If you’re going for “what’s going on”, you might as well ask where does the “excessive” come from. I mean, you could switch to a “lever” instead of a “button” analogy to “justify” that the magician provides energy for the “magical mechanism” of a spell, but the ridiculous amounts of energy implied by even some low-level spells means that won’t actually explain much.
(For example, first years can fly broom-sticks with non-Newtonian mechanics. This either means that a large amount of energy is used to simulate them over normal physics—compensating for inertia with very high accelerations—or that the “normal” physics is actually simulated on a completely different real physics substrate, in which case all bets are off.)
Also, the reasoning for the single-magic-gene, if true in-universe, raises the question of where do all differences in magic ability come from. Sure, Harry considers training and conscientiousness and talent, but only that seems to me not enough to explain differences that we see. Alohomora is explicitly said to balance the casters’ magic powers, and the interaction of many spells (e.g., shields and shield-breakers) are seen to depend on the relative ability of the casters.
There are huge differences of ability between a talented painter and the average person, but that would only explain stuff like creating spells. Pushing a button on a printer works the same for both.
And in the “lever” analogy, just as relative strength is not governed by a single gene, differences between magical power are hard to explain with a single gene. (Even if there are more than two alleles, some of which are magic but with varying strength, and some of which are not, that should result in quantified levels of power rather than what appears to be a continuum.)
I would just go with a combination of “it just ignores the rules” and “intuitive user interface”. If whatever causes magic allows spells like Somnium, it can make you progressively tired and then unconscious as you exhaust your magic ration, just to make a point.
There could be multiple factors that govern the strength of wizardry. For example the base could be a trained component like muscle strength, but the total observable strength also depends on your ability to control it. If you have very fine control over the magic (ie very precise wand movements, nearly perfect self control for spells that require it), you can make your magic flow much more efficiently. A bit like pulling a lever into the exactly correct direction, or a bit in the wrong direction—it’ll still work, but requires more strength.
the base could be a trained component like muscle strength
If it worked like that, there’s still the question of “what component?” Muscles becoming stronger as a result of exercising them is a complex behavior, governed by many genes. Harry’s reasoning towards one “magic marker gene” suggests that is not the case.
I can think of all sorts of possible explanations, I just can’t see one that looks really reasonable; since we have no actual explanation about how stuff works, you need a lot of assumptions for anything and stuff tends to be arbitrary. If you think about it, all substances being combinations of four elements, or Lamarckian inheritance, are plausible explanations if your only observations are on the level of “some stuff burns” and “water quenches fire” or “children kinda look like parents”.
(“Inventing” new charms is mentioned several times, but there are basically no details about how that works. Harry just changes how to apply a couple of existing charms, and he seems to have figured out how he might pick ingredients for potions, but even there he’s not told where the gestures and ritual come from.)
Maybe using magic doesn’t strengthens your magic the way that physical exercise strengthens your muscles, but rather similar to a river carving its way through the landscape—the more water flows, the deeper the river bed becomes.
Such a mechanism wouldn’t require any more genetic information, because it’s not a property of the individual magic user.
I tend to think of spells as being less like a button or a lever, and more like a high striker. If the spell is the ringing of the bell, then you’ve got to put sufficient energy in to attain that. More energy will allow you to hit the bell harder, and thus ring it louder, but you have to be able to put enough in to reach the basic threshold in order to ring it at all.
Of course, spells routinely output more energy than they could be getting out of the metabolisms of their casters, so for the analogy to hold up under extension, it’s more like an electronic high striker, which sounds a siren at different volumes depending on how hard you hit the target.
I don’t think so—I read something about it being somewhat hard, but I don’t remember the details or the source.
Hmm, you got a point. The energy required to fly them should be spent while flying; if you’d do it on creation, there would be the risk of it being exhausted at some point. But Hogwarts has been running for centuries and it’s constantly doing stuff that needs lots more energy than a broom.
I guess my example is just silly. Without more information guessing about the relative magnitude of energy expended for various magics is useless.
I’d say that the energy involved for pretty much all spells is too huge to give any plausibility to the idea that it’s somehow generated by the human body through the genome, with or without a magic gene.
When someone becomes a witch or wizard, their consciousness/soul/whatever is removed from the brain, leaving the body a mindless puppet. The magic proceeds to control the body, but when the magic is exhausted it is no longer able to do so, and the body falls down unconscious.
