The discussion of snake's sentience reminded me of an argument I once made about the nature of pureblood discrimination against Muggles, which I'll reproduce here:

Consider how we, as humans, justify our definitions of personhood. Why do we say that chimps, for example, are not people? Essentially, we come up with a list of features which we have, and things which aren’t people don’t have, like talking, tool use, etc. and then say everything which looks very similar to something which has those features is a person (why, for example, we consider a severely mentally retarded person a person).

In the Wizarding World, manufacturing a facsimile of sentience – talking, etc. is trivial. Even a very poor family can purchase multiple such objects as a child’s toy (Magical Chessmen). They would reject that these object are people, they’re simply toys, not truly free willed, despite resembling that strongly. When it comes down to it, the only difference between real people and all these simulacra seems to be the ability for autonomous magic use – so this becomes the criteria for person-hood.

For wizards, form is not a determinant of nature, thanks to the various transmutations and shapeshifting that is possible, this means that something looking similar to a person cannot be assumed to have the characteristics of a person, so the familiarity based extension I mention above that we have doesn’t apply.

All in all, by this rather natural definition, Muggles aren’t people. All they are is clever simulacra, with no greater moral significance than a child’s toy.

Move back to the chimp analogy. A chimp can do many things a person can do, but falls short on the key criteria. Despite this it’s being suggested that human-chimp hybrids may be genetically viable. It’s quite possible such a hybrid would then meet the criteria for personhood by our definition. Would you approve of people breeding with chimps? Or accept chimp-human hybrids as full members of society without reservation?

Eliezer's author notes say: If you want to know everything HJPEV knows and more, read the Sequences.

That would have been fair enough while there were only a few chapters of MoR up. Now, however, Eliezer is promising that reading the Sequences will teach readers how to perform Transfiguration, how to protect themselves against telepaths, how to conjure up a (v2.0) Patronus, and so forth. That seems a little optimistic.

Has Quirrell been kissed by a Dementor? With Voldemort responsible, presumably.

That would explain his zombie mode - when he slouches, drools, doesn't speak, and can only stagger around.

And in chp 45 the Dementor could have been speaking to (zombified) Quirrell rather than to Voldemort when it said to Quirrelmort "that it knew me, and that it would hunt me down someday, wherever I tried to hide."

Voldemort can take over Quirrell and act through him, turning him into articulate Quirrell. But when he's not actively in control Quirrell enters zombie mode. Voldemort might be going someplace else while he leaves Quirrell on autopilot, or maybe he just needs to rest because controlling Quirrell uses up his energy.

Harry chokes on his water twice in ch 49. Suppose that Quirrell, having been tricked into drinking Comed-Tea, finds out what spell makes it work, and puts it on Harry's water. Then he can think the following: here are some guesses I have about Harry. I will think about them in order; if Harry raises his glass, I will state my guess.

A pretty interesting way of reading minds, right?

chp 51-54 & A/N

Is it plausible that Harry would go along with this rescue? It is harder to accept than a Sirius rescue, which would've been based on the belief that Sirius was actually innocent (he hadn't done the awful things he was convicted of). The extenuating circumstance of having become evil under the influence of the Dark Lord provides a much weaker reason to rescue someone, and requires much more trust in the person who is conveying the information (since they must not only get the facts right, but make some subtle and complex judgments about the prisoner's character and what they deserve).

If Quirrell had just come straight out and asked Harry to help him break Bellatrix Black out of Azkaban, and to pretend to be Voldemort while doing it so that she would follow him out, I don't think he would have done it. Far too many red flags. Sure, Harry wants to end Azkaban, but to start with Bellatrix, who undeniably did so many evil things? Quirrell's case in favor of Bellatrix's innocence sounds like what a partisan would say when trying to make their side seem favorable, not an argument that Harry would buy (just as he could see through Draco's case against Dumbledore). Genre savvy Harry has read plenty of stories about villains with a sympathetic backstory.

Harry knows that Dumbledore doesn't trust Quirrell, he can imagine how Hermione would react to this (and she was right about transfiguration experimentation), or how Neville would react (Neville, who said with his voice shaking that torturing his parents was "not even close to the worst thing she's ever done").

Or even how Draco would react: Bellatrix Black? She was one of the few who were truly evil (chp 47). Forget that nonsense about wanting to save a poor innocent person from the nasty Dementors (you really think that's why Quirrell wants to break someone out of Azkaban?), this is obviously part of a plot. As Father would ask, who benefits? What kind of plot would involve breaking Bellatrix Black out of Azkaban?

But Quirrell didn't just come right out and suggest that they go free Bellatrix from Azkaban, he gradually and artfully got Harry to buy into the plot. So if we're going to wonder whether it's plausible for Harry to go along with it, we'll have to look at how Quirrell manipulated him into agreeing, and why Harry fell for the manipulations and wasn't stopped by these red flags.

Something that came up in a conversation offsite between me and Adelene Dawner:

Both in canon and MoR, where are all the grandparents and great-grandparents?

Supposedly, wizards have much longer lifespans than Muggles. I'm a Muggle, about to turn 22, and I've still got a grandparent left. Meanwhile, baby Harry managed to be orphaned without any of his grandparents stepping forward to take him in, or even trying to have a relationship with him. Perhaps Lily and Petunia's folks, Muggles both, were dead by this time - they never show up in canon - but what happened to pureblood James's mom and dad? Or their parents, or their siblings - when these people could all easily have lived to be a hundred years old, there should be some many-generation families running around.

The only visible ancestors we have before the canon epilogue are Augusta Longbottom, and, by the end of the series, Andromeda Tonks. Old characters like Dumbledore and McGonagall exist, but seem unmarried, childless, grandchildless. The Weasleys had at least one great-aunt and one great-uncle, but neither Molly nor Arthur has parents coming around for dinner, and they try to be an awfully close-knit family.

Chapter 54: why don't Harry and Quirrell cast Somnium on Bellatrix instead of deceiving her? (The deception requires Quirrell to tell Harry the Death Eater password, among other things...) Why does Quirrell talk to Bahry so confidently while Bellatrix can hear him? Why does he follow his whims to play-duel and then kill Bahry instead of quickly subduing and memory-charming him, if they planned to pull off the perfect crime? Why is he so vulnerable to Dementors that he drops immediately when Harry's Patronus vanishes, even though Bahry's Patronus is still there successfully protecting Bahry and Harry? (Or am I misunderstanding the reason for his screaming? It's very similar to Harry's screaming when he first encountered a Dementor. If the screaming were caused by Quirrell's spell coming in contact with Harry's - brother wands or whatever - then Harry should've felt a symmetrical effect, which he didn't.)

Also, am I the only one stupid enough to only now realize that the professor's name is Quivering Squirrel?

Hey Eliezer- if you're planning to upload your Author's Notes to the LW wiki, it might be helpful to post that intention to your profile on Fanfiction.net. I know of at least 3 groups independently trying to collect all of the AN's themselves:

• The Facebook Page

• An Evernote Page

• Dan Cowell's Translation Page

I noticed something odd in chapter 17, which seems relevant:

Harry was rather confused. "But this could be important, yesterday I got this sudden sense of doom when -"

"Mr. Potter! I have a sense of doom as well! And my sense of doom is suggesting that you must not finish that sentence!" ... "This isn't like you!" Harry burst out. "I'm sorry but that just seems unbelievably irresponsible! From what I've heard there's some kind of jinx on the Defense position, and if you already know something's going to go wrong, I'd think you'd all be on your toes -" ... "I see," Harry said slowly, taking it all in. "So in other words, whatever's wrong with Professor Quirrell, you desperately don't want to know about it until the end of the school year. And since it's currently September, he could assassinate the Prime Minister on live television and get away with it so far as you're concerned."

Professor McGonagall gazed at him unblinkingly. "I am certain that I could never be heard endorsing such a statement, Mr. Potter. At Hogwarts we strive to be proactive with respect to anything that threatens the educational attainment of our students." ... "Oh, I doubt that, Mr. Potter. I doubt that very much." Professor McGonagall leaned forward, her face tightening again. "Since you and I have already discussed matters far more sensitive than these, I shall speak frankly. You, and you alone, have reported this mysterious sense of doom. You, and you alone, are a chaos magnet the likes of which I have never seen. After our little shopping trip to Diagon Alley, and then the Sorting Hat, and then today's little episode, I can well foresee that I am fated to sit in the Headmaster's office and hear some hilarious tale about Professor Quirrell in which you and you alone play a starring role, after which there will be no choice but to fire him. I am already resigned to it, Mr. Potter. And if this sad event takes place any earlier than the Ides of May, I will string you up by the gates of Hogwarts with your own intestines and pour fire beetles into your nose. Now do you understand me completely?"

As Harry observes, this exchange is extremely out of character for McGonagall. Telling Harry not to voice his concerns about Quirrel, I could believe; but cutting him off mid-sentence, and them making such a graphic, violent threat if he does, I can not. It is so out of character, in fact, that I think it must be a symptom of being Imperiused.

We know that Voldemort used to use Imperius quite a bit, and the only real reasons he might stop would be if someone figured out how to detect it (which hasn't happened), or if his new form didn't have the power. One Imperiused person rules out the second possibility, so if if Quirrelmort put an imperius on McGonagall, he has almost certainly used it elsewhere too.

