Benja comments on Causal Universes - LessWrong

60 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 November 2012 04:08AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (385)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Benja 28 November 2012 11:32:06AM 1 point [-]

No, the only part of J. K. Rowling's universe that violates 'cause and effect' is...

(There's also a prophecy. True, a prophecy could simply indicate a Meddling Force that nudges events in a particular direction, rather than someone receiving information from the future, but once you have one obviously-causality-violating thing, there's much less call to be extremely suspicious of other, apparently-causality-violating things.)

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 November 2012 11:32:51AM 2 points [-]

Rowling is on record as stating that prophecies can be just-walked-away-from which makes their dynamics less clear and not obviously a self-consistency thing.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 28 November 2012 03:21:54PM 1 point [-]

What does this even mean?

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 29 November 2012 01:48:31AM 6 points [-]

I think it means that prophecies may be merely "very good magically-derived estimations of the future" -- we are not sure they bind the past with the future as tightly as Time-Turners seem to do.

Comment author: Benja 28 November 2012 12:40:26PM *  0 points [-]

Oh, I didn't know that, thanks.