Snitches...

[catlady_de_los_angeles]

Original Yahoo! HPFG Header:
No: HPFGUIDX C2897
From: catlady_de_los_angeles
Subject: Re: Snitches...
Reply To: [Yahoo! #2877] Snitches...
Date: 6/26/00 11:07 pm  (ET)

> I proposed the idea that the Golden Snitches > are living things. (snip)
Perhaps they 'evolve'
> into something else after living though this
> pupal stage

Oh, gods, what a weird thought. What remarkable creature could a Golden
Snitch hatch into? Presumably Silver, Bronze, Copper, and Tin Snitches
produce less remarkable creatures.

> or perhaps they are like little carriages,
> holding a winged creature - like a fairy -
> trapped like a genie in a bottle?

Imprisonment! Slavery! Cruelty to fairies!

Seriously, the question of what is alive and what isn't must be even
more complicated in the wizard world than in real life (tm). Consider the
first-year Transfiguration exercise of turning a teapot into a tortoise
(if the first-years can do that, surely the adults can turn dirt or
at least wood into ivory, thus supplying as much ivory as anyone could
need, without harming any elephants). The teapot was not a living being
person. The tortoise is a living being person. Where did that life come
from when the matter shaped into the tortoise form, and where did it
go when shaped back into the teapot form? If you turn a teapot into
a tortoise and then turn it back into a teapot, did you just murder
a tortoise?

But just as I can't tell whether a wizard artifact that "thinks for
itself" contains a mind or just a very sophisticated computer program,
I can't tell whether a wizard artifact that moves "for itself" is alive
or just is propelled by a motor.

Oh, incidentally, I am not so naive that I don't know that many
secularists believe, in real life (tm), that our mind is nothing but
a sophisticated computer program and our life is nothing but a motor,
but *I* don't believe that.