Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 4

gjm

[Update: and now there's a fifth discussion thread, which you should probably use in preference to this one. Later update: and a sixth -- in the discussion section, which is where these threads are living for now on. Also: tag for HP threads in the main section, and tag for HP threads in the discussion section.]

The third discussion thread is above 500 comments now, just like the others, so it's time for a new one. Predecessors: one, two, three. For anyone who's been on Mars and doesn't know what this is about: it's Eliezer's remarkable Harry Potter fanfic.

Spoiler warning and helpful suggestion (copied from those in the earlier threads):

Spoiler Warning: this thread contains unrot13'd spoilers for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality up to the current chapter and for the original Harry Potter series. Please continue to use rot13 for spoilers to other works of fiction, or if you have insider knowledge of future chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

A suggestion: mention at the top of your comment which chapter you're commenting on, or what chapter you're up to, so that people can understand the context of your comment even after more chapters have been posted. This can also help people avoid reading spoilers for a new chapter before they realize that there is a new chapter.

Spoiler warning and helpful suggestion (copied from those in the earlier threads):

Not in the emotional and psychological sense that 'innocence' is sometimes used.

Not necessarily, if Obliviate doesn't literally restore your brain to the exact state it was in before the period in question.

Hmmm. Now I'm wondering whether obliviation could be exploited to enhance the experience of early (but not technically first) sexual encounters. If one maintained the changes to confidence and presumably sexually relevant skills but also maintained the excitement, anticipation and perception of novelty of the first time...

0TheOtherDave16y

Restoring the exact brain state is probably overkill. I'd expect resetting to their previous values the connection-strengths in the portion of the conceptual activation network centered around to restore what I understand by "innocence" in this context. In fact, it might be sufficient (assuming you didn't have the old values lying around to support a real reset) to just lower those connection-strengths by a constant factor. Which would perhaps be installing a new innocence rather than restoring the old one, but not only do I suspect it would be very hard to tell the difference, I'm not actually sure the distinction means anything in the first place. Anyway, perhaps I'm just being pedantic. But it seems worthwhile, in a community that is often concerned with mind-as-algorithm rather than mind-as-attribute-of-brain, to acknowledge the distinction. As long as I'm here, I should mention a third approach: activating an additional node that inhibits . A lot of real-world attempts at preserving innocence seem to operate this way, although it seems to me that the result is nothing at all like the innocence they purport to preserve.