified evidence as anti-evidence, this has to shift our belief at least a little bit toward the Ringmione hypothesis.
The ring is also a significantly less suspect place to hide Hermione than the stone, because transfiguring something into a ring that you wear goes directly contrary to McGonagall's safety advice. Partial transfiguration provides a way around the safety issue, and Dumbledore and McGonagall are unused to thinking about things that can be done with partial transfiguration, so the idea is less likely to occur to them.
I'm about 50% confident that Hermione is in the ring.
(By the way, the wards' identification of Hermione's killer as the Defense Professor is strong evidence for the theory that the Defense Professor was carrying some nasties standing in his pocket when Dumbledore drew a circle around Quirrel to mark the Defense Professor to Hogwarts's wards.)
Then the wards should be saying now that the Defense Professor is dead?
On a side note, the actual skill that HPMOR is teaching its readers seems to be not science but rather Talmudism, the skill of finding clever interpretations to some words written in a book. It would be cool to see a fanfic that tried to teach science by similar incentives.
This seems to be my impression as well, which is somewhat unfortunate. (This is one of the reasons I try to avoid speculation in my commentaries, though it makes its way in from time to time.)
I think this is the case because there's an author intending the story. The correct way to predict the story is to predict the human writing the story, which is not the correct way to predict the fabric of reality. The story is also (mostly) non-interactive. Identifying an experimental intervention which could have a high information impact, while the backbone of science, is inaccessible to readers. Instead, observational data must be interpreted, which makes it difficult to distinguish between interpretations that agree with the existing evidence but disagree on other features.
And so you could have a game that teaches science (in some ways, Nethack does this, and similar games are easy to imagine), but I don't think you can have a fanfic which does.
Maybe you could have an mspaintadventure that teaches science.
For some reason that reminded me of the beautiful MSPA wizardfic. Not that it's scientific or anything!
I hadn't thought of that. Some possible explanations:
1) Quirrel didn't actually use that trick.
2) The wards don't report the deaths of faculty, only students.
3) As long as any part of "Defense Professor" has is alive, the wards don't register its death.
4) The wards did register the Defense Professor's death, but either
4a) Dumbledore didn't notice the extra death report, since he was preoccupied with a student's death, and didn't look it up afterwards
Or
4b) Dumbledore knows about it, and (correctly) assumes that the same glitch that attributed the troll's actions to the Defense Professor attributed the troll's death to the Defense Professor.
This may not be entirely fair to the Talmud, which at least sometimes grounds out into "what rule for living should we deduce from the clues in the text?".
Losing a finger shouldn't happen. A human is a torus. Depending on which way he puts the ring on, he'd just wind up with his finger in her mouth, or otherwise.
So...you're saying that transfigurations have to be homeomorphisms? You couldn't transform the toroid Hermione into some sort of Klein Bottle, even if you really, really wanted to?
He's saying that there should be less danger of snapping stuff off due to sudden topological changes when there's holes going through both the source and target form (and damn, got there before me).
As for control, it seems to me like the orientation is even intuitively clear in this instance once you actually think about the topological similarities. What with mental images being rather important with magic, it's likely to be doable. (And for getting rid of the mental image later, there's Obliviate!)
Is there a reason to think people have control over what parts of the input to transfiguration become what parts of the output? Most people just think whole input object to whole output object. Harry has figured out how to take only a "partial object" as input, but choosing what parts end up where sounds much more complex.
A desk is not a torus.
But then what was he doing under the covers?
Interesting point.
Of course, he could have removed the gem so that it wouldn't damage the ring when it was transfigured back, and put it on the other side of the desk so that when the rock "fell with a loud crack upon the Headmaster's desk" it wouldn't smash the ring.
But yours is still possible as well.
I'll save you the checking, it was me. Link.
The gem is red herring, the ring is Hermione.
This was my thought as well, but Harry would have had to be unreasonably sure that Dumbledore didn't have some kind of "de-Transfigure everything in sight" spell to use on him.
It's called Finite Incantatem.
Think about what would happen if Dumbledore (strong wizard, has all sorts of authority) cast Finite Incantatem on his desk, and the spell doesn’t include a “do what I mean, not what I say” security feature.
There must be thousands of spells in that general area. Even if for some reason the desk wouldn’t be disenchanted (which probably it wouldn’t, else casting Finite on someone holding a filled magic pouch or near a magic trunk would be very dangerous, and someone would have mentioned that in MoR), it still probably has dozens if not hundreds of other spells, and can thousands of magic items due to recursive space folding. Even if many of those are protected against Finite, they are so many in total that it’s very likely that a lot aren’t.
Now that I think about it, casting Finite on something you don’t know about sounds just as dangerous as casting a spell you don’t know what it does. (Basically, Finite means casting the reverse of a spell.) Very exploitable unless something automagically checks for corner cases.)
Nothing, I would think
Either he used a specific counter-free-transfiguration spell, in which case it wouldn't affect anything that was not free transfigured, or he uses Finite and only puts enough magic into it to overwhelm anything a first-year student could produce.
I suppose he could have put in just enough juice to counter one spell from a first-year but not enough to counter two, but that is relying on a second layer of Dumbledore error.
That's even assuming that Finite or Finite Incantatem can affect artifacts, which we don't know to be true. Have we seen any signs of such?
That wouldn’t be quite enough; Harry could have got someone else to help, though indeed it is unlikely.
You’re quite right about this. Presumably there’s some sort of “stabilizing” element for artifacts and spells that are meant to be (semi)permanent, precisely to avoid accidental Finite. (Not necessarily brute-force resistance spells, it could be just a safety thing to make sure you really want that cancelled.)
It's clear that in Potterverse, there are at least four inputs to a spell: wand, gesture, incantation, and state of mind of caster. Killing Curse and Patronus, for instance, are quite clearly dependent on state of mind. Transfiguration also depends on state of mind, and I don't recall any indication that there is any modification of the gesture or incantation depending on what transfiguration one intends to perform; that is determined entirely by intent. I think that it is reasonable to assume that, just as the Transfiguration spell is a "Do the transfiguration I'm thinking of" spell, the Finite Incantum spell is a "End the spell (or class of spells) I'm thinking of" spell.
This would make the most sense, of course. But remember that this thread started from the idea “what if Dumbledore mass-Finites”, i.e. without knowing what spell he was cancelling. This might work if Finite is smart enough to identify a class like “unknown spells that entered the room together with Harry in this general area”, but that’s stretching it a bit.
Also, though that wasn’t my original point, it still has the risk of very dangerous effects. E.g., if Harry had used a 1 ton stone instead of his father’s, for some reason. Or if someone else placed a dangerous transfigured item on Harry.
By the way, I just had an idea: the reason you shouldn’t transfigure living things is that they get sick and die after turning back (presumably due to DNA damage and protein denaturation, basically approximating radiation exposure). Trolls are dangerous because they self-transfigure into themselves. Now, imagine you’re a wizard strong enough to transfigure a troll, say into a gemstone on your ring. While transfigured the troll shouldn’t be able to fix itself (since it’s a stone). It might even pass most magic wards. But when you turn it back, the troll should repair itself almost instantly, showing no signs of transfiguration sickness.
Not in sight, but Finite Incantatem does seem to be a (likely moderate and adjustable) area-affect spell based on it's spammability in combat and the ability to finite things that you don't know the exact position of.
A second, hidden copy of himself could possibly use the time turner as soon as it was announced the ring was to be transfigured, and make sure Hermione was not in the ring, but I think Harry has better uses than that for as much time turning as he can get.
I wondered about why he took out the gem and put it far away from the ring. But I'd be surprised if Harry were good enough at occlumency to fool Dumbledore. Wondering how he answered those questions.
His occlumency is not the issue. In MoR, as best as we can tell, there are perfect Occlumens, but not perfect legillimens.
it's the other little clues that get left around that may or may not give him away.
Or Harry transfigured Hermione's body into a rock and then the rock into a brown diamond. Unless the story explicitly disallows double transfigurations and I missed it.
I thought this, but the spell used to undo a transformation by Harry in 89 is 'Finite Incantatem' which sounds more like 'stop magic happening here' rather than 'undo a single transformation', especially considering its varied other uses. Assuming Dumbledore didn't make a basic error (he didn't) I feel as though my stone hypothesis from earlier has been falsified.
My problem with that is that the rock should then still be a 'transfigured object' for the purposes of the spells and detected when Dumbledore examines the untransfigured diamond.
I agree, and suspect a time turner is involved. Reasoning:
If I am reading this correctly, Harry asks about whether or not making Hermione an Infernius would allow her to keep her mind twice, once in Chapter 90, and once in chapter 94. In neither case does his reaction seem to phase the other person much, so it doesn't seem to be a social maneuver.
Harry also needs to urgently go to the bathroom in 94. So he doesn't seem likely to waste time asking questions that he already knows the answer to for no reason.
This strongly implies he has forgotten part of the events of chapter 90 at some point, or that he asked that question for some reason other than curiosity. Also, he has access to an unlocked time turner, and is going to have access to memory charms soon (the moment he gets to have a moment where he's not drowning in social contact and can actually go READ the book). He's also really, really, determined to do something to revive Hermione.
Harry could now suspect that he is GOING to take Hermione's body in the future. Then he can attempt to go back in time, and then steal the body, and then memory charm his past self so his past self didn't remember during the interrogation. It's chapter 13 all over again, except far more seriously this time.
This might explain his lack of surprise, and his vague mentions of probability. It could FEEL like he had been woken up in the middle of the night, stolen Hermione's body and handed it off to his time turned self, even though he can't actually remember his time turned self having told him to do that.
Also, it explains such remarks as:
Which in this case you could take as:
So forming an intention to do something really does mean to an extent it might already be happening.
I think Harry's second question about Infernius was rhetorical.
Harry is saying that he's mentally prepared to kill something that looks like and used to be Hermione.
It's also possible that he wanted to confirm the validity of the information he got from Quirrell. If Quirrell and Dumbledore agree on something, it's probably true to the best anyone can tell, or at least that's probably how Harry sees it.
Also likely to hide the fact that he already had the answer to this question--it wouldn't do for people to start wondering what he and the Defense Professor were talking about...
Regarding Harry's lack of surprise, isn't it odd that he puts no effort into wearing the expression of someone who has no idea about Hermione's body being missing?
Remember that Harry had just been hastily awoken long before his accustomed time. It's not unreasonable for Harry to be behaving a little bit awkwardly, and it certainly isn't enough of a tell for Dumbledore to draw any conclusions.
What does seem to be a bit of a tell is his strange behavior around the ring; he seems to deliberately create tension before the ring is verified in order to, apparently, play for sympathy afterwards.
I suggest that Harry, upon finding himself being interrogated about Hermione's remains, resolves to time turn himself after the meeting back to before he was woken and replace the Hermione gem with the Father's Rock gem. Only after resolving on this course of action is Harry ready to submit the gem to Dumbledore for examination.
He can stow the Hermione gem anywhere non-obvious in the meantime and recover it later.
I suspect a time turner is involved for different reasoning. Specifically, I suspect that Harry's wards allow time-turned copies of himself to do things while he is asleep (since future-him knows more). So, my guess is that Harry stole Hermoine's body last night, woke up to find it missing (hence, the fumbling under sheets), goes through the interrogation, goes back in time, and steals Hermoine's body from his sleeping past-self.
Nice.
Note that Harry has no legitimate way to know what an Inferius is.
Also, I highly doubt that Hermione is in the ring - it's just too awkward, it risks detection, if it gets detransfigured in a critical situation then suddenly he has to lug Hermione's body around while fighting off Voldemort or something.
It's far more likely to be an anonymous brick, marked with, oh, let's say a stylized helium atom, that he placed in plain sight somewhere. Shame he doesn't know about the Room of Requirement, or he could've used the Room of Lost Things...
Inferi appear to be common knowledge; they're cited in casual contexts in chapters 70 and 78, by Lavender Brown and the narrator respectively.
That said, the idea that Harry has Obliviated himself is interesting - there's been a timeskip and he's had access to his Time Turner, so he's had time to read his book, and he thinks about Memory Charms during the conversation, which is something of a dropped hint.
The transfiguration won't last forever if he leaves it on its own.
I'm not sure if this means that he actually has to have it on his person at all times, or if he just has to go near it every so often. Maybe he transfigured her into his blanket.
I would have guessed he'd have used the pouch, although Dumbledore can apparently search it without Harry's permission, so that's risky.
Eh, the theories about the ring is the body and the gem is the decoy seem crazily, unnecessarily risky. They rely on Dumbledore doing an insufficient search. It seems like a much more reliable strategy is that as soon as Dumbledore asked to check the ring, he precommitted to going back in time to swap the body-gem for the rock-gem. Then he goes to the bathroom, drops back an hour, transfigures the rock, swaps the gems on sleeping Harry, then goes back to the bathroom for the handoff.
That said, it's been stated that solids undergo internal changes over time, and so a living thing transfigured into a solid and back would die within hours. There's got to be another piece to the puzzle than just Harry transfigured the body. I considered the possibility that Harry transfigured it into something more stable than wizards are used to dealing with, like a single gold atom, but that presents it's own logistical challenges.
Isn't there a simpler (and nicer) solution than Hermione-corpse-transfigured-to-ring, or Hermione-corpse-transfigured-to-gem-then-swapped? Both of these seem unduly complicated and ghoulish.
The nicer solution is that whatever Harry was doing between Hermione's death and dinner-time, he has already succeeded. Harry has somehow set up a time marker by which his future self can travel back to restore Hermione to life (or pass himself some sort of message back telling him how to do it) and she is already resurrected and out of here.
Presumably the plan also involved him selectively obliviating himself, so that he would retain the motivation to work out how to do the impossible in the future, while being quite relaxed about little details like the missing body.
An interesting question is how did he get round the 6 hour limit? Are there any hints in the story so far on the solution? Some thoughts:
I don't see Hermione be revived any time soon, for both story reasons and because Harry is unlikely to unravel the secrets of soul magic in mere hours, even with a time loop at his disposal.
More likely, Harry has found a reliable way to suspend her, and that would be the "he has already succeeded" you speak of.
Is there any chance that Harry has figured out how to hack time turners?
Hermione was dead when transfigured. Any revival has to already surmount post-mortem decay and the transfiguration damage might not be a significant additional cost.
There's a yet-simpler possibility.
He's not stupid, he knew that he would be summoned when her body disappeared, so he slept with whatever her body is transfigured next to his skin so that it wouldn't reverse itself and then removed it in that first moment. No Time-Turner use required.
I notice that there are no instructions to check anywhere else--such as under the covers on his bed.
This is where he's going to be using the time-turner to pick up Hermione's transfigured body before Flitwick arrives.
The reason this works this time, is that he has already precommitted to doing so when he spent all those hours thinking until dinner the day before. The ring is a red herring.
Wait, can you use a time-turner to go back, pick up something and return to the present? In that case you can keep something permanently hidden outside of time, except for a minute every 6 hours as you pick it up and drop it off.
I'm reasonably certain time turners can't jump you forwards in time. So far as I can tell everyone who's used a time turner has taken the 'long path' to catch back up with their most advanced present.
Harry can return to the present via the long route, if necessary. It doesn't appear that anyone bothered to check for extra Harries in the morning, so he wouldn't need to do anything more exotic than hide in the washroom before the previous Harry iteration got there in order to fool the Professors.
For indefinite qualities of "permanently"-- it sounds like it's got the same sort of vulnerability as those embezzling schemes that fall apart if the embezzler is sick for a while.
How do those work?
I ask only out of curiosity!
