DanielVarga comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 7 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Unnamed 14 January 2011 06:49AM

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Comment author: DanielVarga 27 January 2011 12:45:14AM 0 points [-]

Indeed, the whole hero/quest/prophecy shtick would also count heavily towards a simulation argument.

The fact that the author did not mention the obviously relevant simulation hypothesis in 68 chapters (am I correct?) also suggests that he might have bigger plans with it.

Comment author: Zack_M_Davis 27 January 2011 12:54:01AM *  8 points [-]

The fact that the author did not mention the obviously relevant simulation hypothesis in 68 chapters (am I correct?)

Mentioned in passing in chapter 14:

You know right up until this moment I had this awful suppressed thought somewhere in the back of my mind that the only remaining answer was that my whole universe was a computer simulation like in the book Simulacron 3 but now even that is ruled out because this little toy ISN'T TURING COMPUTABLE!

Best wishes, the Less Wrong Reference Desk.

Comment author: DanielVarga 27 January 2011 01:34:38AM 3 points [-]

Thanks! All right, that rules it out. It is a bit weird, because I think the quote ends with a non sequitur. If we live in a Turing-noncomputable universe, we can build a computing device (hypercomputer) that can run the simulation of another Turing-noncomputable universe. (*) So the non-Turingness of a Universe is orthogonal to its simulatedness.

(*) Not always, but this is irrelevant here.

Comment author: TobyBartels 29 January 2011 02:24:47AM *  5 points [-]

More directly, making something close enough to a time-turner to fool the residents is certainly Turing-computable.

ETA: Especially if you're in charge of computing the residents!

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