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CellBioGuy comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 112 - Less Wrong
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Can someone with a horcrux network and the ability to create new bodies create new horcruxes without killing pre-existing people?
Transform a grain of sand into a human being, make transformation permanent with Philosopher’s Stone, bring them to life with a defibrillator (which should be sufficient to “create” a muggle, if I understand chapter 111 correctly), kill them to create a horcrux. Sure, from what we know, that should work.
The ethics of creating living humans in order to kill them seconds late are … well, debatable, to put it mildly.
Voldemort refers to sacrificing one person's "life and magic" to preserve another's when describing the horcrux procedure in 108. This suggests that a muggle would not work as a sacrifice.
Don't think that'd work. Horcruces, or at least the 1.0 kind, seem to be related to ghosts: Quirrell mentions redirecting a 'death-pulse' to create the caster's ghost instead of the victim's. We don't have a clear idea of how that works, but since Muggles don't leave ghosts, I think it's reasonable to assume that whatever the spell's doing, it needs a magical victim to do it.
We see Voldemort making a Horcrux out of a Muggle in canon, but I don't think we've seen it here.
In canon he used the murder of his muggle father to make the Gaunt ring (which is inset with the Resurrection Stone) a horcrux, the murder of a muggel tramp to make Slytherin’s locket into a horcrux, and the murder of an Albanian peasant to make Ravenclaw’s diadem a horcrux.
But you’re right, this makes it seem unlikely that a Muggle victim would work. (Damn, these small differences between canon and HPMoR can really confuse me …)
On the other hand, it seems possible to use up a part of one’s magic/life force to create a witch or wizard (cf. Hermione), which could then be killed to create a horcrux. So while these horcruxes aren’t free to make, at least they are not a zero-sum game, either.
From the description of HPMOR's horcrux spell, it won't work unless a witch/wizard is killed.
Edit: didn't see Nornagest's post.
I was thinking more along the lines of:
1 - Possess accomplice
2 - Create your body
3 - Inhabit your body
4 - Have your body killed, creating horcrux that binds to the rest of the network
5 - Repeat
6 - Profit
EDIT: I have realized one potential folly (or alternately, brilliance) of such a plan. It might mean that anyone could create their own horcrux from their own death.
Or it might mean a few people would need to die to establish the initial network but then everyone with a network could create networks for others.
Adapting the Horcrux (2.0 in HPMoR) spell to make Amulets of Life Saving was the very first thing I thought of when considering ethical immortality in HPverse.
If the created human is never conscious, but always asleep, I don't see any ethical problems. Creating a sleeping body doesn't really count as creating a sentient human.
It just depends whether their dreams are good or bad.