I don't have specifics, but it's something like the embezzler being in charge of the accounting. so that scheme holds up as long as no one else looks at the books. Sensible companies have enforced vacations for anyone who has that sort of responsibility.
My first thought was that she'd been transfigured into the pajamas, but I don't think that's likely. My theory is that when Harry slept in his bed it was the second time he'd been through that time period. The first time, he stayed invisible with transfigured Hermione in his possession, waited until woken-up Harry had finished being searched, gave her to woken-up Harry, then went back in time and went to bed.
That would require him to stay up all night, since he cannot know in advance the exact time Flitwick will arrive. It is much more likely that the Harry we saw was the first one, and that he's now going to go back in time to pick up the body.
I'd been wondering if Harry might have left Hermione's transfigured body with someone else. Probably not Neville or Quirrel, because the professors are already paying attention to them lately and Harry doesn't completely trust Quirrel's intentions. But he could safely leave it with Lesath, as long as no one saw Harry give Lesath the body and reclaim it later. Harry considers Lesath's loyalty a resource now, and no one else thinks Lesath is relevant. It's not typical of Harry to rely on others for help, though, so I'm not confident that he actually did this.
EDIT: It's the ring. Everybody beat me to it.
It struck me last night that, if you really wanted to get good predictions on what will happen in the rest of the story, you can just reread the whole thing, look for any potential plot devices that haven't already been triggered in some central way, and figure out how those things might be used. There's not a lot of story left; Eliezer said this arc, a couple of intermediate chapters, and one final plot arc.
I haven't got the time to do this myself, but it seems doable. If you want to really solve everything, set up a collaborative spreadsheet or something, and start hacking away. :)
I'm doing this right now, and strongly recommend it, partly because Eliezer has made moderately large revisions to the story that are worth reading. I was ambivalent about some of the changes at first, but on reflection I heartily approve of all of them.
In chapter 94, Harry knows about Important Things that we haven't seen him learn.
Harry to Dumbledore:
From Harry's internal monolog:
Harry has never been told about Horcruxes, nor the Marauder's Map. How does he know about them?
Has Harry been busy offscreen?
Or, is this exposition cut from Chapter 86?
(Also, isn't Horcrux capitalized in canon?)
EDIT: Chapter 94 was edited to remove Horcrux references.
Ah, there it is!
Harry time-turned to just before the troll attack. (In the one-and-a-half minutes when he went into Hermione's room.) This is probably pretty clear -- he's been keeping everyone else out of that room, and the centrality of the time-turner in this story more or less demands that Harry do so. Harry would have done this even if he couldn't come up with a plan in his previous six hours, just so he'd have another six hours to think, or do what he deemed needful to preserve Hermione's body.
Somewhere in there, he talked to the twins, and poorly obliviated them. Evidence:
Besides, it'll be a narratively nice, dark moment when Harry uses a spell whose existence he abhors on two of his best remaining friends and allies...
... and prevents them from helping him find Hermione. You think he went back in time to become responsible for one of the circumstantial reasons for his failure?
Sunk cost. Someone has taken the Marauder's Map; might as well be him.
That would not be wise: He should retroactively precommit to not steal the Marauders Map regardless of whether the Map is stolen, just as one should one-box on Newcombs problem.
This isn't quite Newcomb's Problem, though.
Consider this: You have essentially the same set up, and you're a one-boxer, so you walk up and take your million dollars out of box B.
And then Omega comes back and says, "Oh, by the way, want to open Box A too?"
And you say, "Um. Okay?" And open Box A, and get a thousand dollars. Or not. Doesn't really matter - you already have your million dollars, so you have nothing to lose by opening Box A.
This differs from the traditional two-boxing argument in one very important respect: you get new information in the middle of the experiment. Your single Omega-predictable algorithm doesn't have to "change its mind" in the middle, it gets interrupted.
This is essentially what (might be) happening here. Harry has opened Box B and found a dead Hermione inside. That's set and done. Assuming that he has reason to be believe that Box A will help him more than it will hurt him on average (and won't contain, say, a dead/mindless/insane Fred and George), he has no reason not to open Box A.
A more perfectly isomorphic variant of Newcomb's problem is the following. Both boxes are transparent, and Omega acts according to the following rule: if you two-box when box B is empty, then box B is always empty, while if you one-box, box B is empty with a 50% chance.
If you one-box in this variant, you win half a million dollars in expectation. If you intend to two-box should you see that box B is empty, then you only win a thousand dollars.
On the contrary, you should precommit to being responsible for all apparently bad occurrences if you happen to gain the ability to travel through time because if you can trust anyone to try to fix them while making them seem like they were bad to you it will be you.
This has the potential to produce many more self-sustaining "not quite as bad as it looks" bad events. Is this necessarily wise?
If you need more than 6 hours to learn Obliviation, you can use this method. Bonus: in addition to giving you more time to study, this method summons an army of hundreds of invisible Harry Potters (all with a single twist of the time-turner).
I would have tried this method, but I my narrative sense tells me that Harry did not.
http://www.reddit.com/r/HPMOR/comments/1i3y86/quick_question_about_chapter_94/cb0trf7 some new word of god spoilers you may or may not want concerning this
Looks like this has been corrected to "the Dark Lord is supposed to have made his lich-phylactery-thingy".
Somewhere in between, it was called his lich-prophylactery-thingy.
for Horcrux, Moody lets the word slip in Multiple Hypothesis Testing and Dumbledore had described the concept without the word previously
as for the map....?
Harry has been told that Voldemort's immortality came at the cost of Myrtle's life, that no student had died in Hogwarts for 50 years, and has reason to believe that the Chamber of Secrets was involved and that Voldemort did it. He has enough information to piece together that much of the Horcrux plot.
The map, though, I do not remember him learning about.
The previous time we read the word "Horcrux" it was:
In canon, Tom Riddle found Horcrux research difficult and had to ask Professor Slughorn. Harry might suspect something Horcrux-like exists, but I don't see how he could be confident in the name.
Horcruxes are important for Harry to learn about, because Harry already suspects that (1) Quirrell did something Horcruxy to Pioneer 11 in 1973. (2) Quirrell asks about hiding important artifacts, in a winking sort of way. I expected learning about Horcruxes to visibly change Harry's opinion of Quirrell -- it changed my opinion of Quirrell.
Harry is very good friends with the twins. The information is not unlikely to have simply passed along naturally.
Surprised no one has commented on this so far:
Two comments:
1) the last bit seems like Dumbledore in senitmental yet serious and regretful wise wizard mode. Harry is Dumbledore's hero and 'heir' if you will. Does Dumbledore wish he had some of Harry's cold intelligence? Does he think many of his dead friends and dead family could have been saved by someone who was harder than he was from the very beginning?
2) do people believe that there is an "heir of Gryffindor" and that its the twins?
I read this as Dumbledore lying to Harry or, charitably, messing with Harry and I wonder, "why?" Dumbledore is usualy honest. He usualy hides his meanings in plain sight and says true but misleading things.
Then again, so does Harry, but if he has the body he lied about it outright and without hesitation.
The whole conversation is actualy quite odd. Harry misquotes what the sword translates as, but he knows the quote very well and has even quoted it at Dumbledore before. Why does he botch the quote this time?
I interpreted this (with p<0.1) as foreshadowing Harry being Voldemort's heir, and Harry being Voldemort's idea of a better self (with power Voldemort knows not).
I think you are forgetting the context here of MoR: Godric Gryffindor has been set up as a quasi-emo/existentialist Hero, and heroism a painful uncertain path to travel, with countless sacrifices along the way. A life spent fighting and sacrificing beats out of one vanity and arrogance and certainty, as indeed Dumbledore himself has lost conviction and certainty. To quote the relevant passage in ch43:
Harry has said that he is surprised that Gryffindor would permit his heir to be people as frivolous and humorous and chaotic as the Weasley twins with all their youthful hijinks. To which Dumbledore replies,
Did Gryffindor wish his successors to be as grim and sad as him, did he wish to live such a life except as his war-torn world forced him to choose? No, of course not.
The twins are happy and enjoy their life.
Perhaps another time, another place, another life, Godric...
If only Godric's twin hadn't been killed at birth...
But not if he only has her brain.
That leaves out a third, and more sensible, alternative, which is choosing an heir which is the best person available. That person isn't likely to be an exact match to either the person who's doing the choosing or what that person thinks of as an improved version of themself.
Minerva, another Griffindor and the heir apparent as the next Headmaster of Hogwarts seems a likely heir.
When you're choosing across time, there are a lot more people available.
Is Quirrel exceedingly proud and vain? Does he want Harry to be his heir?
My first thought was that Dumbledore was referring to Salazar Slytherin. However, there can certainly be additional interpretations.
Harry insisted on a yes/no answer to whether they're "something like a(n) Heir of Gryffindor". Since Godric did in fact want any number of people to have access to his sword, and this is something like naming heirs, Albus gives up on correcting Harry's categories for the moment.
I think it's important that this comes just a few chapters after Dumbledore regrets resenting Harry for having spent his fortune to save Hermione, when he (Dumbledore) chose not to do so to save Aberforth.
(Ch. 84)
I think it somehow relevant that Dumbledore said, "Fred and George Weasley are the Heir of Gryffindor", not "Fred and George Weasley are the Heirs of Gryffindor".
Admittedly, I don't know what it means, but at this point, I think we can safely say that even minor quirks of grammar mean something in HPMoR.
As noted earlier, identical twins are basically the same person for magical purposes, to the point that an ancient civilization saw no moral problem in killing off one of them.
(To avert what happened the last time I said this - I do not necessarily agree with said ancient civilization. -_- )
I hate to bring it up - it's not weird enough to be interesting - but
Harry first heard of this sword
in the context of three other artifacts. As far as we know, he never learned anything else about the Diadem, but that may change now that the castle is handing out quest items and Harry faces a foe he can't defeat alone. I'd call that line another point in favor of the IA hypothesis.
Two points:
I think only Harry knew about it. Besides, it was supposed to be understandable only if the reader figured out it was about dementors.
A retraction. A couple of days ago, I posted what I thought looked like hints that Dumbledore was beginning to suffer the effects of age-related cognitive decline.
It was a lovely hypothesis and it's hard to let it go. Voldemort was Demented, Dumbledore was demented, and that sort of symmetry in fiction feels beautiful and true. It gave the author a way to engage with the deathism of the pivotal scene of the original novels, the most important death in a series about death. Rowling's allegory of a creeping curse would become the thing it represents. It would be the perfect backdrop for a heartbreaking speech on the horror of aging, something as moving as this, since Eliezer never just discusses something in the abstract. He gives examples. How could he not do this?
Well, because there are many transhumanist stories you could build from the raw material of the Harry Potter novels, so having found one of them doesn't mean it's the one he's writing. And he's already ruled it out.
If Dumbledore had used his Time-Turner for the full six hours every day of his life for 110 years, which he hasn't, he'd still be effectively younger than 140. Never mind.
General nitpick: can I request that everyone learn how to spell "canon" and "McGonagall" correctly?
You can request, but campaigning for accurate spelling on the Internet, even in this particularly educated corner of it, is an exercise in futility. For those who care, they will already have corrected themselves after seeing the correct spelling in hundreds and hundreds of posts. For those who do not, a mere request will not change their values.
It depends on the word. For "McGonagall", a person would probably have low confidence in their being able to spell it from memory, and would check if they cared, so misspelling it is strong evidence of not caring. "Cannon", on the other hand, is the correct spelling for homophone of "canon", and so it is less indicative of not caring. "Phase", another misspelling that appears in this thread, is even more indicative of ignorance rather than apathy. Confusion between "loose" and "lose" is probably interference from words like "choose", and being reminded of the correct spelling probably will help reinforce the distinction. And going outside of the misspellings in this thread, there are plenty of misspelling, such "straight laced", "shoe-in", and "tow the line", for which a person could quite easily not be exposed to the correct spelling.
You are right the Qiaochu_Yuan's request is probably hopeless - but I just don't understand mis-speller's reasoning on these particular words. Ok, cannon v. canon is understandable, but why go to the effort of writing out all those letters if one is going to get McGonagall wrong? Something like "McG" seems better in every way - more accurate, less effort to type.
But obviously I'm thinking about this wrong in some way, given observed behavior.
Why didn't Harry acquire a working Time Turner / make someone else use a Time Turner as soon as he found out Hermione was missing? Why did Dumbledore make sure it was actually Hermione who died, making the use of Time Turners to alter events that much harder?
If this story wasn't constrained by any story telling concerns, Time Turners would just dominate everything. "How do I use my Time Turner to cheat?" would be the first and last thought of a rationally empowered Harry whenever he has an inkling of something bad happening, and not something he could ever miss.
The story says "This [Time Turner] could've saved Hermione, if I'd been able to use it.", but really, how hard would it be to acquire one of the other Time Turners he relied upon for sending the messages? Even if those students weren't present in the Great Hall at the time, as soon as his own Time Turner was locked down in the first place, acquiring access to another one would have been the highest priority by far, and surely within his means (given that other Time Turners are only controlled by fellow students).
The more I think about it, the more an even more rational version of a HP-fanfic should be called "Harry Potter and the Time Turners". Probably less entertaining, but that's the downside when you take your characters' intellect seriously ...
Edit: I also missed this: "if I'd looked for a student with a Time-Turner to send a message back in time before I found out about anything happening to her, instead of ending up with an outcome that can't be altered". That's one remark that is just wholly incompatible with any half-competent Harry. It's just inconceivable, on the order of someone giving you a genie and endless wishes, and you just not thinking of it in a situation of great need.
Eliezer has said somewhere that if Harry were written as a perfect rationalist, he would be too ridiculously super-powerful for an interesting story in that universe to be possible. Harry is simply at the level he is, and it is not really a fault in him or the story that he is not further advanced along the path than he is.
For it is a sad rule that whenever you are most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when you are most likely to forget it.
In the military, it is standard wisdom that in combat, you will not rise to your best, but sink to the level of your training.
That's the incongruity, for me. Time turners don't just seem like the solution to the troll problem, or any particular problem, which you'd have to come up with as the problem arises. They seem like the solution to practically all problems. The particular way they're presented, they'd require you to use them as soon as you identify the probable casus belli, but before you learn of too many specifics.
So, not something you'd have to think of ad hoc, but an optimal problem solver you'd always keep close at hand (replacing your wand, even) for whenever your spidey sense tingles. Sorry for invoking such an unrealistic concept.
Probably something that should've been left out of HPMOR entirely, just because of its lack of balanceability.
There is other evidence in favor of hypyothesis: harry's mind got tampered with. Namely, the Weasley twins had their minds tampered with regarding the map, and harry went through ~30 minutes without realizing hermione was missing.
~30 minutes? How do you come to that conclusion?
There is another point which wasn't discussed much, but does trouble me : the "outpouring of magic" that happened in chapter 89 when Hermione died.
It's the first time we heard about anything like that happening after a wizard death. It's not canon. It wasn't hinted to before, like Dumbledore didn't speak about it in "pretending to be wise", when he tries to convince Harry souls exist. Harry didn't feel it when his parents were killed. Harry didn't feel it when Rita Skeeter is killed by Quirrell. That's a lot of evidence pointing to it not being the common thing that happens when someone dies.
And yet, Harry doesn't ask any question about it, he doesn't try to know if it happens rarely (and then in which circumstances ?) or frequently, or if it's even an entirely new phenomena, it doesn't ask around if it could be faked, ...
Some possibles explanations :
It's the Source of Magic recording the brain state of person when it dies, allowing for resurrection before. But then, why no hint about it before ? Why Harry didn't feel it for Rita ?
It's the Source of Magic recording the brain state of person when it dies, but the Source of Magic didn't use to do it. Harry had to hack the Source of Magic to implement it. And he had to cleverly use Time Turners so he could hack it before Hermione's death.
Someone made an Horcrux of Hermione, and it's the Horcrux that gives the feeling.
It doesn't occur usually, but it does occur because of a bond between Hermione and Harry, be it just "love magic" or be it with Hermione being bound to House Potter.
This is purely faked (either memory-charm, or a fake feeling) by either Dumbledore or Quirrell (maybe using a Time Turner) to try to convince Harry that Hermione is really dead so he doesn't do any folly to try to save her (but then, it seemed to fail).
Hermione tried and failed to become a ghost.
It was, in fact, mentioned in chapter 39, Pretending to be Wise:
Hm.
This is the first time we've seen anyone die anywhere as magically "dense" as Hogwarts...
They wouldn't have been fooled for an instant if the burst was standard in Hogwarts. Though this could be something as simple as it not being well known, given the miniscule fatality rate in Hogwarts.
Okay.
Looking at this again - why didn't Hermione become a ghost?
Even assuming it's just a beta-fork of her consciousness, I find it hard to believe that she would be so willing to just move on, if she had the option. And violent death by troll is exactly the sort of thing that results in ghost formation in literature.
So... evidence that someone's doing something finicky with her soul?
I don't think that's necessarily true.
If dying violently was enough on its own, then there would be scads of ghosts floating around, left behind by the war, even if you also discount those brave or unafraid-of-death enough to fight.
Moreover, Hermione's greatest fear (from the Dementor chapters) was dying alone, and Harry was there to assuage that fear. It's possible that that was enough to allow her to pass on, and that Harry's presence was the only reason that she didn't actually become a ghost. Which could have interesting effects on him if he ever found out.
Which doesn't mean that something extra isn't going on.
Well, sure. Evidence for, not absurdly-strong-evidence that I'd call a proof. :P
I don't think Rita Skeeter is good evidence. It would not do for Quirrell to have Harry notice an unexpected, strange burst of magic when he's trying to quietly kill someone; Quirrell would have found a way to suppress it, if it had existed. (It's also possible that her Animagi transformation suppressed the effect.) The absence of the burst of magic in Harry's parents' deaths, on the other hand, has led me to an inverse suspicion to yours...
Am I naive in that I thought it was ambiguous as to whether Rita's death was intentional?
And of course I forgot the mundane explanation, the one that I would use in the real world : it's just the too vivid imagination of an overstressed 11-yo boy on the verge of emotional breakdown after seeing the most horrible scene of his life. Nothing actually happened, but Harry's mind created the special effects that "should" come with such a tragic event as the death of Hermione.
Remember in chapter 6 : « I, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, do now claim this territory in the name of Science.
Lightning and thunder completely failed to flash and boom in the cloudless skies.
"What are you smiling about?" inquired Professor McGonagall, warily and wearily.
"I'm wondering if there's a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution," explained Harry. »
This clearly shows that part of his mind is thinking that dramatic events "should" get a dramatic special effects, and while in normal time he's perfectly aware that's not how the world works, when he's crumbling under stress, guilt and pain, he could confuse it for reality.
But while that seems a plausible hypothesis in absolute, it just doesn't feel right from a story-telling point of view.
Quite improbable, given that even a Dementor was unable to make him see things that were not there while he was concious.
Note that since Harry isn't aware that Rita was killed in front of him, he wouldn't be aware of that piece of evidence. It's still an anomaly, and one that he should be noticing for all the other reasons, but that particular line of reasoning is not available (to Harry, anyway).
\6. Hermione is a really extraordinary wizard.
Is she particularly powerful, though? She's extraordinarily talented, very knowledgeable for her age, and has more raw power than anyone in her year including Draco; but Rita is more experienced, and most importantly older - it has been repeatedly pointed out that HP lacks the raw power for something-or-other, and the twins are far stronger than he despite not being particularly talented. It seems that Rita should have an edge in the "raw power" department, and I'd expect this effect to key off raw power.
Note that it's also sufficient to assume that Quirrel and/or Mary's room can suppress this effect.
What about proximity? It could be that you have to be physically pretty close at the moment of death. That would explain why Harry didn't feel it when Rita Skeeter died.
Some theories of how the wards could (a) not detect Hermione was wounded and (b) claim that the Defense Professor killed Hermione.
Wounding wards:
Defense Professor killer ward:
EDIT Added Defense Professor killer explanation 5 and 6.
I don't get this. How does Quirrell being female explain anything? The only explanation I can think of is Quirrell being pregnant with a mountain troll, and that just raises more questions.
If Quirrell were female, "he who stands within" would refer to someone else, since "he" is masculin.
That's pretty unlikely, though, since he's apparently keyed into the wards as a professor, so far as anyone can tell.
(Quirrell keeping a troll shrunken/in hammerspace on his person at all times is my favorite explanation at present, even though it sounds like it should have a silliness penalty. He did mention the Hungarian Horntail in the same lecture where he mentioned the troll, and this particular theory would give more credence to the idea that he has one of those hidden somewhere as well.)
Oh, that makes sense. I missed the pronoun.
Oh, another hypothesis, based on something I'd forgotten: Slytherin's Monster was supposed to be keyed into the wards at a higher level than the Headmaster himself. And in this version, it had knowledge it transmitted to Voldemort. What if that included knowledge of how to hack the wards? And then Quirrellmort decided to make the wards register himself as the killer, as a purloined-letter type deal?
Quirrellmort is "the quote undying unquote Baba Yaga, yes, I see some of you are still shuddering at the sound of her name even though she’s been dead for six hundred years."
Oh good, I thought I was the only person who suspected Baba Yaga. It was she I alluded to when writing
Not that she is my first suspect for this escapade.
Wow. Imagine if Quirrel had transformed Hermione into the troll and the troll into a Hermione copy.
Ugh.
Then Harry would've been the killer.
And, due to his 'connection', the wards could've actually mistaken him for Quirrel.
A troll is unlikely to have any last words at all. Specifically not "not your fault."
Also a troll is unlikely to die with the feeling of a thousand books.
I think this is a very low likelihood guess.
If not Hermoine, the only possible person to have died was McGonagall.
That being said, Hermoine's dead. No tricks.
Yep, totally true. I didn't assign it any significant probability, I just thought it was scary.
Actually, it was all like this:
Quirrell heard about Minerva's decision to support more heroism. He realized that Harry changed his original plan (to make all teachers obstacles to Harry, except Quirrell himself), but adapted quickly. He asked Minerva to do something heroic together, as teachers -- to travel to the past and try saving Hermione.
In the past, he changed Minerva to Hermione, telling her that now the attack will come to Minerva and she can better defend against it, or do something very clever. Without Minerva's knowledge, he changed Hermione into a troll, and somehow made her believe that the enemy's plan is the following: while the real Hermione cannot be found, the false Hermione will try to kill Harry. Or something like that.
Now the troll (Hermione) heroically followed and attacked the false Hermione (Minerva) and tried to kill her. The sun didn't hurt the troll, because it was not a real troll. Harry came and killed the troll (Hermione), which made the wards report that a student was killed. The dying false Hermione (Minerva) tried to do the right thing and explain Harry that it was not his fault.
Quirrell is now waiting for the moment when Harry tries to revive Hermione and realizes that the body/brain that he saved actually belongs to Minerva from the future. Then Harry will realize that he killed Hermione, and specifically destroyed her brain by explosion. That should turn Harry to the dark side.
Problems:
1 - The troll regenerated.
2 - The troll was identified as a professor, not as a student.
In the Star Wars universe, maybe, where being betrayed by somebody automatically makes you join them (as does, reportedly, killing them). But Harry is more rational than Anakin.
Defense Professor killer ward explanation 5 is the one I thought of, reading the chapter, but I like explanation 3 too.
... Sudden idea.
The limitation on Time Turners is that they cannot send information back farther than six hours, through any sequence of people or Time Turners.
However, "information" here has been shown to have a very loose, non-physical definition - in the same way that brooms are Aristotelian, magical "information" has an intuitive definition. Bones is able to tell Dumbledore about the existence of future information (presumably) without automatically barring Dumbledore from then traveling back himself, for example.
So it's possible, then, that "information" could be erased simply by hitting yourself with a Memory Charm, allowing you to travel back farther than six hours with a Time Turner depending on how much you erased. This would solve the general problem of the Peggy Sue hints, by allowing Harry to solve time travel using foreshadowed methods in the remaining fifteen-twenty chapters or so of the fic.
As far as the point... well, while "information" hasn't passed through time, information certainly has. Harry is more mature, more driven, and, most importantly, knows that something bad enough happened to cause him to travel back in time. He will be viewing everything that happens in his first year as either a potential existential threat, or a potential threat to someone he or past-he cares about.
Upon reading these past few chapters I think that Harry has invented a spell to download Hermiones brain state just before her death and this is what we are seeing with the whole soul explosion when she dies.
We have never seen this happen so far at all in HPMOR, and I would think if this is a common thing then when Dumbledore is trying to prove to Harry the existence of souls this is the evidence he would use to try and prove it to him. The fact that he did not and this only seems to have happened during this one particular incident suggests to me there is something going on.
Also it's been completely sidestepped afterwards Harry doesn't ask dumble does anything about it this chapter when speaking about Godric's sword which he would do if he didnt know anything about it. Dumbledore doesn't mention it because he doesn't know as he appeared after and he sent back instruments in time he didnt go himself so they didnt pick it up.
And when Harry is sitting outside the room with Hermione in there is a big paragraph where he ponders why magic works the way it does and why it requires a wand. This feels really out of place and I think is there to show Harry's thought process in making this discovery.
It's not unique, and Dumbledore did bring it up, actually:
Compare:
Fair point, I missed that bit. There goes my theory then
About horcruxes
Magic itself seems predisposed to keeping wizards in existence, what with ghosts and resistance to blunt trauma, and Avada Kedavra requiring they be very sure about the outcome, and all that. A ritual that requires murder seems to be opposing that spirit. Can't magic make up it's mind? Or was it designed by multiple, competing purposes?
It occured to me that horcrux might be more of a late addition to magic; a hack, a twisting of an existing function. If so, the requirement may not be there for the usual reasons (to represent the making of a significant choice, as Quirrell put it), but rather as a requirement of limited resource.
What might that be? Life force? Nonsense, 'one must die for another to live' is in fact a bad non-reductionist cliché, and don't get me started on it. How about soul?
What existing aspect of magic best resembles a horcrux?
Thus I've concluded that a horcrux is the corruption of a newly made ghost; it's loaded with the state vector of the caster instead of the victim.
This gives two obvious predictions. Those killed for a horcrux will not leave ghosts. Muggles are unsuitable.
Since both predictions run contrary to canon (Moaning Myrtle and old man Frank Bryce), and Eliezer is unlikely to do that on a whim, they were adequate.
(I'm no longer sure when exacly I came up with all of the above. Pretty sure it was before the Azkaban arc.)
Chapter 71, Parvati talks about Hogwarts' '0% fatality rate' and nobody acts like it's known falsehood. Sure, it was an argument about something else, and it was narrated, not explicit, but still. How could they not know about Myrtle? Simple, there is no moaning reminder.
After this I realized I made a bad assumption (quite possibly my luckiest mistake - but never mind that). I thought the ghost creation process is subverted at the root, making the requirement check for ghosts (afraid of dying, the will to stay, or whatever it is) done on the caster. Instead, depending on implementation details, a hack may be more likely to work on what is already there; so for the ghost to be there, the victim has to have that preference.
If you don't want to draw attention to the fact that you're killing people who are likely to leave ghosts, you have to use some other criteria, and kill a lot. If only 1% of the population would leave a ghost, and you pick your victims at random, on avarege you have to kill 100 people to get one horcrux. And if you only kill the brave who dared to oppose you, it might take significantly more. Better kill their family as well. Of course, there may be ways to increase the probability of ghost as well ('the victim dying in horror'? dunno).
So this explains why mor!Voldemort's campaign was more bloody than canon, and also why smart!Voldemort didn't win quickly. Also, nerfing an overpowered spell.
Many people seem to suggest time-turner tricks for Harry to hide Hermione body. But that raises a few issues to me :
Do we have any evidence for or against the fact that the Hogwarts wards, or more generally a spell that Dumbledore could cast, would inform him of the usage of time-turner inside Hogwarts ? There is mention of "anti-time-loop ward", could there be "time-loop detecting wards" ?
Dumbledore didn't seem to check if Harry used his time-turner or not, and he didn't even ask him if he did. That's suspicious. It seems surprising that Dumbledore goes to great length to do a careful check of Harry's belonging, despite the social cost of doing so, and yet, not a single mention of the time-turner. Not even casually like the portkey. From an "outsider" point of view, it points to the fact Harry used it. Or at least, it would from many authors, but such a "oh well the NPC just didn't think about that major plot device" hand-waving doesn't seem at all to be Eliezer's way of doing things.
People have suggested that on being summoned to the Headmaster's office, Harry precommits to time-turn back and hide Hermione's body before the summons arrives. Whether that means replacing the ring or the stone or what have you.
There are several ways I can think of that Dumbledore could circumvent this:
The first two methods seem wasteful. High cost compared to the relatively trivial transfiguration check. So if Dumbledore has other suspects besides Harry, he might not deem it worthwhile. The third is simple enough, if Dumbledore does have the Map. And if the Map does display multiple instances of time-turned people, as seems likely--I think this has been discussed as possibly being one of the "errors" the twins note.
Which still leaves the question of whether Dumbledore does have it.
Time-Turners are in frequent and authorized use by a fair number of students, as well as Dumbledore himself and possibly other staff members. Any such ward would be constantly triggering, for no particularly important reason. Even if one exists, I can't imagine that Dumbledore pays much attention to it.
Dumbledore is only looking for Hermione. There's no reason for him to be much interested in Harry's magical devices, beyond proving that they aren't Hermione. The portkey was only mentioned because it was a part of Dumbledore's body search; the Time-Turner, presumably, wasn't on his body.
Regarding 2- possible explanations. First, it is possible that Dumbledore knows already about some set of Time-Turner use which is about to happen for (from his standpoint) completely separate legitimate reasons. Second, it is possible that there's no easy way to check if a Time Turner has been used other than to see if it can still be used (see the earlier instance where they checked if Harry's Turner had been used by having him deliver a specific message to the past), and given the precarious nature of the situation, Dumbledore doesn't want to waste any of Harry's Time-Turner hours if he can avoid it.
If the turner also has a restriction[1], it’s easy to check: just ask someone not important to try to use it. (Not important in the sense that it’s no big deal if they loose the ability to time-turn for a day).
[1:] It should have. They can be broken/destroyed, which suggests that they can also accumulate non-fatal damage (like scratches), which technically means that they also carry information to the past. But the information rules don’t seem to apply except when in some cases involving sentience.
Wait a moment, is it the Time-Turner or the user who is limited to six hours?
I may have shared this theory on what Voldemort's plan is, but I want to toss it out there for feedback: what if Voldemort heard the prophecy and inferred that it meant that Fate wouldn't let him kill Harry until after he had "marked Harry as his equal," and his plan is as simple as fulfilling that by setting up Harry as a Dark Lord (what Voldemort interprets as "mark him as his equal") and then killing him? I feel like it has to be more complicated than that, but it seems to fit all available data.
It seems highly likely that Harry has time turned to hide Hermione's body and possible accomplish other objectives to which we are not yet privy. Evidence for this being that Harry now knows about the map when he did not before, and that he reacts to Hermione's body going missing with no emotional response whatsoever. He broadly speculates on the likely suspects for body snatching, but if he cared (which, for resurrection purposes, he surely would), then he would be far more animated: after all, he has previously.
There are some interesting wriggles in this though, in that we tend to get Harry's point of view, so we follow him when he travels back in time. There are a couple of exceptions, so this could be to increase the mystery from the reader's point of view. Worth noting that we don't see any thoughts from Harry indicating that he has made this journey, however. This could be explained by him voluntarily obliviating himself to be immune to legilmens based attacks? Or simply us not seeing his thoughts.
We have also learned that we're near the end of the fic, with one and a half arcs to go! This is intriguing stuff, and strongly implies to me that Harry is going to have to tap into ultimate power some time soon to tie up loose plot threads. Primarily among these being Voldemort's motivation of course! We as readers can guess, provided that we can take Quirrel=Voldemort for granted, which I think the text has given us strong indicators towards thus far. He seems to want to unite all of magical Britain/ the magical world into a unit strong enough to subjugate mankind and thus prevent scientific destruction. His original plan appeared to be to unite everyone round David Monroe as an opponent to Voldemort. When that didn't work (not clear why.. did the death eaters get out of control, or Monroe wasn't charismatic enough?) he decided to fake his death/accidentally got destroyed by Harry (this is, as yet, unclear), and then chose to make Harry the dark hero. It is possible/likely that Harry is either horcruxy or just Voldemort.
One revelation I would really like to see is why characters just don't seem to consider that Quirrel is a suspect. With the exception of Moody, who really only suggests it as a precaution, it really seems like theres nothing Quirrel can do which make people think that he's behind the bad stuff. Now to be fair its obviously clear that Quirrel doesn't want to kill Harry, he has demonstrated that on multiple occasions, but the unseen villain has never attempted to kill Harry!
I agree about Voldemort's motivation. As to why it didn't work, I I think Quirrell has been rather explicit that wizards were sheeple:
My tentative hypothesis is that Voldemort/Monroe realized that his original strategy to unite Wizarding Britain by presenting them with a common enemy wasn't working, so he set up the events in Godric's Hollow to make it appear that Voldemort had died (in an absolutely ridiculous and implausible way, that everyone except him and HJPEV would immediately believe). Then he could proceed to try something else.
It's commonly said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It would probably be better here to say the definition of irrationality is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Quirrell, unlike almost everyone else in the story except HJPEV and maybe Amelia Bones and Moody, is rational.
I suspect Harry's memories of that night are faked. I don't have any good hypotheses for what really happened though. I'm toying with the possibility that Voldemort didn't actually kill Harry's parents, and possibly they aren't even dead. There are 2 or 3 clues that could point to that, but I don't think they're strong enough to overcome the prior implausibility. More likely Voldemort did kill James and Lily, and then did something to Harry, Horcruxed him most likely, but deliberately, not accidentally. How does anyone know, in canon or HPMoR, that Voldemort cast Avada Kedavra on Harry? All we have is the burned body. No one except an infant saw it happen.
Note that there is also no explanation why Avada Kedavra of all things would produce a burned body. That particular bit of description ("burned husk", "burned to a crisp" etc.) has been repeated often enough to be strong foreshadowing, and burning is a great way to make a corpse unidentifiable, especially if dental records for the supposed victim are unavailable and/or no-one has ever heard of such a form of forensics.
Note also that Harry has no memory of Voldemort actually casting the Killing Curse on him. His memory apparently cuts out right after his mother's death.
How about Fiendfyre? Does that leave anything behind? I mean, it cut through Hogwarts.
Hey, when was Draco’s mother killed? He should be about the same age as Harry, and yet Harry’s Mum died when he was like a year old, and the war pretty much ended right then. So Narcissa’s burning could not have been long before (well, I guess it could be a few months; but that still leaves Draco a baby; if he were that much older than Harry to have had time to know her, he’d be a second year now).
New idea: going on the "Dumbledore faked Godric's Hollow" theory, what if "Voldemort's" body that gets found is the unrecognizable, burned body of Narcissa Malfoy?
I can't answer that question (though my instinct is to say "no"), but I will point out that Hogwarts isn't particularly indestructible. Haven't we at least seen one of the trolls damage the walls with ordinary brute force? Or am I misremembering?
We did see that:
Also
High confidence prediction, based on the feminism rant. Rot13 because, while Eliezer has not retracted it, he recommended people not read it:
Va uvf enag ba UCZBE naq srzvavfz, Ryvrmre fnvq Urezvbar jbhyq pbzr onpx nf na nyvpbea cevaprff. Gurer jnf fbzr qvfphffvba bs jurgure ur jnf wbxvat va gur ynfg guernq. Gur snpg gung gur zbfg erprag nhgube'f abgr qvq abg rkcynva gung ur jnf wbxvat gb zr engure fgebatyl pbasvezf gung ur jnfa'g.
Near certain prediction:
Va gur snasvpgvba "Sevraqfuvc vf Bcgvzny", juvpu unf orra erpbzzraqrq va Nhgube Abgrf vzcylvat RL unf va snpg ernq vg, nyvpbea cevaprffrf ner gur va-jbeyq ningnef bs genafuhzna fhcrevagryyyvtraprf juvpu nvq gur Negvyrpg NV jub pbagebyf gur havirefr. Xabjvat guvf, cynpvat Uneel va PryrfgNV'f cbfvgvba, Urezvbar jvyy or oebhtug onpx gb freir n fvzvyne ebyr, hfvat uvf gura genafuhzna novyvgl.
My mental model of EY would make exactly this kind of offhand reference. It is the answer to the riddle about the ring you saw once several years ago.
Makes sense. With slightly less confidence, I predict that:
"nyvpbea cevaprff" -> cevaprff sebz Yhzvabfvgl, Nyvpbea'f Gjvyvtug engvbanyvfg sna svpgvba -> n inzcver.
I think both your prediction and mine were made in the previous discussion thread as well. (Mine was made by someone else.)
I was actually joking about the Alicorn -> vampire thing, and will be somewhat distraught if I turn out to be right.
It seems like there's a good reason for that to happen, while there doesn't seem to be an obvious in-story reason for her to come back as a unicorn's horn. (Or as a winged unicorn.)
Thankfully, EY confirmed on facebook that this is a stupid theory, except that he used a nicer wording.
If for a value of 'nicer' for which "very clever" means "stupid".
It occurs to me that I've seen very little mention of one major dangling plot thread: The Interdict of Merlin. Bypassing the interdict may get Harry sufficient power, without necessarily getting at 'the source of magic' or becoming omnipotent.
There's some precedent for this: partial transfiguration, patronus 2.0, and acorn brewing were all made possible by understanding something others did not. It's possible that the Interdict is something similar, and that Harry will be able to understand his way through it.
This mechanism appears to have been used in other of Eliezer's works as well, for example the "Jeffreyssai" stories in the Sequences.
The problem is that "bypassing the Interdict" is not, on its own, useful; it's only valuable if Harry happens to have written notes on powerful magic spells that are censored by the Interdict. Apparently, there's a loophole allowing Interdict-restricted material to exist (wizards can keep notes for themselves, implied by chapter 23), but it seems unlikely that Harry would be able to get ahold of much of it. (Possible exception: Bacon's diary? Quirrell didn't think Bacon found much of interest, but he could be wrong.)
Related: since Muggle physics can apparently contribute to powerful magics (see: partial transfiguration) would the Interdict apply if Harry ever wrote a physics book? What would the Interdict do if a Muggle happened to accidentally write (presumably as fiction) the details of a powerful magic spell? Can Muggles read Interdict-restricted works?
We have already seen a way to bypass the Interdict in Slytherins monster, another way to get around it would make Merlins Opus Magnum quite laughable. But yes, the Chamber of Secrets has still not been discovered and Harry did just run off to a very certain bathroom...
Edit: Ah dammit, forgot the Neville scene at the end. That would have been too good.
Prediction: by the end of the story, Harry will somehow have managed to dispell the Interdict of Merlin. Given his opinions on muggle society that gains power with each generation, versus wizard society that loses power with each generation, there is no way Harry is going to let that stand. Given that it was brought about by magic, presumably it can be cancelled by magic, and Harry will find a way.
Although not instant win, beating the interdict is potentially a route to great power fast. I think its a more likely route because its more fuzzy.
The 6 hour limit on turners is a hard rule, there is not a lot of room for subjective interpretation to play with. The partial transfiguration trick works because form and object and the like are fuzzy concepts that don't map exactly onto anything in the real world. The limit on the transmitting of "sufficiently powerful spells" seems very similar in that its based on an idea without an exact referent. Sufficiently powerful compared to what, compared to a candle? Compared to a gun? Compared to a nuke? Compared to a meteor? Compared to a supernova?
If Harry calibrates powerful based on a supernova and really "gets" how powerful that is, do all spells seem piddling by comparison and pass through the edict unscathed? There's certainly room to work with here.
Frankly, the only reason that partial transfig does not make Harry insanely overpowered is because of Harry's weak mana (which will get better as he ages) and the need to avoid transfiguration sickness.
I very much hope that no significant use of time-turners is required to resolve Hermione's disappearance or any other events transpired in the last few chapters. These [plot] devices are way too much like deus ex machina and have been overused in this fic quite a bit already.
Regarding Quirrell's motives.
Quirrell is hoping that Harry has now "discarded his foolish little reluctances".
Which suggests a motive for framing Hermione: he was hoping Harry would assassinate Lucius.
Predictions: Tom Riddle is Hat-n-Cloak (95%). Tom Riddle is female (35%). Tom Riddle was Voldemort, but the title was taken over by Qmort who is not TR (20%). The feeling of doom between HP and Qmort is because of time travel (95%). Qmort is an older HP, sent back in time with memories removed (30%).
Doesn't your 30% prediction imply the 20% prediction?
No, HP could go back in time and call himself Tom Riddle. Especially if he was becoming one of those "Dark Wizards who change names like you and I change clothes"
What is the effect on Harry of the attacks on Hermione?
To make him stronger and more resolute.
Therefore, why is someone attacking Hermione?
Because they want Harry to be stronger and more resolute.
Dumbledore and Quirrell want that. They have both been specifically training him for it, each in their own way. Did they arrange H's death?
No. Quirrell's dash to the scene and the conversation of Dumbledore and Quirrell about Harry after H's death indicate that they are afraid of what this experience will do to Harry. Therefore they are not the ones who arranged it. The only other person strong enough to be the agent behind Hermione's death is Voldemort.
Harry and Voldemort are enemies. Why does Voldemort want Harry to be stronger?
Because Harry is Voldemort's intended heir.
Why does Voldemort want Harry for his heir?
Dumbledore's talk of heirs to Harry alludes to Voldemort. Harry, as transformed by the experiences Voldemort is forcing on him, will be the person Voldemort would wish to be. In addition, Harry's scar is a horcrux of Voldemort. That is the spell that Voldemort cast in his confrontation with the baby Harry. The Killing Curse was directed not at Harry, but at Lily, to provide the death magic to create the horcrux. Voldemort intends to not merely be succeeded by the forcibly matured Harry, but to be him.
Dumbledore and Quirrell are also trying to develop Harry. Why not just destroy him instead? Quirrell at least would think of that at once.
Both sides want Harry as a weapon in the war.
What is the prize in the war? Surely nothing so trivial as ruling the world? Harry's own aims are far above that. Since arriving at Hogwarts, he has aimed directly for the heart of magic, using all the methods that wizards know nothing of to figure out how it works, and aims to remake the whole universe according to his desire.
That is the prize: the unification of magic and science, which will unleash power such as the world has never seen.
The secret that this is possible cannot be concealed for ever. Those in power have tried concealment: that is why Magical and Muggle Britain are so sealed off from each other. How could either side know so little of the other, when they live side by side, and everyone at the top level is familiar with both? Propaganda, lies, and concealment both magical and Muggle, to prevent people from learning the dangerous secret, convincing scientists that magic does not even exist, and wizards that science is useless.
It was not always so. Before Science, there was no need. When Science got started with Roger Bacon (his diary is an Important Object in the story, a Chekhov's Gun which has not yet been fired), someone in the wizarding world eventually realised the potentialities. It cannot be stopped: once a single person discovers the idea, someone will eventually do it. Only the agreement of the most senior wizards to not go there kept it from happening, until Voldemort defected. That is what the wizarding war is about. It was Dumbledore's plan that Harry Potter should be the one to make that unification of science and magic, and use it for the light side. So he was bred for great inborn magical power, given a scientific education, and then brought to Hogwarts while still immature, that he might be moulded to the cause.
The Singularity is approaching. Dumbledore and Quirrell are striving for a Friendly outcome, while Voldemort wants to be the outcome.
It seems more likely to me that Quirrell's dash was primarily for the purpose of burning holes in Hogwarts. Despite leaving before Harry, and Harry stopping to pick up the twins and stopping at the library, and supposedly making a more direct route, Quirrell still failed to arrive before Harry, or for that matter, at all.
I'm not saying Quirrell is unafraid of what this experience will do to Harry, just that I don't believe Quirrell's dash is evidence of that.
I think that's wrong. Here's chapter 89:
In chapter 90 Quirrell claims to have left as soon as he discovered "that Miss Granger was on the verge of death", whatever that means, but it seems clear he's lying.
I like the analysis, but I think I'm going to have to diverge near the top.
The problem is, we're fairly sure that Voldemort is Quirrell. There's the Pioneer plate, the amusing questionnaire about "where to lose something you want never to be found," and of course the sense of Doom; in addition, I'm pretty sure that Ryvrmre fnvq fb, va gur ergenpgrq Nhgube'f Abgr sbe Puncgre 20.
You're also missing a candidate. Throughout the story, there's been hints at the presence of a Peggy Sue - a long-distance time traveler with unknown intentions and unknown motives. Unfortunately, it's something of a Fully General Explanation for that reason...
Personally, I'm betting somewhere around 65% that Future!Harry is the culprit - less because I'm 70% certain that Future!Harry is responsible, and more because I'm 95% certain Dumbledore didn't, and 75% certain Quirrell didn't, and after that I'm out of conscious hypotheses so the rest get the ~5%.
"Why not just destroy him instead? Quirrell at least would think of that at once." THAT...is a very, very good question. And btw, Quirrel has many other names: Voldemort, Monroe, possibly "black hat"...
Why DIDN"T he just teach harry how to use cursed-fire, and tell him to go far away from Hogwarts (easily enough arranged) to avoid killing any bystanders? (To, yknow, avoid the appearance of being evil...) Seems to me that would be a fast way to preserve the status quo of the universe... I notice that I am rather confused. I am going to meditate before I post the theory that's offering itself as a resolution.
ok. so: assuming Harry's memory of the night his parents died is correct, what if the crucial difference is that, instead of shrugging Lilly off, Voldemort accepted her bargain...making it a two-person ritual rather than just a one-person ritual...which meant that not only was Harry protected against Voldemort, now the latter had to actively guard Harry's life.
Second part: And as he looked into harry's eyes...he had his equivalent of an "oh crap", and then made harry a horcrux because he figured he may as well. Which THEN sparked a nasty resonance that blasted his body to bits and didn't take like a normal horcrux (is anyone other than Eliezer ~90% sure how they're supposed to work in MoR?) because he'd already used lilly's life in a ritual.
If a mere exchange of promises were sufficient to constitute a magically binding ritual, there would be no need for Unbreakable Oaths.