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moritz comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85 - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: FAWS 18 April 2012 02:30AM

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Comment author: chaosmosis 19 April 2012 03:38:19AM *  9 points [-]

I was thinking about it earlier and Harry has massively underranked the utility of Horcruxes. If one person must die so that a different person can live 100K+ more years then that is an incredibly desirable tradeoff from an impartial utilitarian standpoint and everyone should be doing this. You could even choose to murder only old and dying people so that there would be almost no loss of net time that people spend alive. He dismissed it way too quickly during his conversation with Dumbledore.

Comment author: moritz 06 May 2012 11:34:34AM 4 points [-]

One thing I'm missing from this whole horcrux discussion is: What happens if you die of age, and have a horcrux?

People just seem to assume that once you have a horcrux, you won't wither and die.

But we have no indication to believe this is what actually happens. canon!Voldemort catches a rebounding killing curse, and the horcrux doesn't make him live on in perfect health. Instead he is very close to death, has no body, and needs to possess animals or other humans to extort some influence.

So what happens if you have a horcrux, and come close to dying from old age? It seems to me that your body would die, and you'd need some avenue to live again, and that is not a nice prospect at all. If you have access to a philospher's stone you wouldn't have such a problem, but then you wouldn't need a horcrux in the first place. What else can you do? Possess another human, who suffers greatly from it. Or the ritual that requires a servant of yours to sacrifice a limb; oh, and there's only a limited supplies of bones from your father, so you can't repeat it indefinitely.

In summary, it seems that a single death doesn't give you 100k+ years of live without additional major costs.