This also explains why wizards are more resistant to damage (it’s just the mindless puppet that’s being hurt, so unless you hurt it enough that it can’t be fixed, everything is alright, even if it’s a Bludger to the head), and how Animagi can think when their human brains are transfigured into animal brains (the human brain wasn’t doing any work, anyway).
Nice theory, but it has a flaw : effects on the body of the wizards do affect their mind, eating chocolate helps to counter the Dementor effect, alcohol seems to have the normal effect, and (at least in canon) the wizard teens are affected by hormones like normal teens. So it would require the magic to scan that, and affect the mind in a similar way than a normal chemical effect on the brain would work, but yet still preserve the “resistant to damage” property ? Well, starts to be quite un-occamian.
When we exert willpower or mental effort, it uses up glucose from the blood in the brain. One way you could explain the exhaustion that comes from using magic is that it requires mental effort to the point of creating dangerously low levels of blood sugar in the brain.
Maybe “magic” is what gives you a free will, ie the explanation of how a will can exist with a certain measure of independence from the neurons. So all consciousness requires a small amount of magic, and only wizards and magical creatures have the ability to further manipulate that mysterious magic.
And if a wizard exhausts his magic, he becomes unconsciousness until his magic recovers, because the mind can’t work without the basic .
If magic is a prerequisite for conciousness, it would also explain the correlation between intelligence and strong wizardry.
Maybe “magic” is what gives you a free will, ie the explanation of how a will can exist with a certain measure of independence from the neurons.
That would send a message quite contrary to lots of what LessWrong is about; so it’d be highly unlikely for Eliezer to have something like that in HPMoR.
Besides you are confusing at least three different concepts -- (a) “free will” in the sense of being active agents who make our decisions based on our own inner drives, (b) “consciousness” in the sense of being qualia-possessing self-reflective entities, and (c) “consciousness” in the sense of being mobile and receiving significant input about your physical surroundings (i.e. not sleeping or passed out).
When sleeping, people can be conscious in the (b) sense (as they can dream), but they’re unconscious in the (c) sense.
I suppose a generous reading would be that magic is what allows one to go on thinking in possessing-ghost form once your neurons are left burning on the floor of your enemy’s home. Which seems trivially true.
Here’s a question: how does excessive magic use cause unconsciousness? What’s going on there, physically?
If you’re going for “what’s going on”, you might as well ask where does the “excessive” come from. I mean, you could switch to a “lever” instead of a “button” analogy to “justify” that the magician provides energy for the “magical mechanism” of a spell, but the ridiculous amounts of energy implied by even some low-level spells means that won’t actually explain much.
(For example, first years can fly broom-sticks with non-Newtonian mechanics. This either means that a large amount of energy is used to simulate them over normal physics—compensating for inertia with very high accelerations—or that the “normal” physics is actually simulated on a completely different real physics substrate, in which case all bets are off.)
Also, the reasoning for the single-magic-gene, if true in-universe, raises the question of where do all differences in magic ability come from. Sure, Harry considers training and conscientiousness and talent, but only that seems to me not enough to explain differences that we see. Alohomora is explicitly said to balance the casters’ magic powers, and the interaction of many spells (e.g., shields and shield-breakers) are seen to depend on the relative ability of the casters.
There are huge differences of ability between a talented painter and the average person, but that would only explain stuff like creating spells. Pushing a button on a printer works the same for both.
And in the “lever” analogy, just as relative strength is not governed by a single gene, differences between magical power are hard to explain with a single gene. (Even if there are more than two alleles, some of which are magic but with varying strength, and some of which are not, that should result in quantified levels of power rather than what appears to be a continuum.)
I would just go with a combination of “it just ignores the rules” and “intuitive user interface”. If whatever causes magic allows spells like Somnium, it can make you progressively tired and then unconscious as you exhaust your magic ration, just to make a point.
There could be multiple factors that govern the strength of wizardry. For example the base could be a trained component like muscle strength, but the total observable strength also depends on your ability to control it. If you have very fine control over the magic (ie very precise wand movements, nearly perfect self control for spells that require it), you can make your magic flow much more efficiently. A bit like pulling a lever into the exactly correct direction, or a bit in the wrong direction—it’ll still work, but requires more strength.
If it worked like that, there’s still the question of “what component?” Muscles becoming stronger as a result of exercising them is a complex behavior, governed by many genes. Harry’s reasoning towards one “magic marker gene” suggests that is not the case.
I can think of all sorts of possible explanations, I just can’t see one that looks really reasonable; since we have no actual explanation about how stuff works, you need a lot of assumptions for anything and stuff tends to be arbitrary. If you think about it, all substances being combinations of four elements, or Lamarckian inheritance, are plausible explanations if your only observations are on the level of “some stuff burns” and “water quenches fire” or “children kinda look like parents”.
