It is still unclear how horcruxes would fit into the HPMOR universe given the premise that souls do not exist. Here are some thoughts and conjectures revolving around the postulate that horcruxes are complete memory/personality backups:
To recreate one’s identity, there has to be more than just replication of memories. There also has to be a way to replicate the ‘software’ that governs our thought processes. Removing the limitations and shortcuts that our physical brain has in place would undoubtedly remove lots of mental biases (making us hyper-rational) but also raise the question of whether the resulting entity will really be ‘us’ or just well approximated copies of us (a well explored topic in the transcendent pony fic).
The very possibility of possession (as evidenced in the zombie Quirrell) gives evidence in favor of the possibility to project one’s mind outside one’s original body and still be able to retain the capacity to not only have semblance of life (a la magical portraits and ghosts), but to also be able to learn new information and retain it (i.e. grow) and interact meaningfully with the environment.
Assuming away the whole issue of whether one’s identity can be virtually encapsulated independent of our biological hardware, this would require careful copy control (lest there be multiple versions of you running around, raising the question of which one is the ‘real’ you, explored comedically in one of robst’s fanfics). Is Harry an incomplete horcrux, retaining Voldemort’s post-transcendent software (hyper-rationality), but not his memories, i.e. a failure of copy control? (He clearly didn’t inherit his rationality from biological parents?)
Magic in potterverse directly interacts with mind. So magic is capable of storing information, including memories, software, etc?
Since Voldemort has already gone through the process, he already knows what’s involved.
Do you mean that this is the premise of your analysis, or a premise of the HPMOR universe? Because if I understand correctly, all we have to show for the non-existence of souls is Harry’s (entirely rational) belief, which may yet be challenged by future observations.
It’s not Harry’s observations; it’s everybody’s observations of the world. People don’t act like souls exist. If Dumbledore really thought that people just go on to another great adventure when they die, he wouldn’t have a bunch of pedestals of broken wands.
Nobody in HPMOR believes in souls or acts like they exist. That’s why Harry can decisively conclude that they don’t exist.
Your intuitions about evolution and my intuitions must be drastically different.
I can imagine no possible world where human bodies were attached to an immortal decision-making engine, on an evolutionary timescale, where human brain biology still looks practically indistinguishable from all other mammal brain biology and where human grief behavior still corresponds to other mammal grief behavior.
My intuition was that since a hypothetical immortal soul doesn’t pass on the owner’s genes and therefore doesn’t contribute to genetic fitness, it should have little if any direct influence on evolutionary incentives.
It’s true that an animal that somehow evolved a soul would look drastically different neurologically from a human, but we know empirically that wizards are mostly the same as muggles psychologically/neurologically, so it seems this doesn’t happen to be the case. By the way, I agree with Draco’s hypothesis that if souls do exist, muggles probably don’t have them, since they don’t seem to have gotten any other benefits from the magic patch.
I don’t consider myself a particularly competent practitioner of counterfactual evopsych, so if you do, and still disagree, I suppose I’ll have to update my beliefs.
What I mean by “immortal soul” in this case is just the Source of Magic backing up the brain state of wizards when they die. If the soul were capable of cognitive function independently of the brain then of course you’ and Xachariah would be right.
Nobody in HPMOR believes in souls or acts like they exist.
Well, ok, but it’s also been shown many times that most of the HPMOR cast needs to take several ranks in Knowledge(What The Heck They’re Talking About) just to approach the effectiveness of the average level-1 fighter. Harry should not be weighting either their beliefs or their aliefs very strongly as evidence in any direction.
Correction: it is Harry’s observations of the general public of the wizarding world, which is far from the same thing.
There are many possible worlds in which a number of powerful wizards know for a fact that souls exist, and live their lives accordingly, but which look exactly the same to Harry.
In fact, it’s rather probable that a world in which a minority of wizards are aware that souls really exist would look just like this one. Imagine what it’s like to be a member of such a minority trying to spread the truth.
“By the way, souls really exist.”
“I know—everyone believes in souls.”
“No, I mean it—souls actually, literally, exist. So you shouldn’t be too sad when people die, because they’re just going somewhere else. And you shouldn’t be too sad about your baby being stillborn, because it’ll have another chance at happiness in the afterlife. And depending on their circumstances, severely disabled people might be better off comitting suicide so they can move on to a healthy existence faster. And- hey, where are you going?”
I’m not saying any of those are necessarily reasonable conclusions to draw from the existence of souls, but it makes the point. Trying to live like this will automatically put you at odds with the rest of society, who will at best treat you like a crazy minority religious sect. So most soul-aware wizards will probably keep it to themselves, resulting in a world where Harry will be unaware of them.
But what about Dumbledore? If there were anyone in such a Soul Sect, I’m pretty sure Dumbledore would be one of them. Wouldn’t you agree?
