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linkhyrule5 comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 108 - Less Wrong Discussion
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... Huh.
The power that the Dark Lord knows not... might end up being love after all.
Crazy theory: Voldy resurrects Hermione to keep his promise, then kills Harry. Hermione then drops Voldy somehow, and resurrects Harry using the same means that were used on her.
Additional crazy theory: The method for doing both will be the Philosopher's Stone. She will transmute Voldemort into something mortal-but-inert - a bristlecone pine, perhaps.
Or through different means. You might be able to brew a Harry resurrection potion with forcibly drawn Thestral blood, Hermione's body, and unknowingly bequeathed bones of a Potter, Slytherin heir, or Peverell.
Fine tuning: She will transmute Voldermort's spirit into something inert (since he is free to leave his body otherwise).
Is he? I don't recall any such line in this chapter. I mean, it's probably something he's taken precautions against, but it's hard to be sure(unless I missed something).
From chapter 107:
Good call - I only double-checked 108. That makes my theory far less likely.
What is HPMOR's stance on souls?
Still unknown. Harry believes they don't exist, Quirrell may or may not, and Hermione's death released a big explosion of Hermione-ness.
Her death released a big explosion of her magic. If Quirrel revives her body, she likely won't be a witch any longer.
Except that magical power has already been established to be genetic. The Potterverse doesn't have Wheel of Time-style shields or cutting people off from their magic, to the best of my knowledge.
Ugh, stilling. What a horrible idea that was.
You mean from the author/story/reader perspective, or in-universe?
Between horcruxes, possession, ghosts, and people turning into cats but still thinking like humans, I think souls or at least some form of mind/body dualism for magical people is strongly implied.
ETA: see details in nested comments.
Not really. All of this can be explained by Atlantis - if you already have some mind-reading system to power your spellcasting system (since the actual gestures and whatnot of a spell aren't nearly complex enough to code their results, they have to be executing some protocol stored elsewhere anyway), it's not much of a stretch to say that it has stores of people's mindstates too.
Anything and everything can be explained by Atlantis, but for purposes of experimental predictions, there do appear to be souls.
Not quite. Souls - as in "you are not your brain" - run into all the usual problems with brain damage and whatnot. Mind backups make much more sense, because without a secondary "restore from backup" system nothing particularly interesting will happen.
Well, Harry hasn't actually tested the idea that wizards can suffer brain damage the same way as Muggles. He just assumed they do. But it's a reasonable assumption.
What happens if you progressively damage Quirrel's brain? At some point Voldemort will either decide or be forced to go and possess another body or Horcrux. That thing-which-goes-off is for all intents and purposes a soul.
A backup isn't a good description, because Voldemort is always aware - there's no point at which he exists only as a backup and may or may not be restored. Also, a backup implies restoring multiple instances, and creating multiple backups; the True Horcrux doesn't seem to do that.
Agreed, and I want to expand that a little:
Muggle science determined that muggle minds are contained in muggle brains, and Harry has been reluctant to let go of this idea even though there are observations against it and he has seen that magic can freely violate very solid muggle conclusions like conservation of matter.
Even if muggle brain damage seems to damage the mind, it could be that it damages the mind's interface to the body. Here in the real world, this dualism adds additional complications and doesn't help explain any evidence. In the HPMOR universe there is a great deal that would be explained by mind/body dualism.
Animagus transfigurations almost require it. Skeeter's mind is not contained in the physical arrangement of a beetle's brain. Therefore, her mind isn't just a physical brain in this world. Her brain could be held in some extradimensional pocket and interfacing to the beetle. Her mind could be running on a magical, rather than physical substrate (always or just during transformation?). She could have a soul. (And some versions of "mind on a magical substrate" would also qualify as "souls".)
As DanArmak says, Quirrel didn't just have backups of himself in Horcruxes, he was able to think and perceive while this was his only form of existence. Those copies were running, thinking, planning. They were also connected to each other, and still are. Quirrel was not revived from the Pioneer horcrux, but he has the memories of the Pioneer horcruxes experiences. The pioneer plaque or a pebble or whatever is not a physical substrate that a mind can run on by any natural-to-muggle-science means. Again we have dualism. Brain in another dimension, magical substrate, soul. And brain in another dimension gets pretty strained here, I think.
Here Quirrel's mind is totally disembodied through the help of the Resurrection Stone.
Ch. 1:
I observe a world where minds are not just physical arrangements of brains. The "we are just our brains" hypothesis is being falsified all over the place in HPMOR.
For me there is no question about whether disembodied minds exist in this universe. My questions are whether minds are disembodied all the time or just when magic requires it. Whether muggles also have disembodied minds that are just much more inaccessible to observation. "Minds are always disembodied" seems more elegant by far than magic translating your physical brain into another equivalent form and creating an interface between that and your body only during animagus transformations and other such events, translating that back when returning to human form, and your mind just being a brain at all other times. That would be way more complicated than dualism.
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10023949/1/Harry-Potter-and-the-Philosopher-s-Zombie
Just for fun.
I suspect that Quirrel's spell uploaded his brain into an invisible magical computer he calls "spirit". The biological brain of the body he is possessing is either doing nothing or is limited to low-level unconscious functions.
The Longbottoms were tortured into "insanity", but their canon appearance in St. Mungo's looks far more like brain damage from Cruciatus. And lots of Obliviates seem to cause brain damage as well. Breaking a FMC on Bertha Jorkins in book 4 ended up killing her.
Yes, but that's a new spell - that's the equivalent of a live-sync system, where you make your "backups" so often that they're all basically the same anyway. That's not the default. By that argument, only Quirrell has a soul.
I'm lost---what does Atlantis mean here?
It is implied in previous chapters as the 'source' of magic, having invented it, and all methods having pretty much decayed since its glory days. Also implied to have messed with time in serious ways.
The stone makes transfigureation perminant. It doesn't mean you can transfigure through shields.