VKS comments on Rationality Quotes August 2012 - Less Wrong

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

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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: VKS 21 August 2012 09:06:29PM *  5 points [-]

impossibilities such as ... tiling a corridor in pentagons

Huh. And here I thought that space was just negatively curved in there, with the corridor shaped in such a way that it looks normal (not that hard to imagine), and just used this to tile the floor. Such disappointment...

This was part of a thing, too, in my head, where Harry (or, I guess, the reader) slowly realizes that Hogwarts, rather than having no geometry, has a highly local geometry. I was even starting to look for that as a thematic thing, perhaps an echo of some moral lesson, somehow.

And this isn't even the sort of thing you can write fanfics about. :¬(