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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 24, chapter 95
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 95. The previous thread has passed 300 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system.
Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:
You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
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Comments (304)
So, something from the sub-Reddit:
My limited physics knowledge is failing me. Assuming that you stick with relativistic velocity transformations, why is conserving momentum problematic?
Ch 96 initial thoughts (no big spoilers):
I wonder if EY is aware of a couple of things: There are Muggles living in Godric's Hollow (canonically, Hogsmeade is the only all-Wizarding village in Britain, and at least one Muggle resident appears briefly in the books). The Potter family motto was first written by Paul of Tarsus (unless he was quoting somebody else, presumably long lost), the famous early Christian.
It is pretty sad how that quotation is interpreted canonically. Paul's original meaning is much closer to MoR!Harry's; although Paul's interpretation is softened by his faith in a deus ex machina, it was a faith that Paul may have sincerely believed (where most modern Christians, after 2000 years of disappointment, only believe that they believe).
Chapter 96 spoilers (it's out; please read): The graveyard made me remember how canon implied that Voldemort was a descendant of the Peverelles as well, and how there was Peverelle tombstone there... I had a "Oh crap... no, this is the end of this arc; EY wouldn't have Voldemort show up there to use Peverelle bones in this chapter... right? I mean, there was supposed to be padding before the next arc..."
I couldn't help but wonder what Harry would think if he found out that inscription was also in the Bible (I forget which book; one of the apissles?)
(ETA: 1corenthians15:26.)
That part of 1 Corinthians is a prophecy, not a call to action.
This is quite true (the action that Paul's writings seem to call for are "turn to Christ; be nice to each other; don't be afraid if people try to torture and murder you for joining our cult, because our founder resurrected and promised he'd bring us back if we die before he's done with his work in Heaven". While Paul comes across as way more antideathist than modern Christians, it is abundantly clear he meant it differently from the Peverelles. (Did canon give a time period for the Peverelles? I got the impression they predate the founders of Hogwarts, but I don't recall anything more specific. Presumably, they would have been familiar with Christian memes in any case, so somewhere down the line, verses that would fit their mission without setting off Muggle heracy detectors became the family's choice for epitaphs.)
The HP Wikia makes them 13th century, citing a gravestone from the film (although I cannot read the dates in the film still on their site). Since they cite the film instead of the book, the book probably doesn't say (although it might have just said something less precise than the full dates that Wikia gives).
Hogwarts was founded about 1000 years before the events of the series, so apparently a few centuries before the Peverells.
I had this theory before the current arc, but updated towards it once it became more important to Harry in chapter 89.
In Humanism, Harry thinks about vanquishing future death, but that would not help the majority of the world's population (which has already died). What with the only known method of backwards time travel creating stable time loops, and with people already having died, this makes sense to a degree. But if he were to find a way to upload just prior to death, then technically everybody would have died, but in most ways that count they would not. As people have died more than six hours ago, this also seems impossible with known methods of time travel. However, Harry was (understandably) too distracted when learning about Time-Turners to notice that the six-hour limit could not possibly be fundamental. I believe I have a way around this limit, using only Time-Turners and Muggle understanding of physics. It does rely on the following assumptions:
Not all of these conditions are strictly necessary, but the details of the situation would need to be modified to suit them better. I will now illustrate how to prove to somebody that you can go back in time more than six hours (specifically, six hours and five minutes); extending this to allow for remote unobservable uploading is left as an exercise to the reader.
EDIT: Fixed the link for acceleration calculation by escaping parentheses
After sitting down and going over everything I know about this fic, I believe I've gotten a substantial way towards solving its puzzles. The long version is at my blog here, but here I'll just state without justification the prediction I've come up with:
Voldemort believes fate won't let him defeat Harry until Harry attains the power to vanquish him, which in this case means becoming powerful enough to destroy all of Voldemort's well-hidden horcruxes. And in fact, Harry will become that powerful, by using the differing conservation laws for magic and science to conduct conservation-law arbitrage. Voldemort's plan is to possess Harry once Harry has attained ultimate power, but Harry will prevent Voldemort from winning through complicated means involving multiple currently yet-to-be-fired Checkov's guns.
why would voldemort need to possess harry? he's already stronger and smarter. and immortal.
That sounds like a variant of a pattern from Frank Herbert. A wants B to be strong enough to be useful, so A makes B's life worse to toughen B up. B becomes stronger, but is unwilling to cooperate with A.
I haven't read your blog post yet, but I'm already upvoting for the concept of conservation-law arbitrage.
I recently started yet another re-read of HPMoR, and noticed something I don't think has been discussed before.
In chapter 1, Petunia is talking about Lily making her pretty (which I believe she did using a potion of eagle's splendor with the blueberries replaced by Thestral blood), and says
I used to think that Lily just wanted to protect Petunia from the danger and possibly other reasons. However, after hearing the prophesy in Chapter 89, I'm updating in favor of Lily telling the truth as she understood it. Centaurs are, after all, great at divination, especially astrology (tangent: I've never understood how that can be used for predicting the future on Earth, because it seems like anybody for the last several hundred years could have then, in a vague way, predicted the entire course of human history at least until the Space Age) and may be able to see this coming. Usually astrology isn't the precise, at least not in canon HP, but when it predicts the destruction of the "very stars in heaven", it may be more precise (and the centaurs may care more).
Yes, this has been pointed out. Even more worrisome, how Lily treated Petunia is apparently the main divergence point between HPMOR and canon.
Oh, I just figured something out:
Voldemort wants to see Harry's science textbooks because based on the prophecy he believes (or at least suspects) that Harry will have the power to destroy even the Pioneer Plaque horcrux, and he needs to figure out how that could possibly be.
Can't believe I didn't get that sooner.
He did specify only the textbooks that Harry deemed safe for Draco, presumably keeping with the wizarding model of "the lesser perils."
...but yes, likely so. Couple "if you know what you're going to think in the future and just think it now" with "any technique which is good enough to defeat me once is good enough to learn myself" and he has every reason to want to figure this out pronto. On top of wanting to be Harry's sole source of information, of course.
Something I don't think anyone has commented on yet: exactly why is Harry in the permitted forest in Chapter 95? What is he looking for? This Harry has not previously shown a tendency to wander off into nature for peaceful relaxation. He's more of a library sort of guy, if he wants a place to quietly think and consider.
Too closely linked to Hermione?
Especially, why does Quirrell know that he's in the forest?
Triangulation via sense of doom.
Only works if Quirrell knows where to start looking to begin with. Actually, it is fun to speculate on whether this sense of doom obeys the inverse squared law or something else. Options:
there is a conserved "doom charge" which repels another one like it: you get inverse squared for the force of repulsion.
there is a "doom radiation" affecting a "doom detector": simple inverse for the discomfort level. Something like a "doom magic" source.
Quirrell has a doom charge and Harry is a doom dipole: this would be 1/r^3, but it does not really work since the sense of doom is not directional
Quirrell has a doom charge and Harry gets a "doom induction", forming a doom dipole whose strength depends on Quirrell's doom field strength: 1/r^4. This breaks the symmetry between the two, however.
Both H and Q get doom induction from each other: 1/r^6. This is way too steep to fit the experimental data, as it would feel more like a "doom wall".
There is a dissipating doom charge (because the doom charge carrier "doomon" is massive, or because of the ambient magic vacuum polarization): exponential (Yukawa) decay.
1 or 2 are probably the only likely options, with 2 less likely, both because of the need for the doom source and because simple inverse decays too slowly to fit the description.
I was going to say that it appears that their connection is not symmetrical, because Quirrell was able to track down Harry during the troll event. Further research seemed to reduce this likelihood, however.
Quirrell started burning through the substance of Hogwarts once he realized that Harry had found the troll. He didn't know that the two had met until he read Harry's emotions. That he did not realize that they were getting closer before means that he wasn't tracking both the troll and Harry. I was going to say that it appears clear that Quirrell was tracking Harry (almost certainly via link), because he is not fool enough to leave his magic on his weapon, but not only did he strengthen the troll (and thus must have a method of covering his tracks) but also there is this:
That does not seem to imply that he could feel Harry zipping all over the place, because I would expect Quirrell, being able to read Harry's emotions in the Great Hall and since, to correctly deduce where Harry was going if he started moving in a hurry. That implies that what he was tracking was indeed the troll, and so reduces the likelihood that he could track Harry with the link.
Though it is still clear that the resonance is not wholly symmetrical, as Harry lacks the emotion-reading aspect.
If he does get even a vague sense of doom at large distances, then he could have triangulated regardless, first with the second set of emotions that would have popped up an hour ago, then with the current ones from a different starting location.
Or maybe Harry is not aware that it is or not as attuned to it. I don't recall him seriously trying to investigate or exploit it.
I must try to work ‘magic vacuum polarization’ into conversation.
That would be
(I find this kind of funny).
… and thus were postulated the Maxwell-TrE-equations of Doomodynamics.
Kinda OT: Your having posted the above, plus being an LWer, makes it very likely you would enjoy Yvain's post on Newtonian ethics (but also that you've read it already).
And also Blessed Are The Taxonomers, For Theirs Is The Phylum Of God, and well, a lot of stuff that he wrote. He has written multiple posts in this style, and they are uniformly excellent.
Yes indeed, but the "Newtonian ethics" one seemed particularly apposite here.
Perhaps, but the forest offers better isolation if he's more concerned about being disrupted from his thoughts.
A little piece of evidence pointing to hypothesis "Harry had stolen Hermione's body".
"I care enough to make an actual effort" can be interpreted as "I already made an actual effort", and that was the interpretation that came to my mind on the first reading.
Also, this is very interesting:
And earlier:
It looks like Harry will be able to actually be very cautious as opposed to speak about being very cautious.
Maybe this story will not end in a complete disaster.
For those interested: Chapter 64 has a new omake, "Jasmine's Lamp".
Now I'm dying to see rational treatment of Mozenrath.
You know, the fellow who had a lot of raw magical power, and hence every problem looked to him like a nail in a desperate need to be blasted away with his gauntlet? The fellow whose ego was very inflated and sore, and the concept of "pretending to lose" was so alien to him that he had his ass kicked by a book? The fellow who was unable to think clearly while his place in dominance hierarchy was challenged by Aladdin because he cared about proving his worth more than about getting actual work done? The fellow who believed that other people had no use for him, and only way to make them helpful was to turn them into obedient zombies? The fellow who apparently knew many ancient places of power and pieces of forgotten magical lore yet fails to use them successfully?
Yeah, I want to see a rational treatment of this one. And don't think that we ought to give Aladdin a Death Star to make story balanced. He already has an unlimited supply of wish spells.
Jasmine, as a woman, is unable to command the Djinni? Obviously that wouldn't fly in a Disney production, but I can't recall any women commanding djinn in the Arabian Nights (not that I'm familiar with all of the stories); more generally, the women are pretty passive. (The exception, of course, is the framing story, but Scheherazade would find it unwise to put powerful, active, clever women in her stories.) The original story's Jasmine character (Badroulbadour) is actually pretty stupid.
In the original stories only powerful wizards can command djinn. The way non-wizards get access is by freeing a djinni whom a powerful wizard has trapped and the djinni granting wishes out of gratitude if he's in a good mood (and after being trapped for centuries the djinni isn't necessarily in a good mood). Also in neither story a djinn all-powerful.
That's true about the original original stories, but the djinn in the original Aladdin story[^1] were bound to their objects pretty much in the way that Disney treats their Genie. They still don't seem to be all-powerful; I agree about that.
[^1]: The original Aladdin story is centuries later than the original Arabian Nights. It is first attested in 18th-century French, although people do seem to accept that it came from an oral Arabian predecessor.
The Naruto one is also new - at least, it wasn't there the last time I read MoR a year or two ago.
Was the Genie's post-liberation power ever explained in the animated series? I only watched a few episodes, and am more familiar with Disney's movie trilogy; I got the impression that, in the movies, the Genie retained the power to solve pretty much all the problems (hence why Jafar had to out-Genie him to keep the second movie afloat, and why the Genie was left at the palace in the third while Aladdin was out at the actual plot). I think I'll have to read the TV Tropes page again, now that I'm curious as to how well they kept each episode from being "Villain casts a spell on Genie, Aladdin breaks spell, Genie saves the day".
Tangential: I think this is the first time I've looked at Chapter 64 since the most recent arc started up, and this
Was kinda saddening in light of certain events.
Did I miss something, or do we still have very little idea about what the word substitution in Snape's remembrance of the prophecy means?
versus
for those two different spell-elements cannot exist in the same voldemort...? O.o Those two different spell-elements cannot exist in the same fold?
I thought Severus didn't want to repeat the real prophecy to a random student, so he substituted in some nonsense words, while attempting to keep the tone, meter, and rhythm in place.
I thought approximately the same thing, but along the lines of wanting the student to focus on the tone, meter, and rhythm (which apparently carry much of the meaning) so taking away the meaning of the actual words to remove distractions.
I want to like this theory, but I'm not sure that the nonsense words sufficiently obscure the real prophecy. For example, if Voldemort tracked down the student, somehow reversed her Obliviation (if necessary), and then used Legilimency to find out the wording (if it turns out that Voldemort doesn't know this part?) then I'm pretty sure Voldemort would be able to reconstruct the original words.
For that matter, we are also told that "only someone who heard the prophecy in the seer's original voice would hear all the meaning that was in the riddle." Therefore what Voldemort would actually be interested in, given access to all of Rianne's memories, is Snape's own interpretation of the prophecy, or even any hints at it.
But didn't Voldemort already get that when he Legilimized Snape, when Snape originally told him the prophecy?
He got 1980ish!Snape's interpretation/thoughts, 1991!Snape presumably has new ones.
It's an impersonation of an accent (maybe Eastern European?) Spellets = spirits, Vuld = world.
I thought "SPELLETS" and "VULD" are just Seer-y ways of saying "spirits" and "world" respectively.
This is so contrived as to be almost silly, but I just realized that if you squint hard enough Sybill’s original prophecy might have referred to Harry as the Dark Lord and Quirrell as the one who “approaches”.
The “Defense Professor” is a persona, and in chatting with Harry Quirrell basically claims that he becomes whoever he’s playing the role of. The prophecy could interpret the creation of that persona as “birth”. “Mark” is ambiguous enough (in English it could just mean “notice”), and besides, the prophecy doesn’t say when he will be marked. And he certainly has powers Harry knows not; his weird doomy link with Harry (which we just learned gives him partial access to Harry’s mind) being only the most obvious example, and remarkable from the fact that Harry doesn’t seem to ever think about it.
Again, it’s quite contrived, but it could be a nice twist to pull on your readers, though I assign a very low probability that Eliezer would do that given his statements.
Foreshadowing patrol.
Quirrell:
Since Harry wants to defeat Death, and has a glowy counterspell to destroy him, he'd have some use for this.
Strangely enough, Harry:
If this bit of obscure bit foreshadowing comes true, I update for the probability of Harry living in some simulation or story to 1.
Nah, there are already enough dementors around.
The probability of Harry living in a story is already 1.
I don't understand how that's a reply to my comment.
By far the most likely explanation for this passage is the Quirrel is describing the ritual to summon a dementor, and Harry rediscovers the counterspell. So the hinted-at event has already happened.
My comment was a reply to the comment above yours, sorry.
That wouldn't be a hinted-at event, since that passage occurs way after the Patronus chapters. It would be... aftershadowing?
