But the Potterverse is dualist. Even if horcruxes get some massive retcon, animagi preserve that in MOR.
It enjoys the mind/body distinction, for sure, but not necessarily strongly (not more strongly than a physicalist who wants to be neuropreserved). Random proposed mechanisms for animagi:
the human mind is very compressible, so it’s not hard to build a cat-sized brain that runs a human
the brain actually gets teleported to another dimension and operates the cat via telepresence
the cat is animated through magic and most of its mass is actually used to run computation (slightly less plausible for a beetle)
It enjoys the mind/body distinction, for sure, but not necessarily strongly (not more strongly than a physicalist who wants to be neuropreserved). Random proposed mechanisms for animagi:
the human mind is very compressible, so it’s not hard to build a cat-sized brain that runs a human
the brain actually gets teleported to another dimension and operates the cat via telepresence
the cat is animated through magic and most of its mass is actually used to run computation (slightly less plausible for a beetle)
Or the obvious one: space is compressed using the same method as every other bigger-on-the-inside object wizards use everywhere all the time.
Beetle-sized (of the beautifully blue sort), at least.
Note also that the body the mind wears apparently (according to quirrel) does have an impact on the mind.