Non-Human Spirituous Apparitions

Various fans trying to make sense of the various bits of information provided by Mrs. Rowling have come up with the concept of "Non-Human Spirituous Apparitions" or "non-beings" to cover boggarts, dementors, poltergeists and possibly banshees.¹ I agree the description and concepts they have come up with fits well with what Mrs. Rowling has provided for us. It is, however, philosophically unacceptable to me at a really fundamental level.

The basic premise is that sufficient concentrations of magic mixed with the right negative emotion will produce a spirit that is functionally indestructible and unkillable because, so the theory goes, being "alive" requires having a physical body. Since these things have never been "alive" they cannot be killed, only driven away.

There are two basic problems. The first is that they disrupt the overall balance of power in the world Mrs. Rowling has created. The other problem is that they are created. If they are created but never go away, then for any sufficiently long time, they will overwhelm us by simple population density. There will be too many of them to drive away no matter even if every one spent all day every day casting the spells to do so. Sure, this is theoretical calculus at its theoretical best. For sufficiently slow or sufficiently sporadic rates of creation, it might take sufficiently long to reach this theoretical density that the Earth will be destroyed when the Sun becomes a red giant.² The point is that it is unacceptable that something that increases in numbers cannot and does not also decrease in numbers.