My comment was a reply to the comment above yours, sorry.
BlindIdiotPoster
Karma: 125
I was assuming the -elipson part just went without saying. Of course you’re right.
Honestly so would I.
I would much rather have an indefinitely long Fun life than sit with frank in a white room for a few days until we both starve to death. I would be absolutely horrified if frank chose to reject the offer in my place, so I don’t really consider this preference selfish.
The problem with your “white room” scenario is that one human can’t actually have Large amounts of utility. The value of the 3^^^3th seat cushion is actually, truly zero.
The probability of Harry living in a story is already 1.
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.
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.
Politics doesn’t really have to be “better” than the other popular solutions, it just needs to provide better marginal utility to some people, under some circumstances.
If you do finish the series, and manage to insightfuly and productively discuss the topics you outlined, Ill change my downvote to an upvote.
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.
No.
Harry has just promised to tear apart the very stars to bring back Hermione. I seriously doubt he would give up an important, possibly necessary resource just because the alternative was lying.
Even if souls exist and everyone knows this, evolution would probably still select for humans who feel grief after their loved ones die.
If AK/Dementors actually did destroy the soul, how would anyone know without direct access to the afterlife?
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.
I doubt QM had “defeating death” for anyone but himself as a goal. He also claims to have seen muggle science as being mostly valueless in the past.
That would be my answer if we were talking about, say, a billion cushions. With 3^^^3, most of them aren’t even in your future light cone, so they might as well not even exist.