Haha, yeah, that's probably it. Although I do like your comments and I've found myself agreeing on many things you've written.

Just to close this off, I think Rowling did a great job creating a whimsical world that's quite desirable as it erases many of modern day difficulties (among other things), while not giving too much detail on the how-to of everything. However, drawing from the real world and applying magic wherever she felt like does leave many holes that fanfics love to exploit or try to close. The way I see it, the challenge for someone who doesn't want to go completely his own way about magic, is somehow not trying to iron out every detail, keep things a bit muddy, or not really give any reason for why Lupin is wearing threadbare robes, but rather try to get where he wants in the story without looking too closely on everything.

Now you can always go off rails and the story I've been slowly writing and hope to maybe post one day does go off rails a lot, and heavily draws from a fic where magic is dealt with a bit differently, but I hope not to be too far off from the general feeling as for it to be jarring.

On the robes issue, I'm personally going to go with:

1. Anyone can have somewhat good looking robes by making it themselves (although it takes practice etc)
2. Transfiguring something into robes isn't really done (while possible) because of social norms and the fact that they can be untransfigured or at some point fail if the transfiguration isn't perfect.
3. Having your robes tailor made is a sign of wealth & is also a practicality since the robes are laced with spells.
4. Dumbledore having ostentatious robes (that he could be charming himself) is a sign of power and non-conformance. In the larger wizarding world there'll be many who, like Dumbledore, will be making a statement with their clothing.


Now what I haven't figured out is how the hell books are made. Or even parchment.

Or closer to the matter at hand, the fifth exception to Gamp's law.

 

Thanks for answering your own question.

 

Apologies for the slight necro. I just had a chance to read through this thread in full and thought the conversation to be quite interesting. It seemed to reveal an underlying tension between two ideological camps, each holding to two different conceptions of magic, even if it wasn't always spelled out that way.

Conception 1:
Magic is an objective feature of the world. There are 'magical kinds' (as opposed to natural kinds) in the world, and objective magical laws that magic follows. Wizards and witches are in the business of discovering these magical laws.

Conception 2:
Magic is a subjective feature of the world. There are no objective magical kinds of laws inherent to the universe that magic has to follow. To the extent that magic is subject to human aims, it is a system which is invented, not discovered.

The best example of conception 1 is probably to be found in Taure's original defense of food as an exception to Gamp's law, wherein he conceived of 'edibility' as being some magical kind inherent to the universe. This is similar to how many scientists of the past (e.g. Lord Kelvin) thought there existed a non-reductive life force inherent to all lifeforms, which went over and above their constitutive physical parts (a doctrine known as vitalism).

Conception 2 on the other hand unabashedly acknowledges that there are anthropocentric elements inherent to magical laws. This camp argues that the 'good food' exception was not because of some inherent magical kind like edibility being unsusceptible to magical transfiguration, but rather that there's just some weirdly narrow magical restriction which is specifically targeted to the concerns of wizards and witches.

To be clear, both 1 & 2 can readily explain the conceptual aspect of HP magic. 1 can do so as long as human concepts are reducible to objective magical or physical entities (and there’s no reason to think they can’t be). 2 does so by arguing that magically based concepts (like a Fidelius secret) are brought into existence through human action. Wizards actually invented the concept of ‘secret’, and it really exists as a non-physical concept in the world.

After reading through to the end of this thread, it seems to have become clear that the second camp has 'won', but I want to dedicate this post to defending the first conception as the better magic system.

Why I think conception 2 is worse as a general principle:

The only reasonable way to explain why magical laws are so peculiarly tailored to human wants and needs is to argue that they must be subjective to those needs. So the reason why we might get bizarre exceptions to magical laws like "you can't transfigure good food' or 'you can't create stylish clothes' is because magical laws are not some inherent properties of the universe, but rather are invented by witches and wizards. But it’s easy to spot the problem with this; if magic is invented by wizard kind, then why would they collectively invent restrictions which can only hinder their magical abilities?

One way to address this objection would be to argue that while magic is indeed invented, much of this 'invention' takes place on some different level to conscious intent, so that wizard-kind invented magical restrictions as a kind of accidental process. The issue with this is that there are a bunch of other magical creatures in the world, many of them not obviously descended from humans, like dragons. How could they have magical abilities if magic was something invented by wizard-kind? You would have to argue that magical creatures don't naturally (magically?) evolve but were actually created by humans.

Another way to do away with the problem is to argue that while magic is subjective, it's not subjective to humans. Maybe God decides the magical rules, and the explanation for why they are anthropocentric is because God designed them that way. Needless to say, I don't like this approach either, but I guess that's up to the theological disposition of the reader.

So, what can those people whose tastes align with the concept of 'magic as discovery' do, supposing that we reject the God explanation? Is there any way to defend the first conception of the magic system? I believe there is.

A defense of conception 1:

The best argument the defenders of conception 2 have is that it seems really convenient that many of the magical restrictions are so heavily suited to human concerns. This is hard to explain if magical laws are a purely objective feature of the universe. However, much of this coincidental alignment can be explained by reversing the causal order on its head. Maybe the reason that transfiguring gold is an exception to Gamp's law (let's assume it is) is not because gold was already valuable to wizarding society, but vice versa. It's because of Gamp's exception that gold is a valuable commodity and not the other way around.

In an alternative universe where obsidian was one of Gamp's exception, wizards and witches would be presumably coveting obsidian. We can also explain gold's value in muggle societies as a side effect of Gamp's exception; it's valuable because it's rare, and it's rare because most of the gold was already mined by wizards.

Also, the fact that magical laws seem subjective to human language construction could be being interpreted wrongly as well. Maybe humans labelled the word 'beetles' to read similar to 'buttons' because they discovered that they were both objects that belonged to a magical kind, where intra-kind transfiguration is magically easier. If that seems too far fetched, we can just deny the whole implication in the first place.

There's no reason to believe that just because it was common in transfiguration class to practice on linguistically similar entities, that it was actually easier to do so on account of said linguistic similarity. This could just be a peculiarity of the Hogwarts curriculum. In fact, we have plenty of examples of transfiguration practice being otherwise, where students start out by transfiguring items which share some natural properties but no linguistic ones, like matches to needles.

Besides, I can't really think of any magical restriction which couldn't be explained in terms of objective magical kinds, except maybe clothes. But clothes are actually capable of being transfigured/conjured in the canon; the only issue seems to be with “good clothes”. However, maybe the reason the Weasleys wear shabby robes is perfectly mundane. It’s for the same reason they live in a shabby house; presumably one can create a nice house with transfiguration.

Other restrictions of magic, like not being able to bring back the dead (why can't we just transfigure objects into people?) can also be explained away with a restriction on transfiguring souls, since we know that some non-magical physical people (muggles) have souls.

On the topic of food:
Taure's concept of edibility comes close to explaining the problem in DH relating to food. The original issue with 'edibility' seemed to be that there where cases when the protagonists already had edible ingredients but couldn't transfigure them into good food. To address this, we can modify the edibility clause to be concerned with taste instead. It's not unreasonable that taste (as one of the five senses) might be an objective feature of the world, insofar as it exists as a property that any living thing would have (e.g. X tastes bitter). If taste was a magical kind, then it might be that you couldn't modify the property through transfiguration as a result of some magical restriction. This would answer why it wasn’t possible to make edible ingredients taste better due to Gamp’s law.

Both the concepts of 'taste' and 'souls' are plausible candidates for magical kinds. If there existed some society of magical creatures that had evolved on some other world, they too would encounter issues relating to nutrient consumption and consciousness. They’re not just some arbitrary kinds/restrictions that would be peculiar to contemporary wizarding society.