By Word of God, we know that horcruxes exist in the HPMoR universe. It seems like by now we ought to be able to start figuring out what a horcrux is.
In Canon, a horcrux is a fragment of a soul. But it stands to reason that this will not be the full answer in MoR, as it’s a fairly serious violation of the author’s beliefs. So if we’re to disregard supernatural and religious concepts, the obvious first idea is that horcruxes are storage media for some portion of a brain’s data.
The problem is that most of what makes up a brain has been strongly hinted to not be the answer, either. It certainly looks like Harry is a horcrux in this universe, and Harry already thought of that possibility in different terms, yet the Sorting Hat says with 100% confidence that there is no extra “mind, intelligence, memory, personality, or feelings” in Harry’s head. And I’m disregarding out of hand any clever-schoolboy loopholes like “The horcrux is Harry’s foot!”
What is left of a brain, if mind and intelligence and memory and personality and feelings (and a soul) are eliminated? It would be fitting, though a bit precious, if the answer were somehow “rationality”, if you could come up with a sensible reason to say that a person’s decision-making algorithms don’t fall under any of those five categories. But I certainly can’t; “mind” by itself seems pretty all-encompassing to me.
But I’m new to Less Wrong and not yet very well read about the art of rationality, so it could be that this will be an easy question for some of you. What explanation remains that would describe what a horcrux is? Are there accepted theories out there that I haven’t seen? Or is it maybe time to start questioning my premise that Harry is a horcrux in the first place?
It certainly looks like Harry is a horcrux in this universe, and Harry already thought of that possibility in different terms, yet the Sorting Hat says...
The exact phrasing of the Sorting Hat’s statement was as follows:
...there is definitely nothing like a ghost—mind, intelligence, memory, personality, or feelings—in your scar. Otherwise it would be participating in this conversation, being under my brim.
Now, anyone that’s read the sort of fairytale where riddles are important should immediately be able to come up with a half-dozen loopholes in that, but I think we can dismiss most of them out of hand given that the Sorting Hat has no particular incentive to be misleading. The most promising option that remains, by my reading, is that there’s nothing separate about the Horcrux contents for the Hat to key off of—they effectively are Harry, or part of him. He’s probably tapping that part of himself when he has his Dark Side episodes, at the very least, but I don’t think that’s the full extent of the Horcrux’s influence: at various points he asks himself or people around him why he doesn’t think like other children, and narrative parsimony points rather strongly to the one unique trait we know he has.
The weakest point of this theory, as best I can tell, is the lack of any (obvious) memories from Voldemort; I think we can safely assume the Hat would have found them if they were locked away somewhere within him, but on the other hand it’d be a rather poor resurrection that resulted in an amnesiac personality-clone. Riddle’s diary from Chamber of Secrets also argues along these lines. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen any other Horcruces in MoR, so we have nothing in-universe to compare against, and canon may not be reliable. Perhaps the relevant memories got wiped out by infantile amnesia or something.
The most promising option that remains, by my reading, is that there’s nothing separate about the Horcrux contents for the Hat to key off of—they effectively are Harry, or part of him.
That seems to be supported by this passage from Chapter 85:
Maybe because his dark side wasn’t an imaginary voice like Hufflepuff; Harry might imagine his Hufflepuff part as wanting different things from himself, but his dark side wasn’t like that. His “dark side”, so far as Harry could tell, was a different way that Harry sometimes was. Right now, Harry wasn’t angry; and trying to ask what “dark Harry” wanted was a phone ringing unanswered.
The idea is, crudely, that if Harry is a Horcrux, it is not because he has some distinct thing inside him, but because some part of Voldemort (part of his soul?) has “merged” with Harry.
Voldemort’s Killing Curse worked. Lily’s son is dead. The sacrifice magic hurt Voldemort and created a new person in Harry’s body from Voldemort’s mind, who we’ve been reading about ever since. The hat doesn’t notice this because it never met the previous Harry. Voldemort knows all this and is treating Harry as his mind-child.