But as “Pretending to be Wise” suggests, and as Dumbledore’s room of broken wands makes clear, Dumbledore does not, in fact, behave as if souls are real. Now “perhaps” this is all an elaborate ruse on the part of Dumbledore, and he is just pretending to behave-as-if souls are not real. Regardless of how twisty and deceptive Dumbledore is, this particular deception seems wildly out of character for him.
(Actually, it would be more accurate to say that Dumbledore does not behave as if the afterlife is real. It’s quite possible to have souls without an afterlife; perhaps they just get garbage-collected if not attached to the world in some matter (whether it’s a person’s body, or a horcrux, etc.). In fact, I regard this as a likely enough scenario to be worth thinking about (p = 0.6, say?).)
I agree that, if knowing about the afterlife is made likelier by being an experienced and powerful wizard, Dumbledore should be expected to know about the afterlife. However, we have now gone from “it’s everybody’s observations of the world” to “it’s Harry’s observations of the general public” to “it’s Harry’s observations of Dumbledore”. In other words, Harry’s (and our) evidence base for the lack of an afterlife keeps getting narrower the more we think about it.
In addition, it’s worth noting that Dumbledore, for all his virtues, is also great at self-deception and confused thinking (plotting and strategy excepted). There are all manner of circumstances under which Dumbledore would be unaware of the existence of the afterlife—for example, if it led to a conclusion he was unable to accept, all his power and experience might not stop him flinching away.
That’s how the conversation goes if the Soul Evangelist is trying to convert non believer into a believer. All she has to do is point out the existence of ghosts, the veil in the departments of mysteries, or maybe the legends of the resurrection stone. Most people would take this as sufficient evidence.
In the proposed scenario, she is faced with the much more difficult task of converting a believer-in-belief.
It seems to me that that belief has already been challenged twice, and Harry is being obtuse in still dismissing them so easily. I am sort of expecting Eliezer to use this as a lesson in updating on evidence. It seems to me Harry is acting like Twilight Sparkle in ‘Feeling Pinkie Keen’ by refusing to explore the existence of souls more closely.
For this post, I meant premise of my analysis. More generally, my priors tell me that is the author’s viewpoint of the world, though I wouldn’t presume to guess.
Why should the author’s viewpoint of the world determine the author’s viewpoint of the HPMoR world? Presumably the author also believes that magic does not exist.
Because it seems likely that someone like Eliezer would write a magic system of the sufficiently-advanced-technology-is-indistinguishable-from-magic sense rather than the waves hands-because-magic!-waves hands sense.
Further, if souls existed, Harry would have no reason to want people to not die, which kind of breaks the story (unless I suppose there’s some mechanism to kill souls, which I admit would be interesting)
If souls exist, but the afterlife doesn’t exist or is just really bad/boring, then Harry would have a good reason, to either not let people die or to bring them back once they do.
There’s a spell that doesn’t reveal the true cloak of invisibility, but indicates that such an artefact is present. You could imagine a corresponding spell for souls, or a dog which only barks at soul-imbued creatures (may bark twice at soul-imbued postmen and once at soul-less postmen. In which case you’d need to ask “are you a postman” using veritaserum to distinguish false positives for souls.).
If it gives a positive response to humans and some/all intelligent non-humans but a negative one to people made brain-dead through purely physical means and/or various animals?
If it gives a positive response to humans and some/all intelligent non-humans but a negative one to people made brain-dead through purely physical means and/or various animals?
I may be being stupid, but my objection still makes sense to me, and the sentence fragment you have pointed out to me doesn’t seem to change anything. Are you saying that brain-dead people don’t have souls?
Edit: I think I finally figured out what this means. Sorry, I confused the meaning of “positive” and “negative” response.
It is still unclear how horcruxes would fit into the HPMOR universe given the premise that souls do not exist.
Given the general transhumanist affinity for “uploading”, it seems a lot easier to me.
Also, given all the references to “being in a story”, “things working like they would in a story”, etc, being in a virtual environment where code can be copied from a to b in a flash seems an obvious idea. McGongall’s mind still works in a cat’s brain.
My suspicion is that this premise is flawed. Harry has already been shown to have one of his premises invalidated by experiment, and from my view the reader has seen enough experimental results to seriously question the premise that souls don’t exist (in the HPMORverse).
It is still unclear how horcruxes would fit into the HPMOR universe given the premise that souls do not exist. Here are some thoughts and conjectures revolving around the postulate that horcruxes are complete memory/personality backups:
To recreate one’s identity, there has to be more than just replication of memories. There also has to be a way to replicate the ‘software’ that governs our thought processes. Removing the limitations and shortcuts that our physical brain has in place would undoubtedly remove lots of mental biases (making us hyper-rational) but also raise the question of whether the resulting entity will really be ‘us’ or just well approximated copies of us (a well explored topic in the transcendent pony fic).
