That's true. If wizards have souls, and their minds are not caused by brains, absence of consciousness could be detectable. The sorting hat might think her head is a rock.
But then she wouldn't quite be a Philosophical Zombie.
Now there's a hypothesis: the difference between wizards and muggles is that wizards have minds while muggles merely have brains. Or wizards are not p-zombies and muggles are. I don't think that's where this story is going, but it might make an interesting premise for a different story.
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 93. The previous thread has passed 300 comments.
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.)
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: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,18,19,20.
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: