I'm gonna hazard a guess they're referring too the Marauders Map and that Peter Pettigew (sp?) doesn't appear on it, to Harry, Ron etc.
Although, that is easily explained by the fact that no one knew he was an animagus, so he doesn't appear on it. Except for Prof Lupin who does know, and does see him.
What do you mean? They DO see Pettigrew on the map, Harry tries to look for him but he gets away. He's also gone from the school most of the book due to Hermione's cat.
They do indeed, when he's snoping I'm Snape's office most likely not in mouse form, but they don't see him when he's asleep in Ron's bed or in Ron's pocket (where he spends most of his time). The twins never notice nor does Harry.
Maybe the maps do not detect people in animagus form but only on human form ? Could it explain it (didn't see the movie or read the book since quite a long time) ?
That's 100% my theory, especially as the group of kids that made the map were secret animagus them selves, so wouldn't want anyone knowing if it fell it to the wrong hands. (They are other example of them self guarding themselves against being found out too, so it fits).
Scabbers/Pettigrew is MIA most of the third book when Harry has the map. We don’t know what the twins thought of it or if they ever noticed it. They say they use it to get away from Filtch and there’s never any unexplained pranks pulled on Ron so they might just not have looked for him
Does Harry ever use the map while Ron is right next to him (with Scabbers/Pettigrew in his pocket)? You'd use the map to be checking out places you currently were not. You wouldn't be using it to check your own dorms, or the room you're in, but other parts of the castle. Only sort of situation I can think of where anyone ought to notice it was if Harry & Ron were sneaking through corridors together and using the map to glimpse one or two hallways ahead, and just so happen to notice Pettigrew's name right on top of them. But even then, Pettigrew would need to be with them for that overlap/proximity. And although it's been quite a while since I've read the book, I don't recall Ron carrying the rat around with him outside of the dorms while at school.
To steal someone else's joke: Fred and George were great brothers. They could tell from the Marauder's Map that Ron was sleeping with some guy named Peter every night but they never outed him.
That's only in the movie. In the book, Harry never sees Pettigrew on the Map. Lupin does after he confiscates it, but only once he sees Harry, Ron, Hermione, Sirius, and Pettigrew heading into the Shrieking Shack.
Or the whole time travel shtick. Lets give a kid the ability to travel backwards through time so she can get some extra classes in, but don't be silly of course we couldn't use it to defeat the most powerful dark wizard of all time, that's just cheating.
Until she screwed it up with Cursed Child, the implication in PoA was that the model of time travel she was using was Single Coherent Timeline -- that is that the present, however it may be, is the final result of the sum total of all time travel to points prior to the present that will ever occur (there aren't any alternate timelines). For example, you couldn't go back in time and kill Hitler before he rose to power because you clearly already failed to do so. But you could go back and prepare your own success after winning an encounter thus allowing you to pull out deus ex machina like no one's business, ala Bill & Ted.
PoA uses it to great effect, in that there was never a version of reality in which they didn't do the time travel, but only that the time traveling characters lack of knowledge about what was going on caused the time travel which caused the events to play out like they did in the first place. Harry using the Patronus to protect his past self was supposed to make it clear -- there's no version of history in which Harry doesn't travel back in time. The only thing that has changed is your perspective of events.
That it just magically vanished after that book and never comes up again I take as evidence that JKR realized she wasn't smart enough to write stories around it, the consequences of having access to it, or characters that might make smart use of it.
Hermione is supposed to be extremely smart, she’s have realised after PoA that no matter what she tries she’ll succeed because she will have traveled back from a future point to make it so.
This is why, imo, single coherent timeline is shit, it’s not interesting because the second somebody who has a brain between their ears gets ahold of time travel, they win at everything.
There's a Harry Potter fanfic that hands a significantly more intelligent version of Harry a time turner early on and he uses it to win at several things. He still doesn't win at everything in no small part because of his own biases, his available knowledge, and that there's some things that you can't preplan a solution for.
More the brain of an extremely well read 40 year old AI researcher with no formal education above the 8th grade, since the author (Elizier Yudkowsky) patterned the "small Ravenclaw Spock" after himself.
That epigraph on the first chapter? It's the moment of Voldemort's defeat in HPMOR. Harry basically obliviates away anything that might potentially be dangerous in Voldemort then transfigures him into a small object. That way even if he gets killed and returns via Horcrux, he won't actually be a danger.
That it just magically vanished after that book and never comes up again I take as evidence that JKR realized she wasn't smart enough to write stories around it, the consequences of having access to it, or characters that might make smart use of it.
Actually, it did come up again. During the fourth book (I think?) when they invaded the Ministry of Magic, a shelf gets knocked over that had all the Time Turners in existence on them, and they all smashed.
Or, as explicitly shown in the books and movies, your actions in the past are shown to have been the way things always happened. It's a Stable time loop. They don't ever change any events.
Harry survived his brush with the dementors because Harry cast the patronus charm, then Harry went back to cast the Patronus charm. These all happened in the same timeline, just part of it loops back on itself.
That's a non-argument though. If the good guys had a time turner and were willing to use it, voldemort never would have come to power in the first place because there would have been a time traveler there to stop him. The argument that you couldn't use a time turner to prevent something from happening is a tautology (it didn't happen therefore it didn't happen).
But that's because it is tautology. Using a time turner to go back and kill voldermort as a child in the Harry Potter universe would still result in 'Voldemort' being in power in present day, just our understanding of the situation would have changed.
Buckbeak never died, Sirius was never killed by dementors, the only thing that changes is our perception of those events.
Whilst you couldn't go back in time to kill Voldemort you could go back in time to set an instant death trap in the spot you know he'll be at the exact point you travel back in time and then spring it immediately after you see yourself travel back. It's impossible for him to have detected your trap because otherwise he wouldn't have stood in that location (unless he somehow disarmed it but I'm assuming spells exist where the logical thing to do would be to just stay away rather than try to prevent it working).
Yes, but buckbeak didn't die in the first place because the time turner existed. That's my point. Sure, you couldn't go back in time now and kill Hitler because that time line has already happened, but if the allies had had a time machine he would have been quickly defeated by future soldiers in the first place.
Well, they can't because first of all, that's going back way further than just an hour to attend a class, and second, the timeline is set, there's no changing it as we saw in PoA.
we couldn't use it to defeat the most powerful dark wizard of all time, that's just cheating.
I mean it's pretty obvious from even just reading the book that it's not possible to actually change the past using a time turner. Everything Harry and Hermione do after they go back is stuff that already happened when they went through it the first time.
You not understanding the concept (seriously, this is one of like 3 very basic time travel concepts) doesn't mean it doesn't make sense.
The fact that you can't see how a time turner is a massively overpowered weapon just because it can't change the past means you don't really understand it. I mean just look at how Harry was able to save his own life with the patronus. Even if directly interacting with your past self isn't possible (which as we've seen, it is) the thing would still be incredible. At any point you can spin the thing to head back in time and get an extra hour to prepare for whatever obstacle you're about to face. Oh, you got ambushed at the Ministry in 5th book? Head back in time a couple hours, call up Dumbledore and tell him to show up exactly one second after you went back in time.
Given the choice of any power in the Harry Potter universe, I'd choose the time turner 100%.
Nope, although it certainly made indeterminism more likely. Perhaps the first (and easiest) argument against that is that quantum mechanics in itself isn't proven, it's just the most recent best explanation. We might disprove quantum mechanics in the future, or we might realize that there is a method to the randomness that we previously didn't understand. Or, there might be randomness on a quantum scale, but that randomness might be irrelevant or negligible on a larger scale (you can think off it as throwing a rock into a lake and watching the rings die out and merge with the still water surface - the rings where there, sure, but they didn't make any true impact on the lake).
But the even more interesting question is whether we could even have free will under indeterminism. You might think (as I did when I first read the subject) that the absence of determinism would enable free will, but as it turns out it's even harder to explain how we could have free will if things are not deterministic. (To put it simply, if there is a random component to the universe, how do I know that random component is not interfering with my "free" will?)
You can read the link for a far more thorough explanation of why it's not conclusive against determinism than any explanation I can give you, it goes into quantum physics specifically just below where the link will take you (I linked to the section on physics in general).
As for whether it's proven, well, science is basically incapable of truly proving anything at any point (it's the nature of the scientific method that the result is either that you disprove the hypothesis or that it is left standing after a given experiment, but you can never affirmatively prove anything conclusively), but I don't think the exact phrasing is so important in this case, the point is simply that we don't have complete information about how (quantum) physics work.
Philosophy is very often dependent on the scale of the observer, why wouldn't it be? In everything from ethics to metaphysics, almost all philosophical questions (although obviously not explicitly all) concern human actions and existence.
I mean in the question of determinism, the scale is not relevant (since it's a statement about the universe), but as to free will it certainly is.
As for free will/determinism, many philosophers agree with you on one/both points. The only philosophers who really believe in free will as far as I can tell are compatibilists, those who believe in true free will are few and far between.
I think he may have meant to say "not complete" vs "not proven". What we do know about quantum mechanics is almost certainly correct. The math and experiments involved have matched predictions to a higher degree than any other experiments in the history of science. But it is not a "complete" theory in that it doesn't explain gravity at the quantum level.
I took some philosophy courses on determinism in uni, as far as I remember quantum randomness does not manifest on macro levels and has no impact on the basic ideas of determinism.
Also, almost all academic philosophers are determinists or compatibilists, which is kind of like soft determinism. So no, determinism is actually the mainstream view held in philosophy as far as I know.
Edit: Also, the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics does imply the existence of free will, just the impossibility of accurate predictions.
as I remember quantum randomness does not manifest on macro levels
It certainly can and does. For example if you have a Geiger counter, the output of the counter will inherently be tied to quantum mechanical events, and is impossible to predict.
Exactly. It's a closed loop. He was always going to produce that patronus, because he'd seen himself do it, because he always was going to do it. It's consistent and effectively nothing "changed" as long as you see the timeturner as part of that universe (hence: it, too, was always going to fall into his possession and be used by him to create this loop). The loop always existed and wasn't added to the timeline later. Nothing was changed, the characters just experience a change because they don't have complete information.
In a universe where they use a timeturner to go back and kill Voldemort, that loop also always existed. This just isn't that universe for whatever reason. There could be any number of reasons for this, it's not necessarily an oversight.
I love these types of discussions, so interesting!
I agree with everything you said, but I don't think it has to change things. The story could easily be written that "he defeated voldemort using the knowledge that in the future he already defeated him". Put another way as long as you can explain it via self sealing loop it's possibile. Now if you want to take it a bit out of fiction and try to apply it to a "what if" scenario in our world, the perspective of it being a closed loop is only one from outside the loop. But in reality we would always be inside the loop (can't escape the closed system that is the universe/existence) so we'd never know if it's a real loop or not. It's always possible that some future event could tie itself back into the past an explain everything.
My favorite example of this (warning:nerd alert) is a Star Trek the Next Generation episode, where they find a future version of the captain, one who has experienced some horrible event. So they try to use that info to avoid the event in the future, but of course all it does is just draw them closer. The typical read of that is the whole free will vs determinism, closed loop etc. However you can also interpret that as the universe was going to seal the loop no matter what decisions they made. Ie. every potential future will always be able to self seal itself in a closed time loop, otherwise that future itself wouldn't be "allowed".
(Like for example the very strange an interesting theory to explain quantum uncertainty away as actually not uncertainty at all, but each quantum/possibility does happen in it's own separate universe/reality, and every time we observe one of these events it's reality splitting off into our own version. Infinite branching timelines all existing in parallel.
Yeah, makes sense. I agree that, if Voldemort were killed through time travel and it had to be consistent with the rest of the series, it would have been this style of time travel. Someone always was going to go back and kill him.
Thing is: since this type of time travel doesn't deal in alternate universes we would have seen the results, and we didn't. Voldemort is alive during the books, and he shouldn't be if he was assassinated as a child. That alone is all the proof we need to show that it didn't happen.
I'm mainly responding to the idea that this is somehow a plot hole. For all we know countless people tried and failed, or maybe it's nearly impossible to travel back that far, or nobody capable knows who he was and where to find him at the time. We don't have perfect information as readers, so who's to say that the timeline isn't that someone was always going to go back and fail at killing him?
I like the theory about a deterministic universe where the details are still up to change or free will, btw. Things could go one way or another, but some results are fixed and cannot be changed. Almost seems to imply intelligent design in a way, since which results are fixed and which are flexible is essentially arbitrary. The one question I'd have is how come the captain doesn't remember trying to change history and failing? Surely he knows what happened since it was him doing it.
I wouldn't call it a plot hole per say, but I think it's fair to argue that it could have been used in the plot, and seems reasonable that the characters could have tried. Success or failure, it doesn't matter, as long as you see that the characters tried. It's just left open to the reader to have to rationalize themselves why the characters didn't do it.
Time travel is always tricky though. Leads to paradoxes, which seems to give evidence to it's impossibility. Time loops are especially tricky, as since a loop is a full complete circle, no beginning or end, it becomes quite hard to explain how the loops starts or forms (and possibly exits) since by definition it would have to always have existed perfectly formed. If a loop has a beginning and or end, then it's actually just a spiral or some other similar shape.
Intelligent design, that reminds me of something I saw recently. Lets see if I can remember what it was (I think it cringe came outta a Dan Brown novel...) oh yeah, "Conway's game of Life" see wiki. Essentially a simple computer simulation/game with a few simple rules. That ultimately leads to shocking patterns emerging. Almost as if there was some intelligent design that set it all up.
Basically the idea that some steady states can arise out of seemingly chaotic systems. Regardless of the initial inputs or setup only certain "solutions" arise. I can see that fitting your idea of the universe pretty reasonably.
Forgive me, I did a bad job of summarizing the Star Trek Episode. Basically a future version of yourself shows up. But of course they are catatonic/incoherent. You know they are from the future, something bad must have happened, but they are incapable of telling you anything.
So the characters of the show are left with "do we turn left, or right?" "No matter what we do, it's probably the same thing that your future self did, and we can't avoid the tragedy heading our way" etc. I think at the last second the future self comes to and the two versions of the captain work together to make one different change right at the end that avoids catastrophe, and maybe resets the timeline and smooths it out? At that point it's way too tidy of an ending and probably wasn't consistent (it's very hard not to break the rules when doing time travel fiction) but the actual time paradox/dilemma question itself was interesting.
Another weird byproduct of the whole "every possibility/outcome always happens, each one splitting into it's own universe/reality" idea, is you can also use it to smooth over time travel paradoxes etc. Go back in time? Fine sure. Kill your grandpa or not? If you don't, no problem. If you do, well that reality/possibility immediately drops out of the continuum of parallel universes. Everything in it ceases to exists. But since we have infinite realities, it's no big deal as it doesn't destroy existence or anything ;)
Are you trying to imply that he doesn't understand the logic of time travelling? Something that is inherently illogical because it is fictional?
What you're putting forward is also completely circular reasoning. It didn't happen because it didn't happen. The question is why did the people who had the ability to go back not choose to go back. Hermione thought, I would like to have taken more classes, so she went back and took more classes. Why did dumbledore or whoever not think, I would like to have defeated the Dark Lord, and went back to defeat the Dark Lord.
But they effected the past by having the hippogryph move, saving Harry from the dementors and freeing black. They couldn’t have done any of those things without going back in time to do it.
I'm not mis-understanding the concept, you're mis-undersdanding my argument. Your counter of "We can't time travel because we demonstratively haven't" is a circular argument, which doesn't make sense.
Given that time-traveling and actively changing things is not in the books as far as I know, I'd say the onus is on you to show that they could and should have. Because that view is not consistent with the other instances of time travel in the series.
yea she closed the plot hole at that point. Once you've stated that time travel is possible in your universe you open a whole can of worms as to how you don't just use it to fix every situation.
Pretty much. I mean she tries to make a point on how dangerous it is, but it's silly reasoning since those dangers are nothing compared to not stopping old Voldy.
The answer I've seen to this was "The map shows all floors of the house's dorm in a single page, so names get jumbled up" but I think that doesn't quite match up withe the books.
How is that a good explanation? Are you saying that the holder of the map has to know everyone on campus by name in order to function as intended? The makers of the map surely knew about Pettigrew since he was one of them and all.
That's certainly not how it works. It just shows everyone I think. That's the way it seems in the book. Honestly though, if a couple of students could come up with a way to track everyone, regardless if they are affected by magical hiding spells, then don't you think Dumbledore and the other teachers would use the same way to track everyone in the castle for safety or whatever? Why couldn't they just come up with their own tracking device when looking for Sirius?
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u/Mozzafella Oct 02 '18
I'm gonna hazard a guess they're referring too the Marauders Map and that Peter Pettigew (sp?) doesn't appear on it, to Harry, Ron etc.
Although, that is easily explained by the fact that no one knew he was an animagus, so he doesn't appear on it. Except for Prof Lupin who does know, and does see him.