A random question regarding owl post

[Steve Vander Ark]

No: HPFGUIDX 3048

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, "Cassandra Claire" 
<cassandraclaire at m...> wrote:

> I suppose the question is: if you don't know precisely where 
someone 
> is, can you still send them a letter via owl?

Yes, you can. The owl is INTENDED to go to Sirius, so it does. And 
that makes perfect sense with the way magic works in the Wizarding 
World.

I'll try to make this make sense (it only SORT of does for me yet). 
I'm writing up something about the way magic works in the Harry 
Potter universe for the Lexicon and here's sort of where my thinking 
is. I'd love input on this whole thing:

It seems that in the Wizarding world, there is a certain amount of 
intelligence and reasoning that happens without logical processing. 
Stuff works because it's INTENDED to work. This stands in contrast to 
our scientific reality when everything works only by specific logic 
and pinpoint technology. Think of how literal and frustrating a 
computer can be sometimes. You just want to shout at the screen that 
it SHOULD have been able to figure out what you MEANT it to do, like 
if you type a filename and end it with .htmlk because you 
accidentally bumped the k. Why can't your computer figure out that 
you obviously MEANT .html. Well, in the Wizarding World, magical 
items DO correctly assume the intention of the action. Skele-Gro 
grows the correct bones, mostly because obviously those are the ones 
that NEED to be regrown. You drink the potion, you don't have to aim 
it at the arm or anything. You'd drink it the same way and it would 
be the same potion if you needed to regrow the bones in your leg. A 
potion does what it's intended to do. This is integral to magic as 
opposed to science.

If you look at the split between magic and science that happened in 
our world hundreds of years ago, you see this change in thinking that 
happened. It made modern technology and our modern world possible. In 
the Wizarding World, things went the other way. And now the two 
worlds, though they exist side by side, find each other utterly 
inexplicable. 

Steve Vander Ark
The Harry Potter Lexicon
http://www.i2k.com/~svderark/lexicon