AFAICT, the argument has nothing to do with the problem at all, and everything to do with defending "your" side.

My initial response was "halfer," the naively obvious answer. Then, knowing that these problems always have a trick, I examined the precise phrasing of the question more closely, and "thirder" is clearly correct. That's the -point- of the problem, and what makes it interesting - it's designed to make you come to the wrong conclusion using naive logic, for the pure purpose of showing that the naive logic is, well, naive. We wouldn't be discussing the problem if it didn't have that property - if the naive solution wasn't wrong, it would be a completely uninteresting problem.

Spend some time guessing the teacher's password, people, before you marry your answer, and then proceed to spend hours trying to invent a novel reason why your answer must be the correct one. The problem exists -because- it defies your expectations. Instead of trying to justify your expectations, take a look at what the problem is trying to teach you, because that is what it was designed to do.

TLDR? The Sleeping Beauty problem was designed to impart a lesson about naive logic. Quit fighting the lesson.

The designer had a specific design goal : "thou shalt replicate adequately well under the following environmental conditions"...

Given the complex, intricate mechanisms that humans seem to have that allow for this, the "designer" did a pretty good job.

Cognitive biases boost replication under the environmental conditions they were meant for, and they save on the brainpower required.

So yes, I agree with you. If the human brain system were an engineered product, it clearly meets all of the system requirements the client (mother nature) asked for. It clearly passes the testing. The fact that it internally takes a lot of shortcuts and isn't capable of optimal performance in some alien environment (cities, virtual spaces, tribes larger than a few hundred people) doesn't make it a bad solution.

Another key factor you need to understand in order to appreciate nature is the constraints it is operating under. We can imagine a self-replicating system that has intelligence of comparable complexity and flexibility to humans that makes decisions that optimal to a few decimal places. But does such a system exist inside the design space accessible to Earth biology? Probably not.

The simple reason for this is 3 billion years of version lock in. All life on earth uses a particular code-space, where every possible codon in DNA maps to a specific amino acid. With 3 bases per codon, there's 4^3 possibilities, and all of them map to an existing amino acid. In order for a new amino acid to be added to the code base, existing codons would have to be repurposed, or an organism's entire architecture would need to be extended to a 4 (or more) codon base system.

We can easily design a state machine that translates XXX -> _XXX, remapping an organisms code to a new coding scheme. However, such a machine would be incredibly complicated at the biological level - it would be a huge complex of proteins and various RNA tools, and it would only be needed once in a particular organism's history. Evolution is under no forces to evolve such a machine, and the probability of it occurring by chance is just too small.

To summarize, everything that can ever be designed by evolution has to be made of amino acids from a particular set, or created as a derivative product by machinery made of these amino acids.

An organism without cognitive biases would probably need a much more powerful brain. Nature cannot build such a brain with the parts available.

Voldemort isn't that good a coder - It's a continually updating system, that loads his present mindstate onto the entire system.. And he just rekeyed it to Hermione. All backups and lore: Gone.

Dumbledore loaded the cloak with Bhals stupefication, didn't he? Some delivery mechanism that only tiggered when worn by an adult. Hence the mad cackling and very poor plan for stopping Harry from breaking the universe <,<

So it looks like some of Harry's magic is on the diary for whatever reason, because Voldemort casting a spell on the diary sets off the resonance hard. Did Harry cast a spell on it earlier?

One thing I would like to be mentioned is why these methods might work.

Assume the best possible scanning method is used, such that the future reanimators have a map of where every atom was bonded in your brain.

There's going to be frost damage, even if cryoprotectant is used - there will be areas it didn't reach, cracks from low temperature stresses, oxidation damage from time spent in the cryostat, and so on.

Future software could computationally reverse many of these damaging events - but there will be uncertainty in that there would be multiple solutions possible as to the "original" state. A video of the freezing process would allow you to calibrate the model used to computationally reverse the damage better.

Furthermore, this level of technology means it is probable that the reanimators would be able to "read" memories at some level of fidelity. If there are surviving notes about your life, they could potentially resolve ambiguities when there are multiple possible past memory states.

One thing that bothers me about this proposal is that the "reanimators" would have to be beings smarter than you ever were, and they would probably need to use more computational capacity to revive just one person than that person performed in their entire lifetime.

Cultivating a sense of perfectionism in the most mundane aspects of life is probably what most militaries employ. This includes overlearning everything from folding bedsheets and shining your boots to complicated drills and executing all kinds of personal maintenance with minimal amount of time. Apply long enough, and winging it won't even cross your mind anymore. I think this is a very useful idea if correctly and moderately applied. Strict hierarchy helps the practice, obviously.

The well meaning idea didn't get that well applied during my conscription. I learned to fold my bedsheets like a pro, but hardly learned how to shoot a weapon.

Barring changes of type, such as a successful orbital elevator or a similar change to a technique where fuel is not part of the payload, pretty likely. The technical costs of space flight have decreased, but the costs of fuel and materials haven't changed that dramatically.

And that understates the energy costs involved when you're talking about the sun, specifically. There's a huge amount of delta-v involved in a straight shot -- the Earth orbits the sun at 30 kilometers per second, compared to the 8-10 km/s that a space ship needs to orbit the Earth, where the cost of delta-v increases exponentially -- and not many good targets for gravitational slingshotting to reduce that.

I've calculated that the atoms in the center of the Sun are not fast enough to escape the Sun's gravity even from its surface, let alone from its center.

And published it in my blog.

Not that it is a discovery of any kind, just another eyeopener how bad is our intuition.

Would you say, that 15 million K hot proton is too slow to escape the Sun's gravity?

Prediction : Harry has stolen a march on Quirrelmort. I predict that between the time Professor Mcgonagall unlocked his time turner and Quirrelmort entered the room, he already used the device to visit the library's restricted section.

At least, I hope so : I really want to learn how "spell creation" is done, per EY's interpretation. That will tell us a lot about what magic actually is and what can be done to achieve Real Ultimate Power.

Furthermore, this would be fully rational. Harry's analysis of what to do next should have already made it abundantly clear that he needs to obtain more information, and the restricted section obviously has stuff that might be helpful. And why start on a task now when you can start on it 6 hours ago?

Alright, I will take your word for it. I had never seen anyone say that the classical Newtonian-mechanical sort of n-body problem was almost identical to a quantum intra-atomic version, though.

There are differences and complications because of things like Uncertainty, magnetism, and the Pauli exclusion principle, but to first order the dominant effect on an individual atomic particle is the Coulomb force and the form of that is identical to the Gravitational force. The symmetry in the force laws may be more obvious than the Hamiltonian formulation I gave before.

The particularly interesting point is that even without doing any quantum mechanics at all, even if atomic bonding were only a consequence of classical electrostatic forces, we still wouldn't be able to solve the problem. The difficulty generated by the n-body problem is in many ways much greater than the difficulty generated by quantum mechanics.

Also, nice summary.