It could be that horcruxes performed on things with brains are intensely unreliable—so, instead of the brain being able to assert itself over any dumb matter it’s bound to, like a book, it suddenly finds itself fighting for control with matter that has a ‘soul’ of its own. In this case, the horcrux gets trapped in the brain of an infant child, and you sort of split the difference—the horcrux is partially destroyed by years of being trapped in a baby brain, but leaves certain skills and intellect and preferences behind, integrated into Harry’s brain.
An alternative hypothesis is that the horcrux is inactive, or unconscious, in some form, and has been integrated into Harry’s brain, and Quirrelmort has a plan that involves waking it up at some point in the future if Harry can’t be pushed into his dark side by subtler means.
That explanation would have been a pretty good one, right up until the Humanism chapters, where exposure to a Dementor turns Harry directly into Voldemort for a few minutes. After that it doesn’t really hold water anymore.
I’d agree that it shifts probability away from that explanation, since passing out and waking up without a shred of compassion for other people is certainly less a reaction you expect from someone with only some fairly normal personality quirks than someone with something really unusual going on, although I’ll note that Harry has always had something of a conflict between the part of him that cares about and wants the best for everyone, and the part of him which doesn’t like or relate to other people, and this is certainly not unique or indicative of multiple personalities. But to say that exposure to a dementor “turns Harry directly into Voldemort” seems like jumping to conclusions to me. If we didn’t already know that in the original canon, Harry was inadvertently made a horcrux of Voldemort, I’d say it was an extremely premature narrowing of the hypothesis space.
Voldemort might think like Harry did when he was dementor-warped, but we’ve never gotten to see inside his head, and he didn’t act like Harry acted.
There was a compulsion to chew and swallow chocolate. The response to compulsion was killing.
People had gathered around and stared. That was annoying. The response to annoyance was killing.
Other people were chattering in the background. That was insolent. The response to insolence was to inflict pain, but since none of them were useful, killing them would be simpler.
“The response to compulsion was killing.” Not just “He wanted to kill Dumbledore”. The way it’s phrased implies a memory, a history, a system of behavior that was predetermined and practiced. The only way that can be is if Harry has directly and fully assumed the mind of someone who has already established all that in their past. For me, “turn[ed] directly into Voldemort” is as accurate a way as any to describe that, unless it’s someone other than Voldemort he turned directly into.
“He wanted to kill Dumbledore” would have been poor dramatic phrasing. “The response to compulsion was killing” could mean that he has a memory and history of this, or it could simply mean that in his state of mind, killing seems like the natural response to being compelled to do things by others. If I were trying to write that, I would sooner write “the response to compulsion was killing” than “He wanted to kill Dumbledore.”
The fact that Harry underwent a serious personality change on exposure to the dementor, and Hermione speculated that such a thing might happen to a person who already had that darker personality within them, is a substantial piece of evidence that Harry has something more unusual going on than some personality quirks. The phrasing used in that scene, on the other hand, I do not think can reasonably be treated as evidence of anything in particular. In fact, I can’t think of a single explanation for Harry’s personality change which would make the phrasing seem weird, given that artistic impact of the words being used is as important a consideration as their connotations.
I didn’t read the ‘the response to X was Y’ approach as experience as Voldemort. I thought it was the goal-orientedness side, the intent to kill. The algorithm of ‘I am here, I want to be there, where is the shortest route’.
It seems to me that the horcrux doesn’t need memories. The stored fragment of the soul serves not as a means of resurrection, but to sort of “anchor” the soul to the living world. So the main part of the soul, the part that stays within the living body until death, is left to linger. There is evidence for this: in canon, the first time Voldemort dies, his soul still lives, gathers strength, and then gets a servant to help him, without any contact with the horcruxes.
And I expect that Voldemort actually planned on making Harry a horcrux; what better protection against a prophetic rival than to make him have to suicide to kill you?
The implication of the next part was that IF there was a different spirit anywhere in harry it would be participating in the conversation. Considering how frank the hat is about Harry’s potential for evil, I don’t think it would have lied in a petty fashion like this.
We can try to assume that a horcrux is literally a fragment of a soul, in the Hofstadterian sense. It is then indeed an abstract algorithm (or a set of them), and it need not include memory and separate intelligence, although it would include personality and feelings.
Extrapolating on what we know about how the Source of Magic interprets things, we should expect inanimate object horcruxes to be generally passive, while alive horcruxes to incorporate the algorithms into their own minds, although still somewhat separate.
[It’d be cool to read about how a horcruxed software would behave.]
In Canon, a horcrux is a fragment of a soul. But it stands to reason that this will not be the full answer in MoR, as it’s a fairly serious violation of the author’s beliefs
I would guess that the author sees conservation of energy as pretty important also. I would not be at all surprised if souls really exist in the HPMoR universe.
Va gur Nhgube’f Abgrf sbe Puncgref 39--40 (Cergraqvat gb Or Jvfr), Ryvrmre nccrnef gb or qryvorengryl inthr nf gb jurgure gur UCZBE havirefr unf na nsgreyvsr. Ng yrnfg, gung’f ubj V ernq guvf:
Vg’f na vagrerfgvat dhrfgvba nf gb jurgure Uneel vf orunivat nf n Syng Rnegu Ngurvfg jvgu erfcrpg gb uvf fxrcgvpvfz nobhg na nsgreyvsr. Gb or engvbany, lbh jnag gb unir gur fbeg bs zvaq gung, vs vg svaqf vgfrys va n jbeyq jvgu ab nsgreyvsr, qbrfa’g oryvrir va na nsgreyvsr, naq vs vg svaqf vgfrys va n jbeyq jvgu na nsgreyvsr, qbrf oryvrir va na nsgreyvsr. W. X. Ebjyvat pyrneyl oryvrirq gung gur Cbggreirefr unq na nsgreyvsr, naq jebgr vg nppbeqvatyl; vs Uneel svaqf uvzfrys va gung havirefr, naq ur fgvyy qbrfa’g oryvrir va na nsgreyvsr, gung’f abg arprffnevyl n tbbq fvta sbe uvf engvbanyvgl.
Lrf, ohg fbzrgvzrf gur rivqrapr ninvynoyr gb lbh vf zvfyrnqvat. V qba’g guvax gur rkvfgrag rivqrapr whfgvsvrf oryvrs va na nsgreyvsr, tvira gur xabjyrqtr ninvynoyr gb Uneel.
It certainly looks like Harry is a horcrux in this universe, and Harry already thought of that possibility in different terms, yet the Sorting Hat says with 100% confidence that there is no extra “mind, intelligence, memory, personality, or feelings” in Harry’s head.
I would add that in Cannon, Harry is a horcrux, which adds a fair amount of weight to the idea.
Some possibilities for why the hat would make the statement;
Harry’s scar isn’t a horcrux.
A horcrux is nothing like a ghost, mind, intelligence, memory, personality, or feelings.
The sorting hat was wrong, or lying.
Something about Harry-the-horcrux prevents detection by sorting hats. For example, it can’t be active (and therefore the hat can’t detect it) unless Harry is in dark side mode.
Something about Volemort’s horcrux is different than the hat expects. For example, an occlumens can hide from detection.
While I like the idea that the horcrux is only active when Harry is in dark-side mode, I can’t see any reason to favor that theory.
Upvoted. I don’t have any enlightening ideas about the nature of Horcruxes, but I have always wondered (given what the Hat said) why so many of the theories in these threads take for granted that Harry is a Horcrux, and I invite anyone who subscribes to this theory to explain how they reconcile it with the Hat’s statement.
Well, I think the repeated and explicit naming of Harry’s Dark Side as a thing within and separate from the rest of Harry is a decent reason to take for granted that Harry’s a horcrux. But then, we had decent reason to take for granted that Lucius thought Harry was Voldemort, until we learned a couple of chapters ago of the mysterious unnamed hero from the seventies.
But then, we had decent reason to take for granted that Lucius thought Harry was Voldemort, until we learned a couple of chapters ago of the mysterious unnamed hero from the seventies.
Am I misreading you, or do you think the new information about Noble Hero is evidence against the idea that Lucius thinks Harry is Voldemort? If that’s so, could you elaborate as to why?
Yeah, eh, that statement was actually based on a major stupid error that I didn’t realize was a major stupid error until I tried to type it just now. Quirrell’s Yule speech made Amelia Bones think Quirrell was this Noble Hero; Harry’s Yule speech made Lucius Malfoy think Harry was… someone. I stupidly pattern-matched this Noble Hero into that blank, somehow forgetting the fact that the speeches involved were not the same or made by the same person and were in fact in direct opposition to one another. If I hadn’t been so coy about it I would have discovered this before embarrassing myself.
Well, I think the repeated and explicit naming of Harry’s Dark Side as a thing within and separate from the rest of Harry is a decent reason to take for granted that Harry’s a horcrux.
Take for granted? Maybe Harry has read some IFS stuff in with all the cognitive science, math, philosophy, modern physics, and other things that he’s read.
By Word of God, we know that horcruxes exist in the HPMoR universe. It seems like by now we ought to be able to start figuring out what a horcrux is.
In Canon, a horcrux is a fragment of a soul. But it stands to reason that this will not be the full answer in MoR, as it’s a fairly serious violation of the author’s beliefs. So if we’re to disregard supernatural and religious concepts, the obvious first idea is that horcruxes are storage media for some portion of a brain’s data.
The problem is that most of what makes up a brain has been strongly hinted to not be the answer, either. It certainly looks like Harry is a horcrux in this universe, and Harry already thought of that possibility in different terms, yet the Sorting Hat says with 100% confidence that there is no extra “mind, intelligence, memory, personality, or feelings” in Harry’s head. And I’m disregarding out of hand any clever-schoolboy loopholes like “The horcrux is Harry’s foot!”
What is left of a brain, if mind and intelligence and memory and personality and feelings (and a soul) are eliminated? It would be fitting, though a bit precious, if the answer were somehow “rationality”, if you could come up with a sensible reason to say that a person’s decision-making algorithms don’t fall under any of those five categories. But I certainly can’t; “mind” by itself seems pretty all-encompassing to me.
But I’m new to Less Wrong and not yet very well read about the art of rationality, so it could be that this will be an easy question for some of you. What explanation remains that would describe what a horcrux is? Are there accepted theories out there that I haven’t seen? Or is it maybe time to start questioning my premise that Harry is a horcrux in the first place?
The exact phrasing of the Sorting Hat’s statement was as follows:
Now, anyone that’s read the sort of fairytale where riddles are important should immediately be able to come up with a half-dozen loopholes in that, but I think we can dismiss most of them out of hand given that the Sorting Hat has no particular incentive to be misleading. The most promising option that remains, by my reading, is that there’s nothing separate about the Horcrux contents for the Hat to key off of—they effectively are Harry, or part of him. He’s probably tapping that part of himself when he has his Dark Side episodes, at the very least, but I don’t think that’s the full extent of the Horcrux’s influence: at various points he asks himself or people around him why he doesn’t think like other children, and narrative parsimony points rather strongly to the one unique trait we know he has.
The weakest point of this theory, as best I can tell, is the lack of any (obvious) memories from Voldemort; I think we can safely assume the Hat would have found them if they were locked away somewhere within him, but on the other hand it’d be a rather poor resurrection that resulted in an amnesiac personality-clone. Riddle’s diary from Chamber of Secrets also argues along these lines. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen any other Horcruces in MoR, so we have nothing in-universe to compare against, and canon may not be reliable. Perhaps the relevant memories got wiped out by infantile amnesia or something.
That seems to be supported by this passage from Chapter 85:
The idea is, crudely, that if Harry is a Horcrux, it is not because he has some distinct thing inside him, but because some part of Voldemort (part of his soul?) has “merged” with Harry.
Voldemort’s Killing Curse worked. Lily’s son is dead. The sacrifice magic hurt Voldemort and created a new person in Harry’s body from Voldemort’s mind, who we’ve been reading about ever since. The hat doesn’t notice this because it never met the previous Harry. Voldemort knows all this and is treating Harry as his mind-child.
So Harry 1.0 was overwritten by Tom Riddle 2.0, but this time Tom got a loving family?
I just realized that the existence of the Dark Side is evidence against this.
Harry would be all Dark Side if his original personality had been overwritten.
It could be that horcruxes performed on things with brains are intensely unreliable—so, instead of the brain being able to assert itself over any dumb matter it’s bound to, like a book, it suddenly finds itself fighting for control with matter that has a ‘soul’ of its own. In this case, the horcrux gets trapped in the brain of an infant child, and you sort of split the difference—the horcrux is partially destroyed by years of being trapped in a baby brain, but leaves certain skills and intellect and preferences behind, integrated into Harry’s brain.
An alternative hypothesis is that the horcrux is inactive, or unconscious, in some form, and has been integrated into Harry’s brain, and Quirrelmort has a plan that involves waking it up at some point in the future if Harry can’t be pushed into his dark side by subtler means.
I’ll note that that passage really doesn’t shift any likelihood away from this explanation.
That explanation would have been a pretty good one, right up until the Humanism chapters, where exposure to a Dementor turns Harry directly into Voldemort for a few minutes. After that it doesn’t really hold water anymore.
I’d agree that it shifts probability away from that explanation, since passing out and waking up without a shred of compassion for other people is certainly less a reaction you expect from someone with only some fairly normal personality quirks than someone with something really unusual going on, although I’ll note that Harry has always had something of a conflict between the part of him that cares about and wants the best for everyone, and the part of him which doesn’t like or relate to other people, and this is certainly not unique or indicative of multiple personalities. But to say that exposure to a dementor “turns Harry directly into Voldemort” seems like jumping to conclusions to me. If we didn’t already know that in the original canon, Harry was inadvertently made a horcrux of Voldemort, I’d say it was an extremely premature narrowing of the hypothesis space.
Voldemort might think like Harry did when he was dementor-warped, but we’ve never gotten to see inside his head, and he didn’t act like Harry acted.
It’s not merely that Harry thought a certain way:
“The response to compulsion was killing.” Not just “He wanted to kill Dumbledore”. The way it’s phrased implies a memory, a history, a system of behavior that was predetermined and practiced. The only way that can be is if Harry has directly and fully assumed the mind of someone who has already established all that in their past. For me, “turn[ed] directly into Voldemort” is as accurate a way as any to describe that, unless it’s someone other than Voldemort he turned directly into.
“He wanted to kill Dumbledore” would have been poor dramatic phrasing. “The response to compulsion was killing” could mean that he has a memory and history of this, or it could simply mean that in his state of mind, killing seems like the natural response to being compelled to do things by others. If I were trying to write that, I would sooner write “the response to compulsion was killing” than “He wanted to kill Dumbledore.”
The fact that Harry underwent a serious personality change on exposure to the dementor, and Hermione speculated that such a thing might happen to a person who already had that darker personality within them, is a substantial piece of evidence that Harry has something more unusual going on than some personality quirks. The phrasing used in that scene, on the other hand, I do not think can reasonably be treated as evidence of anything in particular. In fact, I can’t think of a single explanation for Harry’s personality change which would make the phrasing seem weird, given that artistic impact of the words being used is as important a consideration as their connotations.
I didn’t read the ‘the response to X was Y’ approach as experience as Voldemort. I thought it was the goal-orientedness side, the intent to kill. The algorithm of ‘I am here, I want to be there, where is the shortest route’.
I can’t imagine Voldemort or Quirrell thinking so crudely, even in terms of goal systems.
It seems to me that the horcrux doesn’t need memories. The stored fragment of the soul serves not as a means of resurrection, but to sort of “anchor” the soul to the living world. So the main part of the soul, the part that stays within the living body until death, is left to linger. There is evidence for this: in canon, the first time Voldemort dies, his soul still lives, gathers strength, and then gets a servant to help him, without any contact with the horcruxes.
And I expect that Voldemort actually planned on making Harry a horcrux; what better protection against a prophetic rival than to make him have to suicide to kill you?
“In your scar.” Not “in you”, not “in your head”, not “in your brain”.
May as well have said there wasn’t a ghost in your left pinky toe, for as much as “in your scar” rules out anything.
The implication of the next part was that IF there was a different spirit anywhere in harry it would be participating in the conversation. Considering how frank the hat is about Harry’s potential for evil, I don’t think it would have lied in a petty fashion like this.
The It being referred to is the nonexistent entity in his scar. Not any possible entity or intelligence. Like the one in his left earlobe.
We can try to assume that a horcrux is literally a fragment of a soul, in the Hofstadterian sense. It is then indeed an abstract algorithm (or a set of them), and it need not include memory and separate intelligence, although it would include personality and feelings.
Extrapolating on what we know about how the Source of Magic interprets things, we should expect inanimate object horcruxes to be generally passive, while alive horcruxes to incorporate the algorithms into their own minds, although still somewhat separate.
[It’d be cool to read about how a horcruxed software would behave.]
I would guess that the author sees conservation of energy as pretty important also. I would not be at all surprised if souls really exist in the HPMoR universe.
Va gur Nhgube’f Abgrf sbe Puncgref 39--40 (Cergraqvat gb Or Jvfr), Ryvrmre nccrnef gb or qryvorengryl inthr nf gb jurgure gur UCZBE havirefr unf na nsgreyvsr. Ng yrnfg, gung’f ubj V ernq guvf:
Lrf, ohg fbzrgvzrf gur rivqrapr ninvynoyr gb lbh vf zvfyrnqvat. V qba’g guvax gur rkvfgrag rivqrapr whfgvsvrf oryvrs va na nsgreyvsr, tvira gur xabjyrqtr ninvynoyr gb Uneel.
I would add that in Cannon, Harry is a horcrux, which adds a fair amount of weight to the idea.
Some possibilities for why the hat would make the statement;
Harry’s scar isn’t a horcrux.
A horcrux is nothing like a ghost, mind, intelligence, memory, personality, or feelings.
The sorting hat was wrong, or lying.
Something about Harry-the-horcrux prevents detection by sorting hats. For example, it can’t be active (and therefore the hat can’t detect it) unless Harry is in dark side mode.
Something about Volemort’s horcrux is different than the hat expects. For example, an occlumens can hide from detection.
While I like the idea that the horcrux is only active when Harry is in dark-side mode, I can’t see any reason to favor that theory.
Upvoted. I don’t have any enlightening ideas about the nature of Horcruxes, but I have always wondered (given what the Hat said) why so many of the theories in these threads take for granted that Harry is a Horcrux, and I invite anyone who subscribes to this theory to explain how they reconcile it with the Hat’s statement.
Well, I think the repeated and explicit naming of Harry’s Dark Side as a thing within and separate from the rest of Harry is a decent reason to take for granted that Harry’s a horcrux. But then, we had decent reason to take for granted that Lucius thought Harry was Voldemort, until we learned a couple of chapters ago of the mysterious unnamed hero from the seventies.
Am I misreading you, or do you think the new information about Noble Hero is evidence against the idea that Lucius thinks Harry is Voldemort? If that’s so, could you elaborate as to why?
Yeah, eh, that statement was actually based on a major stupid error that I didn’t realize was a major stupid error until I tried to type it just now. Quirrell’s Yule speech made Amelia Bones think Quirrell was this Noble Hero; Harry’s Yule speech made Lucius Malfoy think Harry was… someone. I stupidly pattern-matched this Noble Hero into that blank, somehow forgetting the fact that the speeches involved were not the same or made by the same person and were in fact in direct opposition to one another. If I hadn’t been so coy about it I would have discovered this before embarrassing myself.
Take for granted? Maybe Harry has read some IFS stuff in with all the cognitive science, math, philosophy, modern physics, and other things that he’s read.