Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (54 page)

But they hadn’t violated any of the rules of Transfiguration… had they? They hadn’t made any liquids, any gases, they hadn’t taken orders from the Defense Professor…

The
pill!
That had been something to be eaten!

…well, no, nobody would just eat a pill lying around, it hadn’t
worked
actually, they could have just
Finite Incantatemed
it if it had, but she would still have to tell Harry about that and make sure they didn’t mention it in front of Professor McGonagall, in case they were never allowed to study Transfiguration again…

Hermione was starting to get a really sick feeling in her stomach. She pushed back her plate from the table, she couldn’t eat lunch like this.

And she closed her eyes and began to mentally recite the rules of Transfiguration.

“I will never Transfigure anything into liquid or gas.”

“I will never Transfigure anything that looks like food or anything else that goes inside a human body.”

No, they really
shouldn’t
have tried to Transfigure the pill, or they should’ve at least
realized…
she’d been so caught up in Harry’s brilliant idea that she hadn’t
thought…

The sick feeling in Hermione’s stomach was getting worse. There was a feeling in her mind of something hovering just on the edge of recognition, a perception about to invert itself, a young woman about to become a crone, a vase about to become two faces…

And she went on remembering the rules of Transfiguration.

Harry’s knuckles had gone white on his wand by the time he stopped trying to Transfigure the air in front of his wand into a paperclip. It wouldn’t have been safe to Transfigure the paperclip into gas, of course, but Harry didn’t see any reason why it would be unsafe the other way around. It just wasn’t supposed to be
possible
. But why not? Air was as real a substance as anything else…

Well, maybe that limitation
did
make sense. Air was disorganized, all the molecules constantly changing their relation to each other. Maybe you couldn’t impose a new form on substance unless the substance was staying still long enough for you to master it, even though the atoms in solids were also constantly vibrating all the time…

The more Harry failed, the colder he felt, the clearer everything seemed to become.

All right. Next on the list.

You could only Transfigure whole objects as wholes. You couldn’t Transfigure
half
a match into a needle, you had to Transfigure the
whole thing.
Back when Harry had been trapped in that classroom by Draco, it had been the reason he couldn’t just Transfigure a thin cylindrical cross-section of the walls into sponge, and punch out a chunk of stone large enough for him to fit through the hole. He would have needed to impose a new form on the whole wall, and maybe a whole section of Hogwarts, just in order to change that little cross-section.

And that was
ridiculous
.

Things were made of atoms.
Lots of little tiny dots. There
was
no contiguity, there
was
no solidity, just electromagnetic forces holding the little dots related to each other…

Mandy Brocklehurst paused with her fork on her way to her mouth. “Huh,” she said to Su Li, sitting across from the now-empty space beside her, “what got into Hermione?”

Harry wanted to kill his eraser.

He’d been trying to change a single spot on the pink rectangle into steel, apart from the rest of the rubber, and the eraser wasn’t cooperating.

It
had
to be a conceptual limitation, not a real one.
Had
to be.

Things were made of atoms,
and every atom was a tiny separate thing. Atoms were held together by a quantum mist of shared electrons, for covalent bonds, or sometimes just magnetism at close ranges, for ionic bonds or van der Waals forces.

If it came down to that, the protons and neutrons inside the nuclei were tiny separate things. The quarks inside the protons and neutrons were tiny separate things! There simply
wasn’t
anything in reality, the world-out-there, that corresponded to people’s conceit of solid objects. It was all just little dots.

And free Transfiguration was all in the mind to begin with, wasn’t it? No words, no gestures. Only the pure concept of form, kept strictly separate from substance, imposed on the substance, conceived of apart from its form. That and the wand and whatever made you a wizard.

The wizards couldn’t transform parts of things, could only transform what their minds perceived as wholes, because they didn’t
know in their bones
that it was all just atoms deep down.

Harry had focused on that knowledge as hard as he could, the
true fact
that the eraser was just a collection of atoms, everything was just collections of atoms, and the atoms of the little patch he was trying to Transfigure formed
just as valid
a collection as any other collection he cared to think about.

And Harry still hadn’t been able to change that single part of the eraser, the Transfiguration wasn’t going anywhere.

This. Was. Ridiculous.

Harry’s knuckles were whitening on his wand again. He was
sick
of getting experimental results that
didn’t make sense.

Maybe the fact that
some
part of his mind was still thinking in terms of objects was stopping the Transfiguration from going through. He had thought of a collection of atoms that was an
eraser.
He had thought of a collection that was a
little patch.

Time to kick it up a notch.

Harry pressed his wand harder against that tiny section of eraser, and tried to see through the illusion that nonscientists thought was reality, the world of desks and chairs, air and erasers and people.

When you walked through a park, the immersive world that surrounded you was something that existed inside your own brain as a pattern of neurons firing. The sensation of a bright blue sky wasn’t something high above you, it was something in your visual cortex, and your visual cortex was in the back of your brain. All the sensations of that bright world were really happening in that quiet cave of bone you called your skull, the place where
you
lived and never, ever left. If you really wanted to say hello to someone, to the
actual person,
you wouldn’t shake their hand, you’d knock gently on their skull and say “How are you doing in there?” That was what people were, that was where they really lived. And the
picture
of the park that you thought you were
walking through
was something that was visualized inside your brain as it processed the signals sent down from your eyes and retina.

It wasn’t a
lie
like the Buddhists thought, there wasn’t something terribly mystical and unexpected behind the veil of Maya, what lay beyond the illusion of the park was just the
actual park
, but it was all still
illusion
.

