Harry talks a big game about the scientific method and how a priori reasoning doesn’t actually work for coming to grips with how reality actually works—you have to test things, and you should expect to be really confused a lot of the time. But in the actual text of the story he repeatedly encounters a situation, reasons about how the world must be (sometimes on the basis of scientific knowledge like timeless physics[1] or “astrology is fake, obviously”[2] which he should be legitimately way less certain of after chapter 1, and often via extremely flimsy lines of reasoning or speculation[3]), and comes to confident conclusions about how the world must be. And repeatedly, the story has it that his first guess/hypothesis/a priori conclusion iscorrect, and he either gets a new munchkin-superpower (which no one in the world had previously discovered), or impresses the other characters, and the audience with his brilliant Sherlock Holmes-like deductions.
The only only place where his a priori reasoning clearly doesn’t work, because reality is more confusing than his theories is about the nature of magic. But the after a few scenes, the story basically completely drops that thread. There’s no payoff.
Overall, the story gives lip service what real science and rationality and entails, but doesn’t reliably live up to that standard.
“Quantum mechanics wasn’t enough,” Harry said. “I had to go all the way down to timeless physics before it took. Had to see the wand as enforcing a relation between separate past and future realities, instead of changing anything over time—but I did it, Hermione, I saw past the illusion of objects, and I bet there’s not a single other wizard in the world who could have. Even if some Muggleborn knew about timeless formulations of quantum mechanics, it would just be a weird belief about strange distant quantum stuff, they wouldn’t see that it was reality, accept that the world they knew was just a hallucination. I Transfigured part of the eraser without changing the whole thing.”
“Cometary orbits are also set thousands of years in advance so they shouldn’t correlate much to current events. And the light of the stars takes years to travel from the stars to Earth, and the stars don’t move much at all, not visibly. So the obvious hypothesis is that centaurs have a native magical talent for Divination which you just, well, project onto the night sky.”(https://hpmor.com/chapter/101)
(This one is not as bad, actually. Making an argument more than just confidently asserting a conclusion.)
“If the Dementor could not reach through your Patronus on some level, Albus Dumbledore, you would not see a naked man painful to look upon...”
″It’s not like Dementors can actually talk, or think; the structure they have is borrowed from your own mind and expectations...” (https://hpmor.com/chapter/45)
And then later...
”They had no intelligence of their own, they were just wounds in the world, their form and structure was borrowed from others’ expectations. People had been able to negotiate with them, offer them victims in exchange for cooperation, only because they believed Dementors would bargain. So if Harry believed hard enough that the voids would turn and go, they would turn and go.” (https://hpmor.com/chapter/57)
What?! Dude, what do you think you know, and how do you think you know it? You literally just came up with some ideas that seem to make sense to you, and you’re confidently acting on them as if you know that they’re true.
Nah, you’re reading a book, not in-universe reality. Harry clearly wasn’t right about most things. He just happened to be wrong in ways that worked out for him sometimes. He is testing reality—but not all that well; and he’s not supposed to be good at it. A major theme of the story is the folly of the overconfident, and the difference between having a good argument for something to be true, and something actually being true.
He needed to get to timeless physics to get his transfiguration trick to work. Does it mean the world runs on timeless physics? No, the world runs on magic! He just kept trying different approaches to do something that was conventionally thought to be impossible, and one of them actually worked. Magic is the normal thing in-universe—and magic seems to be able to do pretty much anything. Which is why the universe is restrained by other magic (like, presumably, what we call the laws of physics—as well as the restrictions the wizards believe). Harry never realizes this, because he’s been teaching himself to not think of things like the laws of physics as something imposed on the universe—in fact, it’s a cached thought of his that this is a common folly when trying to understand the universe, so he doesn’t even want to consider it. And people who try such things tend to die very messy deaths, and include plenty of innocent bystanders.
Everything he says about astrology is true; it cannot possibly work the way that humans have taught themselves to do it. That’s what he says, and concedes that perhaps there’s something else at work. He didn’t even bother considering the alternatives, because he ultimately doesn’t care—he was just interested in what Firenze might say, if even that. You could list ways how astrology would work in-universe for days, but that’s just pointless speculation. Even his ideas on testing those vague guesses are very limited and would only bring a tiny amount of evidence.
Just because he gets a super-power from thinking of a way the world works doesn’t mean he’s right. He obviously isn’t so many times—but he also gets something interesting out of it. And it’s clearly hammered in over and over that his reckless approach is extremely dangerous—even at the end of the story, he still didn’t realize that the universe runs on magic; he still thinks in terms of magic being able to somehow bend the laws of physics and exploiting that. When told he’s going to tear apart the stars, he only thinks about utterly mundane things like star-lifting, and not things like, say, accidentally changing a universal constant to cause all the stars in the universe to spontaneously explode. But even within that framework, he has a few tiny glimpses into the kind of danger messing with magic could be—like his notion of transfiguring a ton of unbound up quarks. And even then, you see he still mostly considers someone else making a horrible mistake. That’s a major weakness Harry has, and he doesn’t really get much better at it over the course of the book. He’s hopelessly amateurish and naïve, despite being way above average, in-universe. And it’s hinted he’s not the first one to put the world in such danger—we’re even explicitly told by Dumbledore he decided his continued existence is worth the risk (because destroying the universe is kind of considered inevitable, given magic, and Harry might do it while keeping at least some people alive).
Overall, the implication to me always was that magic can do pretty much anything, no matter how you justify your “rules”. But wizards are taught from a very early age not to do that, and not to mess with magic, because of how ridiculously dangerous it is. The universal laws are something you can talk your way around, and Harry doesn’t want to accept that. The wiser wizards know, but are also wise enough to realize what they’re messing with. Harry never quite gets the message.
I don’t get why people think the story is about how rationality conquers everything. To me, it just keeps hammering in how hard rationality is, and how bad humans are at it—perhaps especially if you think of yourself in a particularly rational person. Which also fits with the description of Harry as essentially “Young Eliezer” :) He keeps making horrible mistakes, not properly learning from his follies, keeps being extremely confident despite having no good reason to do so, and thinks he’s safe because he thought of one or two things that might go wrong (while ignoring the hundreds of others he has no clue about), keeps putting people in danger, playing the world like it’s a game… And he only survives because Dumbledore was carefully orchestrating everything to find those thin threads of timelines that maximized that survivability by relying on “prophecies”.
The nature of magic point is brilliant, actually. It’s at the core of the universe he lives in. It proves difficult to analyse rationally and scientifically. So what does Harry do? Give up. Because he’s lazy, and avoids hard work, wants to find a shortcut to omnipotence, not a hard arduous journey, and really reallyreally doesn’t accept losing. So he pretends he walked away, rather than admitting he lost and keeping at the hard work. It’s Harry in a nutshell, and it keeps biting him over and over over the course of the story.
Some other criticisms:
Harry talks a big game about the scientific method and how a priori reasoning doesn’t actually work for coming to grips with how reality actually works—you have to test things, and you should expect to be really confused a lot of the time. But in the actual text of the story he repeatedly encounters a situation, reasons about how the world must be (sometimes on the basis of scientific knowledge like timeless physics[1] or “astrology is fake, obviously”[2] which he should be legitimately way less certain of after chapter 1, and often via extremely flimsy lines of reasoning or speculation[3]), and comes to confident conclusions about how the world must be. And repeatedly, the story has it that his first guess/hypothesis/a priori conclusion is correct, and he either gets a new munchkin-superpower (which no one in the world had previously discovered), or impresses the other characters, and the audience with his brilliant Sherlock Holmes-like deductions.
The only only place where his a priori reasoning clearly doesn’t work, because reality is more confusing than his theories is about the nature of magic. But the after a few scenes, the story basically completely drops that thread. There’s no payoff.
Overall, the story gives lip service what real science and rationality and entails, but doesn’t reliably live up to that standard.
“Quantum mechanics wasn’t enough,” Harry said. “I had to go all the way down to timeless physics before it took. Had to see the wand as enforcing a relation between separate past and future realities, instead of changing anything over time—but I did it, Hermione, I saw past the illusion of objects, and I bet there’s not a single other wizard in the world who could have. Even if some Muggleborn knew about timeless formulations of quantum mechanics, it would just be a weird belief about strange distant quantum stuff, they wouldn’t see that it was reality, accept that the world they knew was just a hallucination. I Transfigured part of the eraser without changing the whole thing.”
(https://hpmor.com/chapter/28)
“Cometary orbits are also set thousands of years in advance so they shouldn’t correlate much to current events. And the light of the stars takes years to travel from the stars to Earth, and the stars don’t move much at all, not visibly. So the obvious hypothesis is that centaurs have a native magical talent for Divination which you just, well, project onto the night sky.”(https://hpmor.com/chapter/101)
(This one is not as bad, actually. Making an argument more than just confidently asserting a conclusion.)
“If the Dementor could not reach through your Patronus on some level, Albus Dumbledore, you would not see a naked man painful to look upon...”
″It’s not like Dementors can actually talk, or think; the structure they have is borrowed from your own mind and expectations...” (https://hpmor.com/chapter/45)
And then later...
