EDIT: New discussion thread here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. With two chapters recently the previous thread has very quickly reached 500 comments. The latest chapter as of 17th March 2012 is Ch. 79.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author's Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
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, eight, nine, ten.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
Here's a secret in plain sight: if this story has a happy ending, then Harry has the power to destroy Quirrelmort's brain, anytime they're together.
First clue: the WRONG DON'T BAD IDEA messages when Harry tries to make contact with Quirrell. Assume that they mean just what they say -- that something terrible will happen if Harry makes contact.
Second clue: the prophecy appears to say that Harry and Voldemort's confrontation can only leave more or less one. Storytelling convention makes us think it's a metaphor or foreseeing complex future actions. But maybe there's just an already existing spell or condition, dating from the first encounter, that's primed to cause Harry+Voldemort = boom.
There's more. But just from these two clues alone, we can see that an available though seemingly extreme interpretation of data in the story is: "If Harry ever touches Quirrellmort, one or the other will be magically destroyed".
Now the subtler clues.
Third clue: in the original canon, Harry had a piece of Voldemort's soul in him, an accidentally created Horcrux, and the destruction of that piece of soul was a critical step in Voldemort's death.
Fourth clue: in our world's science, there's no such observable thing as splitting souls, but there is such a thing as copying data, or duplicating a software neural network.
Fifth clue: Lucius thinks Harry is Voldemort.
Sixth clue: Harry has patterns of behavior in him that don't at all resemble a loved little boy, but wholly fit Voldemort.
Seventh clue: the Sorting Hat said Harry didn't have a separate mind under the Hat with him. It never said his own mind was normal.
Hypothesis:
In this universe, a "Horcrux" is a compressed or partial copy of your brain software.
Harry was accidentally imprinted with some of Voldemort's brain software at their original encounter. Ever since, he's been a child who knows how to think like Voldemort. Literally. (Harry's dark side really is an alien thing, not as an actual person, but as a range of behaviors that didn't come from his own past experiences but another's.)
Further, in this universe, a Horcrux, or at least an unstable Horcrux like Harry, destructively decompresses/uploads itself back to its source mind when brought into contact with it.
In consequence, if ever Quirrellmort and Harry come sufficiently into physical/magical contact, Quirrellmort anticipates that Harry's brain will turn into a vegetable as Harry-Voldemort destructively uploads itself into the "real" Quirrell-Voldemort, leaving behind a stronger and more complete Q+H-Voldemort.
This may require preparation on Quirrell's part to go well. Or there may be other things involved that Quirrell hasn't accounted for, such as the extent to which Harry has a (literal) mind of his own. Either way, there's a fair likelihood, depending on author intent, that the contact will destroy Quirrellmort, not Harry.
So if the story has a happy ending, where even the protagonist gets to live, then we can express the hypothesis like this:
Harry can defeat Quirrellmort. He just has to give him a hug.
There's a Care Bears Omake spawning in my brain now.
How about the other way - Quirrellmort uploads into Harry? Make Harry the Dark Lord, and then upload into him.
... (read more)Note that Voldemort has seemingly already uploaded into Quirrell.