Intentionality & Magic

[Steve Vander Ark]

No: HPFGUIDX 4555

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, "Aberforths_Goat" 
<Aberforths_Goat at Y...> wrote:
> > This whole "intent" thing just seems so important to understanding
> > magic. We are SO stuck in our perfectly logical scientific way of
> > looking at things (obviously, since that's the way our world 
works)
> > that it's hard to see that the Wizarding World just operates by
> > different logic.
> 
> Bravo Steve!

Okay, I'm copying this over to show my wife. ;)

(See, honey? All that time working on Harry Potter stuff is paying 
off! Did you see what he said? That's me he's talking about there, 
yes, sir...!)



> Of course, if the magic in the map was smart enough to figure out 
which
> information was or was not pertinent to Harry, one can also wonder 
why it
> *wasn't* smart enough to print BARTY CROUCH JR.--SERIUOSLY EVIL 
BADGUY!!! in
> flashing red letters and do a little police siren imitation ...

I don't see the map as providing the intent. I see that coming from 
the wizard and the map being a fairly neutral servant. The level of 
intelligence in the map isn't as well-defined as Tom Riddle's diary 
was toward the end, and that's probably only because of his sucking 
in some of Ginny's life force. There is a certain element of 
personality there, which we see when it talks to Snape, but that was 
almost like an Easter egg in the program, to borrow from the complete 
antithesis of magic, the computer.

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