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?
