system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Harry Potter] Half an hour after his death, Dumbledore appears in a portrait in the headmaster's study. So ... in what sense is he actually dead?
gpt
He's dead in that he's no longer alive.

The portrait may seem superficially to be alive, and you could argue that some of the portraits are at least semi-sentient, but at the end of the day it's got more in common with a really good Markov bot than it does a living, breathing human. Especially portraits of recently living people seem to have a much more limited intelligence than paintings of characters from antiquity or fiction such as the Fat Lady or Sir Cadogan which leads to two possibilities:

1. Portraits of the recently deceased are deliberately enchanted to be less sentient to honor the memory of the deceased and help people move on from their death, or

2. The enchantment that gives these portraits their sentience (or semi-sentience) is like a fine wine or whiskey and gets better with age. A plate-armored knight is certainly not from the late 80's early 90's, and it seems unlikely that the Fat Lady was a recent portrait given that the older students are familiar with her and that people don't refer to her by any name other than "Fat Lady." It could be that (like a Markov bot) they are able to better mimic sentience with more input from people.

I tend to believe the second option, because it seems like most portraits have one or two big character elements that they stick to pretty closely. Cadogan is the embodiment of Medieval Romance and Chivalry, the Fat Lady is obsessed with security even when she recognizes the student. The enchantment when making a portrait seems to require the painter/enchanter to imbue the portrait with a couple main traits for it to rely on while it builds the rest of its personality from its experiences with other wizards and paintings.

Dumbledore's portrait seems to be more elaborate than other paintings, and certainly seems to be aware of some of the issues that the gang faces, but at the end of the day his portrait isn't going to have the same magical insight or creativity that the irl Dumbledore would have had, and probably can't tell you things about Dumbledore that aren't common knowledge.