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MarkusRamikin comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 9 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Sorry if this has been asked before, my meagre google-fu skills fail to reveal it.
Chapter 55. When Harry cast his Patronus in Azkaban, he lost some of his "life" to sustain it:
If you taboo "life", what exactly did Harry lose there and why should he never be able to regain it? It seems unlikely that MoR of all things subscribes to the idea of living things having a life force in some vitalist or spiritualist sense...
Also, will this have any effect on anything in the story? Did Harry permanently weaken his own magical potential or something of that sort?
It means Harry will never be able to truly forget or move past that horrible day. A part of him will always be there, just as a part of Dumbledore will always be in the black room. I am reminded of Barney's "second that would last forever" from HIMYM.
I'm pretty sure something more literal was meant. The way the story is written, it sounded like Harry was in danger of dying from exhaustion, expending... something, to fuel his Patronus. And expending irrecoverably, it is stressed, so it's not like he just did the equivalent of a life-or-death sprint which made him really tired.
I see no indication that the thing permanently sacrificed was the same thing fueling the Patronus. I think the Patronus burns "life" in the sense of one of the things Dementors also suck out, but that can be regenerated by resting (it was implied that the prisoners in Askaban would partially recover magic and something else if the Dementors didn't keep sucking it out when the true Patronus gave Bella a weeks worth of such regeneration back), and it seems unlikely that such a loss to Patronus radiation would be more permanent than loss to Dementors.
Hmmm, I see what you mean. "For it wasn't his magic he had expended, it had never been his magic that fueled the Patronus Charm."
I don't think that using the Patronus 2.0 permanently sacrifices anything though. After all, he's perfectly fine after killing the Dementor at Hogwarts, a situation in which none of his "life flowed back into him."
Are you sure? I read it as referring back to that scene specifically. The exact quote:
(Bold emphasis mine.)
I also view this as poetic language, not a literal loss of some substance, but a major change in the person that is called Harry. If enough change makes you a different person, than any major change can be seen as the fractional death of the previous person you were. Value drift is a pretty common subject around here.
Harry has just been inside an active concentration camp for hours. I hear that many allied soldiers were massively altered when they first came upon & liberated the Nazi concentration camps. It's even possible that something similar to this was written by returning soldiers in memoirs. I think poetic language is to be expected when processing this sort of trauma.
I was thinking the Patronus was fueled by HP (TVTropes warning). From the whole "magic makes you tired" effect, I had thought something like "life force" was a reasonable assumption.