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MathMage comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 109 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Prediction: Atlantis wasn't a catastrophe that the Mirror was too late to avert. Rather, the Mirror was completed, and the Atlanteans removed themselves to a realm of existence within the Mirror. Confidence: 5%.
Far more likely that there was a catastrophe, and the Mirror itself was the cause.
Yeah, that's a good way to turn all this "carefully designed not to destroy the world" stuff on its head.
The narrative also serves to reinforce MIRIs basic premise, that AI could destroy the world.
Either that, or the world where HPMOR takes place is just one among many realms within the Mirror; i.e., the Simulation Argument is true, and the Atlanteans are the Matrix Lords. This explain the weird and inconsistent magic rules: they are just artificial constructs that the Atlanteans came up with on a lark.
Didn't Harry already point out that the time travel was not computable, and as a result it couldn't be a simulation? Although he didn't go to great lengths to prove that. He assumed that there was no force subtly manipulating events to make sure time travel is consistent. In fact, he is in a simulation run on the computer that is Eliezer's brain.
I don't know if he put it into exactly those terms, but a). Harry points out a lot of things that aren't true, like "you can't turn into a cat", and b). if the laws of reality are simulated, then they don't have to make sense; they could just be a giant "switch" statement somewhere in the Atlantean VM code.
If the laws of reality are simulated, then they must be computable. A giant switch statement isn't going to let you figure out how to make time travel consistent. They couldn't easily check every possibility and see if it's consistent. Even if they did, that would mean they're simulating all of them, including the inconsistent ones, and there'd be no reason for Harry to find himself in a consistent one.
Why not ? It's not like the laws of our space-time apply to them or anything.
Atlantis-Human: “Where did you learn about computability, Harry?”
Harry: “… in the Matrix.”
A-H: “The Matrix tells elegant lies.”
Depends on what they're being stimulated on.
The anthropic principle solves Harry finding himself in a consistent one nicely. We don't know about the paradoxical universes because time/magic destroys them. You could also propose that when paradox occurs time goes back to the point of paradox and makes changes, inserts prophecies, etc. (maybe even uses mind magic?) to attempt to correct, destroying only the portion of the time-stream that came after. In this version there is actually just one time stream, not many, and it loads from the last checkpoint so to speak whenever a paradox results.
Results like "DO NOT MESS WITH TIME" really imply an outside intelligence that is meddling to ensure consistent outcomes, rather than a universe that runs only on physical law. This isn't a reponse Harry would have thought of, it was inserted from somewhere external.
Regarding "computational difficulty":
1) We don't know what magic/time/the external universe is capable of, computationally. Magic does "impossible" stuff all the time. 2) It doesn't matter how difficult it is to compute or how long it takes. These things are transparent from an inside perspective. 1 second in-world could take a billion years to calculate, and it would still seem seamless from the inside.
It the simulation were infinitly parrallel and all simulations that weren't consistent crashed, the Harry that made the observation about the loop would necessarily be in a self-consistent simulation.
Time travel isn't fully computable, but that doesn't mean it can't be approximated, that you can't make hacks giving the impression of time travel to people inside the simulation.
It might even be possible that attempts to abuse time travel (like the one done by Harry at the beginning when he tried to factorize primes using the Time-Turner) raise an alert in the simulation, freezes the simulation until an operator manually inputs an acceptable solution ("don't mess with time" being the solution hand-crafted by the operator).
Depends on what kind of time travel and what kind of universe. Heck, even classical newtonian real-valued physics is not computable (but is computable to arbitrary precision). If the information content of the universe is finite (like, it is a grid of finite many cells, each of them could be in only finite many states, and time is discrete as well), then time travel is computable - you just have to store the information for the past 6 hours and brute-force consistent stable loops.
Thing is, on that line, this would sorta become a simulation fic, and Yudkowsky said it wasn't that.
Didn't he also say there wouldn't be AI in it?
I think he said 'Harry won't create an AI' but I don't have the source.
I don't think it's really a simulation fic if simulations exist but the main story level isn't in one.
And changing the genre when the story is over 90% complete would be a questionable move.
This was what I thought as well. I doubt we'll get confirmation of that prediction though, unless Quirrell/Harry actually DOES try to destroy the world. In which case presumably the Atlanteans have to save the day (unsatisfying from a literary point of view, hence unlikely).