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Xachariah comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 24, chapter 95 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Your intuitions about evolution and my intuitions must be drastically different.
I can imagine no possible world where human bodies were attached to an immortal decision-making engine, on an evolutionary timescale, where human brain biology still looks practically indistinguishable from all other mammal brain biology and where human grief behavior still corresponds to other mammal grief behavior.
My intuition was that since a hypothetical immortal soul doesn't pass on the owner's genes and therefore doesn't contribute to genetic fitness, it should have little if any direct influence on evolutionary incentives.
It's true that an animal that somehow evolved a soul would look drastically different neurologically from a human, but we know empirically that wizards are mostly the same as muggles psychologically/neurologically, so it seems this doesn't happen to be the case. By the way, I agree with Draco's hypothesis that if souls do exist, muggles probably don't have them, since they don't seem to have gotten any other benefits from the magic patch.
I don't consider myself a particularly competent practitioner of counterfactual evopsych, so if you do, and still disagree, I suppose I'll have to update my beliefs.
Brain size would almost instantly collapse (from consuming 20% of ATP) once cognitive processing was offloaded to the immortal decision-making engine.
What I mean by "immortal soul" in this case is just the Source of Magic backing up the brain state of wizards when they die. If the soul were capable of cognitive function independently of the brain then of course you' and Xachariah would be right.
How about if we replace "immortal decision-making engine"with "extradimensional backup drive"?