Indeed, you can't ever present a mortal like me with evidence that has a likelihood ratio of a googolplex to one - evidence I'm a googolplex times more likely to encounter if the hypothesis is true, than if it's false - because the chance of all my neurons spontaneously rearranging themselves to fake the same evidence would always be higher than one over googolplex. You know the old saying about how once you assign something probability one, or probability zero, you can never change your mind regardless of what evidence you see? Well, odds of a googolple...
Student: What is truth? And what is God?
Teacher: You don't really want an answer to that question.
Student: Yes, I do. Please.
Teacher (after thinking for a moment): If I take a lamp and shine it toward a wall, a bright spot will appear on the wall. The lamp is our search for truth, for understanding. Too often, we assume that the light on the wall is God. But the light is not the goal of the search. It is the result of the search. The more intense the search, the brighter the light on the wall. The brighter the light on the wall, the greater the sense of re...
Excellent quote, but you should really attribute it.
It's from Babylon 5, season 5, episode 14, "Meditations on the Abyss".
The Teacher is G'kar, the student is some random Narn.
I thought it was a goose.
King: Very clever. (to the guards) set him free from the top of the tallest tower.
No, If the king REALLY wanted to be a dick, he would have put the key and the dagger in the same box, and then said "one box contains a key, and one box contains a dagger."
Actually, it has occurred to me that maybe he doesn't need his body back, because he never lost it. He's not wearing a turban to cover two-facedness, and Harry's "recovered" memory from his infancy may have been the result of a false memory charm. In this continuity, can we really be sure that Quirrel is a separate person that Voldie is using, or maybe he is just Voldie in disguise?
The Command to Look, by William Mortenson, might be enlightening to Slytherins. Even though it's about photography, you can learn things about how your personal appearance can be crafted to inspire the emotions in people that you want to.
But, if his plan is that his soul be sent to another world, he does not need his body back, does he?
Hi. Just found HPMoR and read it all, and please forgive me if anyone had raised this before in the thousands upon thousands of comments that I haven't taken the time to read...
I think I've figured out some Important Things that are going on here.
1) How harry survived the Killing Curse.
Right after the Incident With the Fake Summoning Ritual, we learned about a reference class of magic in which the practitioner first specifies a thing they are willing to sacrifice, and then a thing they expect to receive in exchange. Reviewing Harry's memory of his mother...
That's the kind of code an ID10T puts on his luggage!
The password is always SWORDFISH.
Perhaps I should say ...in which I can't reasonably expect to GET evidence entangled with an underlying reality.