Jiro comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, January 2015, chapter 103 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: b_sen 29 January 2015 01:44AM

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Comment author: Jiro 29 January 2015 04:29:15PM *  2 points [-]

If you accept the definition of the supernatural as a physical law that applies to ontologically basic mental things, then finding the answers to a test would seem to be something the supernatural can do without having to do natural language processing, the same way a spell can turn someone into a frog without having to process DNA. We think of "the answers to a test" as a concept.

Comment author: EphemeralNight 03 February 2015 04:56:51PM 0 points [-]

That just means that the spell inventor doesn't need to know anything about or implement natural language processing. To get magical primitives like ontologically basic mental parts you still have to have complex and fully reducible algorithms running over the base physics outputs somewhere even if that somewhere is "parallel to or between frames of the simulation".

Comment author: Jiro 03 February 2015 05:19:51PM 0 points [-]

If "gets the answers to the test" is a primitive, no you don't. The magic just does it. That's the difference between magic and science. The spell is a black box with no parts inside.