This is really the only sense in which I am disappointed in this story. One of the things that really got me excited about HPMOR was that the protagonist did not just shrug and accept that magic is magic, he sought to untangle how it’s laws work, and the results were as bewildering as I imagine quantum must have been to scientists of the early 20th century. That is one of the puzzles that I really wanted to solve about this story, almost more than I wanted to know how the cloak and dagger mysteries resolved. It felt to me like we were promised that magic would be somehow logical, even if it did not initially appear so. It may in fact still be, but we have few answers about this fundamental and intriguing aspect of the universe. In short: HOW DOES IT WORK??? HOW?!? TELL ME!!!
Astazha
I am among those with a sympathetic view of Snape. This was a satisfying chapter for me.
Ideally he has been obliviated of that part of the conversation too. “the most important part of any secret is the knowledge that a secret exists”, etc.
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)
Harry has to some extent undone the work of Merlin. Merlin’s interdict ensures that the most powerful magics slowly die out of the world as wizards and witches die with their secrets. Harry’s scheme for immortality in the magical world puts a stop to the losses, and allows magical knowledge to be kept as it is re-discovered, however slowly. Previously the loss rate exceeded the discovery rate. I think that is about to be reversed. And the Interdict of Merlin was put in place to avoid a prophesied destruction of the world.
Ch. 80
And when (the legend continues) the Seers continued to foretell that not enough had yet been done to prevent the end of the world and its magic, then (the story goes) Merlin sacrificed his life, and his wizardry, and his time, to lay in force the Interdict of Merlin.
Unexplained recoveries are a real thing. Everyone just shrugs and celebrates, or maybe credits God or the ginko biloba. It’s been Flamel all along.
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.
Also if Hermione wakes up as a copy of Harry:
4 - Harry and most of the HPMOR readers will be extremely dismayed at this development.
I’ve argued before that HPMOR probably includes some kind of mind/body dualism. It occurs to me that an interesting experiment is about to be performed.
The body of Hermione Granger has been infused with the life and magic of Harry Potter. I assume for narrative reasons that Hermione will wake up as Hermione. But a copy of Harry could wake up in Hermione’s body instead.
The mechanisms behind a person’ life force, magic force, and mind are unknown to us. We don’t also don’t know whether or to what extent these aspects of a person are separate or connected. It should be assumed throughout this post that I am talking about the minds of magical people, and that muggles could be a separate case.
If Hermione wakes up as Hermione after being resurrected by Harry’s life force and magic force I will conclude:
A mind is probably not made up only of a person’s life force and/or magic force. The only exception I can think of is if the mind runs on a substrate of your life and/or magic force but the Patronus 2.0 or resurrection process strip that information out of the projected life and magic, passing the substrate but not the pattern on it.
Either the mind has at least something to do with the body OR magic will, upon resurrection, retrieve the mind that is supposed to go with the body OR Harry’s intent is sufficient to establish what was supposed to happen here.
Related to #1, atomic souls in the sense of “an animating force that contains a person’s life, magic, and mind all in one non-physical object that persists beyond that person’s death” would be ruled out. Life beyond death would not be ruled out, but souls could not be things with no smaller components if they exist at all.
I would update to consider possibilities like “your mind is just your brain but magic stores it in other dimensions or on a magical substrate when required” more likely than I previously did.
If Hermione wakes up as a copy of Harry in Hermione’s body I will conclude:
Mind/body monism is almost certainly false. Your mind is not your brain in any sense; the brain is at best an interface that the mind uses or a home that it resides in. Monism could only be rescued if magic turned Hermione’s brain into Harry’s brain during the resurrection process.
Your mind either is inseparable from your life and/or magic or it is a pattern on a life/magic substrate that is transmitted with that subtrate through the Patronus 2.0 resurrection process.
I will update to consider atomic souls as described above to be more likely than I previously did.
Separately, in a world with mind/body monism, I wonder whether regeneration as a magic that always transfigures you back into yourself would prevent learning. Probably not. Magic tends to have the intended effect rather than a strictly mechanistic one.
(edited for formatting and grammar)
Yeah, and that make sense. There’s also that he may be one of the last remaining repositories for lost knowledge.
But we’ve seen internal monologue from Harry where he thinks about the intrinsic value of Voldemort’s life and the values of the children’s children’s children and so on. It’s incredibly naive. Voldemort is an immortal psychopath who is ridiculously overpowered and very difficult to contain. Taking that guy out is entirely in sync with valuing life in general. I’m not a fan of the death penalty, but his mere existence is threatening enough that I would make an exception with no hesitation and not feel bad about it ever.
Also:
“Has your confederacy deduced who I really am?” The words were spoken with deceptive mildness.
“Yes, in fact. Now—”
Pure magic, pure power crashed into the room like a flash of lightning, like a thunderclap echoing about her ears that deafened her other senses, the papers on her desk blown aside not by any conjured wind but by the sheer raw force of arcane might.
Then the power subsided, leaving only Hermione Granger’s death certificates drifting down through the air to the floor.
“I am David Monroe, who fought Voldemort,” the man said, still in mild tones. “Heed my words. The boy cannot be allowed to continue in this state of mind.
Though we don’t know for sure what McGonagal and the rest of the “confederacy” really believes.
Would you quote me where Harry used obliviate in Hogwarts on someone that would have tripped wards? I don’t recall that.
and since we expect them to be quite extensive, it’s very unlikely he never triggered one.
I do not expect this. Time-tuners are fine. Invisibility cloaks are fine. Draco’s torture hex was fine. The only thing I can think of that Harry did that might have triggered a ward without permissions was bring in the transfigured unicorn. And that isn’t conclusive at all. It was transfigured, and as far as I know the Defense Professor can’t just bring magical creatures in to Hogwarts either.
I don’t think it’s been tested.
No magic burst at death would be one prediction to check, though not conclusive. You could test it with Horcrux 2.0, though no one has had the opportunity to do that before now. The fact that Voldemort has expressed uncertainty about whether he is capable of surviving dementors, and that he is relying upon escaping from Quirrel’s body in time to survive dementors points in the direction of him believing that a dementor might be capable of taking out him and his whole horcrux network in one shot.
None of that is conclusive, but it’s all suggestive and supports the popular version of what dementors do.
Yeah, I’m thinking separate systems but there’s a lot we don’t know about how this works and why the discrepancies are there.
Actually, we aren’t sure that Harry doesn’t have Defense Professor permissions, are we?
That’s a good link, thanks. I’m warm to compatibilism. I think I’ve confused the conversation by using the wrong terms, though. Instead of pointing at a lack of free will I should have pointed at the complete lack of causality, which is more constraining. You can read EY on it here.
My interpretation of this would be that space-time would be a fixed object that exists in it’s entirety. In the same sense that you could take a cross sectional scan of a sneaker and play it from rear to front, there would be a logical consistency to how the slides transformed as you progressed through the shoe, but it would not make any sense to say that one part caused another. In this analogy, 4-dimensional space-time is the shoe, and the cross section is 3-dimensional space. We play it from back to front, watching a movie of the universe, but the entire universe from beginning to end already existed; we’re just looking at a slide of it at a time. Everything is consistent as the cross section passes through, but there’s no causality in play, it’s just an object being viewed in sequential slices. Much like EY’s modified game of Life with time-travel.
This actually seems pretty unsatisfying because there is a strong impression that the world is being run mostly on causality in the normal direction, with reverse causality coming in occasionally. This seems to me to work better with the iterating model.
Regarding the time for trials and iterations, I would refer to simulation as an analogy. “World time” is happening in the simulation, and this is what the characters are aware of. From within the simulated world, how much “Meta time” has elapsed outside of the simulation (i.e. the time stream that the computer is in), or how many failed attempts have been dumped from RAM is not very relevant in the sense that these facts don’t have any impact on “the world” (the simulated one) and are in fact probably unknowable to its inhabitants unless access to that meta-information has been somehow granted. To a denizen of the world, the fact that we switched from world version 721.213 to world version 779.344 last Tuesday at 9:41am is unknowable, the transition seamless, the lost attempts erased from world time even though they still occurred in meta time.
I’m not saying HPMOR is a simulated world. That’s just a model I’m using to think about timelines being destroyed and recalculating.
I’d read it as “Defense Professor” being a role with a package of permissions being assigned to a user. The map shows usernames, so to speak, not what roles or permissions they’ve been assigned in some other portion of the security system.
I’m skeptical. If dementors really do destroy your soul then having a horcrux may not be helpful against them. I’m a fan of taking V’s wand down to the pit, in fact.
So, I don’t know how these stable time loops are supposed to work. My working model is that they function by trial and error, that time iterates through a universe until it encounters paradox, at which point it returns to pre-paradox, inserts some change into the world through prophecy or whatever, and tries again. This continues until a stable timeline is found, with an unknown number of them being discarded/destroyed. It appears from within that things worked on the first pass, but they did not. Our viewpoint never follows into one of those dead ends, but they exist(ed).
If the world really works that way, Harry would be potentially throwing his victory away by forcing a paradox. Time would have to reset to before the paradox and insert a change into the world to ensure a different outcome. He may or not be victorious in that new timeline. Harry dying was already a high probability and it would certainly resolve things to Time’s satisfaction. His best chance of securing his immediate past as part of the real and continuing world would be to make sure this timeline remains self-consistent.
(Plus, he’s prophesied to destroy the stars and creating a time-paradox seems like a really obvious possible way to do that.)
The only other possibility I can think of for these apparently stable timelines is that the whole universe is pre-determined and no one has any free will at all. I read something from EY about universes with time travel and he seemed to be in support of this second possibility. Any other possibilities for how this would work?
Lifting someone does work. Where is that energy coming from?