At first I wrote "foreshadowing," but I was too lazy to look up the order in which things happened, so I substituted what I thought was a word safely agnostic to timing.
1-epsilon: Perhaps Harry winds up simulating this world and beaming the ideas for HPMoR to Eliezer to see how people react, or perhaps Eliezer is really Harry James Potter Evans Verres with polyjuice and lots of memory charms, or some other highly unlikely possibility that could make it less than 1.
All of which is to say that the probability that Harry is living in a story is ~1, given the evidence available to us.
I was assuming the -elipson part just went without saying. Of course you're right.
I didn't cry in "Humanism." I didn't cry in "Stanford Prison Experiment." I didn't even cry when Hermione died. But this chapter finally did it for me. "If I were the first person in the universe who ever really cared about someone, then I'd be honored to be that person." That's the kind of moral stand missing in any number of lectures and parables by supposed moral absolutists. It takes quite a bit of deviation from normal thinking to even really comprehend that emotion, let alone spontaneously describe it.
What I love best about HPMOR is that it could so easily have been a Kid Hero parody fic, and even though it skirts pretty close, especially in the earlier chapters, it is never quite a straight up parody. In fact, for all that Harry snarks about his life being one big fantasy cliche, HPMOR takes the Kid Hero genre deadly seriously and plays almost every trope completely straight. Sure, Harry doesn't rush headlong into every danger like most kid heroes, but that's a difference in method, not in spirit. He feels the weight of responsibility just like anyone else who was ever chosen, or chose themselves.
Far more than the science and even the rationality, I love HPMOR because it believes in heroes. Conversations like this one are why I'm not reading a textbook. One day, I'm going to catalog every single discussion about morality, duty, heroism, or wisdom. I genuinely think reading them often will make me a better person, or at least better at being good. So thank you, Eliezer. You really make fiction shine as a teaching medium
I didn't cry in "Humanism." I didn't cry in "Stanford Prison Experiment." I didn't even cry when Hermione died. But this chapter finally did it for me.
me too :)
I didn't cry in "Humanism." I didn't cry in "Stanford Prison Experiment." I didn't even cry when Hermione died. But this chapter finally did it for me.
me too :)
(This pertains to an earlier chapter, but discussion in its thread seems to have died down. Anyone got strong opinions on the proper etiquette in that situation?)
In chapter 91, we are told
Now, given the circumstances, it's not that surprising that either of them had trouble with that particular charm. But isn't it odd that Harry didn't just try again? And we're told that for McGonagall "[i]t wasn't the first time she'd done it so, but she seemed to have lost some of the knack".
Are we to infer that there's some special Patronus-related weirdness going on? Or is it just ordinary grief and upset?
[EDITED to fix a trivial and tangential mistake.]
Harry's Patronus can't possibly work here. His "happy thought" is about facing death and destroying it rather than hiding from it; recall that he couldn't cast Patronus v1.0 because it required thinking happy thoughts about something else rather than facing death, and Harry couldn't do this. But the reason he's casting the spell is to convince himself that maybe there's a chance Hermione isn't dead after all, which is pretty much exactly the not-think-about-the-bad-thing mindset that didn't work for him then.
On the other hand, McGonagall is probably suffering from the typical problem of normal-Patronus casters: if your spell involves thinking about happy thoughts about something else other than death, then having evidence of death right in front of you is going to be a problem.
It's possible that the "lost some of the knack" thing implies that prolonged exposure to Harry Potter is wearing away at McGonagall's ability to think about something else. Of all the adult characters, McGonagall is probably the one most seriously thinking about Harry's ideas.
She's getting more Harry and Godric like, but lacks Harry's vision of a possible future defeating death to allow for an improved Patronus?
Some conjectures on the nature of magic, the invention of new spells, etc.:
Whatever makes magic work is basically mechanical but smart enough to be sensitive to human intentions.
It has to do something broadly comparable to simulating the universe.
It is equipped with defensive measures of one or more of the following kinds. (a) Some things -- e.g., certain kinds of escapades involving Time-Turners -- would require excessive, possibly infinite, amounts of computation, and it won't allow that. (b) Some things -- again, including Time-Turner abuse -- actually lead to contradictions. Maybe those are caught in advance and prevented, or maybe those simulations just end when the contradiction is reached. (c) There are deliberate countermeasures against anything that looks like it's trying to marshal too much power, in case it's an attempt at hacking the underlying computational substrate (or whatever it is that makes magic work).
That is one reason why inventing new spells is dangerous. You might accidentally produce a contradiction or an excessively expensive simulation, or you might do something that looks like an attempt at becoming a god, in which case you -- or your laboratory -- or your country -- or your universe -- is terminated with extreme prejudice.
It is also why the most powerful magics -- the rituals -- require permanent sacrifices: something that involves a permanent sacrifice is harder to apply recursively in some weird way that turns it into a Become God spell. (It's like the way that the class of functions you can compute using only loops whose number of iterations is bounded in advance is smaller and easier to prove things about than the class of all functions you can compute.)
Whatever-makes-magic-work wasn't programmed in advance with any particular spells, potions, etc.; it's a general-purpose magic substrate. All the specific things have been brought into being by human beings -- it's a gigantic game of Nomic. That is why, e.g., all the spells have names that were obviously thought up by humans.
The words, gestures, etc., are likewise basically under the control of the inventors. That is why they can be stupid things like "Wingardium Leviosa", or require you to say "Oogely boogely" with just the right timing. (Perhaps the precision required is up to the inventor, or perhaps whatever-makes-magic-work decides how much precision to require on the basis of how powerful the magic is.)
Bringing a new magic into being isn't fundamentally difficult [EDITED to add: that would explain why there is such a thing as "the usual evasions" when someone asks precocious questions about spell creation]; perhaps it just requires forming a certain sort of intention and then demonstrating what actions (etc.) are required to bring about the desired effect. The difficulty and danger come (a) from the protective measures already mentioned, (b) from the risk that when you tell whatever-makes-magic-happen what you want you might fail to be specific enough and get something that meets your stated spec but is disastrous, and (c) from restrictions like one I mention below.
Maybe the heritability of access to magic is itself a thing that was decided by (a much earlier generation of) humans, perhaps as a deliberate measure to limit the number and increase the cohesion of those designing new magics.
How would this sort of general-purpose Everything Machine likely be set up, so as not to produce a universe of total chaos as everyone starts inventing their own new spells? (Even assuming no one is able to do anything too destructive or internally inconsistent, on account of the sort of restrictions I already mentioned.) Probably by having a requirement that new spells be consistent with existing ones, in some rather broad sense of "consistent". That would be another reason why inventing new magic is difficult. It might also give another reason for things like the Interdict of Merlin: an opportunity for old magic to be "garbage-collected", freeing up regions of possible-magic-space for new generations to explore.
I don't assign a super-high probability to any of these, but I find each more plausible than any other similarly-specific alternative I've thought of.
I'm repeatedly seeing 'Monroe' spelled as 'Munroe'. Is this due to a disagreement about how the name should be spelled, a common spelling error that has perpetuated in these forums, or is it a shorthand reference to some prior discussions or concepts which I'm thus missing in my reading on these discussions?
I suspect this. The author of xkcd is named Randall Munroe, which may explain its larger availability in the minds of typers.
Well, it's probably supposed to be spelled "Momroe" as in "David Troll Momroe". :)
It's spelled "Monroe" in Chapter 86, and there's a "Most Ancient House of Monroe". Personally, I never get these names right either, but I keep a text file handy with all the names, and hard to spell spells like Legilimency Occlumency Occlumens, and Legilimens. Then it's just a simple matter of cut and paste.
So, what do you all think is Voldemort's goal here? In canon, he was a power hungry sadist, so conquering the world while torturing his minions made sense. But MOR!Voldemort seems to find people tiresome and is happiest as an immortal in lifeless space. In that case, why not Horcrux Pioneer 11, kill his earthly body and be done with it?
At the moment, he has a plausible motivation -- provoke Harry into discovering a better form of immortality than Horcruxes, and use it for himself. But it seems implausible that this was his goal until Harry came to Hogwarts this year since he had no reason to expect that his murder of James and Lilly would lead to a combined scientific genius/wizard. What was he trying to accomplish before that?
I think Quirrelmort enjoys many aspects of life on Earth (he is shown to enjoy fancy foods and intricate plots, etc.) He enjoys outer space as an occasional respite from human nonsense, but that doesn't mean he would enjoy a billion years of staring at the stars.
My goal had I access to magic:
instantiate self in immortal form
build experience machine
make 1 and 2 unreachable by launching them out of the solar system
He did say he was worried about morons...I mean Harry destroying the probe. So all his efforts could be merely to ensure his survival. But that would make for a rather lackluster villain/ending.
Conventional wisdom around here, as I understand it: He wanted to unify Magical Britain under a strong leader (namely himself, in the persona of David Monroe) and wipe out, or neutralize, or otherwise remove the danger posed by, the muggles. He wanted to do this because he was very, very frightened of dying, and he thought nuclear weapons (and potentially other things you might classify as "scientific overreaching") were likely to produce more destruction than he could escape. And probably also because he wanted power.
Quirrell's dialog in this chapter has me thinking again about what exactly he did wrong, as David Munroe. I wonder if Eliezer thought that through as well as he should have, being a little too eager to show off the character's flawed understanding of human nature. From chapter 34:
Amelia Bones' later dialog suggests he was giving similar speeches as David Munroe.
Now the thing to notice here is that Voldemort's policies for troop discipline were really not all that exceptional. Lots of armies have had a policy of executing traitors and deserters. A policy of using torture to punish any slack may be hard to find, at least in the modern world, but I think if you go back a couple centuries you'd find militaries using flogging to punish minor infractions. The way the Dark Mark is described here suggests it works slightly different than canon, in that it acts as a magical tracking device whether the bearer deliberately signals Voldemort or not. Obviously no real world military does that, but if it were possible to cheaply put magical tracking spells on soldiers in the real world, it wouldn't be surprising to see militaries using them to discourage desertion. (In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there were already a proposal floating around DARPA to put tracking implants in soldiers. For their own good, ya know, so they can be rescued if they go missing.)
Insofar as we can give a sensible account of what "Munroe" did wrong, we might attribute it to bad marketing: pitching it as, "hey let's do what the Death Eaters are doing!" rather than, "we need to do what any country would do in wartime." Even a cynic should be able to understand people's aversion to the appearance of imitating like Death Eaters, and respond by providing would-be followers with rationalizations for why they're totally different than the Death Earters. Also, from later chapters it sounds like "Munroe" may have been angling to be made magical dictator for life right away. A more sensible approach would have been to first ask to be made temporary dictator, like the original Roman dictators, and then find a way to make the crisis permanent, justifying a permanent dictatorship.
We don't know anything about what Monroe's sales pitch was like (or even if he had one). However, given that "People began to speak of him as the next Dumbledore, it was thought that he might become Minister of Magic after the Dark Lord fell" it probably wasn't as terrible as you're suggesting.
Quirrell's conversation with Hermione seems to imply that for the most part, Monroe focused on action rather than speeches, though it may well have been action calculated to look as heroic as possible in order to win public support.
Amelia Bones:
So it's not totally clear from that if "Munroe" specifically proposed a Light Mark, or just made similar speeches advocating unity or what. But whatever the case, it seems that, while yes people were talking about him as the next Dumbledore, saying he could become the next Minster of Magic, etc., they were not uniting behind him to his satisfaction.
On the 'starfield' spell:
Are we seeing the stars from the perspective of the Voyager probe?
I often get this confused, but isn't it supposed to be the Pioneer probe?
You're right; it is.
In 1992, I think Voyager 2 was still closer to the sun than Pluto. Wouldn't the sun still be the brightest star in the sky?
From Pluto, the sun looks like 'the brightest star in the sky', not like an actual solar body. Not sure about halfway point.
The spell hides current environment, except for a floor/ground "disk." It could be oriented so that the sun is down and thus out of sight.
I thought that that would be where Earth was, but at that distance, you're right; the Sun would make much more sense.
This is a common speculation.
I'm getting that another common speculation is that HPMOR!Voldemort has to 'synchronize' himself to all of his Horcruxes.
If so, what are the chances that part of the motivation of drawing Harry into the spell, is that he can synchronize himself to the plaque and Harry at the same time?
Incremental synchronizations are interesting -- if Horcruxes can get out of sync, then the "soul" recovered from each may develop conflicting objectives.
It is still unclear how horcruxes would fit into the HPMOR universe given the premise that souls do not exist. Here are some thoughts and conjectures revolving around the postulate that horcruxes are complete memory/personality backups:
To recreate one's identity, there has to be more than just replication of memories. There also has to be a way to replicate the 'software' that governs our thought processes. Removing the limitations and shortcuts that our physical brain has in place would undoubtedly remove lots of mental biases (making us hyper-rational) but also raise the question of whether the resulting entity will really be 'us' or just well approximated copies of us (a well explored topic in the transcendent pony fic).
The very possibility of possession (as evidenced in the zombie Quirrell) gives evidence in favor of the possibility to project one's mind outside one's original body and still be able to retain the capacity to not only have semblance of life (a la magical portraits and ghosts), but to also be able to learn new information and retain it (i.e. grow) and interact meaningfully with the environment.
Assuming away the whole issue of whether one's identity can be virtually encapsulated independent of our biological hardware, this would require careful copy control (lest there be multiple versions of you running around, raising the question of which one is the 'real' you, explored comedically in one of robst's fanfics). Is Harry an incomplete horcrux, retaining Voldemort's post-transcendent software (hyper-rationality), but not his memories, i.e. a failure of copy control? (He clearly didn't inherit his rationality from biological parents?)
Magic in potterverse directly interacts with mind. So magic is capable of storing information, including memories, software, etc?
Since Voldemort has already gone through the process, he already knows what's involved.
It's been repeatedly stated - by Harry, anyway -that magic works based on how the creator expected it to. Therefore, Horcruxes work as if souls exist.
This may or may not be true, but it does mean HPJV is being a tad foolish in his assumption that they are impossible.
My suspicion is that this premise is flawed. Harry has already been shown to have one of his premises invalidated by experiment, and from my view the reader has seen enough experimental results to seriously question the premise that souls don't exist (in the HPMORverse).
Given the general transhumanist affinity for "uploading", it seems a lot easier to me.
Also, given all the references to "being in a story", "things working like they would in a story", etc, being in a virtual environment where code can be copied from a to b in a flash seems an obvious idea. McGongall's mind still works in a cat's brain.
Do you mean that this is the premise of your analysis, or a premise of the HPMOR universe? Because if I understand correctly, all we have to show for the non-existence of souls is Harry's (entirely rational) belief, which may yet be challenged by future observations.
It's not Harry's observations; it's everybody's observations of the world. People don't act like souls exist. If Dumbledore really thought that people just go on to another great adventure when they die, he wouldn't have a bunch of pedestals of broken wands.
Nobody in HPMOR believes in souls or acts like they exist. That's why Harry can decisively conclude that they don't exist.
Well, ok, but it's also been shown many times that most of the HPMOR cast needs to take several ranks in Knowledge(What The Heck They're Talking About) just to approach the effectiveness of the average level-1 fighter. Harry should not be weighting either their beliefs or their aliefs very strongly as evidence in any direction.
Correction: it is Harry's observations of the general public of the wizarding world, which is far from the same thing.
There are many possible worlds in which a number of powerful wizards know for a fact that souls exist, and live their lives accordingly, but which look exactly the same to Harry.
In fact, it's rather probable that a world in which a minority of wizards are aware that souls really exist would look just like this one. Imagine what it's like to be a member of such a minority trying to spread the truth.
"By the way, souls really exist."
"I know - everyone believes in souls."
"No, I mean it - souls actually, literally, exist. So you shouldn't be too sad when people die, because they're just going somewhere else. And you shouldn't be too sad about your baby being stillborn, because it'll have another chance at happiness in the afterlife. And depending on their circumstances, severely disabled people might be better off comitting suicide so they can move on to a healthy existence faster. And- hey, where are you going?"
I'm not saying any of those are necessarily reasonable conclusions to draw from the existence of souls, but it makes the point. Trying to live like this will automatically put you at odds with the rest of society, who will at best treat you like a crazy minority religious sect. So most soul-aware wizards will probably keep it to themselves, resulting in a world where Harry will be unaware of them.
The people who point this out would be asked "Where's the proof?"
And if they could produce some, everyone would believe. And if they couldn't produce any... well why should they believe it in the first place?
That's how the conversation goes if the Soul Evangelist is trying to convert non believer into a believer. All she has to do is point out the existence of ghosts, the veil in the departments of mysteries, or maybe the legends of the resurrection stone. Most people would take this as sufficient evidence.
In the proposed scenario, she is faced with the much more difficult task of converting a believer-in-belief.
But what about Dumbledore? If there were anyone in such a Soul Sect, I'm pretty sure Dumbledore would be one of them. Wouldn't you agree?
But as "Pretending to be Wise" suggests, and as Dumbledore's room of broken wands makes clear, Dumbledore does not, in fact, behave as if souls are real. Now "perhaps" this is all an elaborate ruse on the part of Dumbledore, and he is just pretending to behave-as-if souls are not real. Regardless of how twisty and deceptive Dumbledore is, this particular deception seems wildly out of character for him.
(Actually, it would be more accurate to say that Dumbledore does not behave as if the afterlife is real. It's quite possible to have souls without an afterlife; perhaps they just get garbage-collected if not attached to the world in some matter (whether it's a person's body, or a horcrux, etc.). In fact, I regard this as a likely enough scenario to be worth thinking about (p = 0.6, say?).)
I agree that, if knowing about the afterlife is made likelier by being an experienced and powerful wizard, Dumbledore should be expected to know about the afterlife. However, we have now gone from "it's everybody's observations of the world" to "it's Harry's observations of the general public" to "it's Harry's observations of Dumbledore". In other words, Harry's (and our) evidence base for the lack of an afterlife keeps getting narrower the more we think about it.
In addition, it's worth noting that Dumbledore, for all his virtues, is also great at self-deception and confused thinking (plotting and strategy excepted). There are all manner of circumstances under which Dumbledore would be unaware of the existence of the afterlife - for example, if it led to a conclusion he was unable to accept, all his power and experience might not stop him flinching away.
Even if souls exist and everyone knows this, evolution would probably still select for humans who feel grief after their loved ones die.
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.
How about if we replace "immortal decision-making engine"with "extradimensional backup drive"?
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.
It seems to me that that belief has already been challenged twice, and Harry is being obtuse in still dismissing them so easily. I am sort of expecting Eliezer to use this as a lesson in updating on evidence. It seems to me Harry is acting like Twilight Sparkle in 'Feeling Pinkie Keen' by refusing to explore the existence of souls more closely.
For this post, I meant premise of my analysis. More generally, my priors tell me that is the author's viewpoint of the world, though I wouldn't presume to guess.
Why should the author's viewpoint of the world determine the author's viewpoint of the HPMoR world? Presumably the author also believes that magic does not exist.
Because it seems likely that someone like Eliezer would write a magic system of the sufficiently-advanced-technology-is-indistinguishable-from-magic sense rather than the waves hands-because-magic!-waves hands sense.
Further, if souls existed, Harry would have no reason to want people to not die, which kind of breaks the story (unless I suppose there's some mechanism to kill souls, which I admit would be interesting)
If souls exist, but the afterlife doesn't exist or is just really bad/boring, then Harry would have a good reason, to either not let people die or to bring them back once they do.
Isn't AK supposed to destroy the soul?
If AK/Dementors actually did destroy the soul, how would anyone know without direct access to the afterlife?
Divination.
There's a spell that doesn't reveal the true cloak of invisibility, but indicates that such an artefact is present. You could imagine a corresponding spell for souls, or a dog which only barks at soul-imbued creatures (may bark twice at soul-imbued postmen and once at soul-less postmen. In which case you'd need to ask "are you a postman" using veritaserum to distinguish false positives for souls.).
How would you distinguish this from a spell which merely tests if one has been exposed to the Dementor's Kiss?
If it gives a positive response to humans and some/all intelligent non-humans but a negative one to people made brain-dead through purely physical means and/or various animals?
No. The Dementor's Kiss destroys the soul; but the Killing Curse strikes at it, severing it from the body.
I am confused. You know how Dumbledore expresses several times to McGonagall his worry that he might be the Dark Lord Harry will need to face? I mostly thought this was simply guilt from having had to make lots of difficult decisions.
But I’ve been re-reading some older chapters today, and I noticed this (ch. 84):
What Minerva says sounds a lot like foreshadowing. More specifically, standard dramatic logic would suggest that it was actually Dumbledore who gave Harry the mark, thus justifying D’s fears and making Minerva’s reasoning exactly wrong on the point she is most sure about. There’s plenty suspicious about the “standard story” of what happened that night to allow it, and nothing else I know about Dumbledore sounds like something that would cause serious Dark-Dumbledore worries.
But that doesn’t seem to make sense at all with the rest of the story. Am I just reading too much because of theories I read here?
By my inference, both Dumbledore and Voldemort purposely put Harry in the position that left him marked. Dumbledore conspired with Lily to set up a dark ritual which would defeat Voldemort, while Voldemort marked Harry to make it appear he had defeated Voldemort. With both being part of the causal chain, both could be said to have marked Harry.
Evidence, please? Lily's actions in Harry's memory of her encounter with Voldemort certainly don't seem pre-planned, and if you're suggesting that the "dark ritual" was her sacrificing herself for Harry, this is no reason for her to let James die as well. If Lily had known Voldemort was coming, she could have had James go visit a friend for the week or something, thus making sure her beloved husband survived and Harry at least had a father.
Obviously Voldemort wouldn't announce when he was coming, so they wouldn't know that James would take it first.
There are multiple pieces of evidence, that when combined, make a consistent case. Dumbledore talks about being responsible for all that has happened to Harry. Dumbledore includes Lily in a very short list of heroines in recent times. It seems clear that Dumbledore arranged for Snape, and thereby Voldemort, to learn of a "prophecy" that led Voldemort to try to kill Harry. What Lily says when Voldemort comes looks like a clear set up of a dark ritual.
What Lily says is:
But we know that in any ritual, first is named that which is sacrificed, and then is said the use commanded of it. This does, incidentally, match the order that the Dark Lord speaks in ("Yourself to die, and the child to live.") but as Lily got it wrong it seems like she definitely wasn't doing a ritual, and if a ritual happened it was accidental on her part.
Wouldn't both V and Lily be experienced enough not to perform a dark ritual by accident?
I think that dark rituals in general probably aren't something one is at great risk of performing by accident.
Both of them described a dark ritual in terms of what the other gave up, then what the other got.
Per what Lily says, Voldemort gives up killing Harry, in exchange for Lily's life.
Per what Voldemort says, Lily gives up her life, in exchange for Harry's life.
Does this mean there were two different rituals proposed? The same one from two perspectives? I don't think we have enough of the theory of dark rituals to distinguish the two. Did Lily "get it wrong"? Under one possible interpretation, yes, and under another, no.
And then Lily may or may not have balked at the terms, and tried to kill Voldemort, and Voldemort may or may not have tried to kill Harry.
Harry really should have been investigating the details of Voldemort's death a lot more than he has, starting with an interrogation of Dumbledore.
Fair enough; I didn't think of the "sacrifice the chance to kill Harry in order to obtain the death of Lily" interpretation. Which I still think is inelegant but I have no good argument against it, so it has a right to exist.
For me it's low confidence and speculative, but t could be foreshadowing. Dumbledore could be bad. Dumbledore and QQ could even be on the same side. The "one villain in the story, or two" at the time and in context was Harry thinking there were 2 sides and both were bad. But as a meta-hint / foreshadowing it could be saying that there was 1 side with 2 villains.
One big piece of evidence for was that Voldemort and Dumbledore fought a war for several years and neither killed the other. Harry initially thought this was evidence for Voldemort being dumb, but by 94 Harry has updated to the enemy being smart. So Voldemort could have wiped out the Order but didn't.
Dumbledore is soft, but he could have killed all the death eaters. Just gone to their houses and killed them, none of them, nor all of them together (excluding Voldie) are going to be on par with Grindelwald + elderwand + blood sacrifice. Dumbledore could have wiped out the death eaters but didn't.
You can explain that with two factors each handicapping one of them, Dumbledore is soft and Voldemort has a cunning plan. But you can also explain it with coordination. Coordination certainly fits some of the facts better.
Weighing against this of course, is that it really doesn't seem like Dumbledore's style.
I have greater than 5% confidence that Voldemort is three characters: Quirrell (via possession), Harry (via soul-copying ritual) and Dumbledore (via improved Imperius).
Why would Quirrell try to undermine Dumbledore in Harry's eyes, then?
Not saying that I subscribe to that particular theory, but if it were so it would probably be for more-or-less the same reason he made Voldie evil in everyone’s eyes, to set up a contrast for bonding.
Well, this would make sense if the power that the Dark Lord knows not could be rational thinking. Since Voldemort appears to be much more rational than in canon, that ability makes sense. And Eliezer did something pretty similar already in Gur Fjbeq bs Tbbq.
I agree that Dumbledore does not look like a paragon of rationality, but IMO he wins much too often for Eliezer to set him up as that kind of example.
Why? Non-rational people or people who aren't very rational win all the time. Sometimes they get lucky or sometimes they are just rational enough in the right things. If the only way to win was to be highly rational the world would look very different than it does.
I was thinking more in terms of what Eliezer wants to portray rather than our world. “Rationalists should win” is one of Eliezer’s maxims, and setting up someone as “the guy who didn’t know the power of rationality” to win most of the time would dilute that lesson.
Also, MoR!Dumbledore is simply not irrational enough. Little of his success can be attributed simply to luck, and while he is not rational on a level with Harry, it seems at least that quite a bit of his success can be attributed to making hard decisions instead of just following instinct. For example, regardless of what really happened with Draco’s mum, Dumbledore’s behavior on this subject is indicative of cold calculation rather than wishful thinking. The same can be said on the subject of his brother, especially since he was so conflicted about it. Note also how much of his arguing with Harry is more about morality rather than reasoning.
"Don't turn into a giant snake. That never helps."
Typo: "to away from him". (Same typo at hpmor.com and fanfiction.net.)
Haven't we already had Quirrell all but explicitly invert this? He's admitted to reading the Evil Overlord List, and his comment on the Animagus transformation is "all sensible people do, if can. Thus very rare."
"become animagus" is a bit more general than "turn into a giant snake". The original evil-overloard rule is about how turning into a snake lets the hero kill you without losing alignment points, which is why it's such a bad idea.
that ISN'T what quirrel does. He uses it to slip into harry's pouch instead and reduce the sense of doom. much smarter than Jafar.
Piece of meta info:
V'ir vagebqhprq n grrantr sevraq gb UCZBE. Ure cevbe ernqvat sbphf fheebhaqf Qvpxraf naq Nhfgra naq gur yvxr. Fur unfa'g ernq YJ lrg. Fur'f whfg ernq gur arj puncgre. Univat abg ernq gur bayvar qvfphffvbaf be Nhgube'f Abgrf jungfbrire, fur qbrf abg xabj nobhg Ibyqrzbeg.
Vg vf bayl ng gur raq bs guvf, Puncgre 95, gung fur unf gubhtug hc gur cbffvovyvgl frevbhfyl.
Znal crbcyr unir orra jbaqrevat jul Uneel unfa'g znqr gur pbaarpgvba, naq V jnagrq gb funer guvf qngn cbvag bs fbzrbar ryfr jub qvqa'g unir gur Jbeq bs Tbq. Bs pbhefr, fur vfa'g Engvbanyvfg!Uneel, ohg gur qngn vf vagrerfgvat.
Has she read the original books?
Yes.
Fb fur'f ernq Ebjyvat'f obbxf, naq qvqa'g pyhr va gung Dhveeryy=Ibyqrzbeg? Ubj ba rnegu? Vg'f rkcyvpvgyl fgngrq va gur svefg obbx. Nz V zvfvagrecergvat lbh?
V guvax fur ernyvfrq gung guvatf jrer dhvgr qvssrerag va gur ZBE!Havirefr, naq fb qvqa'g rkcrpg eryl ba guvatf orvat gur fnzr. Jura V nfxrq ure yngre zber nobhg gur vqrn, ng ab cbvag qvq fur fnl 'jryy, vg jnf va gur pnaba', ohg gnyxrq bayl bs va-havirefr guvatf. V guvax fur frr'f gur Zrgubqf nf orvat ragveryl qvfgvapg.
Huh, noted. FWIW, I went in having not read the originals before, so when I went back through and read the originals, around Ch. 30, it seemed like a lightbulb going off when I saw how things were set up in the original.
Still, you'd think "it was in the original" would result in at least a high prior probability.
This is essentially why I didn't figure it out until halfway through the fic. Fanfictions depart from canon in unpredictable ways, so there's no point in saying "well it's like this in canon" when you already have major departures.
Dumbledore gets the map from the twins, doesn't give it back and the twins don't remember about it anymore. So, we know who'd obliviated the twins. However, we don't know the results of D's "find Tom Riddle" order... Also, the twins must've known about Harry's time travels by way of the map?
The twins already believed that the map had glitches, so they might think that duplicate footprints were another glitch. Or, they might have heard and believed the "spontaneous duplication" cover story.
I brought this up in a previous discussion thread, but the majority opinion seemed to be that it was more likely to be Quirrell who obliviated the twins.
Another question: can we try to nail down Voldemort's body-management strategy (for lack of a better term)?
I've been assuming that Voldemort possessed Quirrell shortly before the beginning of the Hogwarts school year, and the dark magic he used is only good for about a year before it "uses up" the possessed body in some sense. (Killing it, rendering it an un-possessable vegetable, something like that.)
But after thinking about this hard, I'm not so sure about that. Maybe the degredation in that body's condition is due to being in constant close proximity to Harry Potter, or something. Also, that may not even be Quirrell's body, Quirrell may be long dead and this is just some poor schmuck Voldemort decided he could pass off as Quirrell.
I assume Voldemort has a backup plan, in case his plans for Harry do not come to fruition this year.
Going back in time, what was going on when Voldemort was also, simultaneously, David Munroe? It seems he was planning on using the Munroe persona for many years, so he can't have used the same method he used for the Quirrell-body. What if the Munroe body was his original body, and he was just counting on years of aging to prevent people who knew him as Tom Riddle from recognizing him?
We may safely assume Voldemort used different facial features for Voldemort and Munroe. I don't know if it's been explicitly stated in HPMOR if Voldemort (as Voldemort) was disfigured as he was in canon, but it seems likely. However, I doubt the disfigurement was an unintentional side-effect of dark rituals, as in canon, because Voldemort had no trouble appearing as Munroe. More likely, it was a deliberate choice, to make the villain he set up for himself to defeat as Munroe as evil-looking as possible. One possibility is that this was not a second body, but the same body as the Munroe body, shape-shifted.
I assume what happened on the night of Harry's parents' death went exactly as planned for Voldemort. While Voldemort could have been betting on his ability to resurrect via horcruxes, it's not clear what going there would accomplish. More likely, he either (1) did not die (2) sort of died, but already had a second body ready to go so he wouldn't have to waste time gathering his power to resurrect.
If he had two different bodies for the Voldemort and Munroe identities, it's possible he kept the Munroe body in reserve upon retiring that identity, deliberately disposed of the Voldemort body shortly after or as part of whatever he did to Harry, and then went back to using the Munroe body secretly as he prepared for Stage 2 (to be executed when Harry became old enough to attend Hogwarts.) I wonder if the place he goes when he leaves the Quirrell body is back to the Munroe body.
I thought the clear implication was that Quirrell performed more powerful magics by ritual magic, sacrificing some bit of health with each exertion of power, so that he aged quickly after large exertions.
Huh, hadn't thought of that. Which raises the disturbing possibility that he uses body-snatching as a way to cheat on the costs of dark rituals. But what do the rituals do that he's been using do, beyond the fiendfyre?
Can't say what exactly Quirrell did, but he seems to be aging quickly. Search for "bald" and you'll find rapid balding in Quirrelll, where early on he may have been balding, to increasing indications of baldness. After Azkaban, as Quirrell recovers in the infirmary, Harry notes:
Could this be a result of very frequent time-turning?
Not unless Quirrel is using some sort of super-Timeturner. 6 hours per day over an entire school year of ~180 days is still only
(180 * 6) / 24 = 45days. Most people don't age visibly over just 45 days - unless, of course, there were some sort of massive ordeal & trauma.I don't see the increased again being accounted for just by increased hours of living through time turning either.
If the argument is that too frequent time turning has a damaging effect in itself, I can't see them giving out such a potentially health damaging item to children without at least warning of that specific effect. Also, if EY is keeping the same basic timelines for Dumbledore, he is holding up better than average for his chronological age despite his time turning adventures.
Meanwhile, Quirrell explicitly talked about the advantages of ritual magic, and how it allows greater power than otherwise possible. He has greater power. He is aging rapidly. And by many indications, he is traveling host to host over time. If you could do that, the natural thing would be to use up the host and travel to a new one when you use it up, since your supply of bodies is in effect infinite, while it's a finite resource of 1 body for everyone else.
Yeah, I think he takes bodies and burns them out, then moves to new ones.
Yet all his uses of powerful magic either have no visible effect on him whatsoever, or cause him to revert to pretty much the same zombielike form for varying periods of time. It's strongly implied that different dark rituals require entirely different kinds of sacrifice.
I can't remember whether it was after the "war" that stuck people to the roof, or after Bellatrixes rescue, but there was visible aging to Quirrell.
One idea I like is that his problem lies in having his soul bound to an object a cosmic distance away from him, which makes the body-soul connection increasingly difficult to maintain.
In canon, Quirrell's identity was relevant because he had been the Hogwarts Muggle Studies teacher before being possessed by Voldemort. Since this is not the case in HMOR, Quirinus Quirrell basically is "some poor shmuck" - there is no reason why anybody would wish to falsely assume his identity. Had Voldemort possessed, say, John Smith, he would simply enter Hogwarts as John Smith.
Blaming the Pioneer Plaque for the progressive degredation sounds like it makes sense at first, but the point of the Pioneer Plaque thing is that this Voldemort is supposed to be smarter than canon Voldemort, and a Pioneer Plaque horcrux superior. That theory makes the Pioneer Plaque horcrux inferior. Also I'm pretty sure Voldemort has other horcruxes, including Roger Bacon's diary and quite possibly ones hidden in the other locations Harry suggested when discussing how to get rid of a Dementor.
maybe that's why he hasn't killed harry after hearing the prophecy.
he needs help in finding his horcrux.
which he won't, because space is huge.
No data could ever have existed in past for the effect of Horcruxes at interplanetary distances. He may well simply be a victim of unknown unknowns.
Smart people still overlook things. A lightspeed delay problem in horcrux syncing would not have come up ever before, so it could have been easily overlooked even by a very smart person, especially one that is not scientifically oriented. If he had been more scientifically oriented and been otherwise interested in Muggle space programs, this possibility might have occured to him and he could have tested it with the moon missions, if he had come up with a way to detect anticipated problems.
Does a Dementor count as a material object? If so, the (now-disproven) fact of their indestructibility would have made them seem to be ideal Horcruxes.
Or, since they are "wounds in the world", are they simply places where space isn't?
Since they eat souls ... probably not an ideal place for a soul-fragment, yeah.
Or would they simply "eat" the Horcrux? A dementor is no fun place to be when you have just, like, died (as in "lost a body").
I wouldn't necessarily assume that. Quirrel seems to like the idea of being out among the peaceful pure stars; a strategy which dooms his earthly vessel is not necessarily such an issue. And while he's slowly slipping away, he can fulfill a few last regrets - such as finally becoming Battle Magic Professor at Hogwarts.
He may like being out among the stars, but that's no reason to cut his fun on Earth short unnecessarily. Like, if the Earth were to be destroyed, and all the horcruxes hidden there with it, he'd regard having the Pioneer horcrux left as vastly superior to nonexistence, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't like to continue hanging out on Earth.
Edit: Also, if he's afraid that someone like Harry could accidentally explode the Sun, taking the Pioneer Plaque with it, he has reason to stick around to stop that from happening. Also, if Bacon's diary wasn't a horcrux, how do you account for Voldemort telling Harry it's nearly indestructible?
That isn't necessarily the same level of indestructibility as a horcrux. It could just be a standard charm placed on rare books.
We don't know of any such charms, and why would Voldemort settle for a less degree of protection, when he has so few qualms about killing? My guess is he murdered the owner to make the horcrux.
Canon Voldemort chose his horcruxes for symbolic value. HPMOR!Voldemort presumably chose the plaque for its indestructibility by human hands (though it might have symbolic value too). On the other hand, Bacon's diary has nothing to commend it in terms of material (it is just a book), and Voldemort has no special attachment to Muggle science as a whole - indeed he is inimical to much of it.
He gave it to Harry. It's something Harry would unquestionably want.
Unfortunately, it hasn't come up again, so maybe not.
I’m not arguing, but how do we know that? IIRC we’ve never seen exactly what was in there, and Harry never got around to reading it. And it doesn’t sound like Quirrell to just make a gift just because it’s an "old rare item”, especially since he doesn’t quite like science and Bacon’s relevance to Harry is not that he had magic, but that he was a (proto-)scientist.
We're told that Bacon's research into magic did not get very far without a wand, and he never had any formal magical training since he refused his letter. It thus seems unlikely that he enchanted his diary in any interesting way.
There's a couple potential advantages to having a horcrux in Harry's possession: Harry's then guarding it, and it might be used to possess Harry later on. Though that's less helpful if, as in canon, Harry is a horcrux. But even then, I'd hardly be shocked to see Voldemort creating an additional horcrux on a whim.
"You can never have enough big white belts, remember that."
One thing I forgot to mention in my comments last night, about Quirrellmort's theory of psychology: he seems to have a rational fear that Harry attempting to resurrect Hermione will destroy the world. Does he not realize that Dumbledore and McGonagall might also refuse to help Harry out of that same rational fear? Or is he refraining from mentioning it as part of manipulating Harry?
His fear is that Harry messes up his attempt to resurrect Hermione. He might think that he can prevent such error better if he's in the loop of what Harry is doing.
I think he's a lot more convinced of Harry's capabilities than they are.
Moreover, he knows something about the source of Harry's unusualness that they don't know that he knows, and he needs to keep it that way.
Ok, my head hurts, what is going on with Quirrell?
It is very strongly implied that the Pioneer plaque is a horcrux, in which case Voldemort will not die unless the plaque is destroyed (extremely unlikely) or his connection to it is severed by some means unseen in canon and unhinted at in HPMOR. If we assume that QQ = Voldemort, which is also fairly safe, then no, his time should not be up.
We have been prepared for the idea that Quirrell has any number of identities, multiple times.
Chapter 59:
Chapter 86:
I am all for the different masks, but that when a person makes many people out of himself. Here we have Tom Riddle who is definitely was born and David Monroe who was born(*), and Q.Q. who was born, and Harry's teacher could be only one of those three (or someone else entirely), but not the three at once.
(*)I mean a boy, a baby, not the "returned from Albania" one.
I am amazed that Eliezer managed to take Rowling's most corny idea and made it non-corny: "The power that the Dark Lord knows not" is, after all, none other than the power of true love. And it is a mighty power not because of a hokey magical force attached to it, but because someone who feels it in addition to being rational is motivated to reshape the universe. "Power comes from having something to protect."
quirrel wants to protect himself from death. and gains the power to do it.
Quirrell seems to have been counterfactually mugged by hearing the prophecy of the end of the world...which would mean his decision theory, and psychological commitment to it, are very advanced.
Assume Quirrell believes that the only possible explanation of the prophecy he heard is that the apocalypse is nigh. This makes sense: prophecies don't occur for trivial events like a visitor to Hogwarts destroying books in the library named "Stars in Heaven" and "The World," and the idea of "the end of the world" being a eucatastrophe hasn't occurred to him. Assume Quirrell believes that prophecies are inevitable once spoken. Then why is Quirrell bothering to try to save the world?
Given that he hears the prophecy, Quirrell can either try T or not try ~T to avert it. Given that he tries, Quirrell is either capable C or incapable ~C of averting it. If T and C, by inevitability Quirrell will never hear the prophecy, which means that it is less likely the end of the world will occur (massive events always produce a prophecy that is heard by a wizard, so either Time finds some way to stop the end of the world or someone else hears it but fails to avert it). Say the end of the world causes -100 utility to Quirrell, and trying to stop it causes -1 utility. Then if C, a Quirrell that would try never hears the prophecy, so he never loses any utility, while a Quirrell that would not try hears the prophecy, goes out in a blaze of hedonism rather than fighting the inevitable, and loses 100 utility from the end of the world. Unfortunately, the actual world is the ~C world, where T brings -101 utility and ~T brings -100. So T looks like an irrational choice, but actually maximizes Quirrell's utility across counterfactuals.
This isn't the only explanation for Quirrell's actions; he could just prefer to go out fighting, or be betting on the slim chance that prophecies actually can be averted, or just trying to delay the end of the world as long as possible, or acting on other, weirder motives. But it's an interesting illustration of how alien a being that has truly internalized a really sophisticated decision theory might be.
Upvoted for the word 'eucatastrophe'.
Upvoted because it is an interesting parallel, but this is unlikely to be an explanation of Quirrell's actions. See Chapter 86:
Quirrell believes that he can cause or prevent the "end of the world" prophecy, and is gambling that helping Harry increases the chance of "prevent" rather than "cause". A better chance was to dissuade Harry - that would increase the chance of "prevent" even more - but Quirrell's just realized that he can't do that.
Huh, that does make a lot more sense. I guess I'd been assuming that any reference to someone "averting" a prophecy was actually just someone forcing the better branch of an EitherOrProphecy (tvtropes). Like if Trelawney had said "HE WHO WOULD TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN IF NONE STAND AGAINST IT." The inference that prophecies don't always come true fits Quirrell's behavior much better.
If his goal was really to prevent Harry from destroying the world, he would just crush Harry like a bug and be done with it. He's killed people for much less.
I'm not sure that's possible. If Harry is defeated, it must be in such a way that "only a remnant of him remains," by prophesy. Crushing Harry now would not leave a remnant (even if "remnant" means "legacy," I would argue); therefore, it is not worth trying.
Best guess is that Harry is a horcrux. He can't be killed, except with very powerful magic (Avada Kedavra or equivalent), and Quirrell can't use magic against him. Further, his last attempt at killing Harry was a total disaster. Chapter 65:
This does cast some light on how Voldemort got blown up in the first place. The fatal interaction of magic stems from Harry being a horcrux; but Harry's only a horcrux because Voldemort made him one. Further, the horcruxing most likely happened because of the weird interaction of magic which caused Voldie to blow up (and his soul-explosion, or whatever, then anchored itself to the infant Harry). It looks like there was some sort of trick with a Time Turner involved in Godric's Hollow to set this up. I suspect Dumbledore...
P.S. If Quirrell gets really desperate, he could of course try to persuade someone else to do the AK on Harry. Will be amazing if he can persuade Dumbledore to do it...
Your quote could be just making fun of canon though.
Specifically, the final book where Voldemort goes for not just AK #2 but also AK #3 as well.
"Goblet of Fire" contains AK#2 as far as I remember. "Deathly Hallows" actually contains AK#3 and AK#4.... You would think that after three failed attempts, Voldemort might have got the hint. HPMoR Voldemort would of course update after one failed attempt and not try again.
Allowing for alternatives to AK, I think there are only two possible explanations for why Voldie doesn't just kill Harry at this point:
Of course, every time the AK fails in canon, it is for a different reason (unless you count "plot armor"), making the true correct conclusion more difficult to see.
Only if Harry has no other value to him that would make him worth preserving, in which case the entire story would be completely different. We know that Quirrell values Harry, instrumentally and possibly emotionally, and has great plans for him. He will not sacrifice all of that unless he has no other choice.
That's my point. Quirrell has plans for Harry. Any worry about what Harry will do is better explained by worry that Quirrell's plans will be thwarted by what Harry does, not by some supposed worry of Quirrell's that Harry will destroy the world. And more likely than any worry is just the opportunity presented by Harry's resolve to bring back Hermione by any means necessary.
For those wondering about this:
323 years before 1992, this happened:
That's probably also what's referenced later on:
(though it's pretty likely that in HPMOR-verse, all volcano eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc. are caused by Magic Gone Wrong)
There's a good chance that EY didn't want to allude to any historical event. Maybe his writer's instincts to give concrete examples kicked into gear, and he made up a fictional event about a fictional society.
But suppose he did choose to allude to a specific historical event. Why would he choose this one?
He would not choose this event because it was a great disaster with many casualties. According to the Wikipedia article, there is no historical record of any deaths from this eruption, and the disaster is overshadowed historically by the 1693 Sicilian Earthquake. If EY were going for famous and lethal disasters, he would be very unlikely to choose this one when there are so many more famous ones.
He would not choose this disaster because it is Italian. Italy was not well defined in the 17th century. If you had to choose some place to represent modern day Italy, you would be far more likely to choose a place in Northern Italy (like Florence, where modern Italian comes from) than a city in southern Italy (like Sicily, which was ruled by the Spanish in the 17th century).
The only circumstance under which I think EY would choose specifically to allude to Etna's eruption is if he needed to refer to a volcano. If EY needed to refer to a volcanic eruption, it's probably about Horcruxes.
Quirrell could be smiling because someone else put a Horcrux in Etna, but given his history with Pioneer I think it is more likely that Quirrell himself did the deed.
So (finally), after this long inference chance, I have slightly raise my belief that Quirrell is hundreds of years old.
But would Quirrell refer to someone placing a horcrux in Etna as "folly", given that it is apparently one of the best things you can do with a horcrux? And would he choose to allude to something like this in front of Harry when, unlike with the Pioneer Plaque, he doesn't stand to benefit from revealing the information?