I have a confusion!
Way back in Chapter 39, Harry says:
"I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever, proof by induction on the positive integers."
This immediately caught my attention, given that Harry talks in earlier chapters about his worldview relying on Bayesian inference. Yet, for induction over an infinite sequence of unknown, informative experiences to hold, he has to have assigned an integral prior. Hijinks!
My first thought was that this was a clue dropped by the author to Harry's blind spot and potentially tragic flaw -- after all, "will you notice your confusion" is right there on the tagline! The subsequent emergence of Harry's Patronus spell as the True Patronus, based on this very conviction, undermined that theory somewhat, though if you elide the "True" part of it (ascribing the name to Harry's preteen self-admiration, maybe), the special magnitude of Harry's Patronus can be handwaved by the enormity of his happy thought and not necessarily the sound logic or underlying reality of it.
This has been on my mind for a while, but the most recent Author's Notes ("nothing is there to deliberately fool the readers") seem to confirm that this analysis is far too subtle: that if the narration calls Harry's Patronus the True Patronus, it is; if Harry's absolute faith in universal immortality has been given plot support, then it should be taken as axiomatic to the fiction.
Any ideas? Has Harry accidentally arrived at a true conclusion by non-inferential means?
"Death is bad" is a true conclusion that Harry has arrived at through legitimate means. "I will always want to live forever" is utter nonsense, but it's not necessary for the True Patronus.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 81, which should be published later today. The previous thread passed 400 comments as of the time of this writing, so it will pass 500 comments soon after the next chapter is posted, if not before. I suggest refraining from commenting here until chapter 81 is posted; comment in the 12th thread until you read chapter 81. After chapter 81 is posted, I suggest all discussion of previous guesses be kept here, with links to comments in the previous thread.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.) When posted, chapter 81 should appear here.
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,nine, ten, eleven, twelve.
As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
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: