= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
glumph comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
Comments (1106)
The exact phrasing of the Sorting Hat's statement was as follows:
Now, anyone that's read the sort of fairytale where riddles are important should immediately be able to come up with a half-dozen loopholes in that, but I think we can dismiss most of them out of hand given that the Sorting Hat has no particular incentive to be misleading. The most promising option that remains, by my reading, is that there's nothing separate about the Horcrux contents for the Hat to key off of -- they effectively are Harry, or part of him. He's probably tapping that part of himself when he has his Dark Side episodes, at the very least, but I don't think that's the full extent of the Horcrux's influence: at various points he asks himself or people around him why he doesn't think like other children, and narrative parsimony points rather strongly to the one unique trait we know he has.
The weakest point of this theory, as best I can tell, is the lack of any (obvious) memories from Voldemort; I think we can safely assume the Hat would have found them if they were locked away somewhere within him, but on the other hand it'd be a rather poor resurrection that resulted in an amnesiac personality-clone. Riddle's diary from Chamber of Secrets also argues along these lines. Unfortunately, we haven't seen any other Horcruces in MoR, so we have nothing in-universe to compare against, and canon may not be reliable. Perhaps the relevant memories got wiped out by infantile amnesia or something.
That seems to be supported by this passage from Chapter 85:
The idea is, crudely, that if Harry is a Horcrux, it is not because he has some distinct thing inside him, but because some part of Voldemort (part of his soul?) has "merged" with Harry.
Voldemort's Killing Curse worked. Lily's son is dead. The sacrifice magic hurt Voldemort and created a new person in Harry's body from Voldemort's mind, who we've been reading about ever since. The hat doesn't notice this because it never met the previous Harry. Voldemort knows all this and is treating Harry as his mind-child.
So Harry 1.0 was overwritten by Tom Riddle 2.0, but this time Tom got a loving family?
I just realized that the existence of the Dark Side is evidence against this.
Harry would be all Dark Side if his original personality had been overwritten.
It could be that horcruxes performed on things with brains are intensely unreliable -- so, instead of the brain being able to assert itself over any dumb matter it's bound to, like a book, it suddenly finds itself fighting for control with matter that has a 'soul' of its own. In this case, the horcrux gets trapped in the brain of an infant child, and you sort of split the difference - the horcrux is partially destroyed by years of being trapped in a baby brain, but leaves certain skills and intellect and preferences behind, integrated into Harry's brain.
An alternative hypothesis is that the horcrux is inactive, or unconscious, in some form, and has been integrated into Harry's brain, and Quirrelmort has a plan that involves waking it up at some point in the future if Harry can't be pushed into his dark side by subtler means.
I'll note that that passage really doesn't shift any likelihood away from this explanation.
That explanation would have been a pretty good one, right up until the Humanism chapters, where exposure to a Dementor turns Harry directly into Voldemort for a few minutes. After that it doesn't really hold water anymore.
I'd agree that it shifts probability away from that explanation, since passing out and waking up without a shred of compassion for other people is certainly less a reaction you expect from someone with only some fairly normal personality quirks than someone with something really unusual going on, although I'll note that Harry has always had something of a conflict between the part of him that cares about and wants the best for everyone, and the part of him which doesn't like or relate to other people, and this is certainly not unique or indicative of multiple personalities. But to say that exposure to a dementor "turns Harry directly into Voldemort" seems like jumping to conclusions to me. If we didn't already know that in the original canon, Harry was inadvertently made a horcrux of Voldemort, I'd say it was an extremely premature narrowing of the hypothesis space.
Voldemort might think like Harry did when he was dementor-warped, but we've never gotten to see inside his head, and he didn't act like Harry acted.
It's not merely that Harry thought a certain way:
"The response to compulsion was killing." Not just "He wanted to kill Dumbledore". The way it's phrased implies a memory, a history, a system of behavior that was predetermined and practiced. The only way that can be is if Harry has directly and fully assumed the mind of someone who has already established all that in their past. For me, "turn[ed] directly into Voldemort" is as accurate a way as any to describe that, unless it's someone other than Voldemort he turned directly into.
"He wanted to kill Dumbledore" would have been poor dramatic phrasing. "The response to compulsion was killing" could mean that he has a memory and history of this, or it could simply mean that in his state of mind, killing seems like the natural response to being compelled to do things by others. If I were trying to write that, I would sooner write "the response to compulsion was killing" than "He wanted to kill Dumbledore."
The fact that Harry underwent a serious personality change on exposure to the dementor, and Hermione speculated that such a thing might happen to a person who already had that darker personality within them, is a substantial piece of evidence that Harry has something more unusual going on than some personality quirks. The phrasing used in that scene, on the other hand, I do not think can reasonably be treated as evidence of anything in particular. In fact, I can't think of a single explanation for Harry's personality change which would make the phrasing seem weird, given that artistic impact of the words being used is as important a consideration as their connotations.
I didn't read the 'the response to X was Y' approach as experience as Voldemort. I thought it was the goal-orientedness side, the intent to kill. The algorithm of 'I am here, I want to be there, where is the shortest route'.
I can't imagine Voldemort or Quirrell thinking so crudely, even in terms of goal systems.