Harry wasn’t sitting inside the classroom.

He wasn’t looking at the eraser.

Harry was inside Harry’s skull.

He was experiencing a processed picture his brain had decoded from the signals sent down by his retina.

The real eraser was somewhere else, somewhere that wasn’t the picture.

And the real eraser wasn’t like the picture Harry’s brain had of it. The idea of the eraser as a
solid object
was something that existed only inside his own brain, inside the parietal cortex that processed his sense of shape and space. The real eraser was a collection of atoms held together by electromagnetic forces and shared covalent electrons, while nearby, air molecules bounced off each other and bounced off the eraser-molecules.

The real eraser was far away, and Harry, inside his skull, could never quite touch it, could only imagine ideas about it. But
his wand had the power,
it could change things out there in
reality
, it was only Harry’s own preconceptions that were
limiting
it. Somewhere beyond the veil of Maya, the
truth
behind Harry’s concept of “my wand” was touching the collection of atoms that Harry’s mind thought of as “a patch on the eraser”, and if that wand could change the collection of atoms that Harry considered “the whole eraser”, there was absolutely no reason why it couldn’t change the other collection too…

The Transfiguration still wasn’t going through.

Harry’s teeth clenched together, and he kicked it up
another
notch.

The concept Harry’s mind had of the eraser as a single object was
obvious nonsense.

It was a map that didn’t and
couldn’t
match the territory.

Human beings modeled the world using stratified levels of organization, they had
separate thoughts
about how countries worked, how people worked, how organs worked, how cells worked, how molecules worked, how quarks worked.

When Harry’s brain needed to think about the eraser, it would think about the rules that governed erasers, like “erasers can get rid of pencil-marks”. Only if Harry’s brain needed to predict what would happen on the lower chemical level, only then would Harry’s brain start thinking - as though it were a separate fact - about rubber molecules.

But that was all in the
mind.

Harry’s mind might have separate
beliefs
about rules that governed erasers, but there was no
separate law of physics
that governed erasers.

Harry’s mind modeled reality using multiple levels of organization, with different beliefs about each level. But that was all in the
map,
the true territory wasn’t like that,
reality itself
had only a
single
level of organization, the quarks, it was a unified low-level process obeying mathematically simple rules.

Or at least that was what Harry had believed before he’d found out about magic, but the eraser wasn’t magical.

And even if the eraser
had
been magical, the idea that there could
really exist
a single solid eraser was
impossible.
Things like erasers
couldn’t
be basic elements of reality, they were too big and complicated to be atoms, they
had
to be made of parts
.
You couldn’t have things that were
fundamentally complicated
. The implicit belief that Harry’s brain had in the eraser as a single object wasn’t just
wrong,
it was a map-territory confusion, the eraser only existed as a separate concept in Harry’s multi-level
model
of the world, not as a separate element of single-level reality.

…the Transfiguration
still wasn’t happening.

Harry was breathing heavily, failed Transfiguration was almost as tiring as successful Transfiguration, but
damned
if he’d give up now.

All right, screw this nineteenth-century garbage.

Reality wasn’t atoms, it wasn’t a set of tiny billiard balls bopping around. That was just another lie. The notion of atoms as little dots was just another convenient hallucination that people clung to because they didn’t want to confront the inhumanly alien shape of the underlying reality. No wonder, then, that his attempts to Transfigure based on that hadn’t worked. If he wanted power, he had to abandon his humanity, and force his thoughts to conform to the true math of quantum mechanics.

There
were no particles,
there were just
clouds of amplitude
in a
multiparticle configuration space
and what his brain fondly imagined to be an eraser was nothing except a gigantic
factor
in a wavefunction that
happened to factorize
, it didn’t have a separate existence any more than there was a particular solid factor of 3 hidden inside the number 6, if his wand was capable of
altering factors in an approximately factorizable wavefunction
then it should damn well be able to alter the slightly
smaller
factor that Harry’s brain visualized as a patch of material on the eraser -

Hermione tore through the hallways, shoes pounding hard on the stone, breath coming in pants, the shock of adrenaline still racing through her blood.

Like a picture of a young woman turning into an old crone, like the cup becoming two faces.

What had they been doing?

What had they been doing?

She came to the classroom and her fingers slipped on the doorknob at first, too sweaty, she grabbed harder and the door opened -

- in a single flash of perception she saw Harry staring at a small pink rectangle on the table in front of him -

- as a few paces away the tiny black thread, almost invisible from this distance, supported all that weight -

“Harry get out of the classroom!”

Pure shock crossed Harry’s face, and he stood up so fast he almost fell over, stopping only to grab the small pink rectangle from the table, and he tore out of the door, she’d already stepped aside, her wand was already in her hand coming up pointing at the thread -

“
Finite Incantatem!
”

And Hermione slammed the door shut again, just as the gigantic crash of a hundred kilograms of falling metal came from inside.

She was panting, gasping for air, she’d run all the way here without stopping, she was soaked in sweat and her legs and thighs burned like living flames, she couldn’t have answered Harry’s questions for all the Galleons in the world.

Hermione blinked, and realized that she had started to fall, and Harry had caught her, and was lowering her gently to sit on the floor.

“…healthy…” she managed to whisper.

“
What?
” said Harry, looking paler than she’d ever seen him.

“…are you, feeling, healthy…”

Harry started looking even more frightened as the question sank in. “I, I don’t think I have any symptoms -”

Hermione closed her eyes for a moment. “Good,” she whispered. “Catch, breath.”