Dark and sacrificial magic tends to kill you in the end, and neither the original Voldemort, nor Quirrelmort had a fix for this.
I'd say that it tends to kill your host meat sack. Not a problem if you can hop to a new one.
The horcrux spell forks your identity
The problem being the lack of continuity,
No continuity of ... sself, you would go on thinking after making the horcrux, then sself with new memoriess diess and iss not resstored -
Which would be avoided if your current host body dies in the transfer.
First he attempted to bypass the loss of knowledge by targeting a strong wizard as the possession target
I don't think that is necessary:
Alsso Merlin'ss Interdict preventss powerful sspells from passing through ssuch a device, ssince it iss not truly alive.
If the burst is channeled into a living person instead of a device, then Merlin's Interdict is avoided.
He transfers to a powerful wizard because that's the good place to be. Better than a rat.
And so he ended up fighting both sides of that war, because he took Monroe's body while still remaining Voldemort full time.
I think that's true. The war was not about taking over as the Dark Lord, it was about taking over as the Savior from the Dark Lord, as it is planned to be again with Harry.
See my top level post for a more fleshed out version of how I think Quirrell is preparing to upload to Harry.
The problem being the lack of continuity, Which would be avoided if your current host body dies in the transfer.
I don't think that's how continuity of self works. Suppose I, Velorien A, cast the horcrux spell. I continue to exist, and now I have created a Velorien B, an imperfect copy in a younger, healthier body. When Velorien A dies, whether instantly or in a number of years, I die. Velorien B will continue to exist. From an external perspective, yes, there was one old/ill Velorien, and now there is one young/healthy Velorien. From the perspective of Velorien B, he is Velorien A but in a younger, healthier body. But from my perspective... well, I don't have a perspective, because I'm dead.
New chapter!
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 102.
There is 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.)
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: