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buybuydandavis comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Lets see: Data and implications, assuming Quirrelmort is keeping up his habit of only rarely telling direct lies: Dark and sacrificial magic tends to kill you in the end, and neither the original Voldemort, nor Quirrelmort had a fix for this. The horcrux spell forks your identity, imperfectly, and also carries wholly unacceptable costs to anyone moral. So, you know, nothing voldy cares about.
Theory: Facing his own inevitable demise from accumulated sacrifice damage, Voldy attempted to fix the flaws in the horcrux process - First he attempted to bypass the loss of knowledge by targeting a strong wizard as the possession target - heck, that might have been part of the point of the campaign of terror - to draw out wizards with real power from obscurity. And so he ended up fighting both sides of that war, because he took Monroe's body while still remaining Voldemort full time. The personality divergence from imprinting himself on a mind that strong, however, was more than Voldemort considered acceptable, and thus he targeted Harry. At a guess, he worked out how to remove the carrier object from the spell so that the death of Harry's mother would copy him directly into the mind of baby Harry - who being a baby, would have very little in the way of a personality. The change to the rite also involved torching his then-current body. Heck, maybe all he did was use himself as the horcrux- but this was acceptable, because it was falling apart from sacrifice damage anyway. All of which worked fine, except babies forget just about everything that happens before the fifth year of life so the immaculate transfer of Voldemort's entire mind got wiped by infant amnesia.
Lets see: Stone theories: "True power isn't what people say it is". Gold is not wealth - that is a wizard and goblin misconception, and youth isn't a mystical quality, it is a body functioning correctly.
I am sticking with my theory that the alchemist stone is simply the second level version of the Reparo spell. The one that works on people. - It grants great wealth because it works on everything, which turns second hand and broken magical items, art, ect, into a trivial source of income, and it makes you immortal because age is just damage. Heck, it will likely raise the dead as long as their remains are still recognizably "a broken person".
I'd say that it tends to kill your host meat sack. Not a problem if you can hop to a new one.
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 is necessary:
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.
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.
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.
You can see it that way, and I largely do too, but that was not how Harry and Quirrell identified the problem.
The issue, the reasons for the issue.
If we avoid those reasons, which dying in the transfer does, then the issue is resolved.
I think you've got it the wrong way round. The first part is the problem. The second part is how the problem manifests itself.
Let's take the full quote.
The problem is continuity of consciousness. What Quirrell is saying is that because there is no continuity of consciousness, when you die, you die, no matter that you made a horcrux first.
I certainly don't believe that Quirrell, who has probably spent much of his life considering the problem, would be so naive as to think that destroying the original somehow gives the copy continuity of consciousness with the original.