The fact that he’s wearing it at all stuns me. It needs to be maintained by a coven of the greatest wizards around.
Imagine:
Harry dies (heart attack, stroke, stabbed by Goyle, whatever)
Handless amnesiac Voldemort appears, dies of human transfiguration sickness after a few deeply confused minutes
Horcrux network activates. Best case, this amnesiac being can’t figure out how to possess anyone.
Medium case, somebody gets possessed by the clueless shade. Worst case: network was built to supplement current memories with dump of previous ones (we can see by the part where Voldemort Confounds himself before the Mirror that he had thought about the concept of changing his mental state), and the Dark Lord is back in business
Kind of an interesting mirror to Voldemort, yes? The one Tom has trouble thinking of ideas that involve him being helpful to other people; the other has trouble thinking of ideas that involve other people being helpful to him.
The fact that he’s wearing it at all stuns me. It needs to be maintained by a coven of the greatest wizards around.
An excellent point. Harry could catch some disease that leaves him bedridden and incoherent for a few days. Or one of his experiments with magic could end with him waking up in the hospital the next day. He’s taking an extreme risk here.
Still, this isn’t out of character for HPMOR Harry. His inexperience and reluctance to confer with older wizards went a long way to helping Voldemort return.
Oh yeah, its definitely in character, and, also, to be fair, he’s a traumatized child and its only been a little while. I’m sure he’ll find a way to keep it safe once his mind kicks back into gear.
Agreed, and add to all of those risks that Harry is an obliviation noob and he may not have gotten the wipe right. We don’t know what Voldemort will or will not remember if he wakes.
Even in the medium case of possession by an amnesiac, V might figure out who he probably is, or get briefed by a servant who figures it out. The list of recently deceased epically powered wizards in the world is pretty short.
And Harry is being naive again:
On Harry’s left hand, a tiny emerald glowed bright beneath the morning sun.
Not Heaven, not some faraway star, not a different place but a better person, I’ll show you, someday I’ll show you how to be happy -
The issue with psychopathy is not that these people are not happy, but that they are not capable of empathy. Not that it needs to be taught, but that the brain circuitry for empathy is not functional. Being raised in a kind versus abusive environment matters, but the difference that produces is between someone who is merely cold, selfish, manipulative, and calculating versus someone who is all of those things in a serial killer kind of way. Muggles have no therapy for it. Maybe magic does, but it isn’t a question of teaching Quirrell to be happy. Quirrell will have to be changed into a person who is a capable of genuinely caring about people who are not him.
It’s not nearly that simple. In a nutshell, their brains are very noticeably different from normal brains, the track record of treatment has been not only ineffective but sometimes counterproductive, and the problem is considered by many to be intractable. The studies done were not done well, and there have been some promising results with “decompression treatment” for juveniles who are mild to moderate in their psychopathy, and no other group. It would be a great boon to society if adult psychopaths could be rehabilitated, but no one knows how to do it.
I encourage you to peruse the whole thing if you have time, but here are some excerpts:
Putting these results together begins to paint a picture of the psychopathic brain as being markedly deficient in neural areas critical for three aspects of moral judgment: 1) the ability to recognize moral issues; 2) the ability to inhibit a response pending resolution of the moral issue; and 3) the ability to reach a decision about the moral issue. Along with several other researchers,149 we have demonstrated that each of these tasks recruits areas in the paralimbic system, and that those precise areas are the ones in which psychopaths have markedly reduced neural activity compared with non-psychopaths.
What does all this mean? First, it suggests that the story of psychopathy is largely limbic and paralimbic rather than prefrontal.150 This dovetails nicely with the central paradox of the psychopath: he is completely rational but morally insane. He is missing the moral core, a core that appears intimately involved with the paralimbic regions. If the key to psychopathy lies in these lower regions, then it is no mystery that the psychopath is able to recruit his higher functions to navigate the world. In fact, when he gives a moral response, it seems the psychopath must recruit frontal areas to mimic his dysfunctional paralimbic areas. That is, the psychopath must think about right and wrong while the rest of us feel it. He knows morality’s words but not its music.
The received dogma has been that psychopathy is untreatable, based on study after study that seemed to show that the behaviors of psychopaths could not be improved by any traditional, or even nontraditional, forms of therapy. Nothing seems to have worked—psychoanalysis, group therapy, client-centered therapy, psychodrama, psychosurgery, electroshock therapy or drug therapy153—creating a largely unshakable belief among most clinicians and academics, and certainly among lay people, that psychopathy is untreatable, though as we will discuss below few if any of these studies were properly controlled and designed.
Most talking therapies, at least, are aimed at patients who know, at one level or another, that they need help. Psychotherapy normally requires patients to participate actively in their own recovery. But psychopaths are not distressed; they typically do not feel they have any psychological or emotional problems, and are not only generally satisfied with themselves but see themselves as superior beings in a world of inferior ones.
Treatment not only seems not to work, there is evidence that some kinds of treatment make matters worse. In a famous 1991 study of incarcerated psychopaths about to be released from a therapeutic community, those who received group therapy actually had a higher violent recidivism rate than those who were not treated at all.
The state of the treatment literature has been described as “appalling.”
Second, and most importantly, the decompression treatment was highly effective in reducing both institutional misconduct and recidivism, but only if it was lengthy and only—and here is the less promising aspect of the study—for juveniles scoring in the low to moderate ranges of the PCL-YV (≤ 31)
Watching Charlie Rose this weekend, they briefly discussed recent findings on brain scans of psychopaths. Shriveled amygdalas so they felt little fear, but amped up goal pursuit system (sorry, can’t remember the brain area).
The fact that he’s wearing it at all stuns me. It needs to be maintained by a coven of the greatest wizards around.
Imagine: Harry dies (heart attack, stroke, stabbed by Goyle, whatever) Handless amnesiac Voldemort appears, dies of human transfiguration sickness after a few deeply confused minutes Horcrux network activates.
Best case, this amnesiac being can’t figure out how to possess anyone. Medium case, somebody gets possessed by the clueless shade.
Worst case: network was built to supplement current memories with dump of previous ones (we can see by the part where Voldemort Confounds himself before the Mirror that he had thought about the concept of changing his mental state), and the Dark Lord is back in business
Note that it was Harry, not Voldemort, who came up with that idea. (Chapter 109) So, no, Voldemort most likely did not think of that.
Yes.
But Harry tends not to see other people as PCs, or as able to add anything to his plots.
Kind of an interesting mirror to Voldemort, yes? The one Tom has trouble thinking of ideas that involve him being helpful to other people; the other has trouble thinking of ideas that involve other people being helpful to him.
An excellent point. Harry could catch some disease that leaves him bedridden and incoherent for a few days. Or one of his experiments with magic could end with him waking up in the hospital the next day. He’s taking an extreme risk here.
Still, this isn’t out of character for HPMOR Harry. His inexperience and reluctance to confer with older wizards went a long way to helping Voldemort return.
Oh yeah, its definitely in character, and, also, to be fair, he’s a traumatized child and its only been a little while. I’m sure he’ll find a way to keep it safe once his mind kicks back into gear.
Agreed, and add to all of those risks that Harry is an obliviation noob and he may not have gotten the wipe right. We don’t know what Voldemort will or will not remember if he wakes.
Even in the medium case of possession by an amnesiac, V might figure out who he probably is, or get briefed by a servant who figures it out. The list of recently deceased epically powered wizards in the world is pretty short.
And Harry is being naive again:
The issue with psychopathy is not that these people are not happy, but that they are not capable of empathy. Not that it needs to be taught, but that the brain circuitry for empathy is not functional. Being raised in a kind versus abusive environment matters, but the difference that produces is between someone who is merely cold, selfish, manipulative, and calculating versus someone who is all of those things in a serial killer kind of way. Muggles have no therapy for it. Maybe magic does, but it isn’t a question of teaching Quirrell to be happy. Quirrell will have to be changed into a person who is a capable of genuinely caring about people who are not him.
Brains are flexible, so why can’t psychopaths learn empathy using different circuitry? If sufficiently motivated, that is.
It’s not nearly that simple. In a nutshell, their brains are very noticeably different from normal brains, the track record of treatment has been not only ineffective but sometimes counterproductive, and the problem is considered by many to be intractable. The studies done were not done well, and there have been some promising results with “decompression treatment” for juveniles who are mild to moderate in their psychopathy, and no other group. It would be a great boon to society if adult psychopaths could be rehabilitated, but no one knows how to do it.
I encourage you to peruse the whole thing if you have time, but here are some excerpts:
Thanks, that’s very interesting.
Watching Charlie Rose this weekend, they briefly discussed recent findings on brain scans of psychopaths. Shriveled amygdalas so they felt little fear, but amped up goal pursuit system (sorry, can’t remember the brain area).
If Harry would give it to Moody and Bones, they would very likely go through with the mirror plan and remove Voldemort from time.
Harry seems to hope that he can later recover part of Voldemort’s magic.
That does seem the best long term disposal. Preserves his current state indefinitely.
Meh: It’s been like a day and there are tons of steps Harry need to take longterm. He might even have started taking these steps offscreen.
What would happen if he used the Philosopher’s Stone on Voldemort’s transfigured form? I guess the transfiguration would become irreversible.
He wants to figure out how to restore Quirrel, but is the risk of accidentally releasing Voldemort worth it?
People have speculated that making the transfiguration permanent would risk activating the Horcrux network.
I wondered the same thing, But couldn’t he also later use the stone to reverse it by re-transfiguring it to Voldemort’s body?
You can’t transfigure (via free transfiguration) anything into a target you don’t understand completely. Otherwise it will be just an imitation.