army1987 comments on Rationality Quotes August 2012 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Alejandro1 03 August 2012 03:33PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (426)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 August 2012 07:09:06AM 6 points [-]

"Given the nature of the multiverse, everything that can possibly happen will happen. This includes works of fiction: anything that can be imagined and written about, will be imagined and written about. If every story is being written, then someone, somewhere in the multiverse is writing your story. To them, you are a fictional character. What that means is that the barrier which separates the dimensions from each other is in fact the Fourth Wall."

-- In Flight Gaiden: Playing with Tropes

(Conversely, many fictions are instantiated somewhere, in some infinitesimal measure. However, I deliberately included logical impossibilities into HPMOR, such as tiling a corridor in pentagons and having the objects in Dumbledore's room change number without any being added or subtracted, to avoid the story being real anywhere.)

Comment author: [deleted] 17 August 2012 10:13:52PM *  2 points [-]

Of course, universes including stories extremely similar to HPMOR except that the corridor is tiled in hexagons etc. do ‘exist’ ‘somewhere’. (EDIT: hadn't notice the same point had been made before. OK, I'll never again reply to comments in “Top Comments” without reading already existing replies first -- if I remember not to.)