The very possibility of possession (as evidenced in the zombie Quirrell) gives evidence in favor of the possibility to project one’s mind outside one’s original body and still be able to retain the capacity to not only have semblance of life (a la magical portraits and ghosts), but to also be able to learn new information and retain it (i.e. grow) and interact meaningfully with the environment.
Assuming away the whole issue of whether one’s identity can be virtually encapsulated independent of our biological hardware, this would require careful copy control (lest there be multiple versions of you running around, raising the question of which one is the ‘real’ you, explored comedically in one of robst’s fanfics). Is Harry an incomplete horcrux, retaining Voldemort’s post-transcendent software (hyper-rationality), but not his memories, i.e. a failure of copy control? (He clearly didn’t inherit his rationality from biological parents?)
Magic in potterverse directly interacts with mind. So magic is capable of storing information, including memories, software, etc?
Since Voldemort has already gone through the process, he already knows what’s involved.
Do you mean that this is the premise of your analysis, or a premise of the HPMOR universe? Because if I understand correctly, all we have to show for the non-existence of souls is Harry’s (entirely rational) belief, which may yet be challenged by future observations.
It’s not Harry’s observations; it’s everybody’s observations of the world. People don’t act like souls exist. If Dumbledore really thought that people just go on to another great adventure when they die, he wouldn’t have a bunch of pedestals of broken wands.
Nobody in HPMOR believes in souls or acts like they exist. That’s why Harry can decisively conclude that they don’t exist.
Even if souls exist and everyone knows this, evolution would probably still select for humans who feel grief after their loved ones die.
Your intuitions about evolution and my intuitions must be drastically different.
I can imagine no possible world where human bodies were attached to an immortal decision-making engine, on an evolutionary timescale, where human brain biology still looks practically indistinguishable from all other mammal brain biology and where human grief behavior still corresponds to other mammal grief behavior.
My intuition was that since a hypothetical immortal soul doesn’t pass on the owner’s genes and therefore doesn’t contribute to genetic fitness, it should have little if any direct influence on evolutionary incentives.
It’s true that an animal that somehow evolved a soul would look drastically different neurologically from a human, but we know empirically that wizards are mostly the same as muggles psychologically/neurologically, so it seems this doesn’t happen to be the case. By the way, I agree with Draco’s hypothesis that if souls do exist, muggles probably don’t have them, since they don’t seem to have gotten any other benefits from the magic patch.
I don’t consider myself a particularly competent practitioner of counterfactual evopsych, so if you do, and still disagree, I suppose I’ll have to update my beliefs.
Brain size would almost instantly collapse (from consuming 20% of ATP) once cognitive processing was offloaded to the immortal decision-making engine.
What I mean by “immortal soul” in this case is just the Source of Magic backing up the brain state of wizards when they die. If the soul were capable of cognitive function independently of the brain then of course you’ and Xachariah would be right.
How about if we replace “immortal decision-making engine”with “extradimensional backup drive”?
Well, ok, but it’s also been shown many times that most of the HPMOR cast needs to take several ranks in Knowledge(What The Heck They’re Talking About) just to approach the effectiveness of the average level-1 fighter. Harry should not be weighting either their beliefs or their aliefs very strongly as evidence in any direction.
Correction: it is Harry’s observations of the general public of the wizarding world, which is far from the same thing.
There are many possible worlds in which a number of powerful wizards know for a fact that souls exist, and live their lives accordingly, but which look exactly the same to Harry.
In fact, it’s rather probable that a world in which a minority of wizards are aware that souls really exist would look just like this one. Imagine what it’s like to be a member of such a minority trying to spread the truth.
“By the way, souls really exist.”
“I know—everyone believes in souls.”
“No, I mean it—souls actually, literally, exist. So you shouldn’t be too sad when people die, because they’re just going somewhere else. And you shouldn’t be too sad about your baby being stillborn, because it’ll have another chance at happiness in the afterlife. And depending on their circumstances, severely disabled people might be better off comitting suicide so they can move on to a healthy existence faster. And- hey, where are you going?”
I’m not saying any of those are necessarily reasonable conclusions to draw from the existence of souls, but it makes the point. Trying to live like this will automatically put you at odds with the rest of society, who will at best treat you like a crazy minority religious sect. So most soul-aware wizards will probably keep it to themselves, resulting in a world where Harry will be unaware of them.
But what about Dumbledore? If there were anyone in such a Soul Sect, I’m pretty sure Dumbledore would be one of them. Wouldn’t you agree?
But as “Pretending to be Wise” suggests, and as Dumbledore’s room of broken wands makes clear, Dumbledore does not, in fact, behave as if souls are real. Now “perhaps” this is all an elaborate ruse on the part of Dumbledore, and he is just pretending to behave-as-if souls are not real. Regardless of how twisty and deceptive Dumbledore is, this particular deception seems wildly out of character for him.
(Actually, it would be more accurate to say that Dumbledore does not behave as if the afterlife is real. It’s quite possible to have souls without an afterlife; perhaps they just get garbage-collected if not attached to the world in some matter (whether it’s a person’s body, or a horcrux, etc.). In fact, I regard this as a likely enough scenario to be worth thinking about (p = 0.6, say?).)
I agree that, if knowing about the afterlife is made likelier by being an experienced and powerful wizard, Dumbledore should be expected to know about the afterlife. However, we have now gone from “it’s everybody’s observations of the world” to “it’s Harry’s observations of the general public” to “it’s Harry’s observations of Dumbledore”. In other words, Harry’s (and our) evidence base for the lack of an afterlife keeps getting narrower the more we think about it.
In addition, it’s worth noting that Dumbledore, for all his virtues, is also great at self-deception and confused thinking (plotting and strategy excepted). There are all manner of circumstances under which Dumbledore would be unaware of the existence of the afterlife—for example, if it led to a conclusion he was unable to accept, all his power and experience might not stop him flinching away.
The people who point this out would be asked “Where’s the proof?”
And if they could produce some, everyone would believe. And if they couldn’t produce any… well why should they believe it in the first place?
That’s how the conversation goes if the Soul Evangelist is trying to convert non believer into a believer. All she has to do is point out the existence of ghosts, the veil in the departments of mysteries, or maybe the legends of the resurrection stone. Most people would take this as sufficient evidence.
In the proposed scenario, she is faced with the much more difficult task of converting a believer-in-belief.
It seems to me that that belief has already been challenged twice, and Harry is being obtuse in still dismissing them so easily. I am sort of expecting Eliezer to use this as a lesson in updating on evidence. It seems to me Harry is acting like Twilight Sparkle in ‘Feeling Pinkie Keen’ by refusing to explore the existence of souls more closely.
For this post, I meant premise of my analysis. More generally, my priors tell me that is the author’s viewpoint of the world, though I wouldn’t presume to guess.
Why should the author’s viewpoint of the world determine the author’s viewpoint of the HPMoR world? Presumably the author also believes that magic does not exist.
Because it seems likely that someone like Eliezer would write a magic system of the sufficiently-advanced-technology-is-indistinguishable-from-magic sense rather than the waves hands-because-magic!-waves hands sense.
Further, if souls existed, Harry would have no reason to want people to not die, which kind of breaks the story (unless I suppose there’s some mechanism to kill souls, which I admit would be interesting)
If souls exist, but the afterlife doesn’t exist or is just really bad/boring, then Harry would have a good reason, to either not let people die or to bring them back once they do.
Isn’t AK supposed to destroy the soul?
No. The Dementor’s Kiss destroys the soul; but the Killing Curse strikes at it, severing it from the body.
If AK/Dementors actually did destroy the soul, how would anyone know without direct access to the afterlife?
There’s a spell that doesn’t reveal the true cloak of invisibility, but indicates that such an artefact is present. You could imagine a corresponding spell for souls, or a dog which only barks at soul-imbued creatures (may bark twice at soul-imbued postmen and once at soul-less postmen. In which case you’d need to ask “are you a postman” using veritaserum to distinguish false positives for souls.).
How would you distinguish this from a spell which merely tests if one has been exposed to the Dementor’s Kiss?
If it gives a positive response to humans and some/all intelligent non-humans but a negative one to people made brain-dead through purely physical means and/or various animals?
We still have no way of knowing if it’s testing for souls or brain activity.
I may be being stupid, but my objection still makes sense to me, and the sentence fragment you have pointed out to me doesn’t seem to change anything. Are you saying that brain-dead people don’t have souls?
Edit: I think I finally figured out what this means. Sorry, I confused the meaning of “positive” and “negative” response.
Divination.
Given the general transhumanist affinity for “uploading”, it seems a lot easier to me.
Also, given all the references to “being in a story”, “things working like they would in a story”, etc, being in a virtual environment where code can be copied from a to b in a flash seems an obvious idea. McGongall’s mind still works in a cat’s brain.
It’s been repeatedly stated—by Harry, anyway -that magic works based on how the creator expected it to. Therefore, Horcruxes work as if souls exist.
This may or may not be true, but it does mean HPJV is being a tad foolish in his assumption that they are impossible.
My suspicion is that this premise is flawed. Harry has already been shown to have one of his premises invalidated by experiment, and from my view the reader has seen enough experimental results to seriously question the premise that souls don’t exist (in the HPMORverse).