”They had no intelligence of their own, they were just wounds in the world, their form and structure was borrowed from others’ expectations. People had been able to negotiate with them, offer them victims in exchange for cooperation, only because they believed Dementors would bargain. So if Harry believed hard enough that the voids would turn and go, they would turn and go.” (https://hpmor.com/chapter/57)
What?! Dude, what do you think you know, and how do you think you know it? You literally just came up with some ideas that seem to make sense to you, and you’re confidently acting on them as if you know that they’re true.
Nah, you’re reading a book, not in-universe reality. Harry clearly wasn’t right about most things. He just happened to be wrong in ways that worked out for him sometimes. He is testing reality—but not all that well; and he’s not supposed to be good at it. A major theme of the story is the folly of the overconfident, and the difference between having a good argument for something to be true, and something actually being true.
He needed to get to timeless physics to get his transfiguration trick to work. Does it mean the world runs on timeless physics? No, the world runs on magic! He just kept trying different approaches to do something that was conventionally thought to be impossible, and one of them actually worked. Magic is the normal thing in-universe—and magic seems to be able to do pretty much anything. Which is why the universe is restrained by other magic (like, presumably, what we call the laws of physics—as well as the restrictions the wizards believe). Harry never realizes this, because he’s been teaching himself to not think of things like the laws of physics as something imposed on the universe—in fact, it’s a cached thought of his that this is a common folly when trying to understand the universe, so he doesn’t even want to consider it. And people who try such things tend to die very messy deaths, and include plenty of innocent bystanders.
Everything he says about astrology is true; it cannot possibly work the way that humans have taught themselves to do it. That’s what he says, and concedes that perhaps there’s something else at work. He didn’t even bother considering the alternatives, because he ultimately doesn’t care—he was just interested in what Firenze might say, if even that. You could list ways how astrology would work in-universe for days, but that’s just pointless speculation. Even his ideas on testing those vague guesses are very limited and would only bring a tiny amount of evidence.
Just because he gets a super-power from thinking of a way the world works doesn’t mean he’s right. He obviously isn’t so many times—but he also gets something interesting out of it. And it’s clearly hammered in over and over that his reckless approach is extremely dangerous—even at the end of the story, he still didn’t realize that the universe runs on magic; he still thinks in terms of magic being able to somehow bend the laws of physics and exploiting that. When told he’s going to tear apart the stars, he only thinks about utterly mundane things like star-lifting, and not things like, say, accidentally changing a universal constant to cause all the stars in the universe to spontaneously explode. But even within that framework, he has a few tiny glimpses into the kind of danger messing with magic could be—like his notion of transfiguring a ton of unbound up quarks. And even then, you see he still mostly considers someone else making a horrible mistake. That’s a major weakness Harry has, and he doesn’t really get much better at it over the course of the book. He’s hopelessly amateurish and naïve, despite being way above average, in-universe. And it’s hinted he’s not the first one to put the world in such danger—we’re even explicitly told by Dumbledore he decided his continued existence is worth the risk (because destroying the universe is kind of considered inevitable, given magic, and Harry might do it while keeping at least some people alive).
Overall, the implication to me always was that magic can do pretty much anything, no matter how you justify your “rules”. But wizards are taught from a very early age not to do that, and not to mess with magic, because of how ridiculously dangerous it is. The universal laws are something you can talk your way around, and Harry doesn’t want to accept that. The wiser wizards know, but are also wise enough to realize what they’re messing with. Harry never quite gets the message.
I don’t get why people think the story is about how rationality conquers everything. To me, it just keeps hammering in how hard rationality is, and how bad humans are at it—perhaps especially if you think of yourself in a particularly rational person. Which also fits with the description of Harry as essentially “Young Eliezer” :) He keeps making horrible mistakes, not properly learning from his follies, keeps being extremely confident despite having no good reason to do so, and thinks he’s safe because he thought of one or two things that might go wrong (while ignoring the hundreds of others he has no clue about), keeps putting people in danger, playing the world like it’s a game… And he only survives because Dumbledore was carefully orchestrating everything to find those thin threads of timelines that maximized that survivability by relying on “prophecies”.
The nature of magic point is brilliant, actually. It’s at the core of the universe he lives in. It proves difficult to analyse rationally and scientifically. So what does Harry do? Give up. Because he’s lazy, and avoids hard work, wants to find a shortcut to omnipotence, not a hard arduous journey, and really really really doesn’t accept losing. So he pretends he walked away, rather than admitting he lost and keeping at the hard work. It’s Harry in a nutshell, and it keeps biting him over and over over the course of the story.