(“Inventing” new charms is mentioned several times, but there are basically no details about how that works. Harry just changes how to apply a couple of existing charms, and he seems to have figured out how he might pick ingredients for potions, but even there he’s not told where the gestures and ritual come from.)
Maybe using magic doesn’t strengthens your magic the way that physical exercise strengthens your muscles, but rather similar to a river carving its way through the landscape—the more water flows, the deeper the river bed becomes.
Such a mechanism wouldn’t require any more genetic information, because it’s not a property of the individual magic user.
I tend to think of spells as being less like a button or a lever, and more like a high striker. If the spell is the ringing of the bell, then you’ve got to put sufficient energy in to attain that. More energy will allow you to hit the bell harder, and thus ring it louder, but you have to be able to put enough in to reach the basic threshold in order to ring it at all.
Of course, spells routinely output more energy than they could be getting out of the metabolisms of their casters, so for the analogy to hold up under extension, it’s more like an electronic high striker, which sounds a siren at different volumes depending on how hard you hit the target.
But can they build them?
I don’t think so—I read something about it being somewhat hard, but I don’t remember the details or the source.
Hmm, you got a point. The energy required to fly them should be spent while flying; if you’d do it on creation, there would be the risk of it being exhausted at some point. But Hogwarts has been running for centuries and it’s constantly doing stuff that needs lots more energy than a broom.
I guess my example is just silly. Without more information guessing about the relative magnitude of energy expended for various magics is useless.
I’d say that the energy involved for pretty much all spells is too huge to give any plausibility to the idea that it’s somehow generated by the human body through the genome, with or without a magic gene.
When someone becomes a witch or wizard, their consciousness/soul/whatever is removed from the brain, leaving the body a mindless puppet. The magic proceeds to control the body, but when the magic is exhausted it is no longer able to do so, and the body falls down unconscious.
This also explains why wizards are more resistant to damage (it’s just the mindless puppet that’s being hurt, so unless you hurt it enough that it can’t be fixed, everything is alright, even if it’s a Bludger to the head), and how Animagi can think when their human brains are transfigured into animal brains (the human brain wasn’t doing any work, anyway).
But they don’t wear any fancy jewelry, though. And their animal familiars are not nearly as cute.
Edit: Hmm, Soul Gems as Horcruxes… Horcrux’d wizards as liches… we’re on to something here.
Nice theory, but it has a flaw : effects on the body of the wizards do affect their mind, eating chocolate helps to counter the Dementor effect, alcohol seems to have the normal effect, and (at least in canon) the wizard teens are affected by hormones like normal teens. So it would require the magic to scan that, and affect the mind in a similar way than a normal chemical effect on the brain would work, but yet still preserve the “resistant to damage” property ? Well, starts to be quite un-occamian.
If this is true, it should follow that brain surgery would have no effect on wizards. It should be pretty easy to test.
So wizards are Zombies...
When we exert willpower or mental effort, it uses up glucose from the blood in the brain. One way you could explain the exhaustion that comes from using magic is that it requires mental effort to the point of creating dangerously low levels of blood sugar in the brain.
A good question.
Maybe “magic” is what gives you a free will, ie the explanation of how a will can exist with a certain measure of independence from the neurons. So all consciousness requires a small amount of magic, and only wizards and magical creatures have the ability to further manipulate that mysterious magic.
And if a wizard exhausts his magic, he becomes unconsciousness until his magic recovers, because the mind can’t work without the basic .
If magic is a prerequisite for conciousness, it would also explain the correlation between intelligence and strong wizardry.
That would send a message quite contrary to lots of what LessWrong is about; so it’d be highly unlikely for Eliezer to have something like that in HPMoR.
Besides you are confusing at least three different concepts -- (a) “free will” in the sense of being active agents who make our decisions based on our own inner drives, (b) “consciousness” in the sense of being qualia-possessing self-reflective entities, and (c) “consciousness” in the sense of being mobile and receiving significant input about your physical surroundings (i.e. not sleeping or passed out).
When sleeping, people can be conscious in the (b) sense (as they can dream), but they’re unconscious in the (c) sense.
I suppose a generous reading would be that magic is what allows one to go on thinking in possessing-ghost form once your neurons are left burning on the floor of your enemy’s home. Which seems trivially true.
It all makes sense now: wizards are Zombies!