Update: Discussion has moved on to a new thread.
The hiatus is over with today's publication of chapter 73, and the previous thread is approaching the 500-comment threshold, so let's start a new Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread. This is the place to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic and anything related to it.
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. The fanfiction.net author page is the central location for information about updates and links to HPMOR-related goodies, and AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author's Notes.
As a reminder, it's often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:
You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it's fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that "Eliezer said X is true" unless you use rot13.
"Do my ten fingers exist" is a hard question for reasons that are mostly orthogonal to what I think you intend to ask about 10^100. Let's start by stipulating that zero exists, and that if a number n exists then so does n+1. Then by induction, you can easily prove that 10^100, 3^^^3 and worse exist. But this whole discussion boils down to whether we should trust induction.
It turns out that without induction, we can prove in less than a page that 10^100 and even 2^^5 = 2^(60000 or so) exists in my sense. In terms of cute ideas involved, if not in raw complexity, this is a somewhat nontrivial result. See pages 4 and 5 of the Nelson article I linked to earlier. One cannot prove that 3^^^3 exists, at any rate not with a proof of length much less than 3^^^3.
What I've called "existing numbers," Nelson calls "counting numbers." The essence of the proof is to first show that addition and multiplication are unproblematic in a regime without induction, and then to construct 2^^5 with a relatively small number of multiplications. But exponentiation is problematic in this regime, for the somewhat surprising reason that it's not associative. It does not lend itself to iteration as well as multiplication does.
Edward Nelson has now announced a proof that Peano Arithmetic (and even the weaker Robinson Arithmetic) is inconsistent. His proof is not yet fully written up, but there's an outline (see the previous link). Terry Tao (whose judgement I trust, since this goes beyond my expertise) reports on John Baez's blog that he believes that he knows where a flaw is.
Edit: Terry and Nelson are now debating live on the blog!
Edit again: I should have reported long ago that Nelson has conceded defeat.