After reading comments in /r/hpmor, I've realized that Professor Quirrell has a superior move in the previous chapter, which has hopefully updated or will update soon.
Be honest, Eliezer; you just got sick of all the naked Harry jokes.
How I laughed when I realised it! When I saw you had made a Good Voldemort to oppose the evil one - ah, how I laughed!
I guess now we know what Dumbledore was laughing about in chapter 17.
The Cloak of Invisibility was torn away from him, and the shimmering black Cloak flew away from him, through the air.
Professor Quirrell caught it, and swiftly drew it over himself; in less than a second he had pulled down the Cloak's hood over his head, and disappeared.
Quirrell can escape the trap because he is no longer reflected in the mirror, being hidden by the True Cloak of Invisibility. All he has to do is walk out of the reflection, which he did.
...Into the hand of the Albus Dumbledore flew from his sleeve his long, dark-grey wand, and in his other hand, as though from nowhere, appeared a short rod of dark stone.
Albus Dumbledore threw these both violently aside, just as the building sense of power rose to an unbearable peak, and then disappeared.
The Mi
I guess now we know what Dumbledore was laughing about in chapter 17.
Oh yeah. 18 too, I guess:
"Of course you're in here blackmailing me to save your fellow students, not to save yourself! I can't imagine why I would have thought otherwise!" Dumbledore was now laughing even harder. He pounded his fist on the desk three times."
Not immediately relevant to anything, but on re-reading the last few chapters I've figured out what hex would be utterly devastating to Voldemort while also being something he might not think to calibrate his shields against: the Hurling Hex. Cast on a broomstick, it makes it go out of control and attempt to violently cast off its rider. Voldemort's bones count as broomsticks.
"Well," said Albus Dumbledore. "I do feel stupid."
"I should hope so," Professor Quirrell said easily; if he had been at all shocked himself at being caught, it did not show. A casual wave of his hand changed his robes back to a Professor's clothing.
Dumbledore's grimness had returned and redoubled. "There I am, searching so hard for Voldemort's shade, never noticing that the Defense Professor of Hogwarts is a sickly, half-dead victim possessed by a spirit far more powerful than himself. I would call it senility, if so many others had not missed it as well."
This is Dumbledore admitting he held the Idiot Ball. We've been promised nobody's holding the Idiot Ball. So something's up. I like the theory that mirror is operating as intended and showing Voldemort what he wants to see, that being Dumbledore making a mistake and losing. Alternately, it could be that Dumbledore was somehow able to make a version of him inside the mirror (maybe in his CEV he saw himself inside the mirror protecting the Stone, and that reflection-Dumbledore gained independent existence?). Or he could just have something else up his sleeve.
I'm not quite sure it's the idiot ball, for two reasons.
1:
I would call it senility, if so many others had not missed it as well.
Even with the knowledge that Quirrel was possessed by Voldemort in canon, whether or not Quirrel was Voldemort was an active topic of debate among readers for quite some time.
2:
Really, am I that hard to recognize without the glowing red eyes? ... Quirinus Quirrell seemed - what is the term I am looking for? Ah yes, that is the word. He seemed sane.
If Dumbledore is used to thinking of Voldemort as a cartoon villain, and expects his shade to also behave like a cartoon villain, I could see him missing Quirrell.
(There is, perhaps, also the third reason of motivated cognition brought on by McGonagall, but I always saw that as more plausible if it were magically brought on by Riddle than her really not caring who he was.)
There's also the possibility brought up earlier and echoed in a lot of the other threads: this may be a Dumbledore spawned by the mirror as part of reading Quirrell's mind and determining his CEV. That doesn't explain how real Dumbledore didn't see it, though.
Harry is the viewpoint character, and he thinks everyone is an idiot except him and Quirrell. He is in error. He has been consistently in error about this since ... forever. It's probably a character flaw that he shares with Voldemort, although Harry has a somewhat less murderous form of it.
For instance, Harry believes that the wizarding economy should be trivially exploitable via exchange with the Muggle precious-metals market. He believes this because even though he knows about half-bloods (i.e. witches and wizards who have a Muggle parent), he thinks that he is special and that nobody else ever would have thought of that.
Similarly, he believes that he is the first to come up with the idea of combining magic and Muggle science. He isn't that, either. He doesn't realize this even after he is given the (ostensible) diary of Roger Bacon.
And here's the thing ... he doesn't update about these errors. He's not particularly curious about them. "Hey, wait, there are Muggleborns; what's the chance any of them has ever had a relative in Muggle banking, finance, or economics?" "Oh, Roger Bacon was a wizard? I had better learn me some Latin so I can find out what the history of magic/science interaction has been."
I kinda agree, but...the Time Turners really didn't have protective shells. If you see what I mean.
Random note of confusion - Why is the mirror blank? Harry should be seeing his CEV right now, since he's unCloaked in front of the mirror.
Also, the Cloak is Harry's, yes? If Harry claims the Cloak right now, while Quirrell's wearing it, will that trigger resonance?
I had been thinking that Harry needed to get some mileage out of being the true owner of the Cloak too.
.... Okay, I've got nothing. They are.. still in the mirror?
Dumbledore was acting very strange. The part of my mind that spits out theories is going "If Dumbledore can employ future-scrying-based planning techniques, please fuck off, I refuse to anticipate the plots of gods"
Edit: After bullying my imaginary voices. for a bit:
...I'm not at all sure Dumbledore was even there! Arrgh. "Illusion" is way up there in the plausible theories range. A whole ten percent or so.
The cloak is an obvious counter to a mirror trap.. But Dumbledore put the cloak into play. So... the cloak is trapped, somehow? .. dying while wearing it would shield him from his own hocruxes or something?
It was supposed to shield Harry in the event he ran the gauntlet?
Gah.
General Theory; Dumbledore generally uses shot-gun plotting. Not just one plot, but many plots aimed at the same end. he has applied that principle to taking out Voldemort.
Still don't think "Flamel" is dead.
dying while wearing it would shield him from his own hocruxes or something?
holy crap, awesome you noticed this. Seems plausible.
And further, since I do not want you throwing shoes -" Professor Quirrell made another gesture, and just within a globe intersecting the Greater Circle of Concealment, a slight shimmer appeared in the air. "Thiss barrier will explode if touched, by you or other material thing. The resonance might lash at me afterward, but you would also be dead.
So I guess Q disabled the Greater Circle of Concealment and the Globe before taking the Cloak.
I suppose it's all moving very fast, but shouldn't Harry have triggered the barrier to explode once he hear...
I'm finding it quite hard to keep track of who is in the mirror and who is not. Can someone break it down for me?
My understanding:
Start: Quirrellmort is trapped in the reflected portion of Hogwarts; Harry is under the cloak and thus not reflected, but still trapped in Quirrelmort's ring; Dumbledore is on the other side of the mirror, unrestrained AFAIK.
Dumbledore starts the time-freeze on the Hogwarts side; Quirrellmort reveals Harry, takes the cloak and puts it on himself so he then doesn't have a reflection, and steps out of the reflected portion of Hogwarts.
Dumbledore reverses the time-freeze to act on his side to protect Harry. Dumbledore then disappears from the mirror.
End: Quirrellmort is free to roam about the physical world and has the cloak; Harry is still presumably trapped in the reflected portion of Hogwarts, but he is safe from the time-freeze; Dumbledore is frozen somewhere, but the Elder Wand and the Line of Merlin Unbroken have been left unfrozen as he cast them aside right before he disappeared; they are possibly now in the physical world with Harry and Quirrellmort.
[edited iteratively]
like a dumb animal that cannot understand it is being sent away
Is it just me or is that kind of a weird comparison for a good guy to make... when I think of an animal that is being sent away and, not understanding, keeps wanting to return, I see Albus feeling compassion for the animal, rather than seeing it as something to which to liken an enemy/someone whose intelligence he wants to insult.
Made me wonder if it's a real Dumbledore in there or just a conjured one that Quirrel wanted to see.
It seems like Mirror-Dumbledore acted in accordance with exactly what Voldemort wanted to see. In fact, Mirror-Dumbledore didn't even reveal any information that Voldemort didn't already know or suspect.
Odds of Dumbledore actually being dead?
Harry couldn't see Confundus!Quirrell's CEV in the mirror (the conversation with Dumbledore's family.)
What the man might be seeing there, Harry could not tell; to Harry it seemed that the flat, perfect surface still reflected the room behind it, like a portal to another place.
So I take from that the Dumbledore in the mirror was real, and not a victory fantasy of Quirrell's, since Harry could also see it.
Also, Dumbledore mentioned how he laughed when he found out that Harry was a good version of Riddle, which many readers have taken to refer to this scene in Chapter 17:
Dumbledore started laughing. Laughing a lot harder than Harry would expect, almost howling. It seemed positively undignified. An ancient and powerful wizard ought to chuckle in deep booming tones, not laugh so hard he was gasping for breath. Harry had once literally fallen out of his chair while watching the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup, and that was how hard Dumbledore was laughing now.
"It's not that funny," Harry said after a while. He was starting to worry about Dumbledore's sanity again.
Dumbledore got himself under control again with a visible effort. "Ah, Harry, one symptom of the disease called wisdom is that you begin laughing at things that no one else thinks is funny, because when you're wise, Harry, you start getting the jokes!" The old wizard wiped tears away from his eyes. "Ah, me. Ah, me. Oft evil will shall evil mar indeed, in very deed."
This was a scene that Quirrell was most definitely not present for, and thus the fact that Mirror!Dumbledore knows about it further suggests that Mirror!Dumbledore was not simply some CEV-illusion of Quirrell's.
"But let us pointlessly delay to talk of other matters first. How did you come to be waiting inside the Mirror? I thought you would be elsewhere."
"I was there," Albus Dumbledore said, "and also inside this mirror, unfortunately for you."
So Dumbledore most likely either made a mirror-copy of himself or used a time-turner.
In the former case his sacrifice would make more sense, as there would still be another Dumbledore out there.
In the latter case he must have valued Harry instrumentally more than himself, as he said befo...
Remember that Dumbledore is truly willing to sacrifice himself, and he has access to a number of prophecies.
In particular he knows that either Harry or Voldie must win - Dumbledore cannot destroy BOTH. He KNOWS that it can't go down that way.
... Huh.
... Is it just me, or is Harry Potter now in the same room as the Elder Wand and the Philosopher's Stone?
... Well, there's a great big Dark Lord in the way, but.
My reading was that he threw the objects aside
Outside of the mirror's reflection, and into the real world. It probably be devastating to the government / long-standing enchantments on Britain if the Line of Merlin Unbroken were broken, and Harry will miss out on set bonuses if he doesn't get the Elder Wand.
Dumbledore behaves very strangely in this chapter.
He likens Riddle's spirit to a dumb animal, which does not know that it was sent away. That's a sad, sympathetic image.
He laughs at the skewed symmetry between Good Riddle and Evil Riddle, saying that this is what Riddle could have been if he'd been raised by parents who loved him. If you feel any sympathy for Riddle at all then that's not funny, it's tragic: Riddle's crimes and suffering, his whole live, arose from sheer bad luck on his part. To think it a joke, or to expect Riddle to share it, is somet...
Grab the Elder Wand, Harry!
...
Is Dumbledore also passing the Line of Merlin to Harry? We don't know what's required to pass the Line between holders.
Assuming what happened to Dubledore was real, he made two very stupid mistakes:
he didn't count with the possibility of Voldemort having Harry and the Invisibility Cloak with him
he gloated like a cartoon villain about how he'll trap Voldemort. Why? He needed time for the time stopping spell to charge, but why did he reveal what kind of spell it was? Also, Voldemort couldn't have simply run away, he tried but failed. Voldemort did have extended knowledge but there was a chance he was not familiar with the spell Dumbledore was casting. So why take the unnecessary risk to warn him?
The mirror and efficient simulation
Until the mirror appeared, the HPMOR universe could be simulated efficiently, at least as far as we knew. Time travel is limited to a six-hour cache; you can't transfigure arbitrary things, and Harry's attempts to use time travel to solve computational problems failed. This is likely to be deliberate.
So, how does the mirror exist? According to the inscription on the back, the mirror shows the actor's coherent extrapolated volition (CEV). Is this possible to compute efficiently from an actor's source code? I would guess no...
Scientists of LessWrong, I have Important Questions for you:
What would happen if Harry donned his invisibility cloak and stepped through the mirror?
(Physics)
would he be able to metabolize proteins? Carbohydrates? Fats? Nucleic acids? Are there any essential amino acids Harry will be missing?
Only metabolizing fats, glycerol, and the simplest amino acid, glycine. Everything else is chiral, including a hell of a lot of vitamins. Mirror sugars still taste sweet though. I have no idea if mirroring a protease changes its ability to digest protein (for all the good liberating mirror amino acids would do) but know nucleases and starch-degrading enzymes would be useless.
Though for energy alone he could also consume alcohol, acetic acid (think vinegar), and some ketones and aldehydes that are pretty nasty in large quantities but you can get some cellular energy from like acetone. Unable to get any of the essential amino acids histidine, isoleucine, leucine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, valine, or lysine.
Regular bacterial cell walls contain a few mirror amino acids produced enzymatically during wall production - mirrored glutamate, glutamine, and alanine. Not gonna be much. You could probably make about half the nonessential amino acids internally by drinking VERY VERY dilute ammonia (or thicker glycine) and eating f...
Well.
That happened.
I'm rather hoping (too tired to put numbers on it, sorry) that Harry can summon a phoenix straight from the mirror-he never tested the claim that a phoenix only shows up once, after all...and now he's got the source of phoenixes right next to him. That's a gun that's just itching to fire.
"All your hallows combine" is fairly obvious, though the location of the stone is not entirely clear.
Regarding Chekov's Elder Wand:
We have been repeatedly told about Dumbledore's "long dark wand" (Ch. 56,57,77,81,94,110), a "wand of dread power" (Ch. 77), which we know from Canon is the "terrible device" Grindelwald possessed (Ch. 77). In Azkaban (Ch. 57), Dumbledore confirmed this:
"Nonsense, my dear," the old wizard said cheerfully as he strode off yet again, waving as though in admonition his fifteen-inch wand of unidentifiable dark-grey wood, "I'm invincible."
Query: A key point in canon is the mast...
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...
Blue-sky speculation: Harry's father's rock is the real Philosopher's Stone, and Dumbledore only pretended to believe that Voldemort could locate the Philosopher's Stone wherever it was. Confidence: far too low to assign a number, given that we've already seen what looks to be the real Stone, in the Mirror where it was always thought to be.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 110.
There is a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: