Why do you attach any value whatsoever to a "consciousness" that cannot think, feel, remember, or respond? Your "consciousness", so defined, is as inanimate as a grain of sand. I don't care about grains of sand as ends-in-themselves, why would you?

Be clear that when you say you are conscious, it cannot be this "consciousness" that motivates the statement, because this "consciousness" cannot respond, so the non-conscious parts of your mind cannot query it for a status check. A simple neural spike would be a response, we could watch it on an fMRI.

Well, I expect you're failing, yes. It is going to be futile to try to understand the Islamic State without understanding the philosophy of Al-Ghazali, the most influential Muslim scholar since Mohamed, the man accorded the honorific Hujjat al-Islam (Proof of Islam), and his doctrine of occasionalism.

This is going to be particularly hard on this site because the local "rationality" is rooted in the Aristotle-Averroes-Aquinas tradition, where we believe in things like natural laws that can be deduced by observation. And Averroes (Ibn Rushd) was a critic of Al-Ghazali who was exiled to live among Jews for heresy.

Al-Ghazali, in his The Incoherence of the Philosophers, says that there is no such thing a a material efficient cause; the efficient cause of all things is the will of God. When you apply an open flame to cotton, the cotton is burned by God, not by the fire. If God decided in a particular instance to instead have to cotton metamorphose into a VW minibus on the application of flame, that would be no more and no less a miracle than the occasions on which God had the cotton burn. "Allah's hand is not chained"; God might usually work in ways humans can understand, but He is transcendent, and is not required to obey reason.

Internalize this principle of causation, and it becomes clear that one must align one's will with God as best you can and try to please God. All other tactics are futile, because God decides the results of all things. So first and foremost, you align your actions with those of Muhammad and his closest followers, as recorded in the Koran and Hadiths. Since God is usually logical, you then try to be logical in how you do things after aligning yourself with God's will, but never let logic override faith and fidelity to the example of Mohamed.

Er, a few species of placental mammal are hardly "widely separated lineages".

Sure they are - given that the placental clade contains most of the extant mammal diversity.

Trying to draw conclusions for completely alien biologies by looking at convergent evolution inside a clade with a single common ancestor in the last 2-or-3% of the history of life on Earth is absurd.

Hardly. Using the "last 2-or-3% of the history of life on Earth" is perhaps disingenuous, as evolution is highly nonlinear. The entire period from the cambrian explosion to now is what - 15% of the history of life?

More importantly - elephants, cetaceans and primates occupy widely diverse environments and niches.

And the fact that the Placentalia start with an unusually high EQ among vertebrates-as-a-whole

EQ is a rather poor indicator of intelligence compared to total synapse count.

The common placentilia ancestors are believed to be small rodent like insectivores which had small brains - presumably on the order of 21 million neurons in the cortex, similar to rats. The fact that brains increased by a factor of 2 to 3 orders of magnitude in 3 divergent branches of placentilia is evidence to me for robustness in selection for high intelligence.

Now of course, it's fairly easy for evolution to just make a brain bigger. The difficulty is in scaling up the brain in the right way to actually increase intelligence. Rodent brains scale better than lizard brains, and elephant, cetecean, and primate brains scale even better still. So evolution found increasingly better scaling strategies over time, and in some occasions in parallel.

Er, a few species of placental mammal are hardly "widely separated lineages". Trying to draw conclusions for completely alien biologies by looking at convergent evolution inside a clade with a single common ancestor in the last 2-or-3% of the history of life on Earth is absurd. And the fact that the Placentalia start with an unusually high EQ among vertebrates-as-a-whole make it a particularly unsuitable lineage for estimating the possibilities of independent evolution of high animal intelligence.

I'm not sure if it's appropriate to also discuss the authors notes, but one solution to Eliezers writing obstacles is to publish under a pseudonym. Or why might that not qualify?

She initially got a fail grade for dying, but then Professor Quirrell let her retake the test.

Antimatter would only temporarily kill Voldemort, but would perminantly kill both Harry and possibly Hermione.

The resonance cascade in Akaziban did not kill Quirrel, it only forced him to throw his want aside and turn into a snake. But still, it might be possible to use that as a distraction, while Harry does something else.

It clearly stipulates 12:01 am to avoid just this kind of confusion.

Further, the chapter will be posted at 10:00 am on Tuesday.

So the deadline is Monday night.

I think that attempting to shoot him there wasnt giving an intelligent enemy very much credit. It would only work if the stupid mistakes that Voldemort was making were real, and not a ruse. Given that Harry possibly has only one chance (because Voldemort promised in parseltongue not to try to harm Harry unless he tried to harm him first), taking the first opportunity that presents itself, which might be a trick to get Voldemort out of that promise, is probably unwise.

So what was the source of the resonance between Harry and Q?

Did I miss it?

I always assumed it was ritual magic, as arranged by Dumbledore and Lily, and performed by Lily.

But:

“James and Lily would have gone willingly to the death, if they had known.”

Which seems to imply that they hadn't known.

But it seems just way too convenient for Lily to just happen to fulfill the terms of a ritual, and it's unclear that V would have violated the terms by imposing his horcrux on Harry anyway.

At one time, I wondered if Harry was a time turned version of V, and that was the source of the resonance.

So what was the source of the resonance between Harry and Q? I went back to read the "while potion making" talk, but the source of the resonance seems to have been glossed over.