Nah. There is logic to magic, it's just not consistent with the Laws of Physics. It's the difference between maths and language.

 

This.

If there was no logic to magic you wouldn't be able to teach it in a school, have books on it or its theory, have people dedicated to its research or scholarly publication.

 

No, because a story isn't real life. When a character tells us something, it's presumed to be true unless otherwise shown or suggested to be false by the narrative. And Hermione in particular is an exposition fairy.

Not only is that statement never contradicted, but there's a small mountain of supporting evidence for it throughout the entire series and all supplemental works. Quidditch Through the Ages, Fantastic Beasts, the plots of approximately half the books, and a variety of miscellanea all support and lend credence to the idea that wizards in general aren't logical or practical people.

You can either argue for the eye-rollingly absurd fanonical bullshit like "the Philosopher's Stone was a deliberate test by a manipulative Dumbledore," or you can acknowledge the explanation given in that very same book and accept the idea that Dumbledore, along with literally every professor of a major subject at Hogwarts, didn't see anything wrong with hiding the stone behind a lethal gauntlet of obstacles in a school full of children behind a door that a First Year could open, because hey, they were warned at the start of the feast.

If you doubt me, read Fantastic Beasts. Just the intro alone covers it. It's less a historical summit than it was a series of Monty Python skits. All those problems could have been avoided if they had just sat and thought about it for five minutes, but they didn't, because they're wizards. You don't need some kind of psychological evaluation by armchair experts to explain it away. We were literally given the explanation.

Wizards don't have common sense. They are not good with logic and reasoning. If they were, there would have been only five books, and it would have ended with Voldemort conquering the world.

There's a difference between the existence of a method and the method being logical and reasonable. If magic was logical, there would be a completely reasonable and possibly mathematical explanation for why mispronouncing an "f" for an "s" for a charm can conjure a buffalo on your head.

 

Seriously, am I reading a different version than you, because I can't seem to find anything like that? Unless you meant the summit where they invited members of each race whose future they were deciding?

 

Because the spell Wingardium Leviofa is the one to conjure buffalo? A logical system is simply one that is internally consistent, which magic is... for the most part. It's only when you get down to the self sacrificial magic that started off the whole story that even that kind of logic takes a leap out the window.

 

You're confusing being illogical with being chaotic. Pronouncing the same faux-latin phrase while wiggling a stick in the same specific way creating the same effect each time is consistent, yes, but that doesn't make it logical in the slightest.

 

At the risk of getting into semantics, for something to be logically sound it merely needs to not contradict itself.

"Logical" does not mean "bearing some superficial resemblance to science" (which is what people seem to mean when they say things like "Dresden magic is logical"). Dresden magic is no more logical than HP magic. It simply has a few analogies to thermodynamics.

 

Chaos isn't logical even if it doesn't contradict itself. For something to be logical there has to be some kind of structure.

In HP magic (at least the canonized part of it) there is some logic, but it's by no means completely logical. The rules (as we know them) are just flexible enough that there are no contradictions.

 

Or we could just, as Xandrel is so fond of doing, say 'it's magic' and stop breaking our brains on it.

 

It's a quote that I adjusted for my purposes. I think that it should be included here.

 

HP magic appears to have internal logic, although it has a deficit of external logic. Plot holes are when the author contradicts herself. I see no contradictions, just people fiddling with a force they don't fully understand and trying to figure out what the rules are.

 

Except in this case it's impossible to obtain the knowledge no matter how much effort you put into it.

Edit: is it actually possible to quote a quote in a post?

 

For something to be logical, it needs to follow a chain of reasoning. There really is no reasoning behind why magic works the way it does; it just does.

I was wondering how long we'd go before somebody started shoving unnecessary analogies involving Dresden into this.

I don't. What were we ever shown in the entire series that suggested the mysteries of magic could ever be solved?

 

When Voldemort learned to fly and when we saw the Department of Mysteries.

 

Or the fact that we know there is such a thing as magical theory i.e. a body of knowledge wizards have that explains how magic works.

 

Does canon ever actually state that there is magical theory or what it entails? Because you may be applying the definition of theory as we, the society that leans on science, defines it, i.e. theory being knowledge explaining what how and why. But do we knew that magical theory isn't just, hell I dunno, very detailed instructions how to perform magic, not how it works? Fanon likes to add bits of knowledge that stirring clockwise decreases the poisonous potential or that wings of that counteract the particular negative effect of the blood of this while not inhibiting the blood's desired effect, but I don't recall any of that actually in the books.

 

My very point is, is theory the same to wizards as it is to us. On one hand, with muggleborns inevitably integrated into the magical society, it well might be as they would bring in some ideas from the muggle world over time. On the other hand, we've debated earlier that wizards may not have logic or whatever, so who knows what they define as this magical theory.

 

Voldemort learning to fly wasn't solving a mystery, because flight was never a mystery to them to begin with. Wizards have been able to enchant objects to fly for millennia. If anything, the fact that a "Self Flying" Charm took so long to work out is yet more evidence that magic is not logical.

Also, the Department of Mysteries was the Department of Mysteries, not the Department of Answers. We saw nothing to suggest they ever unraveled anything about any of the subjects they researched. There's no evidence that they understood any more about time travel than anyone else, that they had any greater grasp on what "love" was, or that they understood anything more about life and death than the rest of the world.

The Department of Mysteries proves that wizards are interested in finding answers to big questions, not that they've actually found any.

[EDIT]

Also, I feel the need to elaborate that even if they had solved some mysteries of the world, that still doesn't prove anything. We have yet to have any sort of fundamental underpinning explained to us. We don't know how spells are created or discovered. We don't know how magic works or why. For all we know, wizards are just doing random shit until something works, and while there's a logic to the process of trial and error, that doesn't mean the thing being tested is itself logical.

And we've strayed from the path of the original argument regardless. It doesn't matter if magic is inherently illogical or not. What matters is that the wizards themselves are. There is overwhelming proof of this in the main series and all supplemental material we've been provided with. They lack what we would consider basic common sense, and many seem to be extremely weak in the realms of reasoning and critical thinking. Whether you choose to argue that it's something to do with magical blood, an inherent issue that comes from using magic for long enough, a psychological condition that arises from being born and raised in a magical world, a cosmic tradeoff for possessing magical powers in the first place, or something else entirely, is also ultimately irrelevant.

The why doesn't matter. All that matters is that it is. You don't need complicated conspiracy theories to try and explain away what can be instead attributed to wizards being wizards.

 

Doesn't that tell you something? A mystery is only a mystery as long as it remains unsolved. Flight was a mystery to us until the aerofoil was designed. Wizards simply conquered that hurdle before we did.

I also fail to see how a charm not having been invented is proof of something being illogical. Relativity was still a major part of the universe before it was discovered, after all.

Let's see, we have the time room where actual time travelling devices are created, as well as an hourglass that ages/de-ages things. That suggests some mastery of the subject, I think.

Wizards do also know more about life and death than the rest of the world. They know for a fact that ghosts exist and that there is an afterlife. The Resurrection Stone works, after all.

What is your criteria for not having found answers? Dumbledore seemed to be very aware of love's power in regards to magic, enough to have wove it into the protective charm that kept Harry safe during his childhood.

The evidence of the book suggests that wizards study these questions in a professional manner and that they have used the answers they've worked out to create things like time turners, enchanted hourglasses, floating brains and other such things. Your appeal to ignorance does not hold any ground in the face of this.

This I'll agree with you on, though it can be argued that common sense as we see it isn't really applicable to beings that cockslap the fundamental forces of the universe at the age of 11.

Agreed. It's always more interesting to have the characters themselves be the reason for the random shit that happens than for there to be a magical purpose behind it all.