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Alsadius comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Why should the time of an ominous decision be so relevant to seers? Even if the consequences of the decision have a big impact on the future, that future already was the future. It's not like there is a default future before you make your decision and a different future afterwards, your decision itself would already be a part of the future of any earlier point in time. From a many worlds perspective you might have several different possible futures so your overall prospect of the future might significantly change after an important branching, but Harry's decision doesn't seem particularly influenced by recent random chance; it seems unlikely that from the perspective of 6 hours ago most future Harrys would make a completely different decision.
If you assume both free will and prescience, it's natural. You cannot see the consequences of a decision that has not yet been made, but once it has been, then you can view it. Think of the visions in Dune, as one of the better-known examples - the visions that the seers see are infinite branches, not single facts, and the branch points are their decisions. (The analogy is not perfect - in Dune, the decisions of non-seers are taken as given - but I hope the idea is clear).
Free will as opposing "determinism" is a confused concept according to Eliezer's opinion, and also according to mine -- see Thou Art Physics
Basic points is that we're part of the physical world-- if free will means anything, it must mean the ability of our current physical state to determine our decisions. "Libertarian free-will" in the sense of people making decision that can't be predicted from the current state; that's inevitably just randomness, not anything that has to do with people's character traits or moralities or cognitive-processes -- nothing that is traditionally labelled "free will".
But the Potterverse is dualist. Even if horcruxes get some massive retcon, animagi preserve that in MOR.
So maybe souls are immune to the normal patterns of time and causality, and a decision from the soul has special properties for prophecy. Only when all involved souls have chosen does the timestream become fixed enough for prophecies. I'm not sure what that means for time turners. Maybe people who have gone back are out of contact with their souls.
This would cost the story applicability, but it is a story, not a treatise.
It enjoys the mind/body distinction, for sure, but not necessarily strongly (not more strongly than a physicalist who wants to be neuropreserved). Random proposed mechanisms for animagi:
Or the obvious one: space is compressed using the same method as every other bigger-on-the-inside object wizards use everywhere all the time.
Beetle-sized (of the beautifully blue sort), at least.
Note also that the body the mind wears apparently (according to quirrel) does have an impact on the mind.
Mere dualism isn't enough to save libertarian free will. To the extent your decision is characteristic of you it is at least in principle predictable, at least probabilistically. The non-predictable component of your decision process is by necessity not even in principle distinguishable from that of Gandhi or Hitler in any way. So how can you call the result of the non-predictable component deciding with your free will?
You mean libertarian free will, which already doesn't make sense all by itself, and even then the combination doesn't make sense for additional reasons, starting with that seeing anything would usually require that only main characters have free will.
Now that is a phrase I've never heard before. I follow neither the term nor the argument, and would appreciate elaboration.
Edit: And to address the one point I do follow, someone's decision has to be the tipping point. Again, narrativium being what it is, that someone is likely to be a main character.
The problem is you stated "if you assume both free will and..." as though free will is a thing that exists.
See free will on the wiki. (This is supposed to be a kind of do-it-yourself exercise; the page I linked has spoiler alerts you might want to pay attention to.)
So my promised followup. In order for the world not to display absolute determinism(of the sort where you can project infinitely far ahead given sufficient computing power and knowledge of world-state), then there needs to be a point at which new information is added. Alternately, the limits on the computing power of the Source of Magic's Precognition Engine impose a horizon on predictions. In the former case, some new information is added to the system - likely in the form of a quantum world-choice - that is sufficient to allow a prophecy to be made. In the latter case, the choice of timing is pure coincidence, which makes it very unlikely. It's also possible that the Source simply cannot access all possible data, but only things that have explicitly been formed into conscious thoughts - not sure how accurate predictions could be without sufficient access to the physical world, but perhaps "macroscopic and consciousness" is sufficient? IDK.
In any case, "free will" is a convenient shorthand for the idea I was getting at, which people seem to have understood, but it is not strictly accurate. I think my thought process was quite fuzzy, and you've sharpened it significantly, for which i thank you.
I'd say partial Transfiguration is pretty strong evidence that the Source of Magic is paying very close attention to wizards' conscious thoughts, whatever else its data-gathering abilities.
Oh, is that all. Yes, free will is a meaningless term...unless you have time travel and/or prescience, in which case it suddenly becomes meaningful.
Edit: Upon further consideration, I'm not sure that's true. I have to run to work, but I'll ponder this and update later.
Edit 2: See http://lesswrong.com/lw/bto/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/6ekb
I agree with your second thought. Those two don't qualitatively change the meaningfulness of the term.
I had understood the intention of the free will solution here to be normalizing: i.e. we should end with the result that we have free will in every sense that's important to us. In other words, we can make decisions from our own character and reasoning, we are responsible for those decisions, etc. etc.
If all that's true, if free will is no less important and meaningful for all the findings of natural science, then why wouldn't it likewise be important for seers and prophecy?
Isn't that what my comment claims?
If so, we have no disagreement.