dspeyer comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85 - Less Wrong

9 Post author: FAWS 18 April 2012 02:30AM

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Comment author: ArisKatsaris 18 April 2012 10:59:26AM 6 points [-]

Free will as opposing "determinism" is a confused concept according to Eliezer's opinion, and also according to mine -- see Thou Art Physics

Basic points is that we're part of the physical world-- if free will means anything, it must mean the ability of our current physical state to determine our decisions. "Libertarian free-will" in the sense of people making decision that can't be predicted from the current state; that's inevitably just randomness, not anything that has to do with people's character traits or moralities or cognitive-processes -- nothing that is traditionally labelled "free will".

Comment author: dspeyer 18 April 2012 02:39:59PM 0 points [-]

But the Potterverse is dualist. Even if horcruxes get some massive retcon, animagi preserve that in MOR.

So maybe souls are immune to the normal patterns of time and causality, and a decision from the soul has special properties for prophecy. Only when all involved souls have chosen does the timestream become fixed enough for prophecies. I'm not sure what that means for time turners. Maybe people who have gone back are out of contact with their souls.

This would cost the story applicability, but it is a story, not a treatise.

Comment author: thomblake 18 April 2012 03:22:27PM 5 points [-]

But the Potterverse is dualist. Even if horcruxes get some massive retcon, animagi preserve that in MOR.

It enjoys the mind/body distinction, for sure, but not necessarily strongly (not more strongly than a physicalist who wants to be neuropreserved). Random proposed mechanisms for animagi:

  • the human mind is very compressible, so it's not hard to build a cat-sized brain that runs a human
  • the brain actually gets teleported to another dimension and operates the cat via telepresence
  • the cat is animated through magic and most of its mass is actually used to run computation (slightly less plausible for a beetle)
Comment author: Armok_GoB 19 April 2012 05:38:45PM 9 points [-]

Or the obvious one: space is compressed using the same method as every other bigger-on-the-inside object wizards use everywhere all the time.

Comment author: cwillu 10 May 2012 07:41:22AM *  1 point [-]

Beetle-sized (of the beautifully blue sort), at least.

Note also that the body the mind wears apparently (according to quirrel) does have an impact on the mind.

Comment author: FAWS 18 April 2012 07:06:59PM *  2 points [-]

Mere dualism isn't enough to save libertarian free will. To the extent your decision is characteristic of you it is at least in principle predictable, at least probabilistically. The non-predictable component of your decision process is by necessity not even in principle distinguishable from that of Gandhi or Hitler in any way. So how can you call the result of the non-predictable component deciding with your free will?

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