Which brings us to Harry's attempted breakout of Bellatrix. Breaking in to Azkaban to rescue Bellatrix Black, I could just barely believe. Pretending to be Voldemort while doing so, however, pushes credibility too far. From Chapter 52 to Chapter 54, Harry is Imperiused. There are just too many things stupid and suspicious about the plan to believe that Harry overlooked all of them.

And that brings us to the question of what Imperius actually does. And this, I think, explains the chapter title, "The Stanford Prison Experiment", which otherwise seems not to fit at all. The conclusion of that famous experiment was that if you give someone a role - even a fake role, like a prison guard over subjects in a psychology experiment who are technically free to leave - then they adopt it as part of their identity, including the evil parts, and become blind to the wrong things they do as part of that identity. So perhaps that's what Imperius does: it assigns its target a particular role, which their mind will bend to accommodate. That would also explain why the title was redacted for part 1, which takes place before the Imperius curse was cast.

Here are some abnormalities in Harry's mind:

This was it, this was the day and the moment when Harry started acting the part.

And in another part of him, like he was just letting another part of his mind carry out a habit without paying much attention to it...

Professor Quirrell had instructed Harry, calmly and precisely, how he was to act in Bellatrix's presence; how to form the pretense he would maintain in his mind.

The only problem with this theory, is that Harry believes that Quirrel can never use magic on him. His Patronus and Quirrel's Aveda Kevadera certainly didn't interact well, and there seems to be an issue if they touch. But the theory that they can never use magic on each other, seems to have appeared from nowhere; there is no evidence for it whatsoever, except the sense of doom. Perhaps that idea was planted, to make the idea that Harry was Imperiused seem less plausible?

I would like to take this opportunity to hail Discordia, and say that yes, in fact, I would like it very much if you started convincing people that I was some sort of shadowy conspiratorial figure. Honestly I'm disappointed that this hasn't happened already.

I would like to take this opportunity to say that I've long suspected you had Discordian sympathies (even before HJPEV started being really overt about it with Chaos Legion and such), and that I often already do portray you as a shadowy conspiratorial figure (and, occasionally, as a dark wizard) when I tell people about your work. Honestly, SIAI is the closest thing I know of to an actual honest-to-Gog real-life New World Order conspiracy, or at least the only one I know of whose master plan to utopia is both (1) plausible, and (2) not shockingly uncreative or unambitious or reactionary about what a better world could look like.

I have a question about chapter 49 and was wondering if anyone else had a similar reaction. Assuming Quirrell is not lying/wrong, and Voldemort did kill Slytherin's Monster, then my first thought was how unlikely that Slytherin's Monster should have even survived long enough to make it to 1943. No prior Heir of Slytherin had had the same idea? Perhaps no prior Heir of Slytherin had been strong enough to defeat Slytherin's Monster? No prior Heir had been ruthless enough?

Maybe this constitutes weak evidence for the theory that Quirrell is lying.

Chapters 55-56: disappointment. Harry recovered way too easily, if the story were consistent he'd be screaming on the floor until the Aurors arrived. The obstacle of Bahry's future testimony shouldn't have been so easy to remove, now I'm suspicious that Eliezer will deal with the obstacles posed by McGonagall, Dumbledore and others in the same fashion. In general, the end of Ch. 54 seems to promise all hell breaking loose, 55 undoes that, tries to build more suspense instead, and fails to be believable because it erased previous suspense too easily. It's like a prelude that promised a fugue and didn't deliver. But the part where Harry momentarily thinks of Bellatrix as a good unquestioning minion was one of those moments of brilliance that I love the fic for.

The best description of hell breaking loose I've ever read was the first part of Dostoevsky's "The Idiot". I first read it assuming it would be a difficult work of "serious" literature, and it totally upset my expectations by being more exciting than any "fun" literature I'd seen. Here's how it goes: all the heroes and the main conflict are introduced in the first couple pages, then the situation quickly becomes tense, then passions begin to flare up, then the whole thing explodes while we're not even halfway into the chapter, and when you expect it to subside it explodes some more instead, then more and more, and unbelievably the chaos just keeps growing until the last page of Part 1 when it ends with a couple paragraphs and you have to close the book rather than read on to Part 2, because you're shaking and you need to work out who was thinking what.

Some thoughts about Comed-Tea.

(I apologize in advance if these have already been discussed; there are a LOT of MoR comments and I haven't read all of them. If someone points me at the thread I'll slink off quietly and apologetically and read it.)

1) It seems there have to be two pieces to the behavioral control surrounding Comed-Tea (supposing Harry's basic theory is correct).

The first piece is, as Harry infers, inducing the drinking of Comed-Tea just before a surprising event is about to occur.

The second is suppressing the drinking of Comed-Tea otherwise. Were it not so, the "guarantee" wouldn't work... there would be no reliable expectation of something surprising happening when you drink it.

That second part needn't be magical, incidentally; there are many things that suppress people's desire to drink them via non-magical routes... castor oil is a canonical example. But if Comed-Tea had blatantly aversive properties Harry presumably would have noticed that. So whatever the aversive factor is, it's subtle (which still doesn't make it magical).

Actually, now that I think about it, the first piece of that is so unreliable (that is, most surprising events aren't preceded by drinking C-T) that it's probably better to model it the other way: the unusual aspect of C-T is that it suppresses the desire to drink it UNLESS something surprising is about to happen.

This seems like a realization worth highlighting in the text, as it gets at a very basic and important fact about false positives and false negatives that people lose sight of all the time.

2) Harry seems to be holding the Idiot Ball when it comes to Comed-Tea's implications.

That is, he convinces himself that Comed-Tea doesn't have the ability to Alter the Very Fabric Of Reality... all it does is combine some minor clairvoyance with the ability to magically influence his decision to drink it... and drops the subject.

Um... really? Isn't that second thing basically a limited version of the Imperius Curse? Isn't that at least noteworthy?

At the very least, it suggests that Comed-Tea is an empirical test of defenses against magical mind-control: if Comed-Tea still works on Harry while using X, then X is not a defense against magical mind-control. Harry in the MoRverse is apparently an Occlumens; testing whether using Occlumency suppresses the effect of Comed-Tea seems worth doing. (This is admittedly difficult because Comed-Tea doesn't work reliably, but it's the best thing he's got at the moment. It seems out of character not to try. Also, if I'm right about point 1, then maybe Comed-Tea does work reliably... maybe it's chemically very addictive, but magically suppresses the cravings except at the right time. In that case using Occlumency against it, if it worked at all, would suddenly cause one to crave it. Which would be startling.)

More broadly, the implication that magic to systematically influence Harry's behavior without his knowledge or consent -- in other words, to introduce bias -- is cheap and widespread seems fundamentally important. What other forms of mind-control are operating in the wizarding world? Does Occlumency work against all of them? Does anything work against all of them? Who markets this stuff, anyway, and how was it developed, and why isn't it classified as an Unforgivable Soft Drink? Is there a variant formula that influences people not to bully one another, or to think rationally, or to hail Harry as their lord and master?

That none of this even occurs to Harry (let alone the rest of the wizarding world) in a world nominally without the Idiot Ball seems like a plot hole. That said, one could retcon it by suggesting that ubiquitous magical mind-control artifacts also suppress thinking about magical mind control. (You might even expect this: mind-controlling artifacts that don't do this don't become ubiquitous.)

Narratively, all of this seems like a worthwhile topic to explore in the context of MoR. The parallels to advertising and critical thinking skills, for example, seem inescapable.

3) I see a number of comments talking as though the Comed-Tea itself were influencing minds to drink it at the right moment, and as I recall Harry thinks this way as well.

That something is influencing the drinker's mind seems a sound theory, but that the Comed-Tea itself is doing so seems less clear. Harry should at least consider alternate theories.

In particular, if Harry is still positing an eavesdropping Atlantean Font of All Magic that responds to "Wingardium Levioso", it seems just as plausible that the AFoAM mediates the drinking of Comed-Tea.

Admittedly, the AFoAM is pretty close to being a Fully Generalized Explanation... which is to say, Harry is coming awfully close to theism there. But I suppose that's another post.

Quirrell is reading Hermione and Draco's minds, and the story he told Harry about how he learned that Harry was a parselmouth, in chapter 49, is partially fabricated. While that story does explain Quirrel knowing that Harry's a parselmouth, it doesn't explain why he chose to confirm that knowledge on his very next private meeting after Draco found out. Also, as Harry observed, Quirrell has at least one hidden source of information:

(EDIT: On rereading, Harry brought up parselmouth first, which explains the timing. But the remaining arguments for the conclusion that Quirrell is reading Hermione and Draco's minds still apply, and still seem sufficient.)

"There were times when Harry suspected that Professor Quirrell had way more background information than he was telling, his priors were simply too good."

And besides that, simply as a prior probability, Quirrell ought to be reading every mind he's confident he can get away with reading, and Hermione and Draco are very unlikely to notice . This also suggests that when Quirrell arranged for Harry to learn occlumancy, it was a bit of misdirection; he knew he'd be able to get the same information from Harry's friends, but that having suggested it would make Harry more inclined to trust him. Finally, this means that the secret of partial transfiguration is not safe, and if Quirrell is Voldemort then it does not satisfy the conditions of the prophecy.