Thinking about ch63 (which is among my favorite chapters to read so far)...
I am, of course, curious to see what the implications are of Harry's formally declaring opposition to Death.
But more than that, I am curious about the implications of his epistemology.
Ultimately Harry breaks his connection to Quirrell because he realizes Quirrell can maintain a surface appearance that is radically distinct from his deep structure, and consequently Harry can't know what Quirrell "truly" is. As distinct from, say, Hermione or Draco, who (Harry believes) can be read on the surface.
That seems to suggest that Harry has entirely given up on the idea of judging people by what they do... at least, when it comes to Quirrell.
Well, and Hermione. After all, this is precisely Harry's criticism of Fawkes: Fawkes only judges her based on what she has done, rather than on "the notion of there being something that a person is".
Now, in the real world, I know a lot of people who have more or less this attitude; who judge people based on their apprehension of some kind of core self, and believe that core is what really matters, and that judgments based on people's actions are inadequate by comparison. But those people don't describe themselves as rationalists. Indeed, most of them talk about that "core self" in language that soi-disant rationalists dismiss out of hand. Presumably Harry isn't going that route.
I will be interested to see what route he goes instead.
Reminds me of this article. Now, Hemmens is being a little polemical there and I'm not sure the morality of the books is well-developed enough to support his reading, but there's some interesting convergence anyway.
My take on it is that our judgments of people are ultimately about predicting how well their future behavior will align with our (moral and/or personal) interests. This is determined by their core motivations and assumptions, but our access to that deep structure is often patchy and speculative; if we don't have a reliable enough read on it, a...
Update: Discussion has moved on to a new thread.
After 61 chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and 5 discussion threads with over 500 comments each, HPMOR discussion has graduated from the main page and moved into the Less Wrong discussion section (which seems like a more appropriate location). You can post all of your insights, speculation, and, well, discussion about Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic here.
Previous threads are available under the harry_potter tag on the main page (or: one, two, three, four, five); this and future threads will be found under the discussion section tag (since there is a separate tag system for the discussion section). See also the author page for (almost) all things HPMOR, and AdeleneDawner's Author's Notes archive for one thing that the author page is missing.
As a reminder, it's useful to indicate at the start of your comment which chapter you are commenting on. Time passes but your comment stays the same.
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: