Ch. 84:
"I shall not name any names," said the old witch. "But I shall tell a story, and see if it sounds familiar." Amelia Bones looked back down, turning to the next parchment. "Born 1927, entered Hogwarts in 1938, sorted into Slytherin, graduated 1945.
Also:
"Has your confederacy deduced who I really am?" The words were spoken with deceptive mildness.
"Yes, in fact. Now -"
Pure magic, pure power crashed into the room like a flash of lightning, like a thunderclap echoing about her ears that deafened her other senses, the papers on her desk blown aside not by any conjured wind but by the sheer raw force of arcane might.
Then the power subsided, leaving only Hermione Granger's death certificates drifting down through the air to the floor.
"I am David Monroe, who fought Voldemort," the man said, still in mild tones. "Heed my words. The boy cannot be allowed to continue in this state of mind.
Though we don't know for sure what McGonagal and the rest of the "confederacy" really believes.
We have some evidence Harry has defense professor permissions and didn't trip any wards because of that. He practiced memory charms. In Hogwarts. If the castle thought of him as a student, that would have set alarms ringing, with professor permissions, no alarms. Not strong evidence, because Harry was Dumbledores pet disaster, and it is entirely possible he'd hear an alarm like that, check up on what Harry was doing, and ignore it as long as he wasn't casting it on students. But it's an implication.
Would you quote me where Harry used obliviate in Hogwarts on someone that would have tripped wards? I don't recall that.
Hum, good question.
I assumed that with all his experimenting he did in a year, he must have triggered a ward at a point. He doesn't all the wards, and since we expect them to be quite extensive, it's very unlikely he never triggered one.
So what are our hypothesis ?
Harry is not recognized as Defense Professor by the wards.
Harry is recognized as DP by the wards, never triggered a ward, but that didn't seem suspicious to Dumbledore because there are fewer wards I imagined there to be, so even with lots of experimenting, it's quite normal he didn't trigger one.
Harry is recognized as DP by the wards, never triggered a ward, and Dumbledore failed to realize it, due to a variation of the "availability bias", we don't tend to notice events that fail to occur (while they should) as much as events that occur (while they shouldn't).
Harry is recognized as DP by the wards, and Dumbledore did suspect it. Then, Dumbledore knowing that Harry is likely a Tom Riddle, must have suspected Quirrel to be a Tom Riddle. He knew much more that he claimed, and he lied when he said to Quirrelmort that he didn't suspect anything.
I would put most probability on 1, but none of 2, 3, 4 can be excluded at this point, yes.
and since we expect them to be quite extensive, it's very unlikely he never triggered one.
I do not expect this. Time-tuners are fine. Invisibility cloaks are fine. Draco's torture hex was fine. The only thing I can think of that Harry did that might have triggered a ward without permissions was bring in the transfigured unicorn. And that isn't conclusive at all. It was transfigured, and as far as I know the Defense Professor can't just bring magical creatures in to Hogwarts either.
I don't think it's been tested.
If Dementors really do destroy your soul, how would anyone know?
No magic burst at death would be one prediction to check, though not conclusive. You could test it with Horcrux 2.0, though no one has had the opportunity to do that before now. The fact that Voldemort has expressed uncertainty about whether he is capable of surviving dementors, and that he is relying upon escaping from Quirrel's body in time to survive dementors points in the direction of him believing that a dementor might be capable of taking out him and his whole horcrux network in one shot.
None of that is conclusive, but it's all suggestive and supports the popular version of what dementors do.
I don't think it goes : username (Tom Riddle) => permissions (Defense Professor) or Harry (recognized as Tom Riddle too) would have the Defense Professor permissions.
I mostly assumed that the map and the wards are two different systems, maybe not crafted by the same person (not the same founder if they were made by the 4 founders, or by different headmasters if they were added afterwards).
Yeah, I'm thinking separate systems but there's a lot we don't know about how this works and why the discrepancies are there.
Actually, we aren't sure that Harry doesn't have Defense Professor permissions, are we?
I think that the trial and error model is implausible; in which "time" are these trials and iterations occurring? The global determination of the whole universe seems much simpler.
I don't think it necessarily conflicts with free will, when free will is understood in a compatibilist way (which is how EY and most LWers understand it). If we agree that one can have free will in a completely deterministic universe with ordinary past-to-future causal chains, then why can't one have it in a universe where some of the chains run future-to-past?
That's a good link, thanks. I'm warm to compatibilism. I think I've confused the conversation by using the wrong terms, though. Instead of pointing at a lack of free will I should have pointed at the complete lack of causality, which is more constraining. You can read EY on it here.
My interpretation of this would be that space-time would be a fixed object that exists in it's entirety. In the same sense that you could take a cross sectional scan of a sneaker and play it from rear to front, there would be a logical consistency to how the slides transformed as you progressed through the shoe, but it would not make any sense to say that one part caused another. In this analogy, 4-dimensional space-time is the shoe, and the cross section is 3-dimensional space. We play it from back to front, watching a movie of the universe, but the entire universe from beginning to end already existed; we're just looking at a slide of it at a time. Everything is consistent as the cross section passes through, but there's no causality in play, it's just an object being viewed in sequential slices. Much like EY's modified game of Life with time-travel.
This actually seems pretty unsatisfying because there is a strong impression that the world is being run mostly on causality in the normal direction, with reverse causality coming in occasionally. This seems to me to work better with the iterating model.
Regarding the time for trials and iterations, I would refer to simulation as an analogy. "World time" is happening in the simulation, and this is what the characters are aware of. From within the simulated world, how much "Meta time" has elapsed outside of the simulation (i.e. the time stream that the computer is in), or how many failed attempts have been dumped from RAM is not very relevant in the sense that these facts don't have any impact on "the world" (the simulated one) and are in fact probably unknowable to its inhabitants unless access to that meta-information has been somehow granted. To a denizen of the world, the fact that we switched from world version 721.213 to world version 779.344 last Tuesday at 9:41am is unknowable, the transition seamless, the lost attempts erased from world time even though they still occurred in meta time.
I'm not saying HPMOR is a simulated world. That's just a model I'm using to think about timelines being destroyed and recalculating.
Thought so. Seems like a pretty close call to me. Thanks.
Although, really, it seems a bit contrived. If QQ was identified to the wards as the defense professor, wouldn't that be what the Hogwarts security system sees?
I'd read it as "Defense Professor" being a role with a package of permissions being assigned to a user. The map shows usernames, so to speak, not what roles or permissions they've been assigned in some other portion of the security system.
It's not entirely clear how Hermione's troll/unicorn stuff interacts with the depletion of life-force necessary to fuel the Patronus. That said, she has a Horcrux, so at the end of the day it doesn't really matter. And if Harry can eventually destroy Azkaban, Hermione certainly can.
I'm skeptical. If dementors really do destroy your soul then having a horcrux may not be helpful against them. I'm a fan of taking V's wand down to the pit, in fact.
Since time loops are stable, no reason not to try. Even if Mr. Counsel is Lucius, the most stable time loop is that Lucius doesn't believe the Patronus and gets killed anyway, and then Harry can at least truthfully tell Draco he tried.
So, I don't know how these stable time loops are supposed to work. My working model is that they function by trial and error, that time iterates through a universe until it encounters paradox, at which point it returns to pre-paradox, inserts some change into the world through prophecy or whatever, and tries again. This continues until a stable timeline is found, with an unknown number of them being discarded/destroyed. It appears from within that things worked on the first pass, but they did not. Our viewpoint never follows into one of those dead ends, but they exist(ed).
If the world really works that way, Harry would be potentially throwing his victory away by forcing a paradox. Time would have to reset to before the paradox and insert a change into the world to ensure a different outcome. He may or not be victorious in that new timeline. Harry dying was already a high probability and it would certainly resolve things to Time's satisfaction. His best chance of securing his immediate past as part of the real and continuing world would be to make sure this timeline remains self-consistent.
(Plus, he's prophesied to destroy the stars and creating a time-paradox seems like a really obvious possible way to do that.)
The only other possibility I can think of for these apparently stable timelines is that the whole universe is pre-determined and no one has any free will at all. I read something from EY about universes with time travel and he seemed to be in support of this second possibility. Any other possibilities for how this would work?
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Remember that if Tom Riddle dies, a potentially vengeful demon with significant magical power is unleashed. Preventing that from happening is worth doing for the sake of those common people, regardless of its impact on Tom Riddle.
Yeah, and that make sense. There's also that he may be one of the last remaining repositories for lost knowledge.
But we've seen internal monologue from Harry where he thinks about the intrinsic value of Voldemort's life and the values of the children's children's children and so on. It's incredibly naive. Voldemort is an immortal psychopath who is ridiculously overpowered and very difficult to contain. Taking that guy out is entirely in sync with valuing life in general. I'm not a fan of the death penalty, but his mere existence is threatening enough that I would make an exception with no hesitation and not feel bad about it ever.