I noticed something odd in chapter 17, which seems relevant:

Harry was rather confused. "But this could be important, yesterday I got this sudden sense of doom when -"

"Mr. Potter! I have a sense of doom as well! And my sense of doom is suggesting that you must not finish that sentence!" ... "This isn't like you!" Harry burst out. "I'm sorry but that just seems unbelievably irresponsible! From what I've heard there's some kind of jinx on the Defense position, and if you already know something's going to go wrong, I'd think you'd all be on your toes -" ... "I see," Harry said slowly, taking it all in. "So in other words, whatever's wrong with Professor Quirrell, you desperately don't want to know about it until the end of the school year. And since it's currently September, he could assassinate the Prime Minister on live television and get away with it so far as you're concerned."

Professor McGonagall gazed at him unblinkingly. "I am certain that I could never be heard endorsing such a statement, Mr. Potter. At Hogwarts we strive to be proactive with respect to anything that threatens the educational attainment of our students." ... "Oh, I doubt that, Mr. Potter. I doubt that very much." Professor McGonagall leaned forward, her face tightening again. "Since you and I have already discussed matters far more sensitive than these, I shall speak frankly. You, and you alone, have reported this mysterious sense of doom. You, and you alone, are a chaos magnet the likes of which I have never seen. After our little shopping trip to Diagon Alley, and then the Sorting Hat, and then today's little episode, I can well foresee that I am fated to sit in the Headmaster's office and hear some hilarious tale about Professor Quirrell in which you and you alone play a starring role, after which there will be no choice but to fire him. I am already resigned to it, Mr. Potter. And if this sad event takes place any earlier than the Ides of May, I will string you up by the gates of Hogwarts with your own intestines and pour fire beetles into your nose. Now do you understand me completely?"

As Harry observes, this exchange is extremely out of character for McGonagall. Telling Harry not to voice his concerns about Quirrel, I could believe; but cutting him off mid-sentence, and them making such a graphic, violent threat if he does, I can not. It is so out of character, in fact, that I think it must be a symptom of being Imperiused.

We know that Voldemort used to use Imperius quite a bit, and the only real reasons he might stop would be if someone figured out how to detect it (which hasn't happened), or if his new form didn't have the power. One Imperiused person rules out the second possibility, so if if Quirrelmort put an imperius on McGonagall, he has almost certainly used it elsewhere too.

Which brings us to Harry's attempted breakout of Bellatrix. Breaking in to Azkaban to rescue Bellatrix Black, I could just barely believe. Pretending to be Voldemort while doing so, however, pushes credibility too far. From Chapter 52 to Chapter 54, Harry is Imperiused. There are just too many things stupid and suspicious about the plan to believe that Harry overlooked all of them.

And that brings us to the question of what Imperius actually does. And this, I think, explains the chapter title, "The Stanford Prison Experiment", which otherwise seems not to fit at all. The conclusion of that famous experiment was that if you give someone a role - even a fake role, like a prison guard over subjects in a psychology experiment who are technically free to leave - then they adopt it as part of their identity, including the evil parts, and become blind to the wrong things they do as part of that identity. So perhaps that's what Imperius does: it assigns its target a particular role, which their mind will bend to accommodate. That would also explain why the title was redacted for part 1, which takes place before the Imperius curse was cast.

Here are some abnormalities in Harry's mind:

This was it, this was the day and the moment when Harry started acting the part.

And in another part of him, like he was just letting another part of his mind carry out a habit without paying much attention to it...

Professor Quirrell had instructed Harry, calmly and precisely, how he was to act in Bellatrix's presence; how to form the pretense he would maintain in his mind.

The only problem with this theory, is that Harry believes that Quirrel can never use magic on him. His Patronus and Quirrel's Aveda Kevadera certainly didn't interact well, and there seems to be an issue if they touch. But the theory that they can never use magic on each other, seems to have appeared from nowhere; there is no evidence for it whatsoever, except the sense of doom. Perhaps that idea was planted, to make the idea that Harry was Imperiused seem less plausible?

chp 51-54 & A/N

Is it plausible that Harry would go along with this rescue? It is harder to accept than a Sirius rescue, which would've been based on the belief that Sirius was actually innocent (he hadn't done the awful things he was convicted of). The extenuating circumstance of having become evil under the influence of the Dark Lord provides a much weaker reason to rescue someone, and requires much more trust in the person who is conveying the information (since they must not only get the facts right, but make some subtle and complex judgments about the prisoner's character and what they deserve).

If Quirrell had just come straight out and asked Harry to help him break Bellatrix Black out of Azkaban, and to pretend to be Voldemort while doing it so that she would follow him out, I don't think he would have done it. Far too many red flags. Sure, Harry wants to end Azkaban, but to start with Bellatrix, who undeniably did so many evil things? Quirrell's case in favor of Bellatrix's innocence sounds like what a partisan would say when trying to make their side seem favorable, not an argument that Harry would buy (just as he could see through Draco's case against Dumbledore). Genre savvy Harry has read plenty of stories about villains with a sympathetic backstory.

Harry knows that Dumbledore doesn't trust Quirrell, he can imagine how Hermione would react to this (and she was right about transfiguration experimentation), or how Neville would react (Neville, who said with his voice shaking that torturing his parents was "not even close to the worst thing she's ever done").

Or even how Draco would react: Bellatrix Black? She was one of the few who were truly evil (chp 47). Forget that nonsense about wanting to save a poor innocent person from the nasty Dementors (you really think that's why Quirrell wants to break someone out of Azkaban?), this is obviously part of a plot. As Father would ask, who benefits? What kind of plot would involve breaking Bellatrix Black out of Azkaban?

But Quirrell didn't just come right out and suggest that they go free Bellatrix from Azkaban, he gradually and artfully got Harry to buy into the plot. So if we're going to wonder whether it's plausible for Harry to go along with it, we'll have to look at how Quirrell manipulated him into agreeing, and why Harry fell for the manipulations and wasn't stopped by these red flags.

I read that quote as saying that snake Animagi were more common than Parselmouths, because snake Animagus could be learned, but Parseltongue has to be transmitted directly or indirectly through Slytherin's line (directly, by genetics a la V, or indirectly, by bit-of-soul transfer a la HP. Though Rowling never says whether Harry lost his Parseltongue after the bit of V's soul in his died in DH.)

Slitherin's monster would have been a great snake, but most definitely not a bassilisk in HPMOR. If it had been created to transmit knowledge, it would be some other kind of serpent. Otherwise, one look and oops! there goes the heir of slytherin.

I don't know about you, but I'm not a P-zombie. :)

Also there is no consensus on what is a vital social norm. I think we can agree that common random killing sprees would perhaps fall into this. But even that in itself if surrounded by the right memetic scaffolding could be made to work (perhaps a "kill the guy you hate day" could work). Social stability and prosperity is mostly polygenic.

Kill likely to succeed AGI creators who haven't created a sane goal system (when no other means will work to stop them). Although I know Tim doesn't accept even that exception.

Naw, the "interesting pattern" is the contrived "fire, earth, water, air, void" pattern to the suggestions. It seems rather out of character for that meme to slip into MoR Harry's subconscious, though.

Anyone have any guesses as to what Quirrell's game is?

Quirrell is operating on a level that I surely don't understand. The only theory I can think of that's neither preposterous nor disappointing is that Quirrell is protecting Horcrux!Harry.

In light of the recent exchange where Quirrell asks Harry how he would hide something:

Tell me, Mr. Potter, if you wanted to lose something where no one would ever find it again, where would you put it?"

... "Well," said Harry, "besides trying to get it into the molten core of the planet, you could bury it in solid rock a kilometer underground in a randomly selected location - maybe teleport it in, if there's some way to do that blindly, or drill a hole and repair the hole afterward; the important thing would be not to leave any traces leading there, so it's just an anonymous cubic meter somewhere in the Earth's crust. You could drop it into the Mariana Trench, that's the deepest depth of ocean on the planet - or just pick some random other ocean trench, to make it less obvious. If you could make it bouyant and invisible, then you could throw it into the stratosphere. Or ideally you would launch it into space, with a cloak against detection, and a randomly fluctuating acceleration factor that would take it out of the Solar System. And afterward, of course, you'd Obliviate yourself, so even you didn't know exactly where it was."

The Defense Professor was laughing, and it sounded even odder than his smile.

... "All excellent suggestions," said Professor Quirrell. "But tell me, Mr. Potter, why those exact five?"

"Huh?" said Harry. "They just seemed like the obvious sorts of ideas."

"Oh?" said Professor Quirrell. "But there is an interesting pattern to them, you see. One might say it sounds like something of a riddle."

Assume that Quirrell was asking where he could hide a Horcrux. It's funny because all those options leave Horcrux!Harry dead. The riddle is thus:

• Voldemort must hide his Horcruxes in a place where his mortal enemy, Harry Potter, will never be able to find them.
• Harry Potter is one of Voldemort's Horcruxes.

Any takers?

There is something all too appropriate about comparing AK to a gun.

On the other hand, there are other spells that could be equally lethal, like Diffendo (a cutting spell) or Fiendfyre, and those aren't "Unforgivable."

That 'unforgivable' label always seemed utterly arbitrary. Yes, torture, coercion and killing tend to be nasty things to do but there are far more ways to go about doing it than those three spells. Effective use of winguardium leviosa could kill dozens of people at once, for example. And combining healing magic with a sharp stick over a period of a month is probably worse than crucio for a couple of seconds. Then there's the old 'sleep/stab' combination that makes 'sleep' the most feared spell of all in certain magical worlds.

I suppose the thing about Avada Kedavra is that there's no defense against it.

That seems to be the big distinguishing feature. Teaching 12 year olds something that Dumbledore himself could not protect anyone against seems like it may have downsides.

I've always taken the position that stigmatising AK was arbitrary and pointless but I've never quite taken that position all the way to teaching junior grades how to use it. Surely it is something that should at least have the limitations that are in place for apparition? (Even if that just means removing the limits RE: apparition!)

The difficulty of creating an AGI drops slightly every time computational power increases. We know that people greatly underestimated the difficulty of creating AGI in the past, but we don't know how fast the difficulty is decreasing, how difficult it is now, whether it will ever stop decreasing, or where.