Harry didn’t want to say in front of Professor McGonagall that the existence of brain damage implied that there were no such things as souls.
Harry is wrong here. Yes, the existence of brain damage implies that there are no such things as souls, but that is true only in worlds where we don’t observe people behaving like their normal selves in the absence of their (uninjured) brains.
In this magical universe, we do see people behaving like their normal selves in the absence of their brains, just take a look at Animagi for example. And while just saying “souls” does not explain how this happens, we can at least perceive that brains are not the only possible forms for people’s consciences.
Harry has not yet evicted his cached thoughts about souls, he has not yet given the matter sufficient attention in the presence of new evidence.
I think what’s blocking his progress on figuring out souls is that he still believes that a “soul” has to be immortal, which is incompatible with the effects of brain damage.
An alternative interpretation is that “souls” are not immortal in the sense of being independent from people’s brains, but rather that their “instantiations” track the form of the brain as a person goes on thinking with it, but put it on pause during those moments where the brain is absent from the material world (or something equivalent).
Also, from what Harry knows about how magic works, if a dark wizard expected himself to have a soul and created a dark ritual to anchor it to an object and avoid death, magic could plausibly just make him a “soul” for the occasion.
Brooms working by Aristotelian physics and aguamenti are also a giveaway that magic doesn’t care how the universe would ordinarily work.
Harry is wrong here. Yes, the existence of brain damage implies that there are no such things as souls, but that is true only in worlds where we don’t observe people behaving like their normal selves in the absence of their (uninjured) brains.
In this magical universe, we do see people behaving like their normal selves in the absence of their brains, just take a look at Animagi for example. And while just saying “souls” does not explain how this happens, we can at least perceive that brains are not the only possible forms for people’s consciences.
Harry has not yet evicted his cached thoughts about souls, he has not yet given the matter sufficient attention in the presence of new evidence.
I think what’s blocking his progress on figuring out souls is that he still believes that a “soul” has to be immortal, which is incompatible with the effects of brain damage.
An alternative interpretation is that “souls” are not immortal in the sense of being independent from people’s brains, but rather that their “instantiations” track the form of the brain as a person goes on thinking with it, but put it on pause during those moments where the brain is absent from the material world (or something equivalent).
Also, from what Harry knows about how magic works, if a dark wizard expected himself to have a soul and created a dark ritual to anchor it to an object and avoid death, magic could plausibly just make him a “soul” for the occasion.
Brooms working by Aristotelian physics and aguamenti are also a giveaway that magic doesn’t care how the universe would ordinarily work.