All of QuicklyStarfish's Comments + Replies

Sorry for the late reply but the question just occurred to me: is this publication likely to include the current sequence, "Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners"? (I don't know how long the sequence will be, so I'm not sure if there's time.)

Is there any public timeframe for when these will be released, even an approximate one?

2lukeprog
December? Not sure.
3Username
Perfect. Easy to use, preserves markup, can be used on mobile devices/without and special hardware, all the information is preserved in the link, and it even has decoded hover-text. Motion to make this the standard rot13 tool, I for one will start using it. http://rot13.ca/

Before when I was still contemplating whether consciousness had a non-physical component, well before I discovered coherent philosophy or rationalism, I had a similar "soul swap world" idea. It eventually let me discard the idea of a soul, but I still favoured some kind of non-personal consciousness. This idea eventually became that there was a "consciousness field" permeating space which produced the phenomenon, through interaction with our brains through a physical yet unknown mechanism. I thought it some very subtle physical effect we hadn't noticed yet, not really supernatural.

It was progress.

That's an interesting possibility, but I favour the interpretation that this is the source of dementors:

Even so, the most terrible ritual known to me demands only a rope which has hanged a man and a sword which has slain a woman; and that for a ritual which promised to summon Death itself - though what is truly meant by that I do not know and do not care to discover, since it was also said that the counterspell to dismiss Death had been lost.

It fits very nicely. Dementors (Death) were unkillable (undismissable) because the "true" patronus charm (counterspell) had been lost.

2MinibearRex
Canon makes reference to fog being produced by dementors breeding, which doesn't sound like a light ritual or a respawning option. I don't know if Yudkowsky has kept this part.

Urg... you now have me imagining what happens if polyjuice wears off someone eight-months pregnant.

1NihilCredo
Just a bad film: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110216/
1Armok_GoB
Thanks, mission accomplished! ^_^

Regarding the Cloak, one possibility is that Harry could duplicate it using the Time Turner. (Harry[1] goes back in time, equips himself with Cloak[1], sneaks up to Harry[2] and take Cloak[2] from his pouch. He could use both cloaks to perform an impossible rescue, then return Cloak[2] to Harry[2]'s pouch.)

Can somebody dereference "Heaven's Feel arc" for those of us who aren't familiar with it?

0gwern
Fate/Stay Night comes up in MoR as the franchise whose Fuyuki City trips up Quirrel in the interrogation*; the 'Heaven's Feel' route is one possible plot in the FSN franchise. Plot summary, ref is probably to evil-Sakura's 'army of shadows', which matches up well with Dementors. * I looked it up, and Quirrel's visit there in 1983 or whatever would have coincided with the birth of a few minor characters but nothing else important in the FSN universe